Interesting that of these six methods, only one or two would actually work in the United States, and then only in a few cities.
- England doesn't really do Cable TV like America does, so you actually do see these dishes everywhere. In America, you don't ever see them. You'd probably violate your lease for installing one.
- American cities have hardly any churches compared to Europe, where 5 out of every 7 buildings you pass will be a Church of some form.
- America is 20 years old. Anything older than that is due for replacement. Hence no weathering.
+ (1/2) People. Cool. American cities do in fact have crowds, so you can follow them. But unless you're in NYC, you're probably going to end up at a parking garage.
- American cities tend to follow a grid, and are much more decentralized. Everything you need to get to is in every direction. Every road is six lanes wide, even the dead ends and alleys.
+ (1/2) New York might have clouds, but I've never seen one in LA.
So yeah, if you're lost in a US city, you might as well just ask somebody.
This is a bizarre post that is wrong in almost every detail.
o "In America, you don't ever see them." This is just screamingly false. There are satellite dishes all over the place in both urban and rural areas all over the country. (Suburban too, but there they're often in backyards and harder to see.) They may be sparser than in Europe, I don't know, but they exist in America and are not rare.
o American cities have lots of churches. A much higher percentage than in Europe are low-church Protestant (and thus without the eastern alignment) or constructed in the last half-century or so (and thus without the eastern alignment), but I think the overall percentage of buildings that are churches is actually higher. It's certainly not radically lower.
o The idea that nothing in the US is older than 20 years is clearly meant to be an exaggeration, but it goes beyond mere hyperbole; in any city there are a few buildings that are almost as old as the city itself and plenty others that are a lot older than 20 years. New stuff too, but there are old buildings.
o Semi-true, but in the parking-garage cities the crowds would be moving in no clear single direction, right? Anyway, there are many cities with at least some subway/tram/commuter rail system, not just NY.
o Even in the grid cities, the expressways tend to be radial, and they do point toward a heavier "downtown" area. If you want "decentralized", try Paris.
o The vast majority of US cities have weather that includes clouds, not "only in a few cities".
As far as I can tell, your point really was "these don't apply very well in LA", but that's not because the points mostly don't apply to the US, it's because LA is an outlier.
Which isn't true at all. The Rule specifically limits the right of renters to install satellite dishes to renters who have outside rental property where the renter has an exclusive use area, such as a balcony or patio.
Renters without balconies or patios do not have any rights under the Rule to install satellite dishes.
The direction of mosques could also be a little unreliable in North America, since the method of determining their orientation depends on whether the Rhumb Line or Great Circle distance is used to find the direction of Mecca: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibla#North-American_interpreta...
"Every road is six lanes wide, even the dead ends and alleys"
And you can see your destination, but it is on the other side of that six lane highway, you're on foot, and there's no sign of a crossing point anywhere...
On the other hand, a lot of US cities are much more recent and often planned. And if you're in a city with some kind of grid layout, it's a lot easier to navigate – especially if the streets are numbered, instead of named after old mayors, saints and noblemen. Way easier to get lost in Munich than in Manhattan…
You'd probably violate your lease for installing [a satellite dish in the US].
Large parts of London (and other areas of the UK) are designated as conservation zones and so satellite dishes require planning permission. Every now and again someone gets around to complaining and all the dishes under 4 years old are removed from a road.
I love GPS. I really do. But I'm realizing that my sense of place would be so much more vivid if I were constantly thinking along these lines. I suspect I'd have a sense of my own presence in direct relation to the natural (as opposed to the artificial) environment. Specifically, I think I'd deepen my appreciation of the relation between the larger world, and the micro-environments we construct for ourselves within it.
I realize that there's a lot of additional cognitive load needed to maintain this sense, and that by relying on GPS (as I do to an almost embarrassing extent) I'm freeing up mental resources for other operations. But to some extent this seem like not stopping to smell roses in order to make more time available for other 'more important' things.
Not in towns that have lots of old buildings, where planning rules generally try and stop people from attaching satellite dishes. However, people still have them - but positioned on the roof so that they aren't that obvious from ground level.
