(no subject)

[which_chick]

Meme from not_your_real: place the state

I got 92% (46 out of 50), average error of 20 miles. I would have done worse, but I got a lot of good states (coastline) first.

We painted the burned kitchen today. It'll need another coat before it's done. I also got to take apart a sink faucet to fix dripping. Roy did one as an example and then put it back together so that I could do two all by myself (this is like doctor internships -- see one, do one, teach one) and I reassembled them successfully, so go me.

I fell asleep last night before I got around to watching bad movies, so those will be tonight's entertainment.

Also, I picked up collard seeds at the WalMart, which regrettably didn't have circular knitting needles in size 4. I'll have to look elsewhere for knitting needles, but at least I have collard seeds for the great collard experiment this spring. (Yes, there is still snow on the ground. I believe in being prepared.)

Comments

[zhasper.livejournal.com]

I got 75%

Not bad, I thought, for someone from a completely other country :)

Main clues I used: Coastlines (two seaboards, plus the great lakes) were a good start. States I'd already put down helped some more..

But the biggest clue was the slant/curve of the straight lines - especially on the square states. Once two or three states were down, it was possible to judge fairly well where a state went just by looking at the straight lines and figuring out where that amount of slant/curve would be..

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I know for sure I'd suck worse on the layout of Australia. I know there *are* territories or states or something, but I don't have the first clue of what goes where. Might be Canada is the one with the territories. Similarly, England has... counties? Some damn thing. Dunno where they go, either. We never went over anything more detailed than the country level.

[fooliv.livejournal.com]

Counties or shires, depending on who's doing the talking, I suppose. Canada has both territories and provinces, but they're in the process of converting the territories to provinces, I think. The English counties aren't really the same thing as American states; they're more-or-less the same size as actual American counties, with much the same governmental function. I suspect I could place the cardinal direction of the various English counties, if pressed - Yorkshire in the north east, Kent and Exeter in the south east, Norfolk and Suffolk in the east, etc. Except Shropshire. Damned if I could guess where that beast belongs. The Midlands?

Oh - 98% and 1 mile avg. error. I got Arkansas sixth, and stupidly placed it twenty miles too far to the north. It seems like cheating to have the outlines, really. A "place the capital city" quiz would be a lot more challenging, like that European pin-the-capital-on-the-country game (http://www.rtl.de/news/games/europa_dart/).

But then, a history major ought to be able to do well on these geography games, I guess.

[which-chick.livejournal.com]

I devoted a fair amount of time to thinking about how the place-the-state test could be made more "fair"... The order of states appears to be random, and that means that you can get a good draw (lots of edge-states first) or a bad draw (all those square western states) and thus appear much more or less clueful than you actually are.

I think it would be a MUCH nicer test if, for each state, you started with an empty map. You could still get the states in random order, but there would be no advantage to that one way or the other.