why read maps?

What do you make of the commonplace notion that we only use 10 percent of our brains?  I have always taken it to mean that we could all afford to learn about 10 times as much stuff as we do before having any overload trouble. Too bad we seldom bother. Like most people, I watch for information that confirms my pre-existing notions, and Lo!  An article in The Economist about the link between genius, or savant syndrome and autism roughly confirmed my suspicion.

The movie “Rain Man” is a fair presentation of savant syndrome.  I had assumed that such savants are born, not made, but an element of the syndrome called RRBI, restrictive and repetitive behaviors and interests, must indeed be made, even if the inclination towards RRBI is inborn.

Malcolm Gladwell, in a book called “Outliers” which collated research done on outstanding people, suggested that anyone could become an expert in anything by practising for 10,000 hours. It would not be hard for an autistic individual to clock up that level of practice for the sort of skills, such as mathematical puzzles, that many neurotypicals would rapidly give up on.

So what happens when a neurotypical does clock up 10,000 hours?

There are, however, examples of people who seem very neurotypical indeed achieving savant-like skills through sheer diligence. Probably the most famous is that of London taxi drivers, who must master the Knowledge—ie, the location of 25,000 streets, and the quickest ways between them—to qualify for a licence.

The expert here is Eleanor Maguire of University College, London, who famously showed a few years ago that the shape of the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in long-term learning, changes in London cabbies. Dr Maguire and her team have now turned their attention to how cabbies learn the Knowledge.

The prodigious geographical knowledge of the average cabbie is, indeed, savant-like. But Dr Maguire recently found that it comes at a cost. Cabbies, on average, are worse than random control subjects and—horror—also worse than bus drivers, at memory tests such as word-pairing. Surprisingly, that is also true of their general spatial memory. Nothing comes for nothing, it seems, and genius has its price.

25,000 streets, and no Manhattan-style grid to make it easy!  Plus, London cabbies must also know all hotels, theaters, museums, hospitals, shops, embassies and so much more. I love that they simply call it The Knowledge. 10,000 hours is about 3 1/2 years of 8 hour days.  Obtaining The Knowledge can be a four year project.

So now we know.  Spend 45 minutes a week reading maps. Look for places you have been.  Look for places you have heard of and might like to know more about or visit.  Think about new ways you could travel to work. What might be worth seeing along the way?  Who could you drop in on?  45 minutes a week.  You might get 2% of the way towards a situation where you have clogged up your mind to the point where your ability to do crosswords or learn to read music is slightly impaired.

Tweenbots is a provocative and heartening work of art.

Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.

We see in a new way that low tech navigation is engaging and fun.  The project demonstrates

…the power of a simple technological object to create a complex network powered by human intelligence and asynchronous interactions. But of more interest to me was the fact that this ad-hoc crowdsourcing was driven primarily by human empathy for an anthropomorphized object.

The novel anthropomorphic object certainly gets attention and appeals to people’s playfulness, but I would argue that any human empathy it gives rise to is best thought of as directed at its presumably human creator!  Just imagine the emergency response were this object suspected of being anything but a toy, more or less, that nevertheless has some purpose and meaning for somebody.

I am greatly encouraged that even after a 8 years of fearmongering, no one called the bomb squad on the tweenbot.

Such sensibility and behavior are some of the things I love about about cities, especially New York.

Continued from an earlier post

Mochuisle, an excellent mama, left the kittens only to eat, drink, use the box and to get petted by me. No ingrate, she. Here they are at 6 days.

Soon after, perhaps tired of strangers crouching in front of her home to peer in with a flashlight, she moved her family to a less trafficked spot under the packing table in back.  This made it easy for me to set up barriers to confine the kittens so they would not get underfoot in the store.

I decided early on to keep the mama.  For the rest it was “Buy a map, get a free kitten!” Soon I had a waiting list, in case someone changed their mind and did not show up to take theirs.  It was a lot of fun having kittens at the Map Center.

By four weeks they were getting into everything.

The easiest kitten to name was Vincent The Chin, another polydactyl.

I had trouble thinking up a name for Little Cat C, but don’t worry. The person who took him named him Magellan.

Here is their last group portrait.

The calico and the tuxedo with a white nose were adopted by my neighbor who named them Anna and Piano. I still get to see them now and then.

A store cat had seemed like a nice idea, but Mochuisle was so affectionate, she seemed more like a house cat.  When the kittens were gone, I brought her home.   I had planned to give all the kittens away but one of my sons insisted we keep Vincent The Chin.

Good thing. He grew up into a great big Mama’s Boy.

Although he is a scaredy cat who hides when company visits, he can strike a pose with the best of them.

