• 418_im_a_teapot@sh.itjust.works
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    4 months ago

    This phrase has never made any sense to me. It’s a circle. If one side is moving right, then the opposite side is moving left. So the phrase only makes sense if you specify which side we are talking about, which nobody ever does. Therefore it’s completely illogical to me while everyone else just gets it. Side note: Autism can be a real bitch sometimes.

    Edit:

    1. Some people don’t understand how I can see a problem. That’s cool, but don’t be a dick. We all look at the world through different lenses.
    2. This is when I was a kid “helping” my grandfather in the garage. I’m older now and understand that “righty tighty” references the top of the rotation.
    3. Some people rotate their perspective 90° and imagine themselves standing on the screw. Therefore when your face rotates to the right the screw is tightened. I hadn’t ever thought of that. But I had imagined rotating my perspective 90° the other direction –the top of my head as a screwdriver. In that case, “lefty tighty”
      • 418_im_a_teapot@sh.itjust.works
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        4 months ago

        Clockwise and counter-clockwise makes sense.

        But when you say “right” it’s not clear which side of the circle is being referenced. If the top of the circle is moving to the right, the bottom is moving left at the same time. So the saying only makes sense when you specify that you’re talking about the top of the circle.

        • pyre@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          you have to have never seen a steering wheel to not understand which side of the circle is being referenced. it’s always the top. who would even reference anything else and why.

          “turn it right”

          “which part???”

          “the middle of course, you absolute alien”

          • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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            4 months ago

            I think we can all understand how it functions but that doesn’t make it “correct.” It’s spinning around a circle. Exactly half of its moving right as the other half moves left. That’s why we have the terms clockwise and counter-clockwise. If left and right were actually reasonable for something spinning in a circle this wouldn’t exist.

        • underisk@lemmy.ml
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          4 months ago

          Imagine it as if it were a track you were driving around, which way would you turn the wheel?

            • underisk@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              If a steering wheel has you this perplexed then I beg you to never ever drive a vehicle.

              • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
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                4 months ago

                If you’re gripping the bottom of the wheel you move your hands left to make the car turn right. Which is kind of the whole problem here. Rotation around a centre doesn’t happen right or left. That’s the whole reason why the words “clockwise” and “anticlockwise” exist. Translation = right, left, up, down, forward, back. Rotation = clockwise, anticlockwise.

                • underisk@lemmy.ml
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                  4 months ago

                  If I ask you to turn the car left and you give me this speech I would eject from the car.

                • angrystego@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  It doesn’t matter where you hold the wheel. When you’re turning right, you’re always doing the right movement for tightening a screw, no matter the hand position. That’s the point.

                  • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
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                    4 months ago

                    A clockwise rotation turns a car to the right (in forward gear) and tightens a nut (right hand threaded). But this is not a rotation to the right. It’s a clockwise rotation. You can’t rotate “to the right”. That’s the point.

          • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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            4 months ago

            So you’re explaining rotation, in terms of a smaller imaginary rotation, which engages with imaginary traction wheels, which engage with the work to be turned?

            If that works for you, great, but it is complicated.

            • underisk@lemmy.ml
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              4 months ago

              No im trying to illustrate the parallels between how you turn the wheel, how the car turns in response to that , and how they are all related. You turn left you will make the exact same rotational movement, with both the vehicle, and the steering wheel.

              It’s as simple as, “What direction do you turn the wheel to make the car go left?” I just stacked on top “and also it makes the car itself do that same exact circular movement” so you don’t just dismiss this as some kind of arbitrary convention.

              • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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                4 months ago

                Oh, I see.

                Car steering wheels work that way because of the convention. Change the side that the steering column’s pinion meets the rack and the wheel would work the opposite way. From the mathematical perspective, there’s two ways to continuously map an arc of the steering wheel to an arc of the wheels, and since they aren’t in the same plane neither is “wrong”.

                • underisk@lemmy.ml
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                  4 months ago

                  i know you can make the wheel work the opposite way, jesus christ. the circle motion the path of the car makes when you turn left is the same as when you turn the wheel to the conventional left. imagine, instead you steered “left” by a joystick. the car would still draw the same circular path the same fucking way, because turning left makes an anticlockwise circle, every time, in every situation.

                  • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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                    4 months ago

                    Ah, so the car isn’t even important. You’re one of the people imagining standing on the screw. As long as you have a convention about which way is “up” on it, that does work.

