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Comment by alex_duf | Hacker News Reader

Funnily enough, it's also close to the 0,0 GPS coordinates

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/0°00'00.0"N+0°00'00.0"E

Wasn't the infamous natural nuclear reactor near 0,0? A seam of fissionable minerals that millions of years ago would periodically fill with water, heat up, boil it off, cool down, rinse, repeat -- and that sounds an awful lot like what's happening here.

EDIT: It was at -1.5780591, 13.

> It was at -1.5780591, 13.

...at least at the surface.

Also funny that the island near it happens to be "São Tomé and Príncipe" which I got familiar with only this month b/c the non-ascii chars caused an issue at work.

0°00'00.0"N+0°00'00.0"E

Funny how it's N+E, not S+W

Why? The natural “up” direction is north, and east goes great with it like that’s where the sun comes up and also arrows pointing to N and E look like the coordinate axes in a default oriented graph.

Why is north "up"?

Because some people hundreds and thousands of years ago drew it like that on maps, and people kept doing it that way for cross-compatibility reasons, and now it's a convention.

And the best part is that it depends on culture. In ancient Hebrew, east was venerated for a variety of reasons and was given the distinction as "up" (although I'm not sure that distinction really maps to our concept of up).

https://www.ancient-hebrew.org/philosophy/east-time-eternity...

Perhaps because the sun comes up in the East (at that latitude at least)

I would imagine so, yes. Hence the cultural implications of "beginning" or "origin" since the sun was no doubt viewed as the locus of life.

One of the interesting implications is how they view the past as east and the future as west (or conversely, the past as in front of you and the future as behind you). I'm not precisely sure I yet understand why this is, but I wonder if it's a matter of visibility? e.g., we can "see" the past but not the future.

Instead of downvoting this comment you'd better downvote its parent for starting the whole completely useless conversation.

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