Well, for starters, that depends on which way you're looking at the earth.
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Because who the hell knows by heart which way the earth turns
I mean, anyone who hikes often or likes astronomy. It's kind of important for navigation and orientation to know where the sun will rise and set.
Are you telling me you don't ever imagine yourself on a huge ball spinning towards the sun in the morning?
I'm glad someone else at least understands how incredulous I am.
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Some of us say anticlockwise instead
At this point I'll take it lol
Because in everyday life we can see the rotation of the clock hands but not the rotation of the earth.
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The word you want is "widdershins".
Yeah, it is honestly
Sunwise and widdershins! Only heard the term when I met some witches. IRL witches! It's a thing.
Because clocks are intuitive, the earth's rotation is not. We've agreed long ago that clocks spin to the right, and that convention has continued to this day. Analog clocks are now a regular occurrence everywhere in modern society. Up is 12, down is 6, Clock spins to the right. Ezpz.
The earth's rotation, while a constant, isn't easy to intuit. Depending on your frame of reference the earth spins to the right, to the left, ahead of you or behind you, or some combination of these local cardinal directions. In addition, there is no objective "up" in space. The most common map projections only orient north as "up" because of eurocentric bias when choosing such an orientation.
So nah, earthwise makes no sense for angular velocity unless you also want to mandate north = up
My friend's grandfather used to bet on horse racing all the time, and horses would go counterclockwise around the track no matter what track it was, so he'd say horsewise whenever he wanted to say counterclockwise.
That dude's my hero
Thank you. That's what this whole post is based on.
Why does Big Ben get to decide which arbitrary way I say left turning?
Clocks simply followed the direction of movement from the sundial (as seen in the Northern hemisphere).
Nothing to do with "Big Ben" [sic].
The big Ben remark was a joke because people say big whatever controls things. Like big brother controlls the government. Big phama controls drugs. Well big clock controls what we call left and right turning thing. Big Ben is a big clock.
Though you might be able to get the pun but sorry. Misjudged your intelligence
Misjudged your intelligence
Some civility would be nice.
Fuck yo couch
Maybe I'm wrong, but maybe we should also say right and counterright. Tight and countertight. Open and counteropen.
Maybe we should say a lot of things in more logical ways. Unfortunately, language evolves naturally over time and that comes with these kind of oddities
My dude, I was joking. I'm trying to evolve the language I guess.
Because you then have anti-earthwise, which just sounds like a climate disaster, or humanity itself.
Or, we could still use clockwise. Which is what I was thinking.
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