SciPy 2016: Day 0

11 PM UTC-06:00

I reached Austin last night and the conference is starting tomorrow. Today I spent my time roaming around the city with Isruf, Sartaj, Amit and Aman Singh and then preparing for the SymPy tutorial tomorrow.

One interesting thing I noticed today is that Americans uses absolute directions a lot, “Conference center is North of the Capitol”. We, in India, don’t use absolute locations at all. The directions are given in terms of other landmarks, “Take a left from Gol C, go straight ahead to find the main gate”. These differences play important roles sometimes. Google maps uses the American style of directions and that doesn’t work out well for many of us. Even if you translate the navigation instructions in local languages for the Uber or Ola drivers in Bangalore, they don’t get it because when the map says “Go 100 meters to the North West”, the driver doesn’t know where the north is.