Hacker News Reader

This is a bizarre post that is wrong in almost every detail.

o "In America, you don't ever see them." This is just screamingly false. There are satellite dishes all over the place in both urban and rural areas all over the country. (Suburban too, but there they're often in backyards and harder to see.) They may be sparser than in Europe, I don't know, but they exist in America and are not rare.

o American cities have lots of churches. A much higher percentage than in Europe are low-church Protestant (and thus without the eastern alignment) or constructed in the last half-century or so (and thus without the eastern alignment), but I think the overall percentage of buildings that are churches is actually higher. It's certainly not radically lower.

o The idea that nothing in the US is older than 20 years is clearly meant to be an exaggeration, but it goes beyond mere hyperbole; in any city there are a few buildings that are almost as old as the city itself and plenty others that are a lot older than 20 years. New stuff too, but there are old buildings.

o Semi-true, but in the parking-garage cities the crowds would be moving in no clear single direction, right? Anyway, there are many cities with at least some subway/tram/commuter rail system, not just NY.

o Even in the grid cities, the expressways tend to be radial, and they do point toward a heavier "downtown" area. If you want "decentralized", try Paris.

o The vast majority of US cities have weather that includes clouds, not "only in a few cities".

As far as I can tell, your point really was "these don't apply very well in LA", but that's not because the points mostly don't apply to the US, it's because LA is an outlier.

I'm not entirely sure, as I'm not the parent, but I'm pretty sure he meant 200 years old, not 20.

>You'd probably violate your lease for installing one

And your landlord would be violating FCC Over-the-Air Reception Devices Rule: http://www.fcc.gov/guides/over-air-reception-devices-rule

Which isn't true at all. The Rule specifically limits the right of renters to install satellite dishes to renters who have outside rental property where the renter has an exclusive use area, such as a balcony or patio.

Renters without balconies or patios do not have any rights under the Rule to install satellite dishes.

The direction of mosques could also be a little unreliable in North America, since the method of determining their orientation depends on whether the Rhumb Line or Great Circle distance is used to find the direction of Mecca: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qibla#North-American_interpreta...

"Every road is six lanes wide, even the dead ends and alleys"

And you can see your destination, but it is on the other side of that six lane highway, you're on foot, and there's no sign of a crossing point anywhere...

On the other hand, a lot of US cities are much more recent and often planned. And if you're in a city with some kind of grid layout, it's a lot easier to navigate – especially if the streets are numbered, instead of named after old mayors, saints and noblemen. Way easier to get lost in Munich than in Manhattan…

NW Portland springs to mind as a great example. Streets from 1 to 30, cross streets from Burnside, Couch, Davis, all the way up to Wilson.

You'd probably violate your lease for installing [a satellite dish in the US].

Large parts of London (and other areas of the UK) are designated as conservation zones and so satellite dishes require planning permission. Every now and again someone gets around to complaining and all the dishes under 4 years old are removed from a road.

I love GPS. I really do. But I'm realizing that my sense of place would be so much more vivid if I were constantly thinking along these lines. I suspect I'd have a sense of my own presence in direct relation to the natural (as opposed to the artificial) environment. Specifically, I think I'd deepen my appreciation of the relation between the larger world, and the micro-environments we construct for ourselves within it.

I realize that there's a lot of additional cognitive load needed to maintain this sense, and that by relying on GPS (as I do to an almost embarrassing extent) I'm freeing up mental resources for other operations. But to some extent this seem like not stopping to smell roses in order to make more time available for other 'more important' things.

"actually do see these dishes everywhere"

Not in towns that have lots of old buildings, where planning rules generally try and stop people from attaching satellite dishes. However, people still have them - but positioned on the roof so that they aren't that obvious from ground level.

Within a 15 minute walk of where I work, in Washington, DC, there are a number of churches, but some of them appear to follow the east-west layout, and some do not. It seems to depend much more on where the congregation could buy a lot.

as well as weathering you can look to see which way the trees are bent. in the UK most trees lean to one side as the wind is mostly from the SW.

"American cities have hardly any churches compared to Europe". what? I thought there were loads of churches in america?

Not easy to find good numbers for this, particularly for the US. One source [1] refers to around 65k, another source's number [2] is an order of magnitude higher. Of course, church isn't very specific: it could refer to only christian houses of worship, to houses of worship of various sizes, it could refer to the religions themselves, etc.

For Germany, numbers are more reliable: there are about 45000 christian churches (split roughly 50/50 between catholic and protestant, [3][4][5]). Plus about 2500 synagogues and less than a thousand mosques [6], so less than 50k overall. I imagine that the situation in other Western European countries is similar, but it'd be interesting to know if that's true.

So depending on the correct number for the US, the number of churches in the US is either a lot lower or a lot higher. Huh, I guess this isn't very helpful. :D

[1] http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070129165140AA... [2] http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/721939.html http://www.ev-akademiker.de/projekte/kirchen-oeffnen-und-erh... [3] http://www.ev-akademiker.de/projekte/kirchen-oeffnen-und-erh... [4] http://www.ekd.de/aktuell_presse/news_2005_09_30_3_rv_kirchb... [5] http://www.ekd.de/aktuell_presse/news_2005_09_30_3_rv_kirchb... [6] http://www.cosmiq.de/qa/show/1470093/Wie-viele-Synagogen-und...

Most churches in America aren't churches in the sense meant here, the traditional church building. Many church services are held in random buildings that have been re-purposed as houses of worship, and even the buildings built as churches are often more modern and pragmatic in their approach and don't necessarily look like traditional churches or follow the traditional 'rules'.

Cities have less churches, I guess, but towns tend to have more since there is more diversity of religion. My little borough in CT has 7-8 churches, several of which are 150 years old.

OTOH, I don't think the churches point in any reliable direction. They just all face the town square.