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A man, a plan, a canal: Panama

PostHeaderIcon A man, a plan, a canal: Panama

No, this title does not indicate this is a post about palindromes (even though it is one).

Rather, it’s the first post in a new category: “Counter Intuitive”.

I had a long list of counter intuitive answers, situations, solutions, information and phenomena. A list of questions that you are absolutely certain to know the right answer to. The ones you would bet a LOT of money on. And then you would lose that money!

Unfortunately, I can’t find that list anymore, but I remember the following question from that list, one that tests geographic knowledge:

Suppose you’re on a boat on the Atlantic ocean. You’re on your way to the Pacific ocean, which you will reach by traversing the Panama canal.

When you enter the Panama canal, you mark your position on a map and call it A. When you exit the canal, you again mark your position on a map and call it B.

The question now is:

B is:

1. West of A

or

2. East of A

If you don’t know where the Panama canal is, you’ll probably just have to guess, look up the answer, and learn something new today.

But most people know where the Panama canal is and thus they also know that going from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean through the Panama canal takes you on an east to west journey! (The Panama canal will take you from the Caribbean Sea to the Gulf of Panama)

So the answer is simple!

Mesdames et Monsieurs: Faites vos jeux!

(For those of you who visit Vegas more that Monte Carlo: “Ladies and Gentlemen: Place your bets”)

This is a ‘self grading’ test: After having answered the question and placed your bet, you look up a map of Panama and verify your answer: if you were wrong you mail me a check for the amount of your bet. If you were correct, you get to keep that money and may pat yourself on the shoulder for being such a smarty pants.


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24 Responses to “A man, a plan, a canal: Panama”

  • Injun says:

    Of course the context sorts of gives it away; but without really knowing the answer beforehand, the piece of information I had was this: the most Southern part of North America is much more to the South than the most Northern tip of South America – which makes the “counterintuitive” possible.

    Deduction: are you by any chance researching for your upcoming trip with a cruise ship through the canal? For scientific reasons, of course – evolution?

  • Paul Claessen says:

    @Injun: I’m not sure I understand how you can deduct the counter intuitive answer from the fact that the most northern tip of South America is north of the most southern tip of North America (accepting that you count Central America to North America). The counter intuitive part comes solely, IMHO, from the shape of Panama and the position they chose for the canal: they could as well have chosen a different trajectory for the canal, one that would have resulted in the opposite answer to the above question. The location, position and shape of South America is irrelevant to the question.

    And no, I’m not really researching, or even contemplating, a cruise through the canal, not even for scientific reasons.
    I wouldn’t MIND a scientifically oriented cruise to, say, the Galapagos, but I most likely would start such a cruise in the Pacific to begin with.

  • Injun says:

    Supposing the North & South (ignoring the Central “detail”, I was more thinking tectonics) parts of America were connected by a strip of land that ran perfectly “vertical” (i.e. North-South axis), one simply could not cut a canal that ran from A to B where A lies to the West of B.

    It becomes easier when the two are connected by a more “horizontal” (East-West axis) stretch, and even more easy or even logical (because shorter canal) when the connection is actually an S-bend, with the S turned 90°, to accomodate my observation of long ago (“Southern part of North…”). Supposing the canal is in the middle of the “S” (which it is), the West-East “counterintuitive path” from Atlantic to Pacific is explained.

    My my, a picture would have told this thousand words much more easily 🙂

  • Dawnell says:

    BITE ME!

  • Scott Wright says:

    I always wanted that tatoo. It actually appeared on a Simpsons epsisode. I happened to just be flipping through the dial and stopped on that episode just long enough for my 5 year old to hear Bart ask if he could get a tatoo that said “bite me” on his butt. His mother said that he should not be watching the Simpsons because he always picks up what he shouldn’t. I of course disagreed with this statement.

    A week later we were at Cedar Point amusement park. The park had various little rub on tattoo booths around the park. As we passed one my 5 year old turned and looked up at me and asked “Dad can I get a tattoo that says bite me?”. I will never forget how 30 seconds of TV was burned into my son’s brain and it never stopped from there.

    So I wonder did Dawnell happen to also see that episode?

  • Dawnell says:

    Scott – The phrase BITE ME is very versatile. For example, as a linguist and professional communicator, I use that phrase to test if English is someone’s native language.

    Just ask someone to read the phrase. Bite Me. Non-native English speakers, no matter how well they speak English, nor how long they have been speaking English, cannot say “bite me” with just the right inflection. You can tell instantly and it works every single time.

    I would even go so far as to say this phrase is uniquely American.

    Brits, Aussies, Canucks and Kiwis (native speakers of English who are not American) have their own special emphasis when saying “bite me”. But they are pretty easy to spot and sort out by the beer they drink and the ugly sweaters they wear. So in my opinion, the United States Citizenship test could be greatly simplified.

    If you can say “bite me” properly – then you are IN!

  • Paul Claessen says:

    Hmm.. I wonder if someone from Maine, tested this way, would classify as an American citizen. Maybe we should test Jeniffer!

    How about the Mid-West?
    Let’s call Kay and make her say it.

  • JenCW says:

    Seriously, WTF! My husband (who is a Canuck) makes fun of my accent, now YOU! Jesus, I don’t notice any accent on me at all. I do, however, concur with Dawnell with BITE ME!

  • Paul Claessen says:

    Jen, calm down!
    That Maine-ish of you … don’t worry, it’s NOT an accent.

    (It’s a speech impediment)

  • JenCW says:

    ….impediment? I.don’t.like.you.

