[OSM-talk] SOTM 2010 Girona, Spain!!

[Nick Whitelegg]

>All of Spain is further north than Tennessee, the US state where I live. 
Tennessee is on about the same >latitude as Algeria.

That's another example of the "anticlockwise axis tilt" of perceptions of 
places versus where they actually are.

I've noticed that several places in the world are tilted anticlockwise 
compared to where one expects them to be.

To me living in the UK, the natural way of thinking suggests that 
Edinburgh-London-Paris are on a N-S axis. They're not, it's actually 
NNW-SSE - tilted anticlockwise.

Likewise I imagine Paris and New York, and London-Amsterdam-Berlin-Moscow, 
to be on W-E axes. Again they're not, it's approx WSW-ENE in all cases, so 
again the axis is tilted anticlockwise.

Tennessee I'd have imagined, before I realised (some years ago) how much 
further south the USA is compared to where you think it is, as being about 
the same as southern France or northern Spain.

The much wetter climate of the USA compared to most of Spain, and 
certainly north Africa, plays a role in this. My one visit to SE USA was 
changing planes at Atlanta, GA and it was very green - comparable to the 
UK or France.

Nick