Yes, I have a weak sense of left/right and also the difficulty with 180 degree rotations on maps. Sunrise or sunset helps a lot, but foggy days are impossible. When I left California and went to college in the East, it seemed to me that the sun set on the wrong side. A friend of mine in a similar situation said that we had such a strong mental image of the Sierra Nevada in the east that we could not adjust to having the sun set behind it, even though we were thousands of miles away. I never came up with a better explanation. I'm a calendar boustrphedonist. When visualizing a weekend, I go from Saturday down to Sunday, then reverse direction for the following week. -> Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Tue Mon Sun <- This causes me endless confusion, but the adjacency of days is so firmly fixed in my mind that I cannot force a discontuity between Saturday and Sunday. Eiralih
From: James Propp <jpropp@cs.uml.edu> Subject: [math-fun] left vs. right Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2010 13:11:48 -0400
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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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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