Talk:2800: Down

Shouldn't it be geolocated, to be rotated accordingly? 172.71.160.110 12:35, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

You need to know where and when you are. Taking the 220 degrees (why not 140?) currently in the transcript as correct, that means Mars is at 50° azimuth, which a versatile but overly-fiddly astronomy app I have (why doesn't it remember I do manual orientation? ...it's flat out wrong when it tries to do it from device settings/current orientation!) suggests that Mars will reach 50° 'up', for me, at about 16:30 local time (could have checked when it fell back down to that again, but I didn't) at which point I could easily be sat facing whichever direction puts "Mars down" at a similar angle to the one seen in the comic. But it will change throughout the day, every day that it applies. 172.70.162.244 13:05, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I guess that's why Randall hates it so much, it changes continuously. Although he missed a great opportunity for a clever animated comic -- it could calculate the rotation of the scene based on the reader's location and time. Barmar (talk) 14:20, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

Why didn't Orson Scott Card get cowriting props for this one?

I'm TenGolf and I started the explanation! 172.70.131.6 15:03, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

I'm not so sure about the "relative to gravity in actuality" - there's no objective reason why "down" must follow gravity. (Take Ender's Game - "The enemy's gate is down") DownGoer (talk) 15:07, 10 July 2023 (UTC)

That's not the directional sense of "down". When it's used as a direction, it's towards the center of whatever body currently exerts the most gravity -- if you're on Earth it's towards the Earth's center, if you're on the Moon it's towards the Moon's center, etc. "Down" has other senses, like "the computer is down" that just refers to whether it's functioning. Barmar (talk) 17:16, 10 July 2023 (UTC)