I love maps, and can get anywhere with them. Here’s the kicker though: I have little-to-no concept of left, right, north, south, east and west. I cannot make a left or right turn without first putting up my hands to see which one makes the “L” shape. Most of my close friends and family, when riding in a car navigating, will simply say “Turn my way” or “Turn your way”.
Also, as far as directions go… whatever way I am facing usually seems “northish” to me. Academically, I know the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. However, I have a hard time putting this to practical use. Friends (especially males) have tried for years to correct these problems; but I just don’t “click” on directional issues.
The most exhilarating ‘click moment’ I’ve ever had came about seven years ago, when I finally figured out how to swim the butterfly stroke.
Before click: barely-coordinated thrashing, which left me completely wrung out within 35 yards. After click, fifteen minutes later: skipping across the water like a well-thrown stone. It felt fabulous.
The best part of it was that it happened to me as an adult swimmer. I think it gives me an advantage when coaching other adults who are trying to learn the stroke now. Folks who got the knack when they were 10 years old, decades ago, don’t remember where those big epiphanies were hiding.
If you’re worried about my sig Fran, hopefully I can put it in more transparent terms:
My hypothesis states:
After a month 65% of new registrees are still posting
After six months that drops to 21%
After a year it’s 13%
[What I’ve never explicitly stated is that the formula is only appropriate for periods up to one and a bit years (about 15 months actually). I’ve never investigated the longer-term effects, though I wouldn’t expect the proportion to drop off much further - it is on the unusual side to last 15 months and then stop coming. Maybe one day I’ll have the data to check this out further.]
You’ve been here about 14 months. That makes you, if not one in a million, at least one in eight.
Okay, I get that. But I still have no idea how it relates to the actual formula in your sig. Where does that little 2.3 come in? And why is it little? And why does it go t, then a number, then minus t? Is t the same as n? What does it mean for a probability to be 0.009134? I understand a probability being “one in eight”, but where does 0.009134 come from? You made it up! You made it all up! I declare shenanigans!
I’m sorry; can I get a ruling on this? You got lost in your apartment?
This is crying out for explication.
Oh, and I “get” math, and I love maps; I can find my way around just fine if I have a map. If I’m in the woods, though, in a place I’ve never been before, God help me if the trail isn’t simple to follow. I have no sense of direction whatsoever.
My biggest personal “click” of the last few years involves dancing. The first class I took was salsa, which isn’t easy. I struggled a lot, especially with that dratted Latin hip motion. But then I took swing, and everything fell into place with remarkable speed.
I love this statement. Hey, you’re special, but you’re not THAT special. I think Fran should add this to her sig!
There are lots of scientific things I just don’t get. I mean, I learned the concept, it makes sense, but deep down on some intuitive level, it just doesn’t seem right. Like how a plane flies, how how a big battleship just doesn’t sink like a rock. You can explain it to me all you want, but WOW, HOW DOES THAT WORK??? I guess I just need to be more logical and less emotional.
I sympathize, jjimm. But repeat after me, “Spring forward, Fall back. Spring forward, Fall back. Spring forward, Fall back. There’s no place like home. There’s…” Oh, sorry. When people tell you that we’re gaining an hour or losing an hour, ignore them. Their purpose is to do nothing but confuse us. Spring forward, fall back. That’s all there is to it.
Regarding directions: I love giving directions (and I do it really well), but I can’t listen to them with the slightest bit of success. I can really give out a good set of directions. The people, they say, “I wish I would get lost more often just so’s I could call up Munch and have him give me directions.” But the minute someone tells me to take the second left after the grey house, I’m a gonner.
For fun last week I proved to myself the division rule for 9 (you add the digits of the number - if the result is divisible by 9, so is the original number). Then I generalized it to all bases - the highest single digit in any base has this property (In base 8, it’s easy to tell if things are divisible by 7).
Then I realized that because modularity is preserved, not just whether it’s divisible (that is, if the sum leaves a remainder of 3, so did the original number), that that’s why the number 3 has this property too (in base 10) - because it’s a divisor of 9.
Then I realized that every divisor of the largest digit in any base has this property - in base 16, the numbers 3, 5, and 15 all have the property that you can tell if they divide a number by adding up the digits.
Did it for fun.
However,
I cannot multiply two numbers unless the larger one is on top:
123
x45
I can do.
45
x123
I cannot do. I get lost in the middle.
