Stuff that is backwards in Australia | Hacker News Reader

Stuff that is backwards in Australia

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> Australians celebrate Christmas by going to the beach, and July 4th with sledding and patriotic snowball fights.

It may surprise you to learn that Australians don't celebrate the American day of independence lol

The weirdest thing to me is that Americans observe ANZAC day in Spring. Weird.

Not to mention that snow isn't very common in Australia.

Well, at least it does happen. More than I can say for a patriotic 4th of July

So soon the world forgets the words of President Thomas Whitmore:

We are fighting for our right to live. To exist. And should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day the world declared in one voice: "We will not go quietly into the night!" We will not vanish without a fight! We're going to live on! We're going to survive! Today we celebrate our Independence Day!

> the day the world declared in one voice:

Yeah . . . big news in the Congo as I recall, endlessly lauded in East and West Papua, nobody could shut up about it in Patagonia, a cause célèbre in the Chatham Isles.

The next day, everybody forgot about the 8 year civil uprising in the British colonies that kind of paled against the French Revolutionary Wars, the Napoleonic Wars, and all the other biffos of that time that went on longer and killed more people.

It's a quote from the movie Independence Day, about an alien invasion. There was no President Thomas Whitmore.

~ " You can't be anal rententive if you don't have an anus "

It's a quote from the movie Dogma.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39903005

Beat me to it. I was going to point out that there's a ye olde black and white photo in my town's information centre of that one time we had snow here!

As an Aussie living on the north side, the water spins the wrong way down the plug hole. It is only a tendency, but it happens often enough to not be a random direction. And the left/right thing ... It took ages to get used to the idea that in the northern hemisphere, your image in a mirror is reversed.

Water spin has been debunked, the Coriolis force is just too weak to have any noticeable effect over the minor non-symmetries of the vessel and random currents in the water

Worth mentioning that the title is completely wrong; it is in fact a list of stuff that is backwards in the USofA.

mirrors don't flip images. Take a word written on a wall. Face it. point to the perpendicular wall on the side of the first letter. Now turn 180 degrees (imagine there's a mirror there) and look at the mirror on the opposite wall. Do the same thing, point to the perpendicular wall on the side of the first letter of the word. You are now pointing at the exact same wall as last time. The mirror didn't reverse anything, it's you who's backwards.

Feynman talks about this in his "Symmetry" lecture, and how there's no way to discern "left" from "right" without a shared artifact. (You can try to get clever and use a magnet, but there's also no way to discern magnetic north from south without a shared artifact, so that's ultimately the same convention.) It's like how any complex number can only be a±bi; a+bi doesn't actually mean anything by itself.

"sun comes up on the right and goes counterclockwise through the sky instead of coming up on the left and going clockwise as I have seen it do all my life, and that was pretty interesting." That got me too back then, it's funny how your orientation relies on the sun doing the "right" thing

If you face south in both hemisphere's it comes up on the same side - it's only if you face the equator that it's different

I think sun position at noon/during the day would trip up any person from north if someone would ask them "point to south" while being in Australia or south hemisphere. I can imagine because of that the effect of wrong side sun coming up can be rather strong.

oh totally, I was lost, turned around, for the first few months I lived in the US, never really realised I subconsciously navigated by the sun

Almost 13 years living in Australia and it didn't occur to me that of course the moon phases must be the other way around. So for us this is a waxing, not a waning crescent: https://emojipedia.org/waning-crescent-moon and this is waning, not waxing: https://emojipedia.org/waxing-crescent-moon

(EDIT: HN doesn't like emojis, sorry)

(EDIT 2: replaced emojis with links to Emojipedia)

I recently realised this too, while trying to integrate moon phases into my app. The ASCII emoji names for the 1st and last quarter moon are completely reversed and that makes complete sense since we're technically upside down.

( ||) First quarter in Northern Hemisphere, 3rd (or last) quarter in Southern (|| ) Last quarter in Northern Hemisphere, 1st in Southern

The left/right thing depends on what direction you’re bloody well facing. Like literally go out at dawn on any given day in any given hemisphere and turn until the sun is rising on your left and it will, without fail, set on your right… unless you turn 180 degrees.

If you’re facing south and approaching the equator from the north the sun will rise to port (left) and set on your starboard (right) side… cross the equator and it will still do so… cross the pole and NOW it will reverse.

I guess the article implies that you're facing towards the sun, so if you are in Australia you will generally be looking North.

