Blog Number 336

Greetings and welcome to today's random thought.

I am beginning to wonder if I am going to make it to 100 blogs this year or not.  There are only 37 days left and I have to average a blog every 3 days to make it.

I just finished reading "The God Delusion" by Richard Dawkins.  It was a very interesting read and challenged me in my way of thinking with each chapter (as a side note, I have checked out "The Dawkins Delusion" which is a rebuttal of this book).  I forget exactly why but in one chapter he was referring to the (almost) universal concept of North being Up on maps.  I had not really thought about this but he did mention that there are maps in some southern hemisphere countries (he specifically mentioned Australia) where North is Down.  Here is an example...

Looks very strange, doesn't it?  I bet you don't even recognize our world!  I wondered if people in the southern hemisphere really think this way so I asked a lady that I work with who is in Melbourne, Australia if she thought that we northerners were just a little uppity for thinking we were on the top of the world and that they were on the bottom.  She admitted that she had not thought about it that way but then confessed she was really from England (a fellow northerner).  I then remembered that a co-worker just one row of cubes over was originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina.  When I asked her about this she got lost in thought for a moment then exclaimed, "Yes, how unfair!"  She admitted that she had never thought about the whole north-up / south-down thing but I could tell that she was considering being offended on behalf of her mother country and its neighbors.  This discussion segued into a talk on how on street maps it is easier to be going up (even if that makes south up) and how we each would turn a map so that we were going up the map instead of down it.

When I was researching the up side down maps I did see in a side note that some maps originally had east as up.  Now as strange as south being up is, east being up is way more weird.  I think I need to stop thinking about this for now.  On a non related note (and as a way of an excuse to stop typing) we checked out a DVD with 7 episodes of season 2 of I Love Lucy and the kids love it.  We have time to watch the last 2 remaining episodes yet this evening.

Thanks for reading my Random Thoughts.

Jon