(I can never remember: did I tutor Discreet Math in college? Is it for not being discrete that I always get into trouble?)
I’m not a map-and-compass guy. Here’s me, hiking: I get to a place where you have to take the trail to the right or the trail to the left. I open up the map. I rotate the map until it lines up with the trail on the ground under the map. I put the map on the ground. I walk around the map and bend down to look and see which trail goes to what I have circled on my map as my destination. And that’s the trail I take. Painful. And what do I use a compass for? I use it to make sure I don’t walk in circles when I stop paying attention and walk off the trail.
For me, hiking would be easier if standard topo maps didn’t exist. What I need is a list of edges and vertices. The vertices are the points of interest: ‘Bitchin lake for swimmin’, ‘High peak with no skeeters’, ‘Water fer drinkin’, ‘Where you left the car’ (, ‘The other parking lot where you did not leave the car’)–stuff like that. The edges connect the vertices: ‘Steep hike in the sun: 1.7 mi ‘, ‘Rocky trail but nice views: 3 mi’–that sort of thing. Let’s call this a ‘discrete’ hiking map, because it just lists the vertices and shows the edges that connect them. Vertices are represented by pictures. And the trail markers (those posts in the ground on the actual trail) should just indicate which way to the next vertex (which is depicted on your map).
Why doesn’t the Park Service provide us with ‘discrete’ trail maps?
August 4th, 2009 at 11:09 am
If you tutored math our freshman year, it was very discreet. Because you didn’t help me any. (And I could have used the help, seeing how I never went to class. Talk about your wasted tuition.)