Within a 15 minute walk of where I work, in Washington, DC, there are a number of churches, but some of them appear to follow the east-west layout, and some do not. It seems to depend much more on where the congregation could buy a lot.
Not easy to find good numbers for this, particularly for the US. One source [1] refers to around 65k, another source's number [2] is an order of magnitude higher. Of course, church isn't very specific: it could refer to only christian houses of worship, to houses of worship of various sizes, it could refer to the religions themselves, etc.
For Germany, numbers are more reliable: there are about 45000 christian churches (split roughly 50/50 between catholic and protestant, [3][4][5]). Plus about 2500 synagogues and less than a thousand mosques [6], so less than 50k overall. I imagine that the situation in other Western European countries is similar, but it'd be interesting to know if that's true.
So depending on the correct number for the US, the number of churches in the US is either a lot lower or a lot higher. Huh, I guess this isn't very helpful. :D
Most churches in America aren't churches in the sense meant here, the traditional church building. Many church services are held in random buildings that have been re-purposed as houses of worship, and even the buildings built as churches are often more modern and pragmatic in their approach and don't necessarily look like traditional churches or follow the traditional 'rules'.
Cities have less churches, I guess, but towns tend to have more since there is more diversity of religion. My little borough in CT has 7-8 churches, several of which are 150 years old.
OTOH, I don't think the churches point in any reliable direction. They just all face the town square.
Looking at the sun did me in the first time I crossed the Tropic of Cancer near the Northern Hemisphere summer solstice. I am very used to using sun angle at different times of the day to find cardinal directions. That works very well where I usually live (45 degrees north latitude). But on a visit to Hong Kong, I kept going exactly in the reverse direction I "knew" I should go, and I finally figured out that near the end of June, at the latitude of Hong Kong, the sun was to my NORTH for the first time in my life, and looking at shadows or the sun angle kept reversing my sense of which way was north and which way was south.
As a separate issue during my first visit to Hong Kong, I found my American (and Taiwan) habit of assuming that road traffic drives on the right side of the road made me tend to look the wrong way most recently as I was about to cross streets. I almost got run over by a truck because of that. Habitual behavior is harder to correct than truly novel behavior.
P.S. The submitted article's advice on using wind direction (shown by movement of clouds) as a constant direction over short time spans works very badly here in the American Midwest. There are enough flagpoles in my neighborhood that I can readily observe wind direction as I walk or bike to do errands, and I've frequently seen radical changes in wind direction revealed either by flags near ground level or by clouds high in the sky in just a few hours.
> I kept going exactly in the reverse direction I "knew" I should go
I had exactly the same problem when moving from Australia to Japan, and it didn't go away after 4 years living there! I always wondered whether it was to do with the sun angle, or some other effect, as I seemed to suffer from it at night too. I wonder if there's been any studies of this kind of effect.
It's cute, but really doesn't do much to address the issue of being lost in a city. When I'm lost in a city, my problem isn't whether I'm heading north or east, or where the nearest station is - it's whether I took the wrong turn three blocks ago, and where that side street I'm looking for is.
Once you're lost, my old navigation method can work wonders, and it's really simple: Turn onto progressively busier streets (determined by traffic control, not by current traffic).
You made it to your destination in some small residential area, but how are you ever going to find your way out of here? Just drive straight along until you come up to an intersection. You've got a stop/yield sign, and they have nothing? Turn. You're on a plain two-lane street, and the crossing street is divided with a boulevard? Turn. You both have lights, but they have the crossing button or turn signals? Turn.
In very short order you'll find yourself on a major street, which is a street you'll be more likely to recognize and be famliar with. You're no longer lost and can try locating your destination again.
These are not basic navigation skills, which you should have already to make good use of them, they are to help you if you know the route to take but don't have a point of interest or lost your bearings.
I just spent two years driving from Alaska to Argentina, with no GPS and very basic paper maps. I don't think these tips are useful at all to someone constantly on the move in new places. I'm typically excellent with directions and only got "completely lost" a dozen times or so. (For some reason, Bolivia had me convinced North was South...)
