Which surprised me that he didn't pad it out more by talking about why it was based on the Northern Hemisphere. (He calls it "an accident of ... location.") I am unsatisfied with the explanation.

The Northern Hemisphere has twice as much land as the Southern. Today 88% of the World's population lives in the Northern hemisphere. The fact that we are North-biased is not a fluke, but an effect of geography.

That was my guess, but stopped reading after the third paragraph, as there was no substance in the article by that point.

Wow. I did not expect this from HN. It's an interesting, well written account that covers a variety of things in human history that move in such a pattern, yet here are these two belittling it for its lack of brevity.

I think part of it is that the article sounds incredibly speculative and "just so". It doesn't, in other words, appear to be researched, and it is about something (the causality of our directional associations) which would be really hard to know even if you were to stare at all the known historical facts without uncertainty about them.

So if it's all conjecture, and you wipe the conjectures away, you really do have "I think it's either because shadows in the Northern hemisphere go from left to right when you're facing North, or because when you track the Sun across the sky from that hemisphere, you have to face South and then the Sun describes an arc from left to right."

But almost the perfect amount of words for someone who wanted to write an article about a subject and not a quick summary.

I did not even read it, one picture was good enough

That's nice. If there were a competition of who could grasp the main point from this article the quickest without even reading it you might be in the running for first.

Came here to say the same thing, having not even read the article.