Submitted 10 hours ago by colourlesspony@pawb.social to [deleted]
Do we really need West and South when we can use just use negative North and negative East?
For most of human history people who couldn’t do math, or read, or understand a map, have been communicating directions to each other.
4 directions is just enough to tell someone which way to face, without being too many to remember.
“negative Eastern countries” has a nice ring to it.
I think the idea of directions came before the idea of negative.
Walking backward is just walking negatively forward by another name
How would that be any easier?
Negative north negative east airlines doesn’t have a good ring to it though.
How about 225° airlines?
Just guessing here, but I would think it’s for for clarity and brevity. West and South are shorter to say and distinct enough to avoid being easily misheard causing somebody to go in the opposite direction than intended.
Left and Minusleft
I dunno. That seems double plus ungood to me.
Plus and minusplus
Why stop at two, when you could stop at just one? North Negative North = south Negative 90 North = west 90 North =east
Better idea! What if we use 0 for North and then divide the circle around by exactly 360 points? That way we don’t need NSEW, we have 0, 90, 180, 270!
Ah… I love airplanes… To be clear, the issue with this is that magnetic 0 is not the same as true 0. There’s a slight offset that can cause issues. So why not have like… True 0 and magnetic 0. T0 and m0?
We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:
North
i North
-North
i^3^ North.
And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance… or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.
Why stop at one when you could stop at just zero?
This reply was brought to you by The Lost MC.
In emergencies when you need to use a compass you can save time by using these maximally efficient cardinal names: , , , and .
Yes!, now we are getting somewhere.
east and eastn't
East and weast.
Dammit Patrick…
Your new username is -South -East Wind lmao
And I say we don’t have enough names, we should have names for at least 30° and 45° increments.
We do, they’re just combinations of the 90 degree ones.
Southwest. North-Northeast.
Yeah, there are 32 named points on a compass, one every 11.25 degrees, you can even fractionalize it to get even more granular
Southwest by west half west for example is 242 degrees
Do we really need West and South when we can use negative North and negative East?
Yes of course.
Otherwise I couldn’t say anymore: “I am looking North and my butt is looking South”.
And how would you even pronounce south-Southwest then? Impossible unless you are quite drunk!
/s
anti-north-northeast doesn’t sound unreasonable, but that’s being logical instead of just thinking about two directions, as written in text, as OP is
What goes up, must come negative-Up
One step forward and two steps un-forward.
This is basic coordinate usage. Negative latitudes are South. And 180 or -180 is half a planet away from the prime meridien. West of England are negative longitudes.
Why don’t clocks have just 4 numbers?
False equivalence.
Better question is why don’t they have 8? I hate saying “north by north east”.
You gotta say "nor-nor-east" instead, that's a blast.
In addition to what others have already said, it’d be really silly to make one a negative of the other in the most basic sense, too.
There have been so many issues with electrons having a “negative” charge, and that’s a binary situation! It would be so much worse to introduce implied favoritism with basic directions.
Whatever, Nancy.
North and south are fundementally different, climate and biosphere -wise, so i don't think it would ever make sense to people to modify the same word to describe two very different things. East and west maybe less so, but dawn and dusk are pretty important differences.
Some polynesian cultures use two main direction words, which usually translate as something like mountain-ward and beach-ward.
Other languages kinda do. In Spanish, east and west are este and oeste. Italian is est and ovest.
As a practical matter, relative directions are already hard enough, where I might say that Colorado is east of California, and California is west of Colorado.
To use +/- East would mean there’s now just a single symbol difference between relative directions. California bring -East of Folorado, and Colorado being +East of California.
Also, we need not forget that the conventional meridian used for Earth navigation is centered on Greenwich in the UK, and is a holdover from the colonial era where Europe is put front-and-center on a map and everything else is “free real estate”. Perhaps if the New World didn’t exist, we would have right-ascension based system where Greenwich is still 0-deg East and Asia is almost 160-deg East. Why would colonialists center the maps on anywhere but themselves?
Ah yes, our great 51st state, Folorado!
I see my typo, and it’s too funny and I’m just going to roll with it haha
180° of Arctica and then 180°of Antarctica. Reasonable.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 1 hour ago
Why do we have 2 separate words for good and bad? Good and ungood are totally sufficient.
dbx12@programming.dev 18 minutes ago
Spin it further and get rid of “great” and “outstanding”. I suggest using plus good and double plus good.
A_norny_mousse@feddit.org 12 minutes ago
Doubleplusgood