Slashdot Mirror
Is Sat-Nav Destroying Local Knowledge?
Hugh Pickens writes "Joe Moran writes in the BBC News Magazine that Sat-Nav clearly suits an era in which 'map-reading may be going the way of obsolete skills like calligraphy and roof-thatching.' Sat-Nav 'speaks to our contemporary anxieties and preoccupations about the road,' writes Moran. 'More roads and better cars mean we can travel further, and so the risk of getting lost is all the greater.' But do real men use sat-nav? Moran says that men seem to recoil from being given digital instructions by a woman, and read the satnav woman's pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like 'make a legal U-turn' and 'recalculating the route', as stubborn or bossy. Still we don't quite trust the electronic voice to get us where we want to go. 'Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections,' writes Moran. 'Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.'"
PROBABLY.
'Sat-nav feeds into this long-held fear that the cold-blooded modern world is destroying local knowledge, that roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.'"
Are there still signs on the side? If yes, you have everything you need to get anywhere. (Ok, it doesn't hurt to know the major cities you want to go through.)
If this is true it will be just like speed dial and later the cell phone contact list. Yes we did lose the ability to recite everybody's number, but we rarely miss it. If we don't have our cell phone we call information, if our satnav breaks we will use google maps on a smart phone.... in the long run its just no big deal.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Where they want to.
Switch your satnav (and mobile phone and PDA) off. And turn back on your brain!
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
You haven't lived until you've been in a car with the Denzel Washington sat-nav voice. "Take a MOTHERFUCKING left turn. NOW" If only there was one for Miss Teen USA South Carolina 2007...
In Galway once I had to arrange shipping for some stuff to go to Australia. The truck driver arrived from Dublin and spent an hour driving in circles looking for the address to pick up from. Apparently it just isn't done to carry with a map so you can find your destination. People prefer you to stop and ask.
So I don't think it is specifically a sat nav thing. People sometimes find maps to be intrusive. For me, I have a garmin etrex without mapping capability. I can follow a straight line from A to B. If there is something in the way I just have to go over, under or around it.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
*dons tinfoil hat and tinfoil accessories*
Amahgawd! mapmakers and backseat navigators of the world unite and sue these sat-nav people!
It's just like the buggy coach whip makers!
sat-nav makes it safer to be on the road, now all those idiots driving with a 4' by 4' map over the stearingwheel can actually see where they're going. (that is, if they would stop txting while driving)
I'm sorry to say, i really don't feel my masculinity threatened in any way by a female voice telling me when to turn.
It does, however, alliviate some of the stress of urban driving in cities i don't know.
~men are from earth. women are from earth. deal with it.~
Sure, and taking someones picture will steal their soul as well. And now you can get a camera and a GPS in a single convenient package, so you can both take the souls of the natives _and_ conveniently avoid their local culture at the same time!
Meanwhile, back on planet Earth, my GPS has brought me to more interesting places than I care to count, places I would never have visited without this handy tool pointing the way (or at least helping not to get lost). I'm sure the next generation won't even know what the phrase "getting lost" really means, just as being "out of contact" will have no meaning to them. A map will be about as useful to them as a sextant is to us (what? You sold yours on Ebay years ago? Shameful!). And personally, I wish them all the best with it!
to say Bullshit!
Ever think about how many cars DON'T have sat-nav in the world?
This guy is a perfect example of people nowadays writing articles without first using their brain.
...about the local knowledge of a car or truck driver? If they piss off for good we might be able to enjoy our local knowledges again..
What's destroying local knowledge is the video baby-sitters in the back-seat. When I was a kid we knew what our neighborhood LOOKED like. These days kids just stare at the screen in the headrest in front of them from the time they pull away until they get where they're going. I'll bet half of them couldn't find their way home if you dropped them off two blocks away.
-B-
Summarized on the old blog.
Also made the same pitch to JJ Abrams..
Is it really fair to compare map-reading to calligraphy and roof-thatching? I remember learning map reading in the first grade. It's hardly on the same order of skill level as the other two. Many of the nav systems show you a map or maplike display, so it's not completely gone. Just not seeing the problem here. What about Google maps? Everyone I know uses that, even the ones with nav systems. They want to see where they are going.
I never understood why a TomTom or similar device has to display a map of the surroundings of the vehicle. It distracts from the driving and it's useless unless you know where you are, in which case you don't need the TomTom anyway. You only need the voice.
-- Cheers!
But do real men use sat-nav?