        • Zron@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          What the fuck are you talking about.

          You’re either rotating the fastener to the right or the left.

          It doesn’t matter what side you’re talking about, because you’re not moving one side of the fastener, you’re rotating the whole thing one direction or the other.

          Clockwise just means something is rotating to the right.

          If I ask you to turn around to the right, are you going to ask me what side of you I’m referencing?

          • asap@lemmy.world
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            4 months ago

            Here is clockwise. One arrow is going to the right and one to the left.

            • Zron@lemmy.world
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              4 months ago

              The whole thing is rotating to the right, that’s what clockwise means. Clocks rotate to the right. One arrow is not pointing left, it’s pointing in the direction of rotation, which is to the right.

                • Zron@lemmy.world
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                  4 months ago

                  If you follow that arrow around to the next with your hand, which direction is your hand moving?

                  That is indicating clockwise rotation, or a rotation to the right. We’re talking about circles here

          • doggle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            4 months ago

            If I ask you to turn around to the right, are you going to ask me what side of you I’m referencing?

            No, because humans have a pretty clear forward direction. Screws don’t. You say turn a screw to the right, do you mean make the top of the screw move right or the bottom move right?

            Most people assume the top, but not all, and the language is ambiguous.

      • corsicanguppy@lemmy.ca
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        4 months ago

        I love how half the people in this thread are under-thinking it and don’t seem to understand they’re doing so. I wonder whether it’s a bit.

    • gerdesj@lemmy.ml
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      4 months ago

      They are not a circle unless you have some really odd bolts or screws! I suppose a bolt looks like a circle in “Flatland” but we live in 3D space with time as a fourth dimension that we can directly perceive.

      A screw or bolt and the rest are, roughly speaking, a cylinder with a helical thread on it. They also have a “head” or similar which acts a stopper. You can model all of them as a bolt. We use a spanner, wrench, fingers, screw drivers, drill drivers, scissors, whatever to do the tightening or loosening. You can model all those tools as a spanner (wrench). We need some final mental contortions to make this slightly rigorous: The spanner (wrench) is always considered as being at 12:00 on an imaginary clock and we have to assume that our bolt moves away from us for “tighten” and towards us for “loosen” and I suppose we should also require that we are looking at the “face” of the notional clock and not its obverse!

      Now it should be obvious how the rule works. Turn the spanner to the right and you tighten the bolt, turn it to the left and you loosen it.

      OK that lot is not very helpful when you are under a sink or in a roofing void performing strange contortions. Try holding up one of your hands and pretend you are holding a bolt or the head of a screw. Clockwise turns will tighten and anti clockwise will loosen. You might use “leftie loosey …” to bootstrap: “clockwise tighten”. It becomes even more interesting when you are trying to work out which way to turn a bolt or whatever when you can only feel it and when tightening actually moves it towards you.

      Think about a bolt running through a wheel with the head towards us, say on a very simplified bicycle. Move the bike to the right, and hence the wheels turn clockwise. Friction should cause the bolt to tighten. If you change the design and put the bolt in on the other side and now forwards for the bike is to the left then you will loosen the bolt and that will be dangerous. Now change the design to a bolt with a nut and washers etc and it rapidly gets complicated!

      Also, please note that some bolts have reverse threads to the norm. On a garden strimmer the tightening knob that holds the spool on is often a reverse threaded bolt. That’s for similar reasons to the bicycle wheel thing I mentioned earlier.

      I’ve just spent ages and a lot of words to try and persuade you that this has bugger all to do with autism. I think that your error was really to do with not thinking too deeply about the real issue and focusing on the wrong thing. We all do that, extremely often, regardless of where we are on the spectrum.

      I hope that you see that considerations with regarding helical threads on a cylinder or a tapering cone (but not circles) can be quite complicated and that’s why sometimes we all need some silly rules to get us through the every day ordeal of dealing with them.

      Now, would you like a chat about circles … 8)

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      4 months ago

      SAME!

      Even “clockwise/counter-clockwise” is a bit vague if you’re not both on the same side of the thing, since something turning clockwise from one perspective turns counter seen from the opposite side.

    • MrShankles@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      Clockwise and counterclockwise may be more intuitive for some people. Is the clock-hand (wrench) going forward in time, or backwards. But I don’t know of any quick rhyme for that