...Some sources seem to imply that world wall maps with the Americas at the center were formerly common here.
Google Maps starts out with the US centered because it initially only covered the US and nearby parts of Canada. (But if you zoom way out, you find that they tile the world in a repeating strip, so no place is actually the center.)
My internal mental map of the world tends to regard the Pacific Rim as to the west and Europe to the east, because that's the way you go there by air from here (though, truth be known, in both cases you're primarily going over the arctic regions). Maybe people are still thinking printed maps look like that even though they rarely do.
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Date: 2005-09-13 03:19 am (UTC)Google Maps starts out with the US centered because it initially only covered the US and nearby parts of Canada. (But if you zoom way out, you find that they tile the world in a repeating strip, so no place is actually the center.)
My internal mental map of the world tends to regard the Pacific Rim as to the west and Europe to the east, because that's the way you go there by air from here (though, truth be known, in both cases you're primarily going over the arctic regions). Maybe people are still thinking printed maps look like that even though they rarely do.