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.
You don’t see the sun move in the sky? Or do you think the sun is actually the one moving?
So you say I need to know my orientation and position on earth and their orientation and position on earth just to tell someone in which direction I need to rotate something?
The earth spins on a leftward direction on the same plane it orbits the sun. Is that so hard to grasp? More hard than to teach everyone that clocks HAVE to spin in one direction?
Whatever. Just tell the people to rotate something Earth-wise while the rest of the world using a clock as reference.
I was going to do it without your permission anyway
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
So we agree clocks have to spin one way because that’s how its is but we can’t agree the earth spins one way because people are dumb? The earth spins in a leftwards direction as its spins around our star. That’s facts.
If you just want to call people dumb you are allowed to do that.
No, we agree you have difficulty reading an analog clock.
Yes, because I said clockwise was the wrong one.
When viewed from which direction?
From the same direction we’re making our clocks from
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?
Maybe I’m wrong, but maybe we should also say right and counterright. Tight and countertight. Open and counteropen.
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.
Here’s what’ll really bake your noodle. The north end of a magnet points north which means that the north magnetic pole is actually the South Pole of the Earth’s magnet.
