[TheSpiceIsLife]

Your just using your preferred frame of reference.

It seems reasonable to call north up because that frame of reference is how maps usually look.

To subsume your frame of reference, we could say the Earth isn’t hanging in space, it’s in free fall around the sun.

There are other frames of reference at progressively larger scales.

Edit: Also, the word ‘hanging’ usually implies an ‘up’.

[oska]

> Your just using your preferred frame of reference.

No I am not. What I said was that they should have left it as just that the Earth rotates from West to East (no frame of reference). I only talked about how it would look like from above the South Pole to show that the described anti-clockwise direction of motion was relative to the frame of reference that was being, unnecessarily, assumed.

The Earth has two poles and they are equal, just like with any (approximate) sphere. If you are going to describe how the Earth's rotation looks from above one pole then you should also describe how it looks from above the other. But once you describe it from both poles it becomes obvious that you're not really imparting any useful information because, while it looks clockwise from above one pole it looks anti-clockwise from above the other. Better to not use any frame of reference at all. We know that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. With just a little thought it is then obvious that the Earth is rotating from West to East and that is all that needs to be said.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

> Better to not use any frame of reference at all.

Ok

> We know that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

You didn’t even try!

[oska]

Frankly, it's pathetic that you play games with the words I use - 'hanging', 'rises' - which everyone understands are not actual descriptions of reality and don't engage with the argument at all, which is about reality.

[TheSpiceIsLife]

You started it:

> North is not up

[oska]

You remain blind to, either willfully or unconsciously, my argument. Instead you come back with puerile rejoinders.

Look at the original quote from the article - "when seen from above". There was an assumption there that seen from above means seen from above the North Pole. Thus an assumed frame of reference when none was needed.

I do not assume seeing the Earth from above means seeing it from above the North Pole. Neither would an astronaut, who don't have to assume, they live the experience of seeing the Earth from all orientations.