tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post1527761513760064135..comments2024-03-27T03:19:11.216-04:00Comments on Assistant Village Idiot: Starter WordsAssistant Village Idiothttp://www.blogger.com/profile/01978011985085795099noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-63996864856737428712022-04-27T23:14:21.001-04:002022-04-27T23:14:21.001-04:00With a good set of three starting words (there are...With a good set of three starting words (there are lots of sets that will work), I can pretty much guarantee that I'll get Quordle - with about 75% of those wins happening in 7 guesses. <br /><br />But I have never yet been able to get it in fewer than 7 guesses. A good two-word starting combo might help me guess one of the words on the third guess, but it's never been good enough to help me get all four by the sixth guess.Thos.https://www.blogger.com/profile/09562836622083001506noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-88302313667402059982022-04-25T09:42:34.116-04:002022-04-25T09:42:34.116-04:00The Mercator projection actually had a very import...The Mercator projection actually had a very important navigation feature. It wasn’t drawn that way to make European places seem bigger, but so you could use it like so:<br /><br />“ This map, with its Mercator projection, was designed to help sailors navigate around the globe. They could use latitude and longitude lines to plot a straight route. Mercator’s projection laid out the globe as a flattened version of a cylinder. All the latitude and longitude lines intersected at 90-degree angles. Because the projection was intended to be a reference for navigation and not land geography, the landmasses on the map are not necessarily proportional to their actual size; at higher latitudes, landmasses appear larger than their actual size.”<br /><br />My sister asked me to join her and mom in Wordle. I open with LASER then TONIC. This last week I have had to make a fourth guess only once. Otherwise it’s been 3s. The game is mostly strategic, as you say; I think of those opening two shots as akin to bracketing fire with mortars. The information gained from the two brackets usually lets me hit the target with the third round. Grimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07543082562999855432noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-42771024579714335742022-04-25T01:06:52.468-04:002022-04-25T01:06:52.468-04:00I play Wordle sporadically. I changed my start wor...I play Wordle sporadically. I changed my start word and then discovered that if I'd kept to the original, I'd have got the word on the 2nd try. Oh well, it's a nice diversion sometimes and doesn't generally tax my brain too much as it seems the other versions you write about would do. Donna B.https://www.blogger.com/profile/16771075314473811594noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-40880986908546188282022-04-24T15:29:10.235-04:002022-04-24T15:29:10.235-04:00And on USA maps, if you find the mid point vertica...And on USA maps, if you find the mid point vertically and horizontally it is usually Kansas:<br />https://duckduckgo.com/?q=USA+maps&t=newext&atb=v314-1&iax=images&ia=images<br />Douglas2https://www.blogger.com/profile/11290012200563917585noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-38480542524378465162022-04-24T13:40:22.619-04:002022-04-24T13:40:22.619-04:00When I look at the offered images, many of them se...When I look at the offered images, many of them seem centered on Europe, with corresponding swollenness of Greenland. Not all.<br />https://duckduckgo.com/?q=world+maps&t=newext&atb=v314-1&iax=images&ia=images Assistant Village Idiothttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01978011985085795099noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19305198.post-31460702072671187872022-04-24T10:28:57.401-04:002022-04-24T10:28:57.401-04:00I find myself too disturbed by everything under th...I find myself too disturbed by everything under the ** footnote. "Surprised at the size and distances of Africa and the South Pacific" is not my experience. But I was still a child when something twigged -- either noticing distances that I measured with a ruler on a Mercator map didn't scale to the distance tables between world cities, or wondering why the air routes were arcs not straight lines. It then took me all of a few minutes to work out that the flat rectangular world map did not distort cardinal direction (North being straight up across the whole page) but did tremendously distort distance, whereas the segmented world maps like the Goode homolosine projection (that seemed to be in every classroom I had in primary school) preserved area but made it really hard to work out whether Stockholm was further north than Anchorage. At that point I hadn't even heard of Tissot's indicatrix, but worked out that using a globe took away the risk of being fooled by the inevitable map distortions. <b>So I buy globes for all my little nephews and nieces. </b><br /><br />The phrase "Eurocentrism of mapping" bugged me, and I see it is a term of art in critiquing how non-cartographers <i>use</i> maps, particularly in teaching and visual display of quantitative information, rather than in how maps are created -- but it is also used by people who are disciples of the surprisingly successful fraud and map crank Arno Peters. In college I started praying for world evangelism using the Ralph D. Winters book and wanted a world wall-map as a visual aid; it bugged me that I had such difficulty finding one that didn't split Asia in half because of being centered on the USA. But I don't see any corresponding effort by map printers to prioritize Europe, if it is 'in the middle' or 'too large' that is a side effect of very logical choices made for good reasons to make a map useful for a particular purpose by minimizing or eliminating one or more of the inevitable 4 areas of distortion at the expense of increasing another. <br /><br />"Greenland is not that big" appears to me in this context as a non-sequitur -- it is big precisely because of the use of cylindrical projection, which is accurate at the equator, not because the map is centered north of the equator.<br /><br />Sorry for the tedious essay in response to a footnote. It bugged me. I think I did wordle twice, to verify that my theories were correct. Of course the first time I accessed the site my curiosity compelled me to right click and 'view source' so I contaminated myself by seeing the entire word-list in date-order. I was happy to check back a fortnight later and see that they had fixed the HTML to prevent me from doing that.Douglas2https://www.blogger.com/profile/11290012200563917585noreply@blogger.com