{"id":1319,"date":"2004-09-11T14:09:49","date_gmt":"2004-09-11T18:09:49","guid":{"rendered":"\/?p=1319"},"modified":"2004-09-11T14:14:45","modified_gmt":"2004-09-11T18:14:45","slug":"geosensenet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2004\/09\/geosensenet\/","title":{"rendered":"Geosense.net"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just discovered a most productive way to waste time. Earlier this week, Julie mentioned that she didn’t have time to blog because she was rushing to Geosense.net<\/a>. I hadn’t heard of it before, but curious about Julie’s fun site, I checked it out and spent several hours this morning racing to pinpoint the location of the world’s cities on a projection map. <\/p>\n

Playing games makes me feel guilty, but Geosense.net has a redeeming value: I was learning concrete knowledge. Before I started, Jakarta was the only city I knew in Indonesia, and I only had a vague idea that it was located on one of the western islands. Now I can pinpoint Jakarta in 1 second as well as several other Indonesian cities. Thanks to Geosense, there are many other cities I had never heard of, all over the world, that I can now locate on a map. And many cities that I was already familiar with I can now locate with precision. Sydney, New Dehli and Pretoria are further north, for example, and Lillehamer much closer to Oslo, than I had realized.<\/p>\n

What surprised me most was the improvement I noticed within only a couple of hours. I have probably spent several hundred hours in my life looking at maps, so it would seem that an additional couple of hours would have a negligible effect on my knowledge of geography. But something about the game’s instant feedback, or the scoring, however, focused my attention on remembering where the cities were in a way my map reading hadn’t.<\/p>\n

When I started, I was pleased when my score was over 4500, and within only a couple of hours, a score over 6000 was routine and below 5400 rare. (My top score was 6308, and my lowest ‘error rate’ — the average distance from the city — was 52 kilometers.) These scores show up in the High Scores under my login id of coldsquid<\/i>.<\/p>\n

If you are looking for a productive waste of time, check it out. Feel free to leave comments of your best Geosense scores, or links to other online games that teach real knowledge. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just discovered a most productive way to waste time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1319","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corn"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1319"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1319"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1319"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1319"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}