I've never had much trouble with left & right, nor, since I've hiked thousands of kilometres in all directions on very varied terrain, with maps. On the other hand, Louise has so much trouble with left & right that you can almost rely on taking the opposite of what she says. But when sailing, where such distinctions are needed to avoid disaster, she never made any mistake over port & starboard. R. On Mon, 30 Aug 2010, Hilarie Orman wrote:
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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