The Great Loop

America's Great Loop

Uniberp starts us off with a quote from Capt John's Cruising America's Great Loop:

"I'm currently cruising in a 36'  sailboat in which I "motor around" the entire Loop averaging 7 knots, burning 900 gallons of fuel which takes me around a 6,300 mile Loop safely and very comfortably."

The Great Loop uses the Intracoastal Waterway along the East and Gulf Coasts, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and various and sundry canals.

Iaman responds:

My first thought was "all the course corrections, yikes, glued to the helm for months".
2nd was what was there in those river towns that was worth seeing?

I chime in:

People are designed to process a continuous stream of high resolution video data. Well, maybe not designed, but our design is certainly optimized for it. That's why people like running, driving, watching TV and playing video games, it gives their visual cortex something to do, and a busy visual cortex is a happy visual cortex.
Plus Captain John has a goal, which can be a great motivator.
I question his use of a sailboat, but maybe the hull design makes it more fuel efficient?
6,300 miles divided by 900 gallons comes out to 7 miles per gallon. At 7 knots that is like one gallon per hour.

Uniberp responds:

The human eye is effectively a 600 megapixel camera. And that is not even full field.
They've got a long way to go before they satisfy me more than a flat horizon.

Notes on the Resolution and Other Details of the Human Eye

From an email conversation.