• superkret@feddit.org
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    3 months ago

    When you’re lost, walk downhill, or downstream, until you reach the sea, or a McDonalds.

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      If you reach an Arby’s, you’ve gone the wrong way, crawl back into the wilderness, it’s safer there.

  • iamnotme@feddit.uk
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    3 months ago

    What have the pop band from the 80s got to do with the direction? Is there some code in their lyrics that will point her the right way?

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
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    3 months ago

    I only started remembering which side west is (relative to north) when I started thinking of “the wild west” and then thinking of where the wild west was. Still can’t use it in the real world for anything though. At most if I’m at my own town I know approximately where north is, but anywhere else I’ll quickly lose the sense of which direction is which.

    • Album@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      You’re not supposed to intrinsically have your sense of direction in an unfamiliar location. Some people can do that but assuming you’re not paying full attention on your way to a new location it’s actually normal and expected to have to get your bearings which means taking a moment to orient yourself and figure out what direction is what. And then it’s easy to forget (let’s say you step into a store) until you build a sense of landmarks. Also the more dense a location the harder it is because it’s more complex.

      • Mac@mander.xyz
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        3 months ago

        But you have to memorize if that’s CW or CCW. I’d forget.

        • Snazz@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Im think it was designed with a clock in mind. That’s why it starts with north at the 12:00 position and goes clockwise. I learned it as ‘Never Eat Soggy Waffles’ but I’m sure there are a bunch of these.

  • humanspiral@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Yes. Maps always have up as north. So just hold a map in front of you, and forward direction is north. Easy.

  • Reyali@lemm.ee
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    3 months ago

    At one point in my childhood, my dad made the comment, “Women don’t know compass directions.” I took offense to that and made a point to learn them to prove him wrong.

    I felt vindicated in high school when he was coming to pick me up from a friend’s house and said, “I’m at the gas station. Do I go left or right?” I told him there were several gas stations on the way, and asked which direction he was facing to figure out which one he was by. He couldn’t tell me and finally hung up on me in a huff.

    • Noved@lemmy.ca
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      3 months ago

      Legitimately, how do you? Without prior knowledge of the direction you are facing and the sun is right above you or you can’t see it.

      Cardinal directions have always been hard for me and I’m only now just starting to use them out of job necessity.

      Left and right takes a second most of the time, ask me to look north and it’s going to be a long while.

      If I’m somewhere new or lost like op, it’s just cruel to say “go west”

      • hraegsvelmir@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Not trying to be facetious, but you just kind of do it. I think it might be something that you just subconsciously keep track of once you really become aware of it. I remember it seeming like magic until I was maybe 15 or so, and then I had landmarks for each direction in my mental map and could figure things out in reference to them. After a bit of that, I could mostly stay oriented when traveling by land, and now it’s not an issue even when I fly somewhere. I went to England for the first time last year, and I had the cardinal directions sorted probably by the time I’d walked from the train to my hotel.

        Once you’ve got it down, you just sort of do it on autopilot.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        I think it helps that I’ve been a pilot since I was a teenager. Spend some time where you can see a third of a state at a time you’ll just develop this sense. You get a bigger picture of how things are oriented relative to each other that’s sort of like, wherever you are in your home, you can probably work out which way the road outside goes, likely parallel to one of your walls. I can do that over much greater distances. If you’ve ever stood in the middle of a parking lot in a strip mall, and gone “the highway is over there, the Belk is over there, the J.C. Penney is that way, the furniture store is down on that end and I know the Red Lobster is just on the other side of it though I can’t see it from here,” I can do that with the major cities in my state.

        Orienting yourself if you’ve gotten turned around is another habit to build up. Yes “the afternoon sun is in the West” but also if you’re in the Northern hemisphere, your shadow will point North at noon. I also have a pretty good picture of the highway system in my head and can orient myself by knowing the general heading of a nearby highway.

        From both my time as a pilot and as an amateur radio operator I’m familiar with the various towers across the state. I’ve used those to work out my approximate location and heading both in the air and on the ground. In medium sized cities often there’s a city center with a few tall buildings that can be seen for several miles around, orienting yourself to them can help you develop a sense of direction. I’ve started doing that almost subconsciously.

        Now if I were to wake up in a cave my gyros would be tumbled until I managed to get out. I don’t have an actual built-in compass. But it wouldn’t take me long to orient myself seeing how the daylight hit the cave entrance.

    • aname@lemmy.one
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      3 months ago

      Everytime I grt lost I just return home to get my compass and get on with my day

    • TexMexBazooka@lemm.ee
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      3 months ago

      The birth of the GPS. Basic navigation is a dying skill, a lot of people don’t even know what to do with a map without a big blue dot showing where you are

  • OutlierBlue@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    North is W
    West is A
    South is S
    East is D

    … unless you hit Q or E and rotated the camera, in which case you’re fucked.