4059 Nothing....

Saturday, June 27, 2015

In an age flooded with information people have become so inured to ignorance
that they now fear what they cannot understand.

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I don't understand that green statement up there.  I added it to my list of saved quotes simply because it confuses me.  "Inured" means hardened, numbed, very used to it to the point where the condition is simply accepted and ignored.  So how does becoming inured to ignorance cause one to fear what they don't understand?  (I was tempted to say "fear what they are ignorant about", but that's not exactly what it's saying.)  I don't know exactly what it's saying.  It looks to me almost like an oxymoron.  

Opinions, anyone?

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Nothing happening around here.  We'd had two weeks of near 90 degree days (with very high humidity), and today suddenly it's 67 degrees out there at 2:30 pm.  I don't understand.

I've learned a bit more about GeoGuessr.com.  I discovered that there's always a strong hint as to your location, no matter how desolate the area seems, somewhere up or down the road.  The trick is to find it.  Sometimes it's a road sign, sometimes it's a business beside the road, sometimes it's a clue on the side of a passing truck or bus.  You have to be careful not to zoom past passing vehicles without checking them out.  It's kind of like a road rally.  If you've gone one direction for what feels like miles and miles and have found nothing, you don't have to turn around and retrace your steps.  There's a button on the left that you can click that will take you back to the starting point, and then you can try the other direction. 

It plays with your mind.  When I see people along the road, I keep wanting to pull over and ask them where I am.

(Free hint - If every flat surface in a village is plastered with huge election posters, you're probably in Brazil.  If the land is flat and the soil is thin, and the widely-spaced trees are built like anemic broccoli spears, you are probably in southern Australia. )
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4058 They know who I am...

Monday, June 22, 2015

A glorious defeat is better than victory achieved with the wrong attitude.
 – Samurai maxum --

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I think GeoGuessr might have it out for me.  I had a run of especially good games lately.  I got 24988 out of 25000 on a game (five maps) a few days ago, then on the next game, yesterday, I got 24367.  That's pretty good.

This evening, the first two maps were in Bulgaria!  The first two!  TWO in a row!  Man, someplace like Bulgaria, there's virtually no way to figure out where in the country you are.  When I get something like Bulgaria, once I figure out the country, I pretty much give up and click randomly in the middle of the country.

The next one was Montana, USA.  Don't know if you've ever been to Montana, but there's miles and miles of miles and miles with few signs, and the few signs I passed were out of focus.  Thanks, Street View.   I saw one clear directional sign pointing to a town, so I just clicked on that town, figuring I had to be somewhere near.  I was almost 50 miles off.  BTW, did you know that Missoula, Montana, has an international airport?  An international airport?  It's a small city, in the mountains, major employers a university and two hospitals.  They must have a good senator.

The last two were Brazil!  Two!  One after the other in Brazil!  I have great difficulty with Brazil, because again, where GeoGuessr drops me, there's next to nothing.

Sometimes I can guess I'm somewhere in Brazil without squinting at signs, just by the highway department.  Those guys are crazy.  Like tonight I got dropped in a tiny hamlet of tiny shacks, maybe seven houses widely spaced, nothing else visible for miles and miles in either direction down the road.  But, there were two bus shelters, on either side of the road, at either end of the hamlet.  (Brazil is big on buses.) The road was marked with barred pedestrian crossing marks at the bus stops.  The speed limit was dropped to half through the hamlet, AND they had two, count 'em, TWO, fancy automated electronic speed traps at either end.  Less than a kilometer apart, mind you.  Crazy.  No route signs, or street signs, or signs pointing to towns, though.  You might get lost, but by darn you aren't going to drive dangerously, either.

Other than tonight I've been enjoying GeoGuessr.  I like when I get to wander around France, or Sweden, or Britain, or Italy, or Japan.  I look at villages and houses.  The other day they dropped me in Lesotho, so I got to learn some new stuff. 

But sometimes it's disturbingly depressing.  Once I was dropped into an area that looked incredibly economically depressed, and the houses scared me.  The buildings were obviously very old, and they looked like they had been maintained over centuries by people who owned no tools and knew nothing about building techniques.  Like an exterior wall (not just one house - it was in general) had been repaired by nailing boards up, but apparently the repairer had no measure and no saw.  The boards were random lengths, so some stuck out past the end of the building, and others stopped short, leaving a hole in the wall.  Like there'd be a two-story house, and the ends of the floor of the second story were not covered by the "siding", floor beams stuck out randomly.  I was thinking, jeeze, these people are scary!  I mean, even if you're poor, you can still figure things out and take some pride in the work.  Ok, a good saw might be expensive when you have nothing, but if everyone in the village chipped in a turnip or a cabbage, maybe you could buy/barter one saw to share. 

That was Romania (a bus went by and I got the name of the bus company), very close to the borders with Hungary and Serbia.  I don't want to go back there, not even virtually.

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I guess I owe Romania an apology.  I just went there on my own with maps.google.com street view, and most of the areas I wandered around in are quite nice.  I guess GeoGuessr dropped me into the Romanian equivalent of Detroit (the damaged part), and you can't judge all of the US by Detroit (the damaged part) either.
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4055 An educational time-waster (oxymoron, or good excuse?)

Sunday, June 14, 2015

Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all,

it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy,

and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy,

or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders.

This is easy.

 All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists

for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.

 It works the same in every country.

--Hermann Goering--

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I've been getting to bed very late the past few nights because I've been playing with GeoGuessr (https://geoguessr.com/).  It uses Google maps street view to drop you somewhere in the world, and then you have to figure out where you are using things like the terrain, soil type, crops, which side of the road people drive on, architectural styles, appearance of populace, and so on.  You can travel around (slowly! until you figure out the secret for moving faster) and if you are lucky you'll find a sign that might give you a hint as to the language, and if you are very lucky, you might find a highway sign pointing to a town name, and if you are very very lucky you might stumble upon a hotel, resort, or restaurant with a unique name you can find on the internet.

Purists discourage looking up names on the internet, they consider that cheating, but sheesh, even if you have honestly determined you are definitely in France, France is a pretty big country.  You have to narrow it down somehow!

In a set, you get five different locations.  A perfect score is 5,000 points, so a perfect total for the five is 25,000 points.

I usually come very close on four of them.  I've frequently been within mere feet of the target point.  I'm usually within 30 miles. (Of course, I'm not above cheating, according to the purists....)  But I always completely, utterly, embarrassingly blow one, sometimes by whole continents!  South Africa looks a lot like Australia, for Pete's sake!  Or the American mid-west.  And those central European countries, and south Asian countries, all look alike, and with weird alphabets even if I do find a non-blurred sign, I can't search the internet for it.  It's usual I'll get only a few hundred points on those, and a couple times it's been a big fat 0 (you have to be on the wrong side of the globe to get that, DAMN! South Africa is NOT in Kansas!).  So my total for five maps usually runs around 18,800 points.

Play with it when you have some time.  Don't get discouraged too soon, it does take a little time to figure out how to, uh, cheat.  But it's fun, and it's amazing how much of the world looks like Kansas.

And if you do try it, please leave a comment. 

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I'm working on one right now --- see my comment attached -------------
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