zwol | wednesday morning class blogging

Last Friday, the professor of the class I'm TAing announced that anyone who drew a map of the US with a particular set of cities indicated, from memory, and handed it in at the end of class, would get two points of extra credit.

Today (as I'm writing this) she announced what the point is: she wanted to test how many people would make particular geographic errors, namely, drawing Reno east of San Diego (the opposite is true, thanks to the big bend in California) or Seattle south of Boston (again, the opposite is true, thanks to the big southward bend in the northern border of the US that starts in Minnesota). These errors are common, because people simplify their mental maps of the US relative to the actual map, and in particular, throw out the bends. Also (as someone raised their hand to observe) the mental map is distorted by route topology. If you're driving from San Diego to Reno you pretty much take I-15 and then US-395 the whole way, which *seems* to be northeast even though it's really northwest by north.