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

{If people drew the thing upside-down or sideways...}

That's it in a nutshell. Geometric figures don't come with a little "This Way Up" wineglass stamped in one corner.

I always knew there was something fundamentally wrong with the universe.

The world doesn't come with a top or bottom either, yet we always picture it travelling in a horizontal plane round the sun, north on top.

Guess who added that very section to A13083202

I missed that important word "bisector" in the second line, so I just drew a random perpendicular.

Your term "broad arc" had me a bit confused, I just left the centre where it was, drew a circle and trimmed it back to what seemed right. I did start with a horizontal line. I wound up with a large circle, another circle in the upper right quadrant, a nice arc just behind that looked like the edge of a bonnet, or hair. I trimmed the last circle the other way to form the nose. All in all very convincing and so very wrong,

Fun exercise anyway.

Thanks.
FS

When I was a child and I was asked to turn something "to the left", I would turn it clockwise. The bottom of the item goes left. Everybody else, ie elder brothers, told me that "to the left" obviously means "the top of the object goes left". Just two different ways of looking at things.

And clockwise is relative to the observer.

Cyclonic weather systems go anticlockwise when viewed from a satellite, but us ground-dwellers would only ever see them as going clockwise.

Similar issue when looking at a star map. North and South are where you expect them, but East and West are reversed.

[Amy P]