Interesting. I always assumed that people who had trouble with maps, cardinal directions, etc. were not math people. Perhaps it is because I was around maps since a child that I have always puzzled that some people have trouble with them. When heavy fog or overcast I get lost much easier than on clear sunny days, but I do not consciously think about the sun or shadows. Whereas visualizing geometric solids seems easy for me, this I assume is learned. Nonetheless, I am almost always confused by illustrations of how to insert cards in ATM machines, and have even resorted to first trying the opposite of what I think it says, my wife never has this problem. Also, she finds ambiguous directions that others give about how to get somewhere unambiguous, while I am weighing the odds of what interpretation to give. I guess people are just different. On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 12:11 PM, James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu> wrote:
hvm writes:
I still have difficulty with left and right; for the longest time I had to stop and think about which hand I wrote with. Or ... .
While we're discussing such things, I wonder if other math-funsters have my peculiar sort of trouble with using maps: If I'm heading north, navigating is easy; if I'm heading east or west, I do the appropriate 90 degree rotation; but if I'm heading south, I can't do a 180 degree rotation, so I *pretend* I'm going north (travelling the reverse of the route I actually want to take), figure out what I need to do, and then reverse the instructions (so that left turns becomes right turns and vice versa).
Jim Propp
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