    🙂

  • Paul Claessen says:

    Jen …. BITE ME!

  • Dawnell says:

    JenCW: I have heard your perfectly American BITE ME a few times. Doc’s bite me … is .. more like . buyeeet meeee.

  • JenCW says:

    I thought Doc was such a geek it would be more like BYTE ME! HAHAHAHAAH–oh god, I am funny!!

  • Paul Claessen says:

    Jen, don’t go overboard now.
    You TALK funny.
    That doesn’t necessarily mean you ARE funny.
    And don’t worry, it’s not just you, as far as I can tell, ALL Mainers talk funny.

    Anyway,
    here’s MY test for DUTCH citizenship:

    Y’all pronounce “Scheveningseschollenkop” now.

    So.
    There.

  • Scott Wright says:

    I guess that’s the beauty of a tatoo. There is no local dialect involved. Maybe we should just go with the tatoo. That is as long as it doesn’t involve the word Scheveningseschollenkop. That would most likely end up as a “two-cheeker”.

  • Paul Claessen says:

    A “two-cheeker”? Scott, puhlease! *tries to get the ‘visual’ off his mind’.
    As for a tatoo: personally I’m not into bodily mutulation. I only permit needles stuck into me for medical purposes 1. You know me: if I want to silently express myself, I use t-shirts.
    As for no local dialects being involved, I think that’s the beauty of Chinese characters: I wasn’t aware of this until recently some of my Chinese friends pointed this out to me: one spoke Cantonese the other one Mandarine. They can’t understand eachother’s lanuages! But they DO use the same (pictorial) written language (characters). So, while they can’t TALK to each other, they can simply write it down, and the other can then read and understand it. Wouldn’t it be nice if we ALL had such a common written language? It would wipe out the (written) language barrier! And we don’t have to invent such a language: it already exists! Chinese characters!
    And thanks to the information density of Chinese characters, it probably would also prevent the need for ‘two-cheekers’.

    (Psst… you copy/pasted that Dutch word, didn’t you?)

    1 Which, btw, do NOT include acupuncture!

  • Paul says:

    @Scott: “I happened to just be flipping through the dial”

    The Chief Technology Officer of the company I work for has a TV with a DIAL?

    Maybe it’s time to do some more eBay-ing and get something more, uhm, 21st century-ish? 😉

  • Scott Wright says:

    I think “flipping through the dial” is engineering slang for pushing the buttons on the remote. It could also be considered an “oldism”; a way of relating things we once learned to something new. We really learn nothing new we just trick our brains into thinking it’s just like something we already know.

    I have however flipped through the dial in real life. How many people have missed the pleasures of a mechanical tuner I wonder?

    And yes, copy/paste is required for anything Dutch other than the word “Dutch” itself.

  • Scott Wright says:

    Do Chinese people get tatoos? Makes me wonder but I’m afraid to google that one.

  • Paul Claessen says:

    Do Chinese people get tattoos?

    Yes, they do.

    Chinese Tattoos

    (source)

  • Paul says:

    Not sure how we got from the Panama Canal to nekkid Chinese people.

  • Paul says:

    copy/paste is required for anything Dutch other than the word “Dutch” itself.

    Oddly enough, the word “Dutch” isn’t Dutch, it’s English, but it sounds like the word “Duits” which is the Dutch word for “German”, even though the Germans themselves refer to it as “Deutsch”, while we refer to our language as “Nederlands” and don’t like to be called “Duits” (since we had that nasty fight with “Duitsland” (“Deutschland”) from 1940 to 1945), even though we posess “Duytschen” blood according to our National Anthem, which every genuine Dutch person shrugs off as not REALLY meaning ‘Duits’, even thought it actually does.
    Oh and both our Queen and her mother were married to German princes, so they were Duits (Deutsch), but became Dutch, which really isn’t a Dutch word at all, but an English one that sounds like “Duits”, which really means German … etc etc etc….

    Got that?
    There will be a test tomorrow.

  • Paul says:

    @Scott: “How many people have missed the pleasures of a mechanical tuner I wonder

    When it comes to TV’s, I must admit: I never had the pleasure of mechanically tuning a TV. Not until after I spread my wings (as #5 and the last one to leave the nest), did my parents purchase a TV, and by that time it had color and a decent remote.
    When I was young, though, my sisters and I would go to acquaintances of my parents three streets south of us every other Wednesday afternoon. Those people had (WooHoo) a Black & White TV: half the neighborhood kids would show up, curtains were closed and nobody was allowed to speak. Let alone touch a tuner dial!
    Times were different back then!
    (My parents never owned, nor knew how to operate, a car. And only once in their lives did they leave the country for a short vacation in Luxemburg, which is, oh, 50 miles south of where my father was born. And I STILL have a sister -the youngest even- who does not have, nor wants, a drivers license).

    I DID mechanically tune radios though! Even a radio that I built myself AFTER I ‘built’ my first ‘non-tunable’ radio: We lived VERY close to a very powerful marine band radio transmitter in Scheveningen (there’s that word again!): all you needed was a crystal earphone and then connect both leads of its cord to a honker of a germanium diode and voila, ‘Scheveningen Radio’ loud and clear!
    I never got that second ‘tunable’ radio to work though, and I think that’s when I decided to leave hardware to more nerdy guys and become a software person, although I never lost this possible remnant of my hardware period: the unstoppable urge to take things apart (much to my parents’ dismay, I always considered putting things back together a complete and utter waste of time).

  • Paul says:

    Let alone touch a tuner dial!

    Which would have been utterly futile, since we had only one channel back then, anyway.

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