I also have to write out the numbers I’m carrying/borrowing when I add or subtract on paper, and cross them out as I use them (but I can do 3 digit addition or subtraction in my head).
I’m female and I love maps. Give me a map and I can get there. Also, I navagate very well without a map. If I have been to a place once I can usually get there again with no wrong turns. However languages, music, and complex math give me fits. In math, I could never figure out how to do word problems. You know: a train leaves Chicago heading west at 3pm going 80 mph. An airplane leaves Seattle at 4pm going 350 mph. If the plane crashes into the train what was the entre for dinner on the plane? I could solve these problems but I had to do it with pictures of trains and planes with lots of arrows and use a ruler. Teachers didn’t like that when the test rules said show your work.
I don’t have a great natural sense of direction, but I can read a map like nobody’s business. I love maps. I get very annoyed when people assume that all women are unable to read maps.
simply cats, I also do the “make an L” thing to remember which is left. My college roommate taught me that. It feels like life got easier once I started making the L.
One thing I don’t get is square footage. People say “such and such is 3000 square feet.” To me, that could be anything. It could be my office. It could be Madison Square Garden. It could be a bathroom stall. That is completely meaningless information.
One thing that I do get is converting currency, quickly and painlessly. When I travelled a lot for work, I was often going back and forth from lire to francs to pounds to pesetas to dollars. Not only could I make the conversions in any and all directions, I was also able to shop without making any conversion at all – being able to think “this product at XX pesetas is a good deal, but this product at YY pesetas is a rip-off” without actually thinking of dollars (my home currency). So now what happens? The Euro comes along and makes my only math skill practically obsolete. Geez louise, sometimes you can’t catch a break.
Female, Geography Major, possibly specializing in cartography, avid map junkie, good with direction to the point of being freaky. Example: My family went on vacation to Seattle when I was 10. We spent a grand total of two days there. When we went again when I was 17, I gave directions to the hotel we were staying in - without a map. My mom (and others) think that this is pretty freaky. I don’t understand how you couldn’t do this, I mean I had been there before, after all. I have to be the one driving, being a passenger is too frustrating for me!
But…
Don’t ask me about music. I don’t get it. At all. I’ll be listening to music with someone and they’ll be going on about the bass or guitar or whatever and I’ll be like “that’s a guitar? I thought it was a piano or something. Huh” And they’ll think I’m an idiot. Forget sheet music, I have no concept of what a note is. Or a chord. Please don’t even start mentionning terms like “octave” or I’ll be totally lost. Is this weird?
And I would go into my memorizing numbers easily because every number has a very distinct colour, but I think that that’s it own thread!
I have a good sense of direction, but it is entirely instinctive. I can get where I’m going, but I can’t tell anyone how I did it. I’m good with maps, too. I’m okay at math, not great, but not helpless either.
I’m also a pretty good speller and have excellent grammar (all spelling and grammar mistakes in this post are due to a faulty keyboard), but I don’t know the rules of language. I just know how everything is supposed to sound and look. This may be a big part of why I am abominably bad at any langauge besides English. Everyone on my dad’s side of the family speaks fluent Spanish, and use it frequently with each other. From grade two through my sophmore year in high school, I took Spanish classes. And I can barely form a coherent sentence. I took two years of Latin, and don’t remember a single word. Apparently, this even applies to computer languages. Despite my deep interest in the subject, I just couldn’t “get” programming. (This might have been because of my teacher, though, who was throughly incompetant. She was regularly being surpassed by the brighter students in the class, and half way through the semester would give up entirely and let them teach)
Two other things that never “clicked” for me: analog clocks and shoelaces. I was well into my teens before I could regularly tie my shoes succesfully on the first go, and I still have to think a second or two before I can read a regular (non-digital) clock. (Okay, big hand is on the five, little hand is on the two…)
Fran - to work out the proportion of people still here after any time up to 15 months, do the following:
Example: After half a year (i.e. t = 0.5)
The full equation is 0.009134[sup]t . 2.3[sup]-t[/sup][/sup]
Highlighting the bit I want you to look at: 0.009134[sup]t . 2.3[sup]-t[/sup][/sup]
See? Start with 2.3 [sup]-t[/sup]
Raise 2.3 to the power of negative one half, using a suitable calculator or Excel. You get 0.6594.
And now you have 0.009134[sup]t . 0.6594[/sup]
So now do one half multiplied by 0.6594. You get 0.3297.
