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“You are right,” she said. “WordPerfect was the best. But those days are gone.” Photo by Vitaliy Rigalovsky on Unsplash
Where you’re from might help you get where you’re going. Study: Childhood surroundings determine adults' navigation abilities
Your ability to find your way around may be influenced by your childhood surroundings.
Researchers in Britain and France have discovered that people raised in the country or suburbs are better navigators than those who grew up in cities, particularly those with grid-pattern streets.
"Growing up outside of cities appears to be good for the development of navigational abilities, and this seems to be influenced by the lack of complexity of many street networks in cities," said lead researcher Hugo Spiers, a professor of psychology and language sciences at University College London.
I grew up in the country and spent much of my youth roaming around in the forest with no adult supervision and I have a pretty good sense of direction, even in cities.1 Which tends to support the conclusion of this study.2 It seems plausible that the more you use the “wayfinding” part of your brain early in life, the better it works.
Co-lead author Antoine Coutrot, of the University of Lyon, in France, explained that "growing up somewhere with a more complex layout of roads or paths might help with navigational skills as it requires keeping track of direction when you're more likely to be making multiple turns at different angles, while you might also need to remember more streets and landmarks for each journey."
I rarely use GPS directions when I’m driving. Even when I do, I don’t fully trust them.3
I also seem to radiate some energy that caused people to ask me for directions. People stop me to ask for directions all the time. Cars swerve across three lanes of traffic just for the driver to roll down the window and ask me if I know where such and such place is. This even happens in cities I’m visiting for the first time. I was once asked for directions in Venice, in Italian, and give them, even though I don’t speak Italian. I do speak hand gesture, so we at least had that language in common.
What about you? How is your sense of direction? And did you grow up in the city, the country, or somewhere in between.
The study appeared in Nature: Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability
Helpful hints for those who use Google Docs. How to change the default text formatting on Google Docs — and with it, your life
And here’s where I encounter the problem: whenever I open a new Google Doc, it’s formatted in a way I find neither pleasing, useful, or acceptable. You probably know the set up: Arial, a font size of 11, and a 1.15 line spacing. The words unsophisticated and crude barely come close to how this affronts me.
Yet, foolishly, I accepted this state of affairs for years.
I feel your pain, although I mostly use Microsoft Word. I don’t love it, but it is ubiquitous and was the default word processing software at all my workplaces of the last couple decades.
What I did love was WordPerfect. I wrote my first several books on that program and used it throughout the 90s. Yes, even at work — WordPerfect was what we had on Capitol Hill, at least in the offices I worked in. It was only around the year 2000, when I emerged into the private sector that I realized how Word had taken over everything else. I reluctantly made the switch.
Google Docs — meh. I’ve never used it for any long form writing. I do have various notes and short texts in Docs, and I’ve used it on a couple of freelance projects because that’s what the client was using. What about you? If you do a lot of writing for work or personal purposes, what’s your go-to program?
This is how zombie movies start. Why a U.S. Company Plans to Release 2.4 Billion Genetically Modified Mosquitoes
The Environmental Protection Agency has cleared the release of 2.4 billion genetically-modified mosquitoes in California and Florida. The mosquitoes, created by biotech firm Oxitec, will be non-biting Aedes aegypti males engineered to only produce viable male offspring, per the company. Oxitec says the plan will reduce numbers of the invasive Aedes aegypti, which can carry diseases like Zika, yellow fever and dengue.
Female mosquitoes will die, while males will reproduce and spread the self-limiting gene to the next generation, eventually leading to population declines.
Well, that’s the plan, anyway.
Look, don’t get me wrong. I despise mosquitoes as much as anyone. I’m all for obliterating them. It’s just that — as Blue Oyster Cult reminds us in their classic song ‘Godzilla’ — “History shows again and again, How nature points out the folly of men.”
I’m sure releasing a few billion genetically-altered mosquitoes in two of our most populous states will go just fine. But I’m updating my zombie apocalypse survival kit just in case.
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Except New Orleans, for some reason.
On the other hand, there’s my sister.
The GPS lady once kept directing me into a cemetery, which was not where I wanted to go at all.