My brother is one of the actors on this show.

This brings me absolutely no inside knowledge or wisdom, but a great deal of pleasure when somebody brings it up on a rationalist message board.

Thank you; I had hit "Show more comments above" without effect, but hadn't referred back to the original post.

pb.com is a site which sells postage meters...?

No, nor that they print their own names. They just have to sign their names and date the signature. It's also a good idea to have each of them initial every (numbered) page of your will; this proves that no pages have been inserted or deleted.

When I first started asking how to write a will, a couple of years ago, the best advice I got was to write the will myself — because this is free — and then reread it in a few months. Repeat this process until I couldn't think of anything to add or change. Then visit a lawyer and have them translate it into legalese.

I do not know if this is a practical, general or transferable solution, but it worked for me: throughout my childhood I couldn't orient myself, and I finally taught myself at the age of 24.

Start from a place where you can see quite some distance in all (or most) directions. Outside is best. If you can see, but are not within, a downtown core, you're in a good spot. Ditto mountains, or other tall landmarks.

Now ignore those landmarks. They're untrustworthy. If you can see them, they're close enough that sometimes they'll be north and sometimes west and sometimes right on top of you. They can be a good marker for your position, but not for your orientation. You need an orientation marker.

So instead, look in the other direction, the most featureless cardinal direction you can find. Then imagine a huge, fictional geographic element just over the horizon, and tell yourself it's in that direction: living in Edmonton at the time, I used the mantra, "The desert is west."

This is a fictional desert. (Or sea, or taiga, or forest.) It is always west. (Or east, or southeast, or north.) For this process to work, you can't actually pick a real landscape, or it becomes possible to walk around it, at which point your directions are confused again. If you're like me, a fictional landmark will help you orient yourself — but please don't make the mistake of believing it's real.

Now take a few minutes to walk around, keeping the desert in your awareness. Which way are you facing when it's straight ahead? Which way are you facing when it's behind you?

After a remarkably short time, you'll find that you always know where the desert is. And that will tell you where all your directions are. And then you're oriented. And now you can look at that downtown core and notice, "When I am standing at Broadway & Commercial, downtown is to my northwest."

Repeat this process in a few different outdoor locations, and you'll be ready to try it indoors. Just before you walk into a building, note where your imaginary forest is. As you turn corners, keep it in mind. Since the forest is fictional, you've never seen it anyhow; the fact that there are no windows in this university won't matter so much.

Oh, and if you're driving, remember that the centrifugal force you feel is proportional to your speed! The faster you're going, the more quickly you feel as though you're turning — at highway speeds, it takes quite a long time to turn 90 degrees, and a 270-degree cloverleaf seems to go on forever. Unless your city is laid out with perpendicular streets and no freeways, it's a lot easier to orient yourself when you're walking or cycling than when you're driving. On a mountain highway, I'm still lost. I navigate by the sun or use a map.

So…this strategy worked for me. I've never taught it to anybody else; I have no idea which bits of it are necessary and which are superfluous. Although it uses magical thinking, I'll point out that it's easier to imagine a specific, concrete object — like a wide desert just over the horizon — than to imagine an abstract notion like "west." My problem was too much abstraction; this strategy makes the compass real.

Thanks - edited for proper italics.

Well, it's so much easier and more robust that way! Instead of a long list of confoundingly similar equations, you're left with a single clear understanding of why trigonometry works. After that you can memorize a few formulas as shortcuts if it helps.

Of course this principle completely breaks down when you start working with a child who's already convinced that they can't do math—or with a group of 30 kids at once, a third of whose mathematical intuitions will be far enough from the textbook norm that no one teacher has enough time to guide them through to that first epiphany.

I don't know very much about the American curriculum, having grown up with the Canadian one. But I also didn't pay very much attention in math class. I preferred to read the textbook myself, early in the year, and then play around with as many derivations and theorems as I could figure out, occasionally popping my head above water long enough for a test.

I wrote and memorized my own subtraction tables, and invented a baroque and complicated system for writing negative numbers -- for example, 1 - 2 = 9-with-a-circle-around-it, and 5 - 17 = 8-with-two-circles-around-it. Really this is the sort of mistake which could only have happened to me. :)

I'm glad that they're teaching these sort of strategies in US schools. My experience tutoring elementary school math (my son attended an alternative school in which parents all volunteered their own skills & experience) is that every kid has a slightly different conception of how numbers interact. The most important thing I could teach them was that every consistent way of approaching math is correct; if you don't understand the textbook's prescription for subtracting, there are dozens of other right ways to think about the problem; it doesn't matter how you get to the answer as long as you follow the axioms.