In the same way that "real men" only program in assembly!
another annoying, pointless "skill" is being killed off by progress. boo hoo.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
As opposed to fake men? No, real men read articles telling them what real men do, because they can't think for themselves, don't want to take a gamble and need to mimic the pack.
I can see this, my father argues with the voice in particular, but I don't really care. Maybe it's because I know how computers work and don't really buy into the "personality" of the device and that the voice samples invoked could just as easily be from a guy, or just don't have the macho hang-up, or whatever. But even he went out and bought a GPS after I gave my mom one, because he found it useful. Even though he knew every area he was driving, he didn't know every nook and cranny, so the business trips are made much easier when you dont spend 10 minutes a day getting directions to some arcane street in the area, whether meeting people at some restaurant or going to a business prospect's house (and frustrating them with calls on how to get there) and being 1/2 hour late or nearly getting into an accident as you ogle street signs instead of paying attention to the road.
In some ways, you would be stupid to do that. Not getting there, but having faith that it's the best route. GPS is great for finding streets in unfamiliar cities, but it's stupid in places you know or longer routes. Longer routes, you should always check a map, to see that it's the best place - I swear Garmins somehow just take the first route that completes the journey without comparing them - it once made me travel 60 miles extra on a 300 mile journey when a better highway was just nearby the starting point in the first place. GPS devices sometimes just don't know or calculate real world conditions eithers - like construction, or speed of a road, or # of stoplights or factor in things like proximity of a city and rushhour and decide to take the rural route around it instead.
Even on local driving, it really does stupid things. On a road on route to my house, inexplicably, where I would have to go straight for 1 more mile, and then turn left toward my home at intersection X (no more turns after that, home 3 miles straight ahead), with a 1 stop light in between my current spot and intersection X, it wants to veer off right. With a plethora of stop signs, turns, and lights. Just to arrive at intersection X again and resume the normal route. With or without the lights/signs, stupid routing either way anyone looks at it. Curiously, it never goes this time-consuming route when going the reverse direction.
GPS is great at finding unfamiliar things, but not optimized routing knowledge that a local or experience driver has yet.
Back when Garmin announced it's as-yet-to-be-delivered nuvifone, as a response to iPhone presumably, I wondered whether they were missing a big opportunity to sell a Garmin app to iPhone users and at the same time, with the guaranteed 2-way internet connection, collect data on the routes people (locals) really drive to improve their GPS routing systems in a major way over their competitors. But they saw Google Maps on it as competition and I guess the automatic reflex was too ingrained (too bad, Google's routing is really excellent in my limited experience, but the app doesn't seem to be useful for driving, is it?)
One good solar flare and no GPS and VHF for a while. Did you realise that? Solar storms in the past have gone on for days, which is a long time to be without navigational aids. Your hurrahing for technology is misplaced. Yes I have GPS, yes I keep conventional maps and compass in the car as a backup. I've known too many people drive around London for ages because they were in an urban canyon and the GPS could not distinguish parallel streets. Our problem around here is Bulgarian and Polish drivers who use car GPS until they find themselves as a T-junction too small for their Actic (semi) to get round, unable to reverse, and have to pay a local farmer to drag out their trailer with a tractor. Great fun unless they're blocking your way home.
(As for "taking pictures will steal souls", can I just point you at the late Michael Jackson, an obvious case of the phenomenon? I think it was Terry Pratchett who observed something like "the idea that taking pictures steals souls is held only by primitive tribes and advanced psychologists".)
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
trust the terrain. GPS is very helpful but I am sure everybody else also had strange experiences where the stubborn lady on the dasboard had a very exotic ideas about routes and directions, especially in the less explored countryside. I never fully trust GPS but in the car more than while hiking or being on the boat. In the latter cases I always have another means of verifying my position and one of them is a paper map (and a compass and sometimes even a sextant (boat)). For one navigation (nautic or otherwise) is an interesting hobby (even some math in there too) and it will help you survive the next robotic uprising (or failing GPS satellites)...
At midnight in an unknown town after fighting 3 hours with a bike tire from hell I want to be knocking on stranger's doors and ask for directions instead of firing up Google Maps on my cell and find my way myself. (Wait, that's GSM-nav. Does that count?)
Incidentally, I planned my route with a good old fashioned map, because online resources for bike routes in Germany suck ass.
Free Manning, jail Obama.
That's why they are popular. It's also possible to update a Satnav with new data if roads change, or new ones are built. Most people's car-atlases are obsolete if more than a few years old - meaning we have to replace them regularly to keep up-to-date. While the cost is small, it adds up with a new atlas every couple of years.
