Replies to post #3457 on Mental Stretch

[lentinman]

US Geography:

I was off an average of 0 miles - which can't be correct because I did miss one slightly. The third or fourth one was Montana. Try putting that on a blank map!!! I don't recall exactly how many miles I was off - not much. But, as I went through it, the average miles kept getting smaller and smaller. I wasn't doing the math to see if it was accurate, but when it dropped to 0, I knew it wasn't. I suppose what happened is that it dropped to an average of under 1 mile per state and so they just round it to 0.

My score was 50 out of 51 and 98.03 in 888 seconds.

Geography was my first love even before statistics.

Edit: I started it again, but don't have time to do it. I see it starts (randomly?) with different states. That could make a big difference what order they were in. Some landlocked states in the west are almost impossible to do first - ie Kansas, Nebraska, S. Dakota, N. Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico and Arizona.

If the map was bigger - or able to be zoomed in - so that you could see smaller rivers, that would make some of those possible on the first try. But, nothing would make Colorado or Wyoming or Utah possible on the first try except luck.

Len

[lentinman]

JSIM:

Ok, I got 100%, 51/51, 0 miles, 504 seconds. No reason to ever do it again. Good exercise for people who have limited geographical sense. But, of course, they won't do it because the reason they have little geographical sense is because they aren't interested.

It's amazing how many people "aren't interested". One day I was talking to a female employee and, on a lark, I asked her which direction the Sun rose. Incredibly (and she had a college degree) she didn't know. Her excuse was that she never had a reason to wonder or to care. Amazing.

Len