[jcattle]

Your analogy is not quite appropriate. An upside down mug is "wrong". The mug looses its meaning and you have to turn it around to use it as a mug.

That's not the case with a map. An "upside down" map is just as valid as a right side up map.

The fact that it is upside down is not supposed to mind blowing, it's the fact that it isn't upside down at all. We are just used to it being represented this way up, but there's nothing in the physical world which prescribes north to be up.

[vladms]

> An "upside down" map is just as valid as a right side up map.

Is it as useful and/or efficient though? I could write a phrase in English from right to left and if you really wanted you could read it, but it would be highly inefficient.

An efficient society sometimes has to pick conventions (how to write text, how to print a map, what characters to use, etc) and I find not interesting to point that other conventions could have been used.

[jcattle]

I mean, to me at least it is also interesting. Like Japanese writing or Arabic. It's interesting because it is different, there's a different predominant convention. You can also think further about how the writing convention might have had an impact on culture and the society itself.

Also thinking of maps and Japan: where I am from (Germany) public overview maps of parks or street maps usually have north as up. In Japan however it is very common for those maps to have up as the cardinal direction you are looking at the map at. So if you are looking at the map in a western direction, the map will have west up. So for walking the map is straight up, backwards down, left left and right right.

Like that it is very easy to know which way to go. Want to go to some place that is on the left on the map? Turn left!

[542354234235]

In the writing example, something that seems inconsequential like right-to-left or left-to-right, does have real implications. Since most people are right-handed, writing right-to-left means they develop writing styles to keep from smearing the ink. In left-to-right writing, it is unnecessary. The consequence is that the minority left-handed people are just taught a mirror of right-handed writing, making left handedness much more of a burden in a left-to-right writing culture.

[vladms]

Yes, I think there are many interesting things to consider about maps (like projection, orientation maps fixed on a panel/wall, orientation for digital maps). All those discussion will also transmit the basic idea (there is no "good/bad" way) while also discussing other problems ("can't represent area well", "people like different options", "different cases require different orientation").

[CapsAdmin]

Maybe a better analogy would be English and why it's written and read left to right.

To me at least, it feels very wrong to see English written right to left, but I also know it wouldn't be objectively wrong.

[potato3732842]

English (and latin for that matter) is written/read left to right because that is more convenient for the overwhelming majority of the population that is right handed when using easily smudged waxed tablets, wet ink, etc, etc.

Likewise, maps are traditionally "north up" because most of the population lives north of the equator so that's where most maps hailed from and if you're north of the equator having a "north up" map makes celestial navigation slightly easier.