The biggest problem with using a map is knowing where you are starting from. It does have a larger "page" than a Satnav screen, which means you get more context at once, but if you are lost it's impossible to work out how to get to where you want to be - as you don't know where you are to start with. Similarly, if you're alone in a car, probably the single most dangerous thing you can possibly do while driving is keep looking down to refer to a map on your lap, while trying not to shunt the vehicle in front if it slows down.
The point in the article about men disliking taking instructions from a woman's voice shows how out of touch the writer is (and therefore how completely lacking in credibility the whole article is). If you don't like one vioce CHANGE IT. If your budget Satnav only comes with one vioce BUY ANOTHER if it annoys you that much. So far as comparing map-reading with calligraphy or thatching - this is completely spurious: almost no-one in past eras could do either of these crafts, just like very few people have ever really had the skill to read a map (Question: do you know how to tell which way a river flows, by looking at the direction of the contours? Congratulations, you're in the top 1%)
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
'Since before even the arrival of the car, people have worried that maps sever us from real places, render the world untouchable, reduce it to a bare outline of Cartesian lines and intersections,' writes Moran.
I think "Moran" misspelled his own name...
Of course we don't entirely trust computerized navigation. For one thing, there are dreary little one-horse towns in the UK getting some entertainment as people drive trucks where the road is too narrow or compact cars under super-low bridges.
But, perhaps more importantly in the states, are the splash screens that come up. First the FBI warning about copying movies, then an admonishment not to use it while moving (note: not just driving. the wording states "moving"), and a click-through eula with fine print that says that it's for entertainment purposes only, not responsible for blah blah blah... up-to-date maps will cost you three times as much per annum as anti-virus.
It isn't going to get rid of maps, it'll just make it such that most people don't own them. There are still plenty of uses for maps like, say, loading in to GPS units. Also there are all kinds of maps out there for special things: topographic maps, boundary maps, right of way maps, etc. These are not going away.
Basically, USGS is not going to suddenly say "Oh well, people have GPS now so let's just close up shop." Nope, we'll continue to have highly detailed maps of all kinds. GPS just allows us to use them easier. Take a computer, load all the maps up, and then it can give you an overlay for whatever kind you want at your location.
This isn't just satnav. I don't know many people who can remember how they got somewhere just after they drove with somebody dictating directions. My theory is that "left here... second right..." kind of directions turns off (or reduces the need for) the area of the brain that would normally be tracking where you actually are in relation to where you are actually going.
With Nokia Maps/Ovi Maps, Nokia for example are making it possible to both know exactly where you are, but also where everything you are interested in round about you is, how to get to it and making it possible to share it instantly with anyone else you think might be interested.
It's the end of the locality of local knowledge. Not of the locality or of the knowledge itself. Or put another way, local knowledge goes global.
Deleted
I think Eric Cartman said it best when he was once heard to comment: "Da f***!?"
SatNav doesn't "speak to our modern anxieties about the road" - it speaks directions!
"Seriously guys... da f***!?"
OMG!!! Ponies!!!
I find that having a GPS makes it easier to learn the local streets, since it shows me where I am on the map at all times. Otherwise I have to spend all my time trying to figure our what that tiny street sign says and I miss everything else.
Local knowledge is just that - local. If you live there, you have the knowledge. How can GPS destroy that? And you know what? The article does not argue how it does. GPS is used for new routes. It's new knowledge. Nobody uses Sat-Nav repeatedly for the same destination.
Sat-Nav and GPS are tools - the article poses a question akin to asking if real men don't use hammers. I wouldn't use one to open an egg, but I would use one to fix my stairs.
I am as much a psychogeographer as anyone who loves to discover a city by getting lost in it, but if I am crossing the country (in my case, Belgium) to buy something, I would like to be efficient about getting there.
I'm appalled in recent years at people who refuse to even *listen* to directions from me, a competent human who knows how to tell you how to get where you need to go--because they have a TomTom. I've actually, multiple times given people directions to my home over the phone, step by step and very simple, but then they end up calling me for help because they weren't listening and now they're lost. Even when I tell them that my street name exists for several streets in the Houston area, and that I know their TomTom can't be trusted, they still blithely follow it.
;-/
This wouldn't surprise me so much accept some of these folks are supposed to be computer geeks, who have no illusions about the magical powers of computers and software. Are people lazy or what?
expandfairuse.org
And there was more history than an argument...
