I've often paused before supposedly helpful illustrations meant to indicate the sense in which a magnetic stripe card is to be inserted into an electronic card reader, pondering whether the illustration is truly ambiguous or whether I simply lack imagination For example, this one http://www.flickr.com/photos/thane/2243067955/ Tippy-tapped on my iPad On Aug 30, 2010, at 10:11 AM, 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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