John Huth
Gen Ed 1031 | Last offered Fall 2024
How did/do humans find their way across the planet, and how can we replicate their wayfinding?
Imagine a situation where modern technology vanishes. How would you find your way around? We can look back in time at Pacific Islanders or the Norse and see how they engaged in wayfinding, using the Sun and stars as guides. In this course, we’ll explore time-honored techniques of navigation, and examine how they functioned.
Many of the exercises will be devoted to the practice of these wayfinding traditions using our immediate environment as the laboratory. In the second half of the course, we’ll see how people predicted the weather using natural signs and put this to the test. Finally, we’ll touch on how modern navigation systems work, and how they can be spoofed. Mathematics required will be simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and we’ll often use graphical solutions.