(As for "taking pictures will steal souls", can I just point you at the late Michael Jackson, an obvious case of the phenomenon? I think it was Terry Pratchett who observed something like "the idea that taking pictures steals souls is held only by primitive tribes and advanced psychologists".)
And a wise woman once said, "You hear about the north African tribes who are afraid that cameras will steal their soul...I think you really have to ask yourself about the people taking the pictures, not the natives..."
Frankly, rude gawking tourists and rude gawking anthropologists are soul-destroying creatures.
What local knowledge? No one use GPS to navigate to local places. We use GPS to go places we have no knowledge of. I drove through Austria, Germany, Denmark, Sweeden, Norway this summer without any problem. Last time I did the same 5 years ago I had to spend a full day over the map figuring out the best way to go. Making notes of motorway exits and stuff. And still at every stop I was reading maps, because roads change gets closed etc.
The other thing is that the just because you use satnav you still have to look at the road ahead. If you can not remember which turn you have taken just because somebody has told you "take the second one" then you have more serious problems than SatNav can solve.
I can't tell you how often the damn thing is just wrong.
It has difficulty distinguishing roads that are really near to each other, as well as roads that pass over one another.
You can be driving along a motorway, and suddenly she pipes up "TURN LEFT!!"
If you were keyed to obey her, you'd fly off the overpass and fall down into traffic.
There are parts of Wales I have visited, particularly in Holyhead, where old roads simply don't exist on the map.
And take a look (use google earth) at the roads and routes around any major airport, (for me, Zaventem in Belgium).
Sat-nav is useless there.
The sat nav is about as useful as having google maps on a laptop in the car. Pull over and check it out if you must. Plan your route before you go though.
Cry me a river. This is a typical whiny kumbaya nonsense about how we are losing important skills because of encroaching technology, a theory that immediately falls apart if you look at it from up close. Anyone who can read Google maps can read paper maps just fine for normal use. In fact, Google maps, GPS, and Google Earth probably immensely improved average map reading skills, not just street but topo.
End anonymous moderation and posting on
Most map readers are being killed off as they struggle with the AZ when driving the car and end up ion the path of an oncoming articulated lorry.
Whereas GPS-using drivers can keep their eye son the road and survive.
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I'd partially deaf to bullshit.
Contrary to popular belief, it takes quite a lot to interfere with telecommunications. Not only do geomagnetic storms NOT last days (that'd be a ridiculous amount of energy output, and a days long continuous geomagnetic storm has NEVER been recorded), but severe ones powerful enough to interfere with equipment for more than a handful of minutes recur on the order of once every few decades.
Severe storms, large enough to disrupt half the planet, like the Carrington Event, occur roughly every 500 years, the last one being about 150 years ago, but believe me, if one of those hit us, your GPS would be the least of your concerns. The Carrington Event reportedly lit up the sky at night when the solar wind hit the Earth's magnetosphere, causing aurora as far south as Hawaii, and disrupting telegraph communication over half the world. Nowadays, it'd cause electrical fires all over the place by overloading power lines and blocking pretty much all forms of telecommunication. And bear in mind, this, the largest geomagnetic storm ever recorded, barely lasted a single day.
I would rather posit that the constant (in)breeding of stupid people is 'destroying local knowledge'. I was brought up before (Not by much) the internet and 'wikipedia as a verb', and at least in my case easy access to information SUPPLEMENTS what I know, and doesn't make me RELIANT on such technology. Of course, as society gets dumber and lazier as a whole, I have little doubt that instant access to information WILL replace actually having to know and remember stuff... But that's not the fault of the technology, it's the fault of modern civilization's end-run around natural selection. :P
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
GPS units have basically taken a map and stored it digitally, created a way to keep the map up to date, track your location on that map and give you verbal cues based on that very same map again.
This is like saying Audio books are the end of reading.
Fact: Everything I say is fiction.
This is an amazingly true observation. The video screens in minivans are bizarre to me: it's as though someone thought "you know what American children need? MORE TV!"
Need Geek Rock? Try The Franchise!
Its one thing to not be able to read maps, but these things are turning people dependent and dumb. I have multiple friends that rely on their nav so much that they can't remember how to get to my place that is less than 10 miles away after they've driven here over five times. They turn into drones. One girl I dated had to rent a car once and she lived only five miles away and she couldn't remember how to get to my place. From her place, my place is literally left, right then straight for 3 miles, then left, then right. because she didn't know the street names.
This smacks of some journalist on a slow day trying to think up something to write about. I am not interested.
