Why don't compasses have just two Cardinal directions (North, East, -North, -East)?
Do we really need West and South when we can use negative North and negative East?
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I think the idea of directions came before the idea of negative.
Walking backward is just walking negatively forward by another name
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.
Why do we have 2 separate words for good and bad? Good and ungood are totally sufficient.
(reference)
Doubleplusgood
That's actually how it works in Irish. The word for good is deas, while the word for bad is deas prefixed with the negating particle mí, so mídheas.
(There are still separate words for tge cardinal directions).
Is it? I tried checking in a dictionary but it didn't list mídheas as a word and "deas" was defined as right/nice/honest, not just "good"
The complement of good, u good, I cludes things that are neither good not bad (neutral)
Left and Minusleft
Exactly, we don't need to be right at all.
Clockwise and anticounterclockwise
Double plus ungood
I dunno. That seems double plus ungood to me.
Plus and minusplus
Why do we have 26 letters? Why not just communicate in binary!
01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101110 01100001 01110100 01110101 01110010 01100001 01101100 00100001
On the other hand, 8000+ characters seems kinda fun...
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::: spoiler hint The joke is "wo cao ni ma bi", change the tones and you got 我操你妈逼 🤭 :::
oh you salty dog you
...(🤷♂️)
55 73 65 20 68 65 78 20 66 6f 72 20 74 65 72 73 65 6e 65 73 73 20 62 72 75 68 0a 0a 41 6c 73 6f 20 74 68 69 73 20 69 73 20 73 74 69 6c 6c 20 61 73 73 75 6d 69 6e 67 20 55 54 46 2d 38 20 6f 72 20 61 74 20 6c 65 61 73 74 20 41 53 43 49 49 2c 20 73 6f 20 77 74 68 20 6c 6d 61 6f
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?
Fun fact... there is an ICAO effort to "get rid" of magnetic headings for runway numbers. I listened to a presentation they did last year, and as much as I went into it thinking it wasn't needed, I was a convert listening to them.
Btw, magnetic variation is pretty significant in some places. It's 13 degrees where I am.
What's the new one? I must have missed the presentation. Probably because I wasn't invited.
I don't remember where I watched the presentation. I think it might have been one of Brian Schiff's videos, but I don't remember. Here's a link to it I found online. https://www2023.icao.int/safety/OPS/OPS-Section/Pages/Truenorth.aspx
I suppose it makes sense but it feels wrong. I'm so used to having and using magnetic but that isn't a reason to continue doing less efficient things.
The redundancy aspect is there as when systems would fail (GPS for true), the magnetic redundancy would still come into okay and still work enough to get by.
Why not?
Because what happens when your referent changes? Which direction is Mars from Earth? We obviously need a single navigational system that works anywhere in the universe.
Easy! Assuming the earth is the center of the universe, coordinates are 360,360
+- the current position of the Earth in the solar system +- the current position of the solar system in the Milky Way. In the Local Cluster, in the Local Group, in the Virgo Supercluster, in the Local Mesh
In order to return, we just go that way:
There is no center of the universe.
Huh, guess you are right
Mars would be that way I assume
Plus or minus?
We could use one, and assume we’re operating in the field of complex numbers:
1 N = North
i N = West
i^2^ N = South
i^3^ N = East.
And we could use the complex modulus to indicate distance or speed... or we could map the Riemann sphere onto the surface of the earth and use a single complex number to indicate location.
Directions from maps: turn pi at the nearest i intersection
Now you're talking!
Why stop at one when you could stop at just zero and not use a compass?
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:
Yes! Now we are getting somewhere.
east and eastn't
East and weast.
Dammit Patrick...
Negative north negative east airlines doesn't have a good ring to it though.
How about 225° airlines?
You probably already know this, but for others' amusement... Southwest's Pilot Training pathway program is called Destination 225, and I doub't that many prople even in the airline business get the reference. So if nothing else, they've got a branding headstart.
I didn't! Had to look up online compass that had degrees on it.
But it doesn't surprise me that any company's PR guys would come up with things like that.
