buter's BABY blog

It's a curious thing, that you'll be in a serious meeting or something, and then someone says something which triggers a quote from your childhood. I mean, how often do you say "Miss Jane" in response to someone saying "it's upside down"? Or maybe you say "by the rocket clock" when someone tells you the time .... all these things that just make their way into your subconscious.

So when smh published this story about map reading I couldn't stop thinking about Mr Squiggle. Could it be that the reason he could understand the upside-down squiggles but Miss Jane couldn't, was that Mr Squiggle, being a male, had a better ability to mentally rotate the image than Miss Jane? Was it in fact all a terrible reinforcement of a stereotype (which according to smh has now been discovered to be true)?

I must admit that it's taken me a while to be able to interpret maps without turning them around, but that I stopped doing it because if you turn it once, you have to keep turning it, and that just gets tedious - especially if you're driving! Eeek! But for the men who think it's illogical to turn the map around - I just want to say, you're turning it around in your head anyway, so what difference does it make (apart from less brain work) if you turn the map around physically?

Hey, don't satellite navigation systems turn around depending on your direction anyway? So does that mean they were designed for women or for men? Or does it indicate who they were designed by?

That could be a question for a later time folks.

Back to my rocket clock.