Try spending a week driving in Italy with a broken sat-nav with a van full of in-laws flown in from all corners of the world, in particular try it when your *not* italian like me! The funny thing was that I never needed the thing, I mean seriously how many signs pointing to Rome do you need to see on the Motorway to know your on the right track?
Well having said that, on my previous trips to Italy when using a sat-nav on no less than two occasions the sat nav directed us onto a half constructed road! And I kid you not, one of those occasions the sat nav insisted that my fiancee and I drive off the edge of a half constructed bridge!!! It was the on-ramp to the motorway under construction!
This was Italy so that kind of thing apparently happens often, oh and before you ask there were none of the usually expected signs indicating that the road you are turning onto doesn't actually expect prior to the half built bridge!
The moral of the story is the usual rule of thumb with any system - garbage in garbage out, don't put all your faith in a machine!
Driving is Ireland is really simple because of the efficient layout of our road network.
The directions for anywhere you want to go in Ireland are simple:
1. Drive to directly Dublin
2. Drive to directly your destination
(Being from Dublin, I would suggest that step 2 is unnecessary - but I would say that)
Also, due to the voices, I doubt that we follow GPS at all. If it's English - we'll not listen to it, 600 years of oppression yada yada yada, and if it's Irish, we won't let some muck-savage/D4 ponce tell us what to do.
Although, well probably still end up in the dead-end 'cos that's where all the craic is.
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
> One good solar flare and no GPS and VHF for a while. Did you realise that?
That's only in your head. You're talking absolute rubbish. Perhaps one particular time one GPS didn't work for a few minutes, but NEVER EVER has the whole GPS network been unusable for "several days" - that's just something you made up. The GPS signals are very strong and very easy to read. That's why a GPS antenna is only a couple of cubic centimeters but a TV signal requires upwards of a 40cm parabolic dish. What you're talking about has never happened and most likely never will.
Do you know how infrequent major solar storms are? There hasn't been a big one capabable of disrupting any major in over 100 years. Even if it happened right now, aircraft can navigate using internal navigation and beacons and it would be the massive problem that the ignorant press sometimes portrey to be.
> I've known too many people drive around London for ages because they were in an urban canyon
Perhaps 5-10 years ago. No modern GPS has any significant problems getting a lock in London these days. It doesn't even have skyscrapers. New York City perhaps, but not London.
Fucking spell the whole word. Satellite Navigation. using "Sat-Nav" makes you sound like a douche.
...roads no longer lead to real places but around and through them.
Living in the Middle East, I am used to the large highways that connect our cities taking us through the city. For historical reasons, that is how the roads were made. However, travelling in the US I was astonished to see that the large roads between cities pass _by_ the cites, not through them, or at least not in the sense that one must slow down to city speed as he goes through. Here, the roads connect our cities, but in North America the roads that were built in an era where one does not need to stop at each possible detour along the way actually go right past the cities.
In short, one does not need to be intimate with the whole path from A to B nowadays, and the technology (both GPS and even the roads themselves) reflect that. I suppose that the beginning of the trend would have been the construction of interstate highways that let the driver bypass the cities that he is not interested in, or the invention of the automobile which reduced the need to stop frequently.
Thank for reading to the sig. You may stop reading now. It is safe. There is no more content. Why are you still reading?
In my experience, GPS navigation systems are great for telling you where you are, but lousy at getting you from point A to point B in an efficient manner.
I find the combination of a traditional map and a GPS to be a great improvement.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
Please remember that "must of" should be "must have". I know that they sound similar when using contractions (must've - which firefox won't even accept) but the first one is wrong while the second one is correct. The second one also makes a lot more sense.
This message is FYI only, not meant to be disrespectfull or anything.
The two worst sets of directions I've ever received, thanks entirely to "local knowledge" (and my lack of it) were in country towns of New South Wales, Australia.
1) "Drive straight along this road, and turn left about two miles before the traffic lights".
I happily drove off, until I got to the traffic lights, whereupon I did a U-turn and drove back two miles, cursing.
2) "You can't miss it. Go along this highway, until you get to where the school used to be and then turn left".
Apparently everyone in the town knows that the shopping centre used to be a school. I wasn't from the town...
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
Moran says that men seem to recoil from being given digital instructions by a woman, and read the satnav woman's pregnant pauses, or her curt phrases like 'make a legal U-turn' and 'recalculating the route', as stubborn or bossy.
Well, nowadays for most GPS units, you can get customizations with nice manly voices... So you aren't turned down while it guides you to your hot steamy hookup that you met on Romeo...
http://www.solarstorms.org/SRefStorms.html
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The Laws of Technology:
1) The more technologically advanced and/or complex a system is, the easier it will be to defeat or break.
