19 thoughts on “For the Love of Darwin!”

  1. Holy crap. Just reach out with your right hand, touch the wall, and keep walking so that your hand NEVER leaves the wall (yes, you will spin around a lot) and you WILL get out. It’s that freaking simple.

    1. That solution would require some level of rational thinking. Consider that in the transcript of the call, she decided that since this happened the very first time she took her daughter out of the house, her solution is to never take her out again. Given that leap in logic, I think that a little simple problem solving would be too much for them to handle.

  2. My God, just walk toward the light. Go right through the corn wall- it won’t stop you.

  3. Wow……I am speechless as well. Its a corn maze not a brick maze. You can walk through the walls. Or you can put your hand on the right wall as someone has said. I weep for our . future

  4. We must ban corn mazes. They’re just too dangerous. Think of the children.

  6. Out of curiosity, I’ve read more about the incident since different media outlets are using different parts of the story.

    The farm manager said they knew there were still customers in there, so no one had left. They never called out for help.

    One of the videos showed that there are signs in the maze that give you clues on how to get out if you feel you are lost.

    They also did not that the farm would not have been upset at all if they had just walked right through the corn to get out.

    The upside is that the farm plans to put a marker where the family got lost. I’m glad they have a sense of humor about it, and I hope it doesn’t hurt their business at all.

  7. I learned that hand on the wall trick watching Batman on TV…….

    How dumb can you be and still procreate….

  8. The right hand on the wall trick doesn’t work – look at the aerial view of the map. There are islands – you would just walk around in circles. The right-hand on the wall trick only works if there no loops. If a maze has more than one possible path through it – fail.

    According to the Darwin rules, Robb and Thomas must castrate themsselves and any male offspring immediately.

    1. No, it works. In order to be going around in a circle, you would have to take your hand off a wall and put it on a circle. Hang on a bit, and I’ll illustrate.

  9. dusty,

    That’s why you should also mark your choice at forks even when using the right hand trick, so you can see if you’re doing a circle.

    If you are, you go the other way at the mark but continue the same hand on the wall.

  10. Bitter: That’s only true if you keep your hand on the wall at all times *from the time of entry*. But nobody’s going to do that in a “simple” corn maze that they expect to be able to easily navigate.

    Once you’re already in and you have no idea if you’re next to a “circle” (and the maze has at least one, as is stipulated here), well… the assumption doesn’t hold, not reliably.

    (At one level, I understand the mockery.

    On the other hand, I respect their implicit desire to not just trample a hole in the maze and damage someone else’s property.

    Lacking other people nearby or a way to contact the maze operator directly rather than calling 911, I’m not going to judge their semi-panicked reaction that harshly.

    It’s getting dark, you’re exhausted, the mosquitoes are coming out, you have a newborn… I have far more sympathy than that.)

    1. Why the right hand rule works. Here is the best quality photo of the maze I could find. Here are the three different possible paths you could take using the right hand method. Two of them have the same entry/exit points, but that makes sense since the company that designed the maze said that they typically design three sections – one for people who don’t want to spend a lot of time, and then progressively a little more time required to solve it with each of the other sections.

      There is only one way you could end up walking around an island and that’s if you take the bridge on the right instead of continuing along the wall. Even then, you circle the island once and end up back on the bridge and on the right path once again. You will still end up circling where you hit, but you will get out.

      While I can understand that you might make a mistake in where you put your hand if you don’t do it from the entry point, none of the island sections are terribly huge. The largest one is near where they were found, but they weren’t at that spot. They were near a section with only walls that would have let them out.

      Also, I understand a certain respect for property that would make you disinclined to trample through the corn. Regardless, if you sacrifice the health of your child to avoid walking through some corn that might suffer minor damage, then you’ve probably got your priorities horribly out of whack.

      As for a way to contact the maze operator & to find out if there were others nearby, it has been reported that they made zero effort to shout out at all. One article I read earlier that had more information from the police rather than just relying on the 911 call said that they didn’t even have to actually use the dogs to find them. Just hearing them shout at the instruction of the 911 operator was what led the officers to them. So, in other words, if they had done it from the very beginning, the staff who were still there would have responded and gotten them out without endangering any corn that they so dearly wanted to protect.

      Even with some shreds of sympathy for some elements of their plight, even if they couldn’t figure out the clues, they didn’t think anyone was around to help, and they respected not damaging the corn more than the health of their baby, there was a series of bad decisions that had to be made to get you into that position in the first place.

      Talking about it here at home, we’re going to venture a guess that she actually has some post-partum issues and just started freaking out. Her husband may not have wanted to rock the boat and just let her make the call. But, if that’s the case, why didn’t he step up and offer to make the call, or try calling the farm itself, or even just tell her to stay put and he would walk straight through the corn to find the exit? Man points were seriously lost, even if she was hysterical.

  11. Sigivald,

    The point is these are adult human beings, the dominant species on the planet. They were not in a life-threatening situation and had numerous options if they had simply put the big brains that G-d or nature gave them to work but instead they chose to waste taxpayer dollars.

    It’s like the idiots up here who go out unprepared and then call SAR without even trying to self-rescue.

    Screw that, no sympathy.

  12. Technically, you *can* get in a loop if you decided to do the hand-to-wall in the middle of a maze and there is a loop. At this point, you have to realize that you’ve been at the same point before then… switch hands.

    In a MASSIVE maze this could be a problem because you might not be able to discern the original point of starting easily. Otherwise, as long as there are no bridges or tunnels, you should be good.

    I wrote a bunch of maze solving algorithms when I first got into programming, and yes there *are* certain shapes that can get you trapped if you were to start in the middle and never take your hand off, but this wasn’t a maze like that and even if it was, it was at least worth a shot to try to find your way out.

  14. Not arguing the right hand on the wall pros and cons. It is a DAMN CORN MAZE. It is not made out of bricks. Walk through the corn and get out.

  16. Wow… city slickers.

    You know, corn is planted in ROWS, which are easiliy walked through. Also, corn is flexible and can easily be moved out of the way without damage.

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