Maybe they are still defining the Western Hemisphere by the Tordesillas Line.

Not that I thought much about it, if I thought of it at all, but I would have ascribed The Americas as being the Western Hemisphere. But I accept Patrick's interpretation. Gives new meaning to the English headline "Fog In Channel; Europe Isolated."

Maybe they think the hemisphere line goes down the middle of the Atlantic.

#2 Like Wyman, I casually equate the Western Hemisphere to the Americas.

I beg to differ, there is more than one definition of 'the Western Hemisphere'. Which means the issue is using a term with multiple relevant meanings, rather than lack of a map.

One would think a monarch or two might have traveled west of Greenwich.

If they meant the Americas, they really should have said "the Americas." It's sloppiness rather than stupidity, IMO. And it's indefensible sloppiness -- England is very proud of having the Greenwich or Prime meridian, so you'd think they'd know what was east or west of it. After all, they did create that particular definition, and got it codified by an international conference in 1884 (whatever the folks in Paris think). Perhaps it's more ignorance of history than geography.

It's quite true that one could place the prime meridian anywhere: but once it's placed, Eastern and Western hemispheres are defined against it.

Not to defend the intelligence of our so-called elites, but to be fair in this case, "Western Hemisphere" has evolved to be shorthand for the Americas. It's not a particularly smart shorthand, but then the entire point of a "western" hemisphere is rather arbitrary in the first place. A northern and a southern hemisphere make sense.

*facepalm*

Oh, Slate...

*facepalm*

I don't even care if it's dire; I'm going to see it anyway, because of Samuel West. Considering the crap-fests friends have sat through on account of Jeremy Renner, I think I'm justified.

The "limited release" part is annoying me, though. I can't get Google to tell me today whether Boston is part of that. (I'm not counting on the Hartford area.) Much as I want to sit and enjoy a couple of hours of fangirling, traveling to New York for it seems a little excessive.

7
And historically, mapmakers did just that: the prime meridian went through their own most important location.

Wikipedia has a long list of different prime meridians and who uses them.

If you're planning to navigate you really do need an eastern and a western hemisphere.

If you're planning to navigate, or use Zone Time, the border between east and west runs through Greenwich, England on one side, and 180° on the other (which more-or-less coincides with the International Date Line).

Yes, the location was arbitrary, but once chosen it's also defined.

You might also wish to complain to the editors of the Merriam-Webster dictionary, who define "western hemisphere" as "the half of the earth comprising North and South America and surrounding waters."

And, for that matter, the U.S. Department of Stage, whose Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs does not appear to deal with western Europe.

Even the OED admits that the definition based on the Prime Meridian is not the only common usage (or at least that's how I would interpret "specifically" in the definition); they define it as "the half of the earth, divided longitudinally, which contains the Americas; spec. the half of the earth that is west of the prime meridian."

English monarch? *English* monarch?

It seems that the self-centred ignorance extends beyond geography and into history and politics as well. Not really a surprise, I suppose.

Wait, our journalistic elites can add and subtract?

Western Hemisphere always sounds weird to those of us down here in the Southern. Obviously there's only one division into hemispheres, right?

Fucking East-West, how do they work?

Also, now I come to think of it -- we didn't have a visit from a reigning British monarch until 1954 -- and they've been our monarchs, or so they claim, since 1788. Sheesh.

No wonder an Irishman tried to shoot the Queen's son when he visited Sydney in 1868. It's enough to make Fenians of us all.

Fhtagn @14

HM the Queen is English and monarch of England. So, like the use of Western Hemisphere - sure, maybe, but sloppy.

As a matter of preference I'd use "reigning" rather than "sitting" because, again, the slight chance of misunderstanding.

Emma in Sydney @17

To be fair, since 1931, or maybe 1942, or possibly 1986 they've been your monarchs, as you claim.

Neil W @18

She is, yes, but calling her that is about as useful and accurate as calling Obama the President of Wisconsin or Hollande President of Provence. Given the number of people who think England is synonymous with the United Kingdom, and that Scotland, for instance, is a town in England ...

As old Rudyard did not say...

Take me somewheres west o' Greenwich, where the best is like the worst,
Where they scorns all the Beatitudes, an' a fool can raise a thirst.

Emma @#16: ObXKCD.

As someone who lives at about 0.7 W, I had never come across the definition of the western hemishphere as being where the Americas are. But even on that definition Buckingham Palace may well still be in the western hemisphere.

