Apparently, Mandarin speakers start with East and work their way around clockwise (East-South-West-North), but westerners start with North.
Turns out "North" derives from an older word meaning "to the left". So, we too are facing East in a sense when we start with "North"! I'm thinking of how the standard angle in math is also measured from "eastward" on graph paper:
On a related note, I just found out that the Mandarin word for compass is "south-pointing needle" (zhǐnánzhēn (指南针)). Once again, Mandarin makes more sense! The magnetic reason why the "north" end of a compass points the way it does is because of a magnetic south pole lurking up there inside the arctic circle attracting it! The north end of the compass is indeed south-seeking!
Why we ever chose to call the North Pole direction of the planet "Up" is the subject of an older blog post.
However, at least our planet's rotation is consistent with the Right Hand Rule (yet another arbitrary decision we have settled on) for rotation: Grab the planet with your right hand with your fingers curled in the direction of rotation and your thumb picks out the direction of rotation, which is north ("up"). I thought this must be one of the reasons we adopted the right hand rule in the beginning but my internet research tells me this is simply a coincidence!
North is to the left of East, the original ordinal direction. The North pole is "Up" arbitrarily but consistent with the right hand rule. The right hand rule works for positive charges which is what Benjamin Franklin thought was the charge of the charges-in-motion (before electrons were discovered). (Interestingly, people are still arguing whether Franklin was a leftie or a righty...) Of course which subatomic charges we labelled "positive" and "negative" was, itself, arbitrary!
So, right handed people from the Northern Hemisphere have determine which way is Up and that electrical current is the motion of positive charges. Now we have to live with all of these arbitrary decisions!
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