Those six methods assume a lot that doesn't work everywhere.
1. Tons of places have no satellite dishes.
2. Good idea, but you need to find a town to find a church...
3. Surely you need to be a local to know about weather patterns.
4. Assuming people have jobs, are going to work, and there is some kind of mass transit that stops at some kind of known location regularly.
5. You have to already know if you're North or South of the city..
6. What? again, you would have to know which way is North/South before you look at the clouds.
And that the local population is helpful. In the country where I live people will offer help without being asked if you read a map in the middle of the street, but good luck asking someone for directions if you're not a native.
I'd rather just look at the sky and see the direction of sunrise or sunset to find the direction instead of looking for TV satellites or churches etc.
And, I can't help but notice that the author starts by saying these are the ways to find directions when GPS is knocked out or if there is no one around to ask for directions and later speaks about following the flow of people!
I think these are all meant for different situations. For example you can't look for the Sun if its cloudy. Also, the horizon is usually blocked by a lot of buildings in big cities, so even if it is clear, you won't be able to find the sun pretty easily. Also, if you don't have a watch and the time is somewhere between 11 and 1 o'clock how can you tell if the Sun is in the Southeast or Southwest?
>For example you can't look for the Sun if its cloudy. //
I do - one can often tell where the brightest part of the sky is even on an overcast day; knowing roughly the time and season (for a known geography) then gives a rough direction. I read a report that polarising sunglasses help this too but I've never actually tried. With me it's sometimes more of a perception that the sun is in such a direction whilst I can't really make out that part as [particularly] brighter.
However we rationalize, finding your way out when you are lost in a city based on wind erosion patterns or the direction in which the wind is blowing the clouds, is perhaps how Sherlock Holmes would find his way. I'd rather look for someone to ask directions, look for road signs, landmarks, payphones, maps, city's skyline, metro stations etc.
I have personally tried walking off randomly in Paris. I didn't use any map or GPS or even my direction sense. I just kept walking randomly and I realized it is very difficult to get lost in a city like Paris even if you wanted to. You pick any direction and walk for about 15- 20 minutes and you would definitely find at least a sign post pointing in the direction of a nearest metro station, and once you are in a metro, you are in the grid, you are not lost anymore! And of course, in a city like Paris there are always people around irrespective of the time of the day to ask for directions.
We were in Marrakech earlier this year - I really tried very hard not to get lost, but it's almost impossible not to. Even the GPS on an iPhone and Google Maps didn't help that much (and produced a horrific bill for roaming charges). Far easier to pay one of the locals to walk you to where you want to go - at least round the souks where it is completely maze like.
Another approach to in-city navigation is, of course, to have a centrally located conspicuous landmark. In this town an ancient castle on top of an extinct volcano serves splendidly in this role.
Yes, asking locals is the only way to go. There are things that map will never help you with i Marrakesh.
After two days in Marrakesh locals told me that there is a shorter way from my riyad (kind of a guesthouse) to Jamaa-el-Fna (main square). Easy! You just have to turn left here instead of right, after twenty steps use the arch to find seemingly dead-end internal yard, enter some non-descript door and ... wait for it... smile at the receptionist of the spa salon on your way to their front door, which opens to one of the main streets. And from there it is a direct way to Jamaa.
It is like a magical world from child fairy tales, with wormholes in time and space behind every corner.
We stayed at a riad quite close to the souks, along a very windy lane down the side of a mosque. Even 20 minute walk from the taxi that took us from the airport to the riad was an adventure!
I'm from Chicago where the streets are gridded n/s/e/w and the addresses are numbered according to distance.