From my business point of view, a story with the line “…when you’re in the middle of the forest and you don’t have a very good map” is a teachable moment.  It is not clear from the blogger’s tale whether he had some crummy map or no map at all, but there is no mention of a compass and I just have to assume he did not have one of these. Had I made available these excellent maps from Great Swamp Press on mapcenter.com sooner, Mr. Black might have run across them in time, and his day at Arcadia Management Area may not have turned out as misadventurous as it did.  He did, for the most part enjoy a delightful day.

I was struck by his readiness to post a such an open confession of map unpreparedness on the internet for all to see.  This is in stark contrast to my own inclinations.  I have had misadventures of my own that could have been easily prevented had I brought a map and compass along, but I will not be recounting them here.  Yes I too learned the hard way.  If you must have the details you will have to ask one of my sons who take greater pleasure than I in recounting those follies.

Bad case of blog neglect.  Pet Blogging to the rescue!

Three years ago, on festive, easy to remember March 17, began the coolest story ever at The Map Center.  It was closing time. I locked up as usual and sat beside my wife who had stopped the car right in front.

“Who is your new occupant?”   I was baffled by the question so she pointed at this grungy little cat looking out of the shop window.

“I’ve never seen him before.”

I got out, unlocked the door, and propped it wide open. First I approached the cat slowly, fingers extended, but it showed no desire to get acquainted. It was a filthy looking stray so I assumed that however it got in it must want to go back out by now. I attempted to shoo him out the door.  He took one look at the raw, cold late afternoon, pivoted, and scooted past me into an inaccessible undercounter gap.

“Biggest leak I ever saw a cat take” I said as I cleaned up a mess near the window. “If he can use a litterbox he can stay.”  I went home and returned with litter, a box and a can of food left over from our late Cullie Cat.

Saturday the food was gone, the box had been used, but there was no other sign of the cat. I left more food. Sunday, I went in, dished out a can of cat food, sat nearby, and waited. In a minute it appeared, gave me a vicious hiss, hunched over the bowl and ate.  When done, it checked me out, consented to be petted once and vanished again. Nothing like a meal to break the ice.  I looked forward to having a Map Center Cat.

Monday, food was again gone, cat absent.  I had yet to look for its hiding place.  There are numberless nooks and crannies in The Map Center.  That afternoon, from deep in a cabinet under a large work table, I heard the kittens.  I instantly realized that was no leak Friday, it was her water breaking.

I contributed a nice towel to replace the old cardboard and junk she had been making do with.

She had cleaned herself up beautifully since Friday.

Under all that fur you could feel nothing but bones. But she was eating several cans of food a day and all six kittens seemed OK.

Look at those paws. A polydactyl! They look like boxing gloves on the little cat, so we named her Mo Chuisle, after Hilary Swank’s character Maggie Fitzgerald in Million Dollar Baby.

To be continued.

Articles questioning the abandonment of printed maps and atlases seem easier to find in British media.  I think American newspapers are too reluctant to print anything that contradicts the messages of major advertisers.

All the google ads surrounding the above linked article in the Daily Mail are for GPSs.  Do those ad buyers know or care?  This is admittedly less extreme than seeing ads for airlines beside an article about a plane crash that happens to contain a key phrase like “Caribbean vacation.”  Still I wonder:  Does all that caution pay off if the papers get too boring?

How did anyone manage a walk in the park before GPS was invented?

I am intrigued by the contrast between Letterboxing and Geocaching.  Geocaching.com tells us that

Geocaching (pronounced geo-cashing) is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure. A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache’s existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS unit can then try to locate the geocache.

People love their high tech toys; I certainly approve of outdoor family adventures and online communities; and hey, the official Getting Started page does advise “Bring both a map and a compass.”  But it seems kinda thin.

Letterboxing.org’s FAQ page goes on forever. For starters,

Letterboxing is an intriguing mix of treasure hunting, art, navigation, and exploring interesting, scenic, and sometimes remote places…
Someone hides a waterproof box somewhere (in a beautiful, interesting, or remote location) containing at least a logbook and a carved rubber stamp, and perhaps other goodies. The hider then usually writes directions to the box (called “clues” or “the map”), which can be straightforward, cryptic, or any degree in between. Often the clues involve map coordinates or compass bearings from landmarks, but they don’t have to. Selecting a location and writing the clues is one aspect of the art.

Before you seek out a letterbox, you should carve your own rubber stamp to stamp in the cached logbook.  Not cool to buy one, unless you have a really good reason why that store-bought rubber stamp is simply perfect for you.

Who needs cryptic clues when you can just enter the coordinates in your GPS?

I confess that I have never participated in either of these sports. So far, a walk in the woods or park has always been its own justification.  But I deeply admire the work some letterboxers put into their clues.