An even funner Southwest PR story is the Malice in Dallas. I don't have a good resource to point you to, but you can google it. it was an armwrestling match between CEOs to settle a corporate dispute. The two companies holstered their lawyers and settled the grudge with a big PR event.
Why do we have subtraction when we can just add a negative number?
Isn't that exactly how computers work?
Why do we have down when we can just use negative up?
What goes up, must come negative-Up
One step forward and two steps un-forward.
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
Most Mediterranean cultures used to have names for at least eight winds, each at 45 degrees from each other. Greeks (and therefore Romans) used twelve, at 30 degrees.
Here's a classic navigator's wind rose, for instance, with 32 different directions based on eight named winds (might be a bit hard to read on dark backgrounds, here's the original SVG):
"negative Eastern countries" has a nice ring to it.
So you'd have states like North Dakota and Negative North Dakota?
The Negative shall rise again!
How would that be any easier?
I would not be surprised compasses were invented before negative numbers
edit
negative numbers : 200 BCE
compasses : as early as 202 BCE
(these are just from a cursory search, I am not a specialist)
If the four cardinal points bother you, better not look up wind roses or rhumbline networks...
Mind officially blown. 🤯
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.
Northeast would be one of the 8 already. North by northeast is the direction between north and northeast
I understand that. If we had a word for north east, let’s say “yest”, then I wouldn’t have to say “north by north east”, I could just say “north yest”.
This is just the Minecraft coordinates system and it sucks. "OK I'm at the coords, where's the--oh fuck, it was -3002, 108 not 3002, 108."
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.
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.
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.
People used to have no problem remembering the names of at least eight winds, depending on the direction...
Here are the ones used in Catalonia, for instance; we were taught them at school:
Though, to be fair, llevant means where the sun rises and ponent where it sets, migjorn means midday, which makes sense given the other two, and everyone already knew tramuntana, cause it's a headache when it blows, so it's mostly the other four we have to remember... the Greek one seems quite harder, though, then again, I'm not Greek..:
Sure, but 4 is easier to remember?
We just say "North-East" for gregal or "North, North-East" if it's half between North and gregal. Other would be North-West, South-West, and South-East.
We used to say Boreas, Auster, Zephyr and Eurus
Sure, but that's usually much less poetic, North by Northwest notwithstanding.
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
Try all the 16 possibilities and then see how many "antis" you really need there.
In all cases, 2 at most.
North
North-north-east
North-east
North-east-east
East
Anti-north-east-east
Anti-north-east
Anti-north-north-east (south-north-east is impossible so the second anti would be redundant)
Anti-north
Anti-east-anti-north-north (reversed word order to distinguish it further)
Anti-east-anti-north
Anti-east-east-anti-north
Anti-east
Anti-east-east-north
Anti-east-north
Anti-east-north-north
These extra complications make it even more unusable that the anti thing itself LOL
I was assuming a conlang situation where "north" referred more to the axis, rather than the direction.
Anti-north-north would be more "reversed-vertical-vertical" meaning it's reversed vertical (south), and closer to the vertical axis than the horizontal axis. North would just be "vertical" without being reversed.
I don't know what you are even talking about (and too lazy to put it into a translator now).
But I know that North and South are terms that must be usable for everybody. So, especially for such people who don't know what you are even talking about.
Essentially: it's not designed as a change from North/East/South/West, it's designed as a from-scratch way to refer to those directions.
The sun rises in the East and sets in the West, so let's say East is "Sun" and West is "Setting-Sun."
Polaris/The North Star is in the North, so let's call that direction "Star" and the other direction "No-Star."
When you say "Setting-Sun-Sun-Star," you're saying the direction is more similar to the path the sun takes through the sky than it is to the North Star, and in the direction the sun sets.
16 directions is pretty arbitrary anyway though, usually 8 is enough and then you don't have the confusion of repeated words.
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!
Right next to Clorida.
But is that Wast or Eest of the Missipissi River?
I see my typo, and it's too funny and I'm just going to roll with it haha
Fine choice my friend, I'd leave it too haha! 😂
@[email protected]
Your new username is -South -East Wind lmao
Why don't clocks have just 4 numbers?
False equivalence.
180° of Arctica and then 180°of Antarctica. Reasonable.