Sexual orientation 'affects map reading skills'

Not in my family. Hubby is awful at map-reading. I'm the navigator.

(You mean, he's going to get worse???)

This thread is so gay . . .

Why Mature Men Don't Ask for Directions When We're Lost, by Red Green, Canadian television icon.

Okay it all comes down to pride. We're out there driving around in our own vehicle, burning gas, wearing sunglasses, looking good. People who see us driving by would never guess that we have no idea where we are. And we don't want to tell them. Men don't enjoy the concept of going up to total strangers and saying "You may not know this but I'm a moron." In contrast the woman we're traveling with is often very anxious to share this knowledge with the world. It somehow eases her burden. To women, getting lost on a trip is a blameless act of nature - to men it's a personal failure. He knew where he was when he left home - he doesn't know where he is now. Somewhere along the line he crossed the line from the world he knows into the world he doesn't know. To a man this is how he felt when he got married or had kids. If he admits he's lost in the car, he'll have to admit that he's lost everywhere and that's way too much to ask. So just bite your tongue and circle the block a few more times. Men aren't lost, they just go the long way.

The techniques of opening conversation are universal. I knew long ago and rediscovered that the best way to attract attention, help, and conversation is to be lost. A man who seeing his mother starving to death on a path kicks her in the stomach to clear the way, will cheerfully devote several hours of his time giving wrong directions to a total stranger who claims to be lost.

Travels with Charley: in Search of America, John Steinbeck

Honestly, I've never known a man who was any good at map reading. But the people I've known with the best built-in sense of direction have all been men. I swear, sometimes I think they're psychic.

My dad taught me how to read maps. Whenever we'd go on trips (mostly vacations) he'd make me follow along on a map and every 20 minutes or so he'd ask me a question. "How far to the Ohio state line?", If "I drive at 55 mph, how long until we cross into Virginia?", etc...

I have been surprised how many adults don't know so many of the basics though. Quinn and I had a discussion a few months back and she wasn't aware that the north/south Interstate highways are odd numbered and the east/west highways were even. A lot of people don't understand the mile markers on the sides of the Interstates or how the 195/295/395/495 loops around cities are setup either.

I taught my daughter how to read maps and she's very good at it. If I'm driving and she's in the car she's my navigator by default.

fishin, my dad played those map games with me too. Because of the early training, I am good with maps and have a better than average sense of direction. I guess Eva and I don't fit in the standard mold...

There is a sport which is known as orienteering, which is a competition to find one's way in a "hiking race" by following a map. Orienteering skills are also taught to people in the armed forces who are thought to need them. Personally, i prefer survey maps to road maps. Road maps are notoriously unreliable, and often don't clearly show features such as rivers which can be a crucial aid in knowing where you are. However, you can't realistically use relief maps for a long highway journey--you'd need hundreds of them, unless you got the really large scale maps, which are no better than road maps.

I used to collect survey maps. My favorite was the 1:6250 ("one over sixty-two fifty") maps, which means that one foot on the map equals 6,250 feet on the ground. Maps with that resolution show small individual features such as houses or barns. They're hopeless for cities, though.

There are several PC-based road map programs you can get--National Geographic produces a good one. The best ones allow you to go online to get updates with construction and detour information. A company i worked for had a service contract with a national chain of fuel centers (for semi trucks and cars), and we'd send people all over the United States east of the Mississippi and in the Southwest to do service calls at the customer locations. I used Microsoft Streets and Trips, which has the online update feature. I'd use that to give them a series of maps--one for the entire trip, with little detail, but showing the entire route. Then i'd print out another map for each state they had to drive through. For the end of the trip, i'd print out a map from the National Geographic program, which includes terrain features along with the road map part--so they could use things like rivers and lakes and small airports as landmarks.

I am no big fan of Microsoft, but i highly recommend the Streets and Trips program, and their online update information is first class. Very reliable stuff . . .

>waves hand< Straight, female, and seldom lost -- as long as I trust my instincts and not someone else's directions.

When you first go to another hemisphere inbuilt compass deserts you. I think the sun being/going in a different direction has something to do with it.

Same here. I was and am always in charge of the map. I didn't think men needed maps

That's very plausible, Dadpad. In the northern hemisphere the sun appears to always be south of directly overhead, with seasonal variation (so, of course, it would appear to be north of just overhead in lands where people live upside down, such as yours). Determining one's position north or south of the equate with an astrolabe or a sexton consists of measuring the sun's apparent distance above the horizon at apparent local noon, and comparing that to a navigational almanac.

Of course, i do think it is reasonable to assume that east and west are the same for you as they are for me.

Set a sexton is a person who looks after maintenance of a church.

You mean a sextant I assume.

Another navigator here.

BBB


Orienting Your Solar Array

It is important for proper system operation that the array be oriented true South (if you are located in the northern hemisphere). The directions of magnetic South and true South differ from one another depending on geographic location. This variance is called declination. Check the declination for your region in order to extrapolate true South from a compass heading of magnetic South. The map below shows the magnetic declination for the US. For example, central Oklahoma falls between the 8 degree E and the 10 degree E lines. This means that the north point of a compass points about 9 degrees E of true north. So true north is actually 9 degrees to the WEST of where the compass points.
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I used to have the direction sense of a Bird Dog. Now my sense of direction went all kaflooie when I moved from California to New Mexico. The only direction I'm sure of is the nearby Sandia mountains, which are East of my home. When the sun goes down in the West, I've got East and West covered. But North and South are still a mystery after five years in Albuquerque.

Is it the higher altitude (5000 above sea level) difference between at sea level in the San Francisco Bay Area? I know the clouds look different in the high desert. ---BBB