To me, anyway.

(INJ) Remembering a whole tune would seem to be much more complex than remembering the pitch of a note yet we seems to do it rather well, just as we remember faces rather than any specific physical feature of them. But to me pitch of a tune is an integral part of it and if I hum a tune to myself in the wrong key (because it's easier, say) I still have to assign a key to it.

...is lobbing an accordion into a skip without touching the sides.

On a more serious note, I've had perfect pitch since I could ever remember, both in the absolute sense and the relative sense. So I have very little trouble transposing at sight, as well as playing at sight, or keeping in tune when singing a song in different keys. I've never known how I do it - I also have a pretty fast learning memory for music too. But, oddly enough, I'm lousy at matching names to faces.

(JLE) Yeah, but you're a f****** genius. Would you lob a soprano sax in the skip while you're about it, just for me? Then the five tons of rubble just to make sure.

[JLE] Hi - I'm Kathy. I was the other [apart from pen] female person at Rugby Pilg in May. I thought your piano playing was particularly fine.

I don't have [or have never tested the possibility of having] perfect pitch. I do, however, have an unerring sense of direction, and can point to North however many times I've been spun round. Is this normal?

[Chalky] Wow. I, for one, have never heard of that. Out of curiosity, how accurately can you do this (exactly north, or just approximately?), and how rigorously has it been tested (not quite sure what the most rigorous test I can imagine would be -- maybe someone moving you while you were sleeping into a dark room where you have never been before?)? And can you point to any direction just as easily, or, if asked to point southwest, would you still start from north and work from there?

And do you have to be here to do it?

[Chalky] Can I carry you round with me next time I go orienteering?
I have a pretty good sense of direction and I hang around with a lot of very good navigators, but that's a first for me. I think we need a scan for an overdeveloped pineal gland.

I can always tell where I am and where North is -- I carry a street map and a compass whenever I travel.

[CdM] Just approximate north - nothing too exact! The other directions I would work out in a more conscious way.

[Dan] Interesting. Makes me wonder how bewildering I would find being placed on the north pole with nowhere to point.

[INJ] I don't think you'd want to be burdened with the load :-)

I'm quite good at finding my way home, no matter what city or how drunk I am. can I claim that as a skill?

[nights] That seems to be a skill that humans have evolved as a species. This is evidence - I am sure - that beer has been around at least as long as humans have.

[nights] Were you born with it?

(nights, rab) There must be serious limits to the ability or we wouldn't have "Show me the way to home".

I'm almost tone deaf, can't remember names, and have to calculate north by looking at the sun and trying to remember what time of day it is. Should I get a new brain? Incidentally, there are languages that accent with pitch rather than stress (such as Japanese and Attic Greek). I wonder what it is like to have perfect pitch and speak those.

[Chalky] How do you go in the Southern Hemisphere, in a place you haven't seen a map of?

I have an excellent sense of direction and hardly ever get lost, but I think that's got more to do with observation of my surroundings and the use of maps, mental and otherwise. I feel slightly unnerved without a map, if I am going to spend a while in a place. I carry a compass sometimes. The problem is that, since I obviously use the sun's position for orientation, this sense is most finely tuned on the southern hemisphere environment, so my location of north flips 180degrees when in the northern hemisphere. This is a *most* unnerving experience. I was convinced that London was t' other way 'round, and had to work very hard to swap to the "correct" directions.

[Flerdle] I can relate to that. I find the same problem when I go South of the equator and the sun goes the wrong way.

(Breadmaster) It doesn't make any difference, having perfect pitch. It's the change of pitch that is important. The pitch of speech varies so rapidly, even during one syllable, that it is impossible to assign a pitch to it, other than high or low, say. BTW your method of finding north is quite normal and one I use myself, if that's any comfort.

[flerdle] I wouldn't know - having never ventured into that territory.

[INJ] It does, it does!! And the moon's upside down.

I don't think I consciously look for or use the sun's position or movement, it just adds to a general sense of where's where.

[Chalky] You might be in for a surprise then :-)

there must be limits, but so far I haven't found one. I even, in my fairly drunken state, remembered the Russian for 'do you mind if I use your toilet', while nipping into a bar in St Petersburg on my merry way back to Ligovskii Prospekt. I may have been born with it, but I don't think I was ever drunk as a child.

*goes to work*

[flerdle] It would be interesting for sure. I've been fairly close to the equator but never below it [see? I still see north as 'up' and south as 'down'] Can relate to everything you said earlier about observation, map usage, etc. Even as a child I had a compulsion to know where I was placed and was first to a floor plan, street plan or map - it made my day when faced with one of those pictorial street guide display thingies with a big fat arrow saying YOU ARE HERE!

(Chalky) North is still at the top even in the Southern Hemisphere. Weather charts are a bit difficult to get the hang of because everything goes round backwards but North is still at the top. Everything would still go round backwards even if North were at the bottom. It's fundamental. I'm with you on maps. My father had millions of OS Maps, some dating from the 1930's. I've got them all now and a whole load more. I've made a contour map, six feet by two, of the North Downs from Farnham to the Medway. Wonderful what you can do with tracing paper and a scanner and printer. Needless to say, Maison Rosie (TQ 3516 5955) is bang in the middle.

[flerdle] Maybe that's why you think the moon is white? :-)

[Néa] *thwap*

[Chalky & Rosie] Sign me up to the Cartographile Club !! I love 'em - old ones, new ones, from maps of countries, oceans, volcanic distribution etc. down to the most detailed O.S. map - I can pore over them for ages. I trust you've discover www.old-maps.co.uk which is a superb resource for late C19 O.S. maps of Britain.

Sorry, forgot the http ... that should be www.old-maps.co.uk

(Blob) Tried that. Excellent. Thanks.

Hello. Sorry about the downtime. Looks like an upstream provider is having problems.

Now a bunch of semitrained chimpanzees are jumping up and down on the routing tables. Connectivity is coming and going and the routes are changing even as we speak. Whee.

I hope you're filming that!

(Dan) Only properly trained chimpanzees should be employed. Otherwise you might as well use IT consultants.

Should be sorted now.

chimps running about aimlessly running servers, routers and whatnot? users with more knowledge than the IT staff? sounds like a job for Bath University Computer Services!