Eastern – Western: What?

Why is this part of the world eastern and this other part, western?
via http://xkcd.com/

The use of western and eastern to describe certain parts of the world has not always bothered me. In fact, I drank the social studies Kool-Aid just like most of my peers in elementary, middle and high school. We were part of “the western world” and that was that. I wasn’t bothered…I wasn’t even apathetic. Critical thinking of this nature didn’t reach my cranial hemispheres until my mid twenties. So the world is a sphere. It’s round. West and East are sort of arbitrary directions that we use in order to reign in some control of our spinning globe.

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