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Nature is full of clues to help you find your way – if you know where to look. Stuart Heritage lets go of the GPS to learn the art of natural navigation from pioneer Tristan Gooley
[...] How to navigate in a city
Look for satellite dishes. They all point towards the equator. In London, that is roughly south-southeast.
Find an 'invisible handrail' and use it to remember your bearings. In the countryside, this might be a river. In a city, it could be a main road.
Look at a tree. Do the branches point a certain way? That's probably south. Are the leaves on those branches smaller than the leaves on the opposite side? That's definitely south.
Use the sun. It rises in the east, sets in the west and moves through the southern sky, giving you a very basic compass.
Need to get home? Head against the flow of people at the start of the day or with the flow at the end and you are pretty much guaranteed to find a station.
Source: Ditching the satnav: the lost secrets of natural navigation
(Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @01:34AM (15 children)
I can get lost but as long as it's not cloudy and dark I can always tell which way's north without even thinking about it, within five or ten degrees anyway. Been able to since before I even knew what north was. Never been to the southern hemisphere though, so I couldn't tell you if it's my subconscious picking up on environmental clues or something else.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Funny) by driverless on Sunday May 13 2018, @02:04AM (7 children)
Navigating in a big city by looking for deer spoor and rabbit droppings and moss on trees and watching how the trout swim in the stream: Pointless.
Navigating on a big city by asking for directions: Priceless, as long as you're not a guy.
For everything else, there's GPS.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Sunday May 13 2018, @02:48AM (1 child)
Maps. Decades ago, I had a buttload of maps. Rand McNally was the most reliable of maps, and I kept their road atlas in my vehicle. Other map makes published maps of New York City and other local areas/regions. A person *could* get hopelessly lost due to errors in those maps. A person was more likely to get confused due to changes that were made after a map was published. At times, you could be frustrated due to lack of detail. But, overall, maps served me well.
An intelligent person most certainly does not rely on asking for directions. I have so many stories, I could literally fill multiple books.
But, I navigated the continent, without GPS, SatNav, or any other electronic devices.
In today's world, people are far less aware of their surroundings than people of past generations. I see almost the exact same phenomenon that happened when calculators became a thing. People used to do math, so they did it. Then, calculators, and no one does math. Today, it's not calculators, but real computers in your pocket, and everyone relies on them for everything.
That old adage, "Use it or lose it" applies to the mind. What used to be second nature for most people has been lost by today's generations.
And, people aren't going to recover what they lost. Any young person today who learns the old ways is an outlier. That young person may preserve knowledge in case the rest of mankind ever needs it again. But, lacking some catastrophic event making old knowledge necessary again, people in general are never going back.
(Score: 2) by driverless on Sunday May 13 2018, @08:57AM
You don't need to be able to do perfect mental maths though, just enough to cross-check your other results. In other words when you're buying a bunch of stuff you should be able to have a rough idea of whether the result is correct or you've run into a problem with a mis-priced item (on the wrong shelf) or something being charged twice, or whatnot. Same with navigation, you need to be able to at least get a general idea of whether you're going in the right direction or are in the right area, and not rely purely on electronic devices.
I still have printed maps, but only really use them for long road trips where I need to plan the travel in advance and the peephole view that a GPS device gives me isn't enough. Even then, I use the GPS for fine detail and the map only for sketching out the high-level travel plan.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @02:50AM (4 children)
Nah, doesn't matter if it's in the city or out in the sticks. I can get around Chicago just as well as I can the woods in west Tennessee. If you know a landmark that you can't help but cross going west (cross street, creek, whatever), and you can always tell which direction is west, you may not know where you are but your version of lost can never be more than a temporary one even without assistance.
Now needing specific directions to someplace you've never been, that's another story entirely.
P.S. Yes, I've been all over Chicago. I spent a few weeks doing contract work there. Stayed at one of the guys I worked with's family home in the south-central bit. They gave me some pale blue sneakers so's I wouldn't get killed to death on account of mine apparently being the wrong color for the neighborhood. Fixed the best Mexican food I ever tasted too. Really nice folks.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Sunday May 13 2018, @04:42AM (2 children)
Try driving in almost any European city on a cloudy day. Because the roads are not laid out on a grid and they are frequently not straight, it's much more difficult to figure out directions.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @10:27AM (1 child)
Doesn't really seem to matter. Virginia and Tennessee ain't exactly known for their gridline roads or lack of sky-obscuring weather either but neither bother me even a little.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @12:55PM
Yup... anywhere in mountainous terrain does NOT have straight roads... they twist and turn all over the place, constrained by elevation grading.
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday May 13 2018, @04:51AM
Out at Superstition our landmark is the lights of the plaster plant, but we also have some geographical ones as well.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday May 13 2018, @03:59AM (1 child)
I thought it was fairly well known that birds have an inherent sense of direction. Some have speculated they (you) have some kind of magnetic sensors somewhere in you. Do you get lost when you pass by a refrigerator plastered with magnets?
(Score: 3, Funny) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @10:28AM
No, but I did read some cornball scientist who suggested guys could navigate better because of a higher concentration of iron in their noses once.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Sunday May 13 2018, @04:15AM (1 child)
When I was that punk college kid traveling through cities I had a clip on compass on my bag. Nothing fancy, but I could figure out which way is North. Particularly in Japan, popping out of a metro station in a concrete jungle knowing which way is North helps get your bearings.
I've done the sun thing but then I keep debating what time of day it is. If it is noon in the summer, the sun is quite useless for navigation. In cities with better line of sight I typically find a tall landmark or a body of water which also assist getting around. I still do this today when traveling for work: In Dresden I wanted to stay awake to fight off jet lag so I just wandered around the city getting a feeling for the layout.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday May 13 2018, @10:33AM
Not unless it happens to be absolutely directly overhead, which only happens for a short time in the places it happens at all. If you know it was ten degrees to the south yesterday, then you now know what direction is south and thus all other directions.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by isj on Sunday May 13 2018, @01:12PM (2 children)
I seem to also use the sun when navigating. I didn't realize that until I went to Sydney and got very confused.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 13 2018, @01:56PM (1 child)
Worst is going to the tropics. Went to Guam in July. Sat on hotel patio having breakfast... watching the sun rise in the “west?” Ran to front desk and looked at the “map” on the wall. The sun was “north” of us. Sun was near Tropic of Cancer, we were south of that.
Florida and north calories are bad for me. Nothing on the horizon to get a Bering from. Just trees. Get near big cities thought the high rises are artificial mountains.
(Score: 2) by kazzie on Monday May 14 2018, @07:07AM
Sounds like an interesting diet.
Try it in Alaska instead.