The whole of South America is east of the line of 90 degrees west, though North America is well to the west of South America. It's hard to tell from a quick glance at a bad map on a small screen, which is all I have just now, but you could run an argument that the western hemisphere comes out in pretty much the same place on both definitions.

To get a western hemisphere which cleared the coast of Africa, you have to start a little over 17W (or 25 if you want to lose Cape Verde too). But that means round the other side you get New Zealand, New Caledonia and a chunk of Siberia - none of which are particularly American. The only way of defining a western hemisphere consisting only of the Americas is for it to be not a hemisphere.

So we can add basic geometry to the list of failed subjects.

Tom Whitmore @ #7:

England is very proud of having the Greenwich or Prime meridian, so you'd think they'd know what was east or west of it.

a monarch or two might have traveled west of Greenwich.

"What amounteth al this wit?
What shul we speke alday of hooly writ?
The devel made a reve for to preche,
And of a soutere a shipman, or a leche.
Sey forth thy tale, and tarie nat the tyme.
Lo Depeford, and it is half-wey pryme.
Lo Grenewych, ther many a shrewe is inne!
It were al tyme thy tale to bigynne."

" Given the number of people who think England is synonymous with the United Kingdom, and that Scotland, for instance, is a town in England ..."

I can't stand idiots like that. After all, it's a county, isn't it? ( or a duchy, or barony, or a knigthsteadtwainwiddershinsfortnight holding, right?).

Fhtagn @19

On re-thinking, not only are you right, but the occasional correct use of English Monarch in an historical or UK constitutional context means that uses such as this are, at best, a problem. In fact it is less correct than, for example, "the first time a sitting English Australian monarch had ever been to the Western Hemisphere Americas."

There are sufficient unambiguous cases of people being publicly dumb that when there is theoretically multiple meanings in isolation but in context everyone gathers the same meaning I chose not to clutch my pearls.

A tomato is a berry, but I do not get upset when I find them with the vegetables in the grocery store rather than the fruits.

Likewise I do not worry about "less" versus" fewer" since no one has ever provided an example where the choice changes the meaning.

Likewise I do not worry about "less" versus" fewer" since no one has ever provided an example where the choice changes the meaning.

The joke about the man who goes into a bar and asks for a pint of less would be even more strained.

Here I am, 67 years old and theoretically well-educated, and I would not have blinked at the "Western Hemisphere" part of that sentence (though the "sitting" monarch made me look again). I suspect that would have to do with the common conflation of "Western Hemisphere" with "New World"--and while pointing to the Prime Meridian inspired a forehead slap, I don't feel too bad about not possessing a copy-editor's alertness and command of detail. (Though this bit of terminological precision goes into the system for future deployment. Fool me once, etc.)

I always used the Webster definition, with the "Western Hemisphere" meaning the Americas and environs. Whether that is, strictly speaking, wrong or not, it certainly will cause confusion with people who believe (especially but not only if they're correct!) that the division goes through Greenwich. So I'll have to stop saying to my fellow (US) Americans that "there is only one civilized in the Western Hemisphere, and we don't live in it."

marek points out that the whole definition is fairly stupid anyway. I think it's talking about a political hemisphere, not a geographical one; in that light it makes more sense, and it makes no sense at all to talk about the hemisphere line dividing any one country.

Still, I feel really stupid now for using it that way. I did know that Greenwich was 0°, but somehow that didn't translate into dividing the hemispheres there.

Neil @18
Not seeing how 1788 doesn't count, was Monarch of (colony of) NSW when it was founded, didn't show up for _ages_.

Neil 28: The joke about the man who goes into a bar and asks for a pint of less would be even more strained.

In Michigan dialect you could have him walk in and order a pint of "worse" and the minority who even understand the phrase 'a pint of bitter' would laugh.

Emma @16 That whole East-West thing is even worse in Manhattan where there are only 3 cardinal directions: uptown, downtown and crosstown.

And, in fact, the Greenwich Prime Meridian has shifted several time- if you go up to the Royal Observatory, they have marks indicating the several locations there, several feet apart.

I live in the eastern hemisphere and work in the western. It's a 30 minute commute....

Details, details, details. Picky, picky, picky :)

Does it help if I point out that (being in Western Australia) you're all to the west of me? (well, except for Emma in Sydney, but she's one of them T'Othersiders, over east - and even she's to the west if you take a sufficiently robust definition of "west"... it's just that I'd have to go from Perth to Sydney via Cape Town and Buenos Aires).

Emma in Sydney @17 : No wonder an Irishman tried to shoot the Queen's son when he visited Sydney in 1868.