And now you have 0.009134[sup]0.3297[/sup]
So finally do 0.009134 raised to the power of 0.3297. You get 0.213, or 21%.
What’s that you say? What does something raised to the power negative one half actually mean? What does 0.009134 raised to the power 0.3297 actually mean? What are you - some kind of philosophy graduate or something? Whe the hell cares what it means!
We can discuss the meaning of the number 7 later. For now just shove in the numbers and turn the crank.
My mother is 80 and has never driven a car in her life. There’s a reason for that. If she’s more than a block from home then it’s unlikely she’d find her way back.
She has tried to give me directions, but she uses landmarks.
Her: I need to go to the Arts and Crafts store.
Me: Where is it.
Her: It’s by that road they closed when they built the airport.
Me: ?
Her: You know, when you were little. The road we used to take to Gramma’s house.
Me: Uh, OK.
Her: It’s just beyond that place with the big flower gardens.
(I’ve learned better than to ask if it’s right or left because I never know what mental direction she’s facing at the time. North, south, east or west are foreign concepts. )
It goes on like that until I finally get out the phone book and look it up.
Okay, having read that ten or eleven times, I’m just about following you but… [sub]I don’t know what “raising” is.[/sub]
And I still don’t get where you plucked the numbers 0.009134 and 2.3 from. I mean, where did you come up with those numbers? It looks like you plucked them from mid air. Maybe it’ll be best if you explain it to me at Londope. Bring paper! (I’ll tell you about historical materialism in return ;))
Rysdad - my Granddad is a chauffeur and as a result my nan has never needed to know the way anywhere - she’s exactly the same as yours. “It’s by the park with the swans!”
You know what bup just said? This is how I read it:
And I have to write out any math I have to do. Solve for x? Sure. Gimme some paper. (And I have to set it up and solve for x the way the nuns told me to in school.)
And after quite a few years as an Art major (actually Graphics, Art Lite) I still don’t know why some of my socks don’t “go” with some of my pants. (White “goes” with everything. Right?)
So when the Little Woman gets home in the evenings she’s know to ask: Did the boys wear that all day?
Uhhh… yeah?
Then she’ll change their clothes.
And Puddin’ “raising” is what you do when you think your cards are better than the other guy’s. (Not that I “get” card games more involved than War.)
-Rue.
Maps and navigation, no problem. When I visit a new area, I like to drive around, with a map, exploring. As long as I know which way North is, I’m not lost for long. Once I travel through an area, and then look at the map afterward, the 2D/3D tend to merge in my mind. I can switch between either view in my mind’s eye easily. Hell, I love to pour over topographic maps just for fun. I was disappointed in a geography class I took in college when we didn’t spend more time on a topographic assignment. The professor acted like it was going to be so hard, and most of the people in the class pestered the guy for help, since they were having so much trouble. I kept asking “Is that all?” because I was sure he wanted more out of us.
Reading music is a mixed bag. I played drums in high school, not too well, but I could play. Counting time and reading notes was no problem, but when a fellow student tried to teach me piano, I had no patience with the way he explained things. I couldn’t relate the notes on the page to the things he said. But I love music with odd time signatures, like in jazz. Brubeck’s Time Out sounds so natural to me. Probably why I can’t dance.
Math is weird for me. I can add long strings of numbers in my head, but like to see them written down for clarity and accuracy. Long division is fun to me. Higher math: calculus, geometry, etc. eludes me in practice. I understand the theories somewhat, but can’t apply them. kabbes’ equation might as well be Arabic writing to me. But I actually kind of liked word problems, they had a context I could relate to.
Language is back and forth. I can pick up the context of Spanish that I hear or read, even though I haven’t studied it for years. I just can’t remember the vocabulary. I haven’t really tried other languages, but I can pick out structure fairly well. After I read A Clockwork Orange, I was speaking in Alex’s dialect for a month afterwards. It felt natural, and confused everyone I talked to. When I would show them the book, including English majors, they couldn’t read one page sometimes.
I’ve never had a problem with maps. I can usually navigate successfully in strange places without a compass if I have an accurate map. (I might make a wrong turn here and there, but I never seem to get hopelessly lost.)
My problem is more when I get inside buildings and people refer to compass points (such as the “north” wall). In order to figure out which wall is which, I have to orient the entire building in my mind to the outside world and then picture my current room in it. For complicated layouts (especially multi-floor buildings), north/south/east/west lose all intuitive meaning to me. My indoor orientation works on a completely different system than my outdoor one.