2) As information retained by technological systems increases, the less information is retained by humans, thus progressively minimizing the need for a human working knowledge.
3) "Advanced" doesn't necessarily mean advanced.
Who needs to:
1) Learn how to read a map if you can use your GPS?
2) Learn how to spell, if you have spell-check?
3) Learn proper grammar, if you have grammar-check?
4) Learn penmanship, if you type instead of write?
5) Learn Morse code, if your cell phone cannot get a signal?
Unfortunately, people have become so reliant on technology that they have made themselves completely vulnerable to the most simplest of problems, particularly #1 above, which could be the difference between life and death if the GPS unit is damaged or the batteries are dead. Number 4 is becoming an increasing problem, since pharmacists are increasingly misreading prescriptions because the handwriting of the doctor that wrote them is so bad that they dispense the wrong compound, with disasterous results.).
Consider learning Morse code: If you are in a situation where you need it, like boating or hiking, chances are VERY good that your cell phone won't get a signal, and a 50 cent mirror or $2.50 flashlight will get a distress message out better. Even with a radio, basic radio operation skills are far more helpful that being able to text, since cell reception is not as widespread, powerful, or reaching as a signal from a radio.
Skills that are not dependent on technology are vital. Society has become reliant on technologies and gadgets that were intended to *aid* in accomplishing tasks, and not intended to completely replace hard skills.
If you need to live your life surrounded by gadgets, gizmos, and the latest tech, chances are you are already diminishing your capability to adapt and function should something happen and they stop working.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Most of the digital mapping data misses out a lot of local features. Even the Tele Atlas data that Google maps uses is buggy and in Western Europe misses minor roads, and I've even seen it miss junctions between major roads. In Eastern Europe it often misses entire roads and cities (e.g. compare the capital of Albania on Google Maps and OpenStreetMap .
Even in Western Europe, the digital map makers miss stuff like cycle and walking trails. If you look at a detailed map like the British Ordnance Survey, which has been built upon local knowledge for hundreds of years, you'll see an amazing amount of information that is missed in the digital maps. I was surprised the first time I looked up my local area and saw that even the tiniest woods were named, and every hill was named and had elevation data. This is local data that almost no-one cares about anymore, but it still seems a shame to lose the history. I think the future is this kind of local data encoded in a modern digital open-standard format, and the only project I see doing this kind of work is OpenStreetMap.
I normally don't post here because there is far too much bullshit being spread, but I felt compelled by this article, as I feel it is a whole load of bullshit.
It's more than just the back streets. I often notice LOTS of fascinating details on local maps (such as the high-res ordnance survey maps) that simply aren't included in the likes of Google Maps, Microsoft's Live Virtual Earth Whatever, etc. Mapquest (or was it multimap) used to provide these, but when google earth and all came along, they switched to Live to compete, and lost all the details that made me use them.
There's a basic example of what I'm talking about here:
http://www.keith-dufftown-railway.co.uk/maps/Map3.gif
Note the names of hills, local areas, quarries, etc. Often these local names are what give rise to street names and town names. More importantly, stuff like ancient pagan sites and ancient burial grounds --- the fascinating rich places of history and legend --- are often included.
The world will definitely be a colder place if these are lost in favour of being able to zoom in from a globe to pixelated overhead photos of cows, and low-res DEMs instead of intricate contour lines.
Ummm, no, sorry, I don't work in quant, nice failure at assuming while discussing assumptions though.
And the reason we know the frequency of major geomagnetic storms is because of ice core samples whose stratified layers can yield details about Earth's atmosphere going back thousands of years. And unlike you, I don't get my info from a site that looks like something geocities vomited up.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=bracing-for-a-solar-superstorm
And I picture you as someone too lazy to do any actual research into a subject before making unfounded assumptions, especially since even a 5 second Google search yields more credible sources than yours, which contradicts most of your post, as I've explained. I'm sure I certainly wouldn't want to hire you to help me with anything relating to EMC if you do business the same way you post on Slashdot.
The problem with GPS units (or google maps/etc) for that matter is that they tend to compute the fastest route respecting speed limits, unless you reprogram them by hand if it is possible. Since I usually drive about 10-20% above speed limit outside towns (it is a calculated risk taking into account the probability of law enforcement presence as a function of time, rain, taxi behavior, hills, obvious traps, and limiting risks as a function of extreme weather, traffic