Tried? Alfred was shot. In the back. He got better.

Megpie71 @37: there's a difference between being "to the West" and "in the Western Hemisphere" -- as you imply, everything that's not due north or due south of one's location can be considered as "to the west."

Brooks Moses at 13:

Attention is called to a fortuitous typo:

"The U.S. Department of Stage"

A cabinet-level Secretary of Theater?

An article I read years ago, by an advocate for Hawaiian independence, pointed out that "Everything east of us is called West, and everything west of us is called East."

The line between north and south goes at the equator for sound physical reasons; east and west is more than a little arbitrary. It doesn't help that meridians are defined as going through fixed points on land (because fixing a point in the ocean is non-trivial): whether you use Greenwich, Paris, Beijing, Buenos Aires, or Honolulu, you're going to have land areas that are divided between the eastern and western hemispheres by that definition.

Megpie #37: You're to the west of Tuart Hill?

What about "less fish" and "fewer fish"? Surely those expressions mean different things?

Helen: yes, of course. 'Less' is for amounts of a material (such as fish). 'Fewer' is for numbers of objects (such as fish, which is the problem).

'Less fish' should be used when you're discussing how much fish (as a substance) there is. "You cooked 45 pounds of fish for Kwanzaa last year, and we ended up eating fish until the Vernal Equinox! Cook less fish this year!"

OTOH, "My cat got into the aquarium today, and now it appears I have 4 or 5 fewer fish than I had yesterday."

I believe Matthew Ernest's point is that if I say "Cook fewer fish" when I mean "Cook less fish" or "I have 4 or 4 less fish" when I mean "I have 4 or 5 fewer fish" there is no possibility of confusion, even though I have chosen a non-agreeing word.

I suspect I could construct a situation where someone might say "I have less chance" when they mean "I have fewer chances" or vice versa, and it would be meaningful, but I think I'll wait until real life or a maths problem throws that up before insisting on it.

"The map, please."
- David Warner as Evil in 'Time Bandits'

What makes northern southern hemispheres necessary and western eastern not?

Anyway, Slate is part of our journalistic elites?

Do the people of Britain think of themselves as in both the Eastern and Western Hemispheres, or just at the center of the Universe?

Bryan @47: the existence of the rotation of the earth makes N/S hemispheres unambiguous (except as to name) where there's no particular obvious starting point for an East/West division. The great circle normal to the rotational axis is an unambiguous great circle; no other great circle defined by an angle relative to the axis is unambiguous, and one that includes the axis is maximally ambiguous.

That's the cleanest way to say it I can come up with. ("Great circle (A circle drawn on a sphere whose radius is equal to the radius of the sphere)" and "normal (at 90 degrees to)" are slightly jargony, but I think they're reasonable concepts.

Jack @48, I couldn't speak to NOW, but when the prime meridian was established, Britain certainly DID think of itself as the center of the universe!

Took me a good while of living in China to get used to the Middle Kingdom right there, front and center, in *every* single map of the world, lol!

Likely kin to my sense that dogs speak English. . . .

Speaking of "get a map": the UN Economic Commission for Europe includes the United States, Canada, Israel, and Tajikistan.

Looking at the map, the de facto grouping seems to be "Arctic and north temperate zones," which would probably confuse more people than those few of us who stumble across a mention of the fact that this organization includes the United States. "North temperate" is my inference; I suspect that it started out being an actual European organization, picked up the U.S. and Canada along the way, and got a bunch of Central Asian republics because they stayed in when the USSR dissolved.

And then there's NATO.

If you think all this is confusing, consider that at one time national borders were extended upwards indefinitely, so, in theory, the planets changed ownership over a 24 hour period as the Earth rotates. There's still almost as much argument over where national airspace gives way to international space as there is about where international waters begin.

England is a country, like Scotland, Wales, France and even the USA. The nationality, though, is British - according to the passport I'm looking at. And most of us no longer think we're at the centre of the universe when that position is so obviously held by yourselves.

Erik @40: Yes. A few doors down from the Department of Homeland Stagecraft, and the Theatrical Security Administration.

I believe also that we don't use the term 'sitting', since that's what parliaments do. Rather it should be 'reigning'.

bryan @47:

The same reason there are North and South poles, but no East or West pole. The earth rotates around an axis; the places where that axis intersect the surface of the globe are the poles, and the midway point between them is the equator. You can define an arbitrary number of longitudinal meridians that intersect the equator at 90 degrees, but there's no good reason to pick one over another as "zero".

