John Huth's The Lost Art of Finding Our Way is a good read for anyone interested in improving their navigation skills.
No, it simply puts them in a different physical environment. People who grow up in a city learn to navigate in a city. People who grow up in the bush learn to navigate in the bush. We adapt to the physical environment in which we find ourselves. Studies have shown that even pigeons follow roads to the extent that if they take a wrong turn, they will backtrack to a roundabout and follow a different road rather than cut "cross country." And why not? The roads are obvious physical landmarks; why wouldn't pigeons use them?
See: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.htm...
I know it's not exactly the same thing by I remember my Eastern-European grandma almost never using the words "right" of "left", she was almost always using what I can roughly translate as "upwards" and "downwards", as in: "paganel, give me that pitchfork that is upwards from you" or "pass me the rake that is downwards from where you are".
My grandparents lived in a mountainous region, and as such one of their main tools for making sense of where things were was to position those things "higher" or "lower" compared to the position of the speaker.
When I'm in a hilly place my automatic sense of direction gives me downhill = south, with about 25% accuracy
My instinctive sense of direction doesn't work with "the sun in the south midday" thing, and I need to pull that up into the intellectual part of my brain all the time.
"Ummm, I'm in SF, if the sun's over _there_ and it's mid morning that much be, ummm, south east-ish I think. Yeah. So north must be (turns around) _that_ way".
I _never_ end up thinking those things at home, I just "know" which way north is. It doesn't even occur to me to question how or why I know that.
Where I get confused is the equator, where my simple rules don't work.
Good luck finding your way out of the national park with your empty phone.
Sarcasm, of course. But this manly-man "gotta be self sufficient" thing always strikes me as so peculiarly limited. Why assume that this piece of gear will be lost but not that one? Why should we believe that, when all the restaurants have gone and civilization has collapsed, the grocery stores will still be open? That by the time a software engineer cannot be found at all their skills will be at all relevant?
I get being a well-rounded person and the desire to be useful in a pinch, but let's not delude ourselves about how prepared any of us really are for The End Of The World. Certainly none of us should be getting up on soapboxes about it.
And how many more things I do know
> Basic practical knowledge comes in handy all the time.
It doesn’t. The ability to strike a tent, roast a grizzly bear, read weather from moss and bird patterns comes in handy about 0% of the time.
Even knowing that the sun sets in the West has zero practical applications in urban settings.
Certainly not zero. If I know I'll be coming back to my car in the late afternoon, knowing roughly where the sun will be means I can park in a spot where the shadow will probably be, possibly even in an unfamiliar lot.
Here's another one. The first step in cell phone navigation is frequently something like "Head West on such-and-such street". In the absence of any other markings, the sun can tell you which way that is.
I use it to decide where to sit when eating outside - will the table be more in the sun or the shade after an hour or so?
Being able to set up some basic shelter and navigate in the wilderness is more likely to be handy if your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere and your cell phone battery is flat.
What does that even mean? Is there an upcoming mass extinction event that comes with a detailed list of skills required to survive it? All the parent was talking about was basic practical skills that lets you solve day to day problems. You can chose to solve them differently, or avoid those problems altogether.
That's why the national park is full of clearly marked trails.
If you're backpacking through unmarked wilderness, you need a navigation system, and you know you need it. That's 0% of people to several significant figures.
Having a very coarse idea of compass directions lets you do things like "I just need to keep heading east until I hit the railway line, then follow it to a station", or "I can head to the coast then turn right and I'll eventually end up at Cliff House, and I know how to get home from there".
It is still a useful skill, especially if you ride a motorcycle, where those strategies are often "good enough" that it's not worth stopping to pull out your phone (even if you do have coverage and battery...)
Even just being at a large event like a festival, and being able to look at a map with north indicated and then go, "yeah, so we need to go _that way_ to get to the stage we need next" is better than trying to match landmarks from the map to choose which direction to go (in my opinion...)
https://www.foxnews.com/us/hawaii-hiker-amanda-eller-apologi...
>> If you're backpacking through unmarked wilderness, you need a navigation system, and you know you need it. That's 0% of people to several significant figures.
I semi-regularly backpack through unmarked wilderness with no navigation and no map, and I have friends who do as well. But as you said, perhaps I'm in the 0% to several significant figures.
If this were true, you'd be lost. I'm including things like "keep the mountains on your left" in the category of "navigation".
The people complaining about forests are correct in that regard -- in a forest, you can't see the mountains, the sun, or the stars, and getting lost, unless you have very good training in forest navigation, is pretty much inevitable. (If there's a river, you _can_ still see that.)
It is very self centered of you to think everyone's lives are similar enough to yours that this skill even has a chance d being used once, less so being necessary.
By the same reasoning I could argue that everyone should know how monetary policy in the united States works, because it effects everyone in the world, even if you don't live in the USA. We have finite time and energy to learn things, it would be a waste to use them on learning how to do something you will never have to do.
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3078087/google-map...
(And our phone battery never runs flat! And cellular reception in ubiquitous and reliable!)
(BRB, off to write a blog post titled: "Falsehoods hackernews readers believe about being human"... <smirk> )
Why? Certainly anyone could learn to do this, but is there any practical reason for someone like me who absolutely never goes to the wilderness to spend time doing this?