It's a different world out here
Here's something new I learnt yesterday about the middle east - every house has a little indicator stuck on the ceiling pointing towards Mecca. My Emirates flight had a Mecca locator up on the projector every so often. Many people carry a Mecca locator GPS device on them. Every one is quite aware of the direction to Mecca as their primary direction.All that orientation means that more people know the direction towards Mecca than the cardinal directions (N,S,E,W). This has some interesting implications for an application we're developing for here. We can't for example show a layout of a house and orient it to North and ask people to pick where they want their network points installed. People would just get confused. We have to orient our maps towards Mecca, or show a little Qibla arrow as they are called.