No West pole?!?!?!

Martyn Taylor: and has been so since 1918. It's in the history books, so it must be true!

From the Preface: "History is now at an end (see p. 123); this History is therefore final."

From page 123:
"Chapter LXII
A Bad Thing

America was thus clearly top nation, and History came to a ."

Tom Whitmore, #49:

On a tide-locked world, where one side continually faces the body it's orbiting-- our Moon, Io, and Europa are examples-- there is another natural division into hemispheres. Between the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon and the hemisphere that never sees Earth lies a great circle.

At the two points where this circle meets the lunar equator, one might say, lie the West Pole and the East Pole of the Moon. (But I've never been sure how to assign which name to which "pole.") *

Doug Burbidge, #58:

Nice cameo of Bill Heterodyne at the bottom of that page. Handsome guy.

The Heterodyne Boys and the Cast-Iron Glacier and The Heterodyne Boys and the Race to the West Pole were two of the earliest titles that appeared when making up new titles in the series was just a parlor game among Phil Foglio's friends, before he actually drew a story about them. My own favorite: The Heterodyne Boys in Shipwreck Canyon.

Eventually, Steven Savage automated this game.

*I know that nutation complicates this explanation, but it's approximately true.

Clearly Britain is the centre of the universe. That's why we use Universal Time.

Except during the summer.

Magneto was a Pole.

Serge: ARRRRGH! *is ded from pun*

Bill Higgins @ 60:

Wouldn't it make more sense to define the poles as being in the center of their respective hemispheres? Thus the "earthward" pole would be the point closest to the Earth (or where the Earth is always exactly overhead) and the "spaceward" (for lack of a better term) would be its antipodes.

Bill:

Even with a tide-locked world, that doesn't quite work, because of libration. You could define Nearside and Farside as hemispheres, but parts of the Farside hemisphere are visible from Earth at times, and people or instruments in those locations can sometimes see the Earth.

Lila @ 63... :-)

Eyeballing a lunar map, it looks as if the feature nearest the Earth-facing pole is a crater in the Sinus Medii named Bruce.

The Bruce Pole.

In #64, Chris W. writes:

Wouldn't it make more sense to define the poles as being in the center of their respective hemispheres?

Your argument is perfectly sensible-- but now we're up to six poles.

The "earthward" and "spaceward" hemispheres have their uses, but sometimes planetary scientists also consider the "leading" and "trailing" hemispheres. The Moon's leading pole, vaguely near the crater Schlüter and north of Mare Orientale, is at the center of the hemisphere that faces frontward in the Moon's orbital movement around the Earth. The trailing pole, in Mare Smythii, faces backward.

That astronomers have assigned the name "Mare Orientale" suggests that I should call the leading pole the East Pole.

On Europa, on average, the trailing hemisphere is a slightly darker color than the leading hemisphere, probably because it gets more radiation damage from Jupiter's intense Van Allen belt. Saturn's Iapetus has an even more dramatic leading/trailing contrast, probably for different reasons.

Turns out Wikipedia has an article on "Poles of astronomical bodies."

Vicki writes in #65:

Even with a tide-locked world, that doesn't quite work, because of libration. You could define Nearside and Farside as hemispheres, but parts of the Farside hemisphere are visible from Earth at times, and people or instruments in those locations can sometimes see the Earth.

Yes; I was trying to avoid discussing libration in last night's message, because it was late and I was sleepy. This means the leading pole and the trailing pole, as I have defined them, are not fixed, but wander around somewhat.

(Earlier I typed "nutation" when I should have written "libration." Forgive me. Even Jove nods.)

Bill Higgins (68): (Earlier I typed "nutation" when I should have written "libration." Forgive me. Even Jove nods.)

This line pretty well sums up one of the reasons I love Making Light. The fact that it's just an aside makes it even better.

It seems to me that the effects of libration would be relatively easy to deal with. Figure out where the edges of the motion fall, and stick the pole meridian in the center of the area defined by those.

Mary Aileen, #69: IAWTC.

Lee @ 70...

What's that you said, regarding the effects of libation?
("LiBRation.")
Oh.
Nevermind.

Bill @68 - Well, six poles is only an octahedron. Imagine if a munchkin was holding the Moon for ransom and decided to turn it into an icosahedron!

--Dave, will make saves for food

Serge @ 62: No, he wasn't, unless his residence in the Warsaw Ghetto and Auschwitz made him a Pole.

It would be a cute pun, except that he's a (German) Jewish Holocaust survivor. They're very different things.