Do we really need West and South when we can use negative North and negative East?
Why do we have 2 separate words for good and bad? Good and ungood are totally sufficient.
I think the idea of directions came before the idea of negative.
Why do we have subtraction when we can just add a negative number?
Isn’t that exactly how computers work?
Why do we have 26 letters? Why not just communicate in binary!
01010100 01101000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01101001 01110011 00100000 01110110 01100101 01110010 01111001 00100000 01101110 01100001 01110100 01110101 01110010 01100001 01101100 00100001
So you’d have states like North Dakota and Negative North Dakota?
The Negative shall rise again!
Just guessing here, but I would think it’s for for clarity and brevity. West and South are shorter to say and distinct enough to avoid being easily misheard causing somebody to go in the opposite direction than intended.
As a practical matter, relative directions are already hard enough, where I might say that Colorado is east of California, and California is west of Colorado.
To use +/- East would mean there’s now just a single symbol difference between relative directions. California bring -East of Folorado, and Colorado being +East of California.
Also, we need not forget that the conventional meridian used for Earth navigation is centered on Greenwich in the UK, and is a holdover from the colonial era where Europe is put front-and-center on a map and everything else is “free real estate”. Perhaps if the New World didn’t exist, we would have right-ascension based system where Greenwich is still 0-deg East and Asia is almost 160-deg East. Why would colonialists center the maps on anywhere but themselves?
Ah yes, our great 51st state, Folorado!
I see my typo, and it’s too funny and I’m just going to roll with it haha
Fine choice my friend, I’d leave it too haha! 😂
Negative north negative east airlines doesn’t have a good ring to it though.
How about 225° airlines?
You probably already know this, but for others’ amusement… Southwest’s Pilot Training pathway program is called Destination 225, and I doub’t that many prople even in the airline business get the reference. So if nothing else, they’ve got a branding headstart.
I didn’t! Had to look up online compass that had degrees on it.
But it doesn’t surprise me that any company’s PR guys would come up with things like that.
An even funner Southwest PR story is the Malice in Dallas. I don’t have a good resource to point you to, but you can google it. it was an armwrestling match between CEOs to settle a corporate dispute. The two companies holstered their lawyers and settled the grudge with a big PR event.
