Geography is four-dimensional | Hacker News Reader

Geography is four-dimensional

sive.rs

46 pointsgalfarragem28 comments

I feel like the headline relies on a misnomer. Sivers is talking about culture. Most culture occupies a geography, even if it’s a changing one; the culture shrinks, expands or drifts over the land. The land itself shifts and changes under the culture. Both affect each other. But what Sivers is talking about is groups of people changing, and someone returning with a snap shot of what used to be. This is a common experience among returning emigrés, and their time capsule abroad is sometimes referred to as cultural fossilization. They removed themselves of the living dynamic body of a culture, and have become unknowingly conservative toward it in their expectations. This has also been noted by authors like Thomas Wolfe (There’s no going home.), and consolidated to a Greek word, nostalgia, which also means the pain of homecoming.

Same is true for humans too. About their personality. Constantly changing and you will never meet the same person twice in that sense.

Dubious given Brouwer’s Fixed Point Theorem;)

I resonate with the first paragraph. Those people raised with beliefs of a time that does not exist anymore happen to be very conservative and refuse to see the change.

And all change is always for the better, is always progress, some even say..

In fairness, for you to say those beliefs aren't valid now is equally conservative - things will change and maybe in the direction of their beliefs, in part because of what they do. That's how change happens - some people with a different vision persevere from being rejected to being accepted.

They are conservative about time X, and in your comment is conservative about time Y (which happens to be now).

Nice food for thoughts.

So for exemple the diaspora that left Iran when the Shah left is probably still thinking of Iran as it was at the time.

Without generalizing it most probably mean the same thing for the Jewish that stayed conservative through the exile.

And so on with every person that migrate, bringing the culture of a bygone era with us

Is it the past travelling in our present?

Neural plasticity definitely matters.

I get the latitude, longitude, and they added time. But what was the fourth dimension? Or third rather, because the post assumption is that time was the fourth added.

Altitude is the third dimension, but I presume you knew that.

"Geography is three dimensional" doesn't correctly communicate the time dimension.

Hmm I thought that, but we don't really live in a 3D world (or use the altitude parameter in a very meaningful way in life) so I wondered whether there's something else I was missing.

I wonder what makes you belittle the altitude dimension? Buildings have storys, humans can sit and stand, birds can fly, your eyes can move up and down your monitor.

Also the altitude of a given lat/long can change due to geological processes, climate processes, war, etc.

The history and geography change very little whether the bird was flying while I was sitting and looking above the monitor. This is what I meant with "meaningful way". Even though a building has storys, life on 12th floor isn't much different from life on second floor. In any case, much less different than life 20 years ago, or ten kilometers away from it. In a sci-fi story or movie we see lives really in 3D, planets wrapped in habitations and such. THERE you can and should count altitude as meaningful, but we're not really there yet.

If you lived in a high place (Denver), you will find it different from a flat lowland (Chicago).

Also in Rio, how high you live can be a marker depending on which part of town you are. Favelas are on hills, whereas wealthy people in Zona Sul live down the hill closer to the beaches.

It's not that altitude isn't important, it's that it's basically determined by latitude and longitude (and time). Cultures don't exist directly above or below each other, especially not at the national scale being discussed here, and even at the micro scale, differences within a single high rise are presumably minor compared to the same distance laterally.

Visiting Chongqing city felt quite 3D to me

Even with altitude, you still need time. The Earth moves around the Sun, the Sun around the galactic center, all at hundreds of km/s. Without a timestamp, lat/long/alt just tells you where something was, not where it is. Time was never optional.

You can model geography as a 2D heightmap to a pretty good approximation tbh.

a heightmap is three-dimensional, where the third dimension is usually represented with color or contour lines.

A mathematically ideal sheet of paper in a 3d-dimensional space can be addressed with both 2D coordinates, within the reference frame of the paper, and 3D coordinates, within the 3D space, but given that the paper has a location in space, 2D coordinates are sufficient to specify a point in 3D space.

You can do the same with geography. It's why generally only specify geographical coordinates with latitude and longitude, altitude is a given from those two, since you're as unlikely to be hovering in the air as you are to be immersed in bedrock.

The lat and lon are actually 3d since we live, up to a first approximation, on the surface of a sphere. The correct way to think about it is xyz in a reference frame anchored in the center of the Earth

If you accepted that nothing exists at the north pole, that’s enough to obtain meaningful 2d coordinates for a location:)

Not workable in practice, though!

The fourth is altitude. I asked a colleague how he found Vietnam. I was surprised to hear him say it said it was windy, desolate, and cold as hell. It did not match my experience at all. Turns out he had been hanging out at 30 000 feet the whole time!

Cool story bro. Mt Everest is 29,000 feet.

“The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

Every geography has a timestamp.

You can't go home again.

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