h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Why is it that when I turn my underpants inside out, they also turn back to front? Is this related to the Mobius strip in any way or just equally bizarre?

This is really simple. First, let's assume you're holding your rightside out undies in the "correct" orientation to wear. If you only turn them inside out they'll be upside down but front to front. When you turn them right side up, you flip front to back.

Can't you be silly about this like everybody else?

People here are really, really helpful, and take all apparent requests for explanation at face value

Its like the conundrum of why a written text reverses when reflected in a mirror, rather than turning upside down or something else instead.

Once you figure that out, making it turn upside down is simplicity itself.

Helpful hints: it has to do with plane of rotation; your right shoulder is on your right in the reflection in the mirror too, though something written on it will still appear reversed.

This is a fundamental principle of what stage magicians call 'misdirection'.

Recumbent Man, no offense meant

None taken. We are an assiduous group, perhaps surprisingly so.

The question of a mirror reversing words but not other apparent orders(particularly up/down) is fascinating.

It has to do with how we categorise directions. Front/back and left/right are 'handed' perceptions, while up/down is not. Gravity accounts for this choice.

Talking of handedness, does the world spin clockwise or anti-clockwise?

Depends which pole you call 'up'. Conventionally we put the north at the top of the map, but there is no cosmic reason for this: it is purely arbitrary.

Arbitrary but Eurocentric.

Absolutely.

Talking of poles and where we stand on them, I designed a t-shirt which had the message 'How did you know I was Australian?' printed on it upside down.

As for what people are like here, yes I really appreciate that nobody is taking what I say so seriously that they post abusive replies. I call this phenomena, The Sasquhanna Hat Company effect as in the Abbot and Costello sketch. In other words what you say innocently may be taken out of context by people with bad experiences, who don't understand the joke or feel so persecuted that they think you are attacking them personally

Its really not the mirror that reverses the word written on the opaque card.

Try it with a transparent panel.

Abbot and Costello -- didn't they do "Who's on First"? A phenomenon in itself.

Another sketch of theirs I remember is "Poko Moko --slowly I turned..."

Yep. Abbott & Costello are famous for "Who's on First?".

While I'd never heard it called "Pokomoko" until today, many vaudevillians performed the "Niagara Falls (slowly I turned...)" skit. I think of The Three Stooges performing it, but they all did at some point.

Wasn't Pokomoko the trigger word?

I always heard it with "Niagara Falls" as the trigger word. But when I looked up "Pokomoko" it went right to an Abbott & Costello video, even though the word "Pokomoko wasn't in it.
http://youtu.be/8KpsUlvzbkk

Ah... apparently Abbott & Costello did it both ways, as Niagara Falls and as Pokomoko.

Sounds like a stage direction. The gun fires and Niagara falls. House lights go down, then come back up to reveal that Toots Mulligan is the real killer and not Diane Wilson, the screaming patsy, found with the gun in her hand. Yes, I have a fertile imagination - comes from working on a farm, which I never did