"Block numbers are consistent across the whole city. Standard blocks, of 100 addresses each, are roughly 1/8th of a mile long. (Hence, a mile is equivalent to a street number difference of 800.) Each street is assigned a number based on its distance from the zero point of the address system, the intersection of State Street and Madison Street. A street with a W (west) or E (east) number runs north-south, while a street with a N (north) or S (south) number runs east-west. A street's number is usually written on street signs at intersections, below the street name. Major thoroughfares are at each mile (multiples of 800) and secondary arteries at the half-mile marks. Thus, Western Ave at 2400 W is a north-south major thoroughfare, while Montrose Ave at 4400 N is an east-west secondary artery.
Another way of finding your way around is city route numbers.
In South Africa most major routes in metropolitan areas have "M" numbers (metro route numbers). I once managed to navigate across Johannesburg using these alone.
Unfortunately, in Johannesburg at least, they are not widely noticed by the public, except on freeways, and increasingly not replaced when they are vandalised or stolen, but they are very useful if you know about them, both for finding alternate routes, and for orienting yourself when lost.
They are usually consistently numbered. In Greater Johannesburg, even numbers go east-west, while odd numbers go north-south, and the signs also include a compass direction. In Durban, where there has been a huge number of street renamings, they have become indespensible for me when I visit the city.
EDIT: As an aside, if you ever drive in South Africa, do not rely on Google Maps (which has numerous errors). Rather buy an up-to-date map book or GPS. The map books by Map Studio are quite good.
There are also really odd things like streets that seemingly dead-end, but which actually continue in the same direction but offset by one or more blocks; in other words, a street that takes a dog-leg via a crossing street. The problem is that there are almost never signs to tell you which way to turn to stay with the street you're on, or even that the street does, in fact, continue.
Even with a GPS, DC can be hard to navigate because there are so many discrepancies between most map databases and the actual streets. For example, I have a relatively recent Garmin, and every time I'm in DC it tries at least once to turn me the wrong way down a one-way street, or tries to send me down a street that isn't there. The one-way streets aren't alternated logically like the ones in NW Portland, either; there may be some rhyme or reason to the one-ways, but I have yet to decipher it. Another experience I often have in DC: a street I'm on suddenly becomes one-way in the opposite direction.
Denver is a mess. West of 25 streets run E-W, but they jog as they cross the river and run SE-NW downtown. They then straighten out once they hit Broadway (and change suffixes to become Avenues).
That's nothing. There's a corner of San Francisco where you can head along 9th street until you hit 16th street, turn left, and in a few blocks you'll get to 3rd Street.
(San Jose's 4th street doesn't do anything anywhere near that crazy.)
In Europe (1) streets are numbered starting from the end of the street closest to the center of the city. This is very handy for when you're making your way back to the center!
1: though I'm not sure how widely this applies, it's worked for me in several countries.
I got lost in Venice once when i'd just arrived. It was midnight on a sunday and there weren't many people around as I was trying not to think about the film "Don't look now". It was about then that i realised that although i had what looked like the hotel's address, it wasn't going to be quite that simple to find.
Oh, Venice doesn't count. Getting lost there is an experience in itself... although probably it would have been better not to have it so soon, and presumably tired and hungry.
I think the author is trying to say, "use your sense of locality; you know, that thing we're all born with". Ironically, we don't really need to put an effort into using the tricks the author conjured up - it's all automated in other ways as part of the process of orientation. But, yes, I am aware of the fact that a small percentage of the population has practically no mentionable sense of locality at all, and may need to navigate manually rather than relying on inherent abilities.
- England doesn't really do Cable TV like America does, so you actually do see these dishes everywhere. In America, you don't ever see them. You'd probably violate your lease for installing one.
- American cities have hardly any churches compared to Europe, where 5 out of every 7 buildings you pass will be a Church of some form.
- America is 20 years old. Anything older than that is due for replacement. Hence no weathering.
+ (1/2) People. Cool. American cities do in fact have crowds, so you can follow them. But unless you're in NYC, you're probably going to end up at a parking garage.
- American cities tend to follow a grid, and are much more decentralized. Everything you need to get to is in every direction. Every road is six lanes wide, even the dead ends and alleys.
+ (1/2) New York might have clouds, but I've never seen one in LA.
So yeah, if you're lost in a US city, you might as well just ask somebody.