If you’re facing towards the sun you’re rotating, facing west at dawn and east at dusk. If you’re above the Tropic of Cancer you’ll be rotating clockwise through facing south at noon… if you’re below the Tropic of Cancer you’ll be rotating anticlockwise through facing north at noon. If you’re between the Tropics you’re spin will be determined by the season… if you’re on the equator you’ll have spent half the year spinning clockwise, half spinning anti clockwise, and one very confusing day not spinning at all but pitching (or rolling, depending on your starting position).

What won’t happen is that you start the day on one side of the equator, facing towards a pole which that east and dawn is on your left and, never changing your facing but proceeding to the other side of the equator, expect the sun to set on your left.

The article implies that left and right flip when you pass the equator… they don’t. There’s no natural relationship between your hands position relative to the axis of your nose and the planet’s rotation relative to the sun.

If you are in Sydney at sunrise and you look towards the rising sun and keep looking in the same direction, after a while the sun will be to your left.

If you are looking North, the sun moves from right to left. If you are looking South, the sun is behind you, so you're not looking at it. There is no direction you can look at, that lets you observe the sun moving from left to right. [1][2]

If you are between the tropics, for example in Cairns, which is in Northern Queensland, then yes as you said depending on the time of the year, you could be looking South at the sun moving from left to right. But, only a small minority of the Australian population live North of the Tropic of Capricorn, and the above is true only during a certain period of the year. So I think that's beyond the point the OP is making...

[1]: unless you place yourself upside down.

[2]: I found another exception: if you are looking at the sun through a mirror

The article didn’t make its point precisely because it failed to state a starting orientation, rendering left and right meaningless… assuming Australians all face the same direction at dawn, or are stupid enough to stare at the sun at any given moment of their day in the first place, doesn’t help the point. The actual point they intended to make was that in Australia the path the sun traces through the sky is always to the north of your position, whereas for someone in America or Europe it’s to the south, but neither of these has the slightest thing to do with left and right, neither of which exists without a subjective orientation that cannot be assumed by the reader.

Directions like North, South, East, and West are relative to the planet. Clockwise and anticlockwise are relative to the clock face. Left and right are relative to the observer’s subjective position. Talking about the sun’s position and arc in terms of left and right is acting like the universe is solipsocentric.

Maybe only we who live on boats get this in our bones?

Lost me at "sun comes up on the right".

Seasons are reversed, so that winter in the Northern Hemisphere is summer in the Southern Hemisphere and vice versa.

But our holidays and working calendar is the same as in the Northern Hemisphere.

So whereas Americans are celebrating Christmas and taking a break during their coldest part of the year, and resting up, we Australian's continue to work throughout our winter, which is in July.

I live in Sri Lanka (~7° N) and the one thing I can't get used to is that the Sun will, at some point in the year, come from any given direction. There are all sorts of architectural assumptions in the temperate regions that don't work in the tropics.

Nice list, the but point 2 is a bit ironic, Australians don't celebrate 4th of July at all

We do sometimes have an informal "Christmas in July". Which is a little odd, since 6 months on from Christmas would be June.

missed the most obvious one - the midday sun is to the North, as opposed to the South … this one really threw me as i often use the sun to quickly orient eg when getting off a train

As a life long Aussie that has never been further north than Brisbane Queensland... yeah that sounds about right. This is just normal to us. Still very cool.

The bit about the sun going the other way only holds if you are facing the equator, as you would be on the front porch of a Greek or Roman style home that was designed to capture sunlight.

One thing I noticed when I was there -- y'all's birds are... different. Instead of the normal tweets and chirps of North American songbirds, I awoke to all sorts of strange squawks and caws from species unknown to me. I guess I should consider myself lucky I didn't encounter a cassowary (though I did find myself amongst a flock of eager looking bin chickens).

Unless you where far North Queensland you would have been safe from the living dinosaurs of the Cassowary. Also Bin chickens are cool if a little ugly. There are some bird here that tweet but it is not common. If you have ever come across Cockatoos in a flock... it is like a screaming cloud of destruction...

> Australians see the moon upside-down

Such hemispherism.

The more obvious one is that Orion's standing on his head.

Are you talking about the constellation we call "The Pot"?

Djulpan's upside down? !

It'll sink.

That fact genuinely shocked me.

"The sun in the Southern Hemisphere moves counterclockwise across the sky over the course of the day, rather than clockwise. Instead of coming up on the left and going down on the right, as it does in the Northern Hemisphere, it comes up on the right and goes down on the left."

What? So Australians always observe sunrise facing North ? This is an amazing behavioural observation, worthy of some sort of high profile international prize!

yeah nah

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