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Comment by iamtedd | Hacker News Reader

Eh. I'm in the southern hemisphere, and the Github Globe first appears in the middle of the Philippines Sea. They're just assuming everyone is in the northern hemisphere.

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Hemispherism is pretty common in tech, kind of surprising to see it in a project to produce a globe though :)

Same.

I think the combination of timezone and language settings would work for the obviously problematic cases (eg, Australia vs Japan/China/Asia, and South vs North America. Africa is still a problem though.)

That shouldn't matter for the timezone, though, no?

Using the timezone was Github's way of easily getting the right orientation of the globe for the viewer's location. In my case (and I'm guessing everyone in the southern hemisphere) that doesn't work.

Aren't most globes oriented that way for display though? They copied the normal angle used for physical globes so it's instantly recognizable I suspect.

Whoosh, that was his point entirely. Globes are Northern hemisphere biased because of the history of European colonialism.

Also 90% of the human population lives on the northern hemisphere.

Land area too.

It looks like it starts showing the globe North of about 5° South, which would get 89% of the world's population. Pan down just another 3° (include the population centres in Indonesia, without sacrificing anything in the North) to get to 94% of the population. Of course, Github's user base may be distributed differently.

Source: https://youtu.be/p-MGKz4qjJw

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