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Comment by skellington | Hacker News Reader

The weirdest thing about this to me is I was just thinking about the arbitrariness of current North being up the other day and then this article pops up here.

They're reading our freaking brains!

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Reading the "Divine Comedy" led me to a realization (or at least a shower thought) the other day: It makes perfect sense for someone living in the northern hemisphere to think of "north" as "up." Why? Because when you look up, you see the stars, all rotating around a fixed point at the very top of the heavens. (In our current epoch, this fixed point is close to the star Polaris.) If you journey on foot in the direction of this fixed, highest point — toward Polaris — you'll find that you are traveling due north.

So the conventional association between Upward and Northward is very much grounded in physical reality (for dwellers in the northern hemisphere).

I doubt that is a thought on anyone's mind... I find people orient themselves by the direction their house / street faces, to a lesser extent the position of the sun, and north at the top is a completely arbitrary thing imposed on us.

As evidence, see GPS navigation, which shows "forward" at the top.

Agree. It's also often that Upwards has a literal meaning, where the Upper place is literally geographically higher than the Lower place. Think of Lower Saxony, which is in the northern part of Germany, for example.

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