A bit of musing from me today.
Those of you who know me personally, will know that I am not strong on the whole spatial intelligence thing.
Some examples:
All this leads me to my love/hate relationship with the map apps on my phone. I am immensely grateful for the technology that has provided me with a hands-free way to navigate the highways and byways as I dash off to collect this or that item on which to lavish some transformative love and attention.
Mr Namasi - who, like his sisters, is blessed with a bump of locality that can only come from their father, because their mother outperforms me in the 'getting lost' event - is no doubt equally grateful no longer to be on the receiving end of panicked phone calls when I have managed to lose myself along some country lane. That man has managed to locate and extricate me from extreme lostness using only my hysterical description of landmarks and a map on his computer. More than once. I kid you not.
But now I have the soothing tones of Siri to guide me. I have even allocated a female voice and a South African accent, so that I feel a greater sense of kinship with her. Not that speaking with a South African accent has made her any better at interpreting my spoken instructions. She and I have had some interesting conversations!
But I digress.
The thing is, lifeline though she is, Siri has the habit of issuing a few instructions that I find less than helpful.
"Head north (or south-east or whatever)". My car is fitted with an indicator that copes with left, and right. My car is not fitted with an indicator that tells me which way is north. And since I'm not looking at a printed map, and since Siri helpfully swings the on-screen map around so that the direction I'm headed is always up, I have no idea which way is north. Thanks Siri.
How I deal with this: I just drive forward. Forward is a direction I know, even though my car doesn't have an indicator for that. I also know backward. Are you proud of me? Siri simply has to replot the route and tell me what to do once she's figured it out.
"Proceed to the route". Siri, you're the navigator. I'm following your instructions. How is it that I'm not already on the route? This is particularly unnerving if Siri's on-screen map shows me floating across the countryside where apparently no roads exist.
How I deal with this: I just keep going in the hope that Siri will figure it out.
Once, several years ago, I was on my way to collect my son from a friend's house. Siri hadn't been born yet, and my phone didn't run to maps. The friend lived in a new area which didn't appear on my paper map. So, of course, I was lost. The friend's mother was trying to direct me over the phone, (handsfree, of course). "Turn left off Rockingham Road," she told me. I did as I was told and promptly got even loster. You see, in her mind's eye, I was travelling in x direction along Rockingham Road, when in fact, I was going the opposite way.
Without some kind of context, so many instructions are like this, aren't they? They work on the assumption that certain basic pieces of the puzzle are already in place. And that's about as helpful as 'proceed to the route.'
Those of you who know me personally, will know that I am not strong on the whole spatial intelligence thing.
Some examples:
- Although I know the rules (and the point) of chess, I can't actually play the game. There are too many parameters for me to be able to use all my pieces in concert to build a strategy and defend myself against my opponent's strategy.
- Even though I was pretty decent at maths at school, I always came horribly undone in the geometry papers (but not trigonometry, for some reason - that, I could do). I simply couldn't figure out how the size of this angle, or the length of this line impacted on that angle and that line, even though I knew the various theorems being applied.
- Even if I have been to a place before, I can't be relied upon to find my way back there without help. Don't get wrong: I'm pretty good at navigating if I have a map, and someone else is driving. But I can't build a map in my head that tells me where one place is, in relation to another. So, if I turn left at the end of X street to go to place A, and right at the end of X street to go to place B, and far as I'm concerned, places A and B are miles apart. Even though it often transpires that the roads curve back towards each other en route, and the distance between A and B is actually short enough to walk in just a few minutes.
All this leads me to my love/hate relationship with the map apps on my phone. I am immensely grateful for the technology that has provided me with a hands-free way to navigate the highways and byways as I dash off to collect this or that item on which to lavish some transformative love and attention.
Mr Namasi - who, like his sisters, is blessed with a bump of locality that can only come from their father, because their mother outperforms me in the 'getting lost' event - is no doubt equally grateful no longer to be on the receiving end of panicked phone calls when I have managed to lose myself along some country lane. That man has managed to locate and extricate me from extreme lostness using only my hysterical description of landmarks and a map on his computer. More than once. I kid you not.
But now I have the soothing tones of Siri to guide me. I have even allocated a female voice and a South African accent, so that I feel a greater sense of kinship with her. Not that speaking with a South African accent has made her any better at interpreting my spoken instructions. She and I have had some interesting conversations!
But I digress.
The thing is, lifeline though she is, Siri has the habit of issuing a few instructions that I find less than helpful.
"Head north (or south-east or whatever)". My car is fitted with an indicator that copes with left, and right. My car is not fitted with an indicator that tells me which way is north. And since I'm not looking at a printed map, and since Siri helpfully swings the on-screen map around so that the direction I'm headed is always up, I have no idea which way is north. Thanks Siri.
How I deal with this: I just drive forward. Forward is a direction I know, even though my car doesn't have an indicator for that. I also know backward. Are you proud of me? Siri simply has to replot the route and tell me what to do once she's figured it out.
"Proceed to the route". Siri, you're the navigator. I'm following your instructions. How is it that I'm not already on the route? This is particularly unnerving if Siri's on-screen map shows me floating across the countryside where apparently no roads exist.
How I deal with this: I just keep going in the hope that Siri will figure it out.
Once, several years ago, I was on my way to collect my son from a friend's house. Siri hadn't been born yet, and my phone didn't run to maps. The friend lived in a new area which didn't appear on my paper map. So, of course, I was lost. The friend's mother was trying to direct me over the phone, (handsfree, of course). "Turn left off Rockingham Road," she told me. I did as I was told and promptly got even loster. You see, in her mind's eye, I was travelling in x direction along Rockingham Road, when in fact, I was going the opposite way.
Without some kind of context, so many instructions are like this, aren't they? They work on the assumption that certain basic pieces of the puzzle are already in place. And that's about as helpful as 'proceed to the route.'
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