"DT" wrote in message
...
Bigcrapsnip


Your first error, Ralph, was to begin your entire diatribe with 'I
assume...'. Your second was to refer to 'looking down on the solar
system' without defining your frame of reference. There is no 'down'. At
this point I lost interest.

That's a bit of a low blow IMVHO. There's a general convention (that annoys
the pants off antipodeans (a term which is itself based on a general
assumption about which way is "up") about which way is "up") which is that
North is up. True, there is no "up" in space, but in a vernacular sense most
people would consider looking "down" on the solar system to indicate looking
at the ecliptic plane in plan view from a vantage point above one pole of
the sun, approximately, that pole being the one that points in the
approximate same direction as the North pole of the Earth. That being for
purely conventional reasons, because earth maps, by arbitrary convention,
generally have North at the top.

He's not drawing some detailed conclusion from this choice of reference
frame (as he would be say in a discussion on SR), he's just setting the
scene. If, for instance, one said "looking down on America, one can see the
Grand Canyon" one doesn't need to specify precisely where in space one is. A
reasonable reader can easily understand what the writer means.

Read more widely, and be more critical of others assertions, value
evidence more than opinion, learn mathematics.
These things will improve your ability to reject crap.
Best wishes,
--
DT
Replace nospam with the antithesis of hills
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Valleys? Holes? Pits? Plains? Please be specific

Ian