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You could argue that the fact that we use clock face designs derived from sundials built in the northern hemisphere, rather than the southern, is itself an acci
by teraflop 6y ago
You could argue that the fact that we use clock face designs derived from sundials built in the northern hemisphere, rather than the southern, is itself an accident of history.
- abraae 6y agoYou could argue that the bulk of the world's landmass and hence people being in the northern hemisphere is itself an accident of history.
- CydeWeys 6y agoBut that we call it the "north" hemisphere is itself an accident of history. We could've easily called it the south hemisphere instead. /s
- ajuc 6y agoThat's just English. In my language directions are named from where the sun is at given time, so it wouldn't change. East is "sunrise", south is "midday", west is "sunset" and north is "midnight". Context and grammatical case differentiate between midnight as time vs midnight as direction.
- PJDK 6y agoThat's really interesting, what language is that if you don't mind me asking?
- ajuc 6y agoPolish, but I think all Slavic languages are similar. BTW this is why "decadent west" work so well in Russian propaganda. "Zapad" is west but also "sunset" or literally "falling [sun]".
- lebuffon 6y agoThat could be inconvenient in Australia no?
- ajuc 6y agoIf you didn't knew that north-south is inverted vs the sun in southern hemisphere and tried to navigate based on the intuitive rules - yes. Otherwise not really.
- lopmotr 6y agoNo doubt. But we cope with September, October and December not being the 7th, 8th, and 10th months respectively. If it was your regular language, you would probably hardly notice.
- floatrock 6y agoI mean, sure, if you assume settlement and development patterns in both hemispheres had equal probability to develop a need for standardized mechanized time keeping. But I would direct that armchair discussion more to the comments section of Guns Germs and Steel and all the TED talks that talk about how geographical differences are suspected to influence societal developments, all while keeping your racism and eugenics radar on maximum-alert. Really, though, I think it was just some overworked Economist journalist trying to crank out another science summary piece, completely unaware that the top-commented criticism was going to be a bunch of nerds bikeshedding the omission of a mildly-interesting historical anecdote rather than anything substantial about the science being reported on. :)
- darkwater 6y ago> Guns Germs and Steel and all the TED talks that talk about how geographical differences are suspected to influence societal developments, all while keeping your racism and eugenics radar on maximum-alert. I really have no idea about those theories but they could perfectly be NOT racist at all just like saying a girl from a poor neighborhood has less chances to be rich as an adult than a kid from a mid-class neighborhood is NOT racist, just stating the (sad) reality. And as a complete ignorant I guess that in a primordial society, climate had a huge impact on access to food, and the less you have to think about surviving the more you can think about improving your life.
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- austincheney 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel I haven’t read the book, but my understanding is that racism did play a preferential factor in that an ethic group that achieved geopolitical dominance tended to impose sanctions on more economically primitive people both intentionally and unintentionally. An unintentional example was the case with 1000 years of exposure to many pandemics for Eurasian people that isolated people never experienced, but once exposed suddenly dwindled.
- nofunsir 6y agoIsn't everything an accident of history, given enough history?
- dylan604 6y agoTechnically, the earth having life is an accident if you look at the rest of the cosmos. If life was brought to this rock by comets and asteroids crashing into the planet, then that's definitely an accident.
- tombh 6y agoI sometimes reflect on the fact that, were it possible to be an intelligent fly on the wall at the moment of the big bang, molecules were not a foregone conclusion. Certainly I'd accept they'd be a good prediction, but molecules evolved just like everything else. We think that molecules, and even more fundamental properties, are just that, intrinsic, but they have something of the serendipity of clockwise moving right from 12 noon.
- iainmerrick 6y agoI’m not quite sure what you mean, can you clarify? Take Conway’s game of Life as a cut-down example. It might not be obvious right at the start that many (most?) initial setups will produce gliders. But gliders aren’t a lucky accident, they’re fundamental. Anyone who applies the same rules will quickly discover gliders. Are you thinking that there could be initial conditions that don’t produce gliders/molecules? Or that the underlying rules/laws might have been different, and not conducive to gliders/molecules? Both of those seem extremely speculative to me. The rules are as they are, and gliders and molecules are inevitable.
- tombh 6y agoAh yes, good point. And Conway's Game Of Life is a better example because yes, indeed, gliders are fundamental (as are molecules). And Conway didn't make GoL for the gliders specifically, they may have surprised him just as much as us (although I'm sure he was searching for emergent phenomena). So yes I think there are certain initial conditions and rules that don't produce gliders/molecules, but that is only obvious either through simulation or hindsight. In the beginning, as a pundit, or a fly on the wall, it feels like there's everything to play for. So a weird thought experiment is if we could somehow contain a randomly-seeded, massively slowed down Big Bang and have modern day scientists (without recourse to modern knowledge) observe it. I imagine there'd be all kinds of theories, conversations, schools of thought, etc on which direction the universe would take. So I think the point is that, in fact, we are observing a Big Bang! Just at a later stage. We're trying to understand what's happened and what will happen. A very prescient example of that is Fermi's Great Filter[1], ie does intelligent life necessarily destroy itself? So perhaps I can summarise my original comment with the thought experiment of those scientists observing the impossibly contained early universe asking themselves in the same way we ask ourselves about the Great Filter, "are protons, neutrons and electrons, capable of stabilising into complex but harmonious structures?" 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter
- nine_k 6y agoAs much as having significantly more landmass and arable land in the northern hemisphere is an artifact of history.
- trhway 6y ago>an accident of history. another accident of history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality#Symmetry_breaking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homochirality#Symmetry_breakin... "One supposition is that the discovery of an enantiomeric imbalance in molecules in the Murchison meteorite supports an extraterrestrial origin of homochirality: there is evidence for the existence of circularly polarized light originating from Mie scattering on aligned interstellar dust particles which may trigger the formation of an enantiomeric excess within chiral material in space.[11]:123–124 Interstellar and near-stellar magnetic fields can align dust particles in this fashion."