{"id":20203,"date":"2008-11-13T10:00:01","date_gmt":"2008-11-13T10:00:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2008\/11\/13\/rearranging-the-cities-into-a-much-more-visually-pleasing-arrangement\/"},"modified":"2008-11-13T10:00:01","modified_gmt":"2008-11-13T10:00:01","slug":"rearranging-the-cities-into-a-much-more-visually-pleasing-arrangement","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20081113-01\/?p=20203","title":{"rendered":"Rearranging the cities into a much more visually pleasing arrangement"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>My friend the seventh grade teacher gave an assignment wherein students were to produce a map of the state of Washington with various required elements, among them, a selection of major cities in the state. Some students failed to understand that the purpose of a map is to represent where the cities are and not to dictate to the cities where they should be, for they moved the cities around in strange ways.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Some students put     <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ci.port-angeles.wa.us\/\">     Port Angeles<\/a> 100 miles inland nowhere near any body of water.     Psst, it&#8217;s a port.     Ports are not as effective when they are 100 miles inland. <\/li>\n<li>Other students took the idea of a port too far     and put Port Angeles 100 miles out to sea.     This sort of misses out the other half of being a port,     which is being <i>connected to land<\/i>. <\/li>\n<li>But the winners of the <i>Unclear on the concept<\/i> award     are the students who moved the cities around.     &#8220;All these dots looked all crooked and stuff,     so I moved them around to make a straight line. Was that wrong?&#8221; <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> Moving the dots around to make a more visually pleasing arrangement might work if you were designing, say, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tfl.gov.uk\/assets\/downloads\/standard-tube-map.gif\"> transit map<\/a>, where the topology of the connections is the important thing rather than their physical arrangement in space. But this wasn&#8217;t one of those times. <\/p>\n<p> <b>Bonus chatter<\/b>: Another student decided to embellish the map by coloring everything outside the boundaries of the state in blue. Psst, the color blue has special meaning in maps. <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Teraina\"> Washington is not an island<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>My friend the seventh grade teacher gave an assignment wherein students were to produce a map of the state of Washington with various required elements, among them, a selection of major cities in the state. Some students failed to understand that the purpose of a map is to represent where the cities are and not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103,109],"class_list":["post-20203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer","tag-the-wisdom-of-seventh-graders"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>My friend the seventh grade teacher gave an assignment wherein students were to produce a map of the state of Washington with various required elements, among them, a selection of major cities in the state. Some students failed to understand that the purpose of a map is to represent where the cities are and not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20203"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20203\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}