= On Mon, Jun 23, 2014 at 8:39 PM, Pierre Abbat <phma@bezitopo.org> wrote:

On Wednesday, June 18, 2014 = 19:13:16 John Cowan wrote:
> The question here is, which way does the Moon face? =A0My intuition sa= ys that
> it faces the Earth, so "in front of the moon" means the same= thing under
> either interpretation.

It makes sense to say that the Moon always faces the Earth, but there= is
nothing outside the Earth always faces, except a geostationary satellite. S= o
which way does the Earth face? I'd say the Earth's nose is in the B= ight of
Benin, its right ear is in the Gal=E1pagos, and its neck is at the South Po= le.
That puts its glabella in Greenwich, where it is defined to be.

I think that Lojban rules for assigning facing to objects that don't na= turally
have it should be different from English rules.

I'm honestly not sure how often the facing of a celestial body= would come up in general- or even subject-specific- conversation. As far a= s a concrete example of a sentence involving facing and celestial objects, = the best I can up with is "The daytime of a planet occurs on the hemis= phere facing the star it is orbiting.", or "A tidally locked cele= stial body has a revolution and rotation rate that cause the same hemispher= e of the body to always be facing the body it orbits.", and in both th= ose cases, we're talking about the facing a /part/ of the body, not the= body itself. If anything, I would say that either celestial objects face a= ll ways simultaneously, or face none. I also don't think it's reall= y a good idea to use directions that require front/back/left/right/up/down = when dealing that by their nature don't have any of them.

=A0

Pierre

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