It's cruel to mock the stupid

[pecunium]

Which is why I am not linking to this, but it's an amazing moment of WTF!?!, and I can't keep it to myself (I'm not always the nicest of people).

Today I’m on a flight to San Jose, CA. Well, two flights. Couldn’t find a direct flight.

It was yesterday that I discovered LA and SF were not in the same location… See, I don’t know CA very well and I’m actually headed to Palo Alto. So I mistakenly assumed that LA was pretty much right there, too.

I think the confusion came from last time I was in CA, I flew into SF and out of Oakland, so I had this impression of all the cities being close to each other.

I'm croggled. Not so much that a grown man, and an american citizen, might not know LA and SF are 400 miles apart from each other, but that he would look at a state the size of California, and assume all the metropli are adjacent because two of them were so colocated the last time he was here.

That's the first bit.

The second is that he admits it, with a sense of blasé delivery which implies he thinks this a reasonable mistake to make.

Comments

[crisavec.livejournal.com]

I have to admit I've always been mindboggled by that sort of attitude as well as the oftreported statements in the press about how few people(it used to be just highschoolers, but has expanded to the public at large) can find Iraq or some other highprofile location on a map.

I've always been a mapgeek and loved poring over them and looking up locations, so maybe I'm just biased...but still.

[urox.livejournal.com]

Problem is, you're a map geek. Other people won't understand. I'm a music person and had the damnedest time trying to explain time signature and why something is 6/8 vs 3/4 time. I just know it inherently, but others not familiar with it just don't seem to get it. That could also be because I'm a poor explainer of concepts.

So given a state outline, say, Tennessee, you'd know which end Nashville, Knoxville, and Memphis were, without prompting? Those are all rather prominent cities but I wouldn't expect people to know those locations inherently either.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

It's not map-geek, it's information junkie.

Tennesee is sort of large, I don't know it in detail (though I can tell you that Memphis is West, Nashville is Central and Knoxville is East, then again, my theory instructor could tell you why waltzes are really in 6/8, even though they are written in 3/4, so that info-geekery may be affect how I look at a lot of things), which is why, even if I didn't know that, I'd not fly into Knoxville, and plan to rent a car to Memphis, without checking it out before I booked the flight.

TK

[urox.livejournal.com]

Still, people are information junkies about different things. But yes, one should check out distances before making plans. Better yet, one should ask locals about the best places for things. :)

Google Maps is my friend. I can't keep all the counties in LA straight in my head despite the number of times I've visited, but I'll definitely map one location to another to find out if I'm likely to visit or go to an event elsewhere while I'm down.

[crisavec.livejournal.com]

Actually pecunium nailed it in his reply...Information Junkie. I, like him, have something of an idea of where they are at...but should I be going to an area I'll be all over maps of it. Good example, I have to goto Yakutat, Juneau, Wrangell and Ketchikan next week. I had an idea of where they all were, but once I was told I was going I went and looked up street-level maps of them just because I wanted to know.