It did not take long to find this masterpiece of the genre.  GretchenF’s opus is a playful tribute to twelve beloved children’s books.  Plus, in a two hour, stroller friendly 2 mile walk you will be compelled to reflect upon nearly every statue and point of interest in Providence’s beautiful Roger Williams Park.  Such nice work I am posting about it even though you do not even need a map.

There is so much to think about in that essay Is Google Making Us Stupid? that I must continue.

Carr opens and closes the essay with references to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Even people who have not seen the movie know about HAL, the computer that conversed like a human.  I missed the point back then by assuming Hal was supposed to horrify me.  It did not, but I get it now.  The horror is not HAL, it is what happens when people hold the intelligence of HAL in the same or greater esteem than they hold their own.

Simulated Intelligence is the non-misleading term for chess playing computers, attempts to pass the Turing Test, and the like.  To speculate that even the most remotely possible achievements of so called artificial intelligence could belong in the same class as (it is already a tragedy that I feel the need to introduce this term) Organic Intelligence is to ignore or devalue most of what distinguishes intelligent beings from machines (and I include plenty of beings besides human ones).  Eager for a “Yes” when they ask “Can this machine think?”, technophiliacs unwittingly shrink the concept of intelligence.  Human nature strikes again. The pursuit of artificial intelligence with hope of gaining perspective on the very nature of intelligence blunts appreciation of what minds are for and what they really do.

Where to begin?  Eye contact.  Body language.  Why do we ever bother to touch each other?  The initial and most essential communications that we undertake with our fellow beings are nonverbal.  Infants and pets master this effortlessly.  Then there is poetry.  Music. Art. Gardening. Home cooking. Turing Test my a–.

No one has been able to provide a widely agreed upon definition of consciousness.  I will not try, but I will insist that the needs to survive, reproduce and, in the case of a social creature, connect with others are necessary to and inseparable from the whole that is consciousness.

Isolating parts from the whole is exactly what the manner in which computers process information is all about.  Those who think that with enough speed, memory, parallel processing, data, whatever, something we could consider consciousness might “emerge” are, in my opinion, today’s version of medieval alchemists who thought there had be some way to turn lead into gold.

None of this is a reason for scientists, programmers and engineers to cease their work.  Playing chess is fun, but building a machine that can beat anyone at chess is, no doubt, even more fun.  Mo’ better computers are coming our way!  However, the job of keeping it all in proper perspective must not belong to the people immersed in that stuff.  Have you thanked a philosopher today?

Some of us devise marvelous tools, even before their eventual uses are devised.  Then most of us adopt tools and proceed to shape our worlds without reflecting upon how our tools shape us too.  It is worth thinking about.  With today’s tools, the stakes are high.

No, only you can, but if that is what you want, help is at every hand!

This important essay, Is Google Making Us Stupid?, does not mention map reading, but I think Nicholas Carr ties together a great number of observations on the same theme I elaborate on this blog.

Google, audible turn by turn navigation, or glancing at a little online map image instead of getting the atlas off the shelf does not make you stupid.  What they do is make it much too easy to let your mental habits drift while you fail to take proper account of the gains and losses to your mental powers.  Before you know it, something has happened that you might not have chosen had you thought it through beforehand.

In the essay, Carr and other highly intelligent, literate people confess that after years of googling, surfing and skimming online content they have lost the patience or even the ability to read a book!  Has that happened to you yet?  Not me, thanks.  Carr and his anecdotal cohort seem bemused at what has happened to them.  They are, after all, busy and successful.

Not every book does this for me, but the reason I consider the novel one of the greatest art forms is this.  Often upon completing an excellent novel, I am pleasantly surprised by the intensity of the moment when I contemplate the whole of what I have just absorbed.  A vast blob of emotional truth crystallizes and shimmers before me.  The  unknowable becomes known. I would say it is inexpressible but it is not:  The author expressed it!  It took thousands of words.  No wonder I sound silly trying to describe the experience in a paragraph.  Carr quotes Maryanne Wolf: “Deep reading is indistinguishable from deep thinking”.

Everywhere are messages and pressures urging us to buy and get with the latest thing.  Skeptics like me are merely trying to provide balance and perspective, not stop progess.

Mind control is here.  It always has been.  How much control do you want to take and how much do you want to hand over?

Something I ought to learn more about is how blind people navigate a city.  Do they develop impressive spatial intelligence?  Is it strictly a matter of obtaining and following step by step directions?  Does it depend?

A customer (this guy is sticking by old fashioned maps to get around) told a story about his daughter.  She landed a new job, entered the address into her GPS device and drove to work.  She drove to work every day for two months.  On the morning her GPS malfunctioned, she could not find her way to work.

Losing my sight is easier to imagine than being in the fix that woman was in.  No one (I think) chooses to become blind, yet people everywhere are choosing to abandon the ability to direct their own physical movement through… well, do we have a word for what isn’t cyberspace?  Oh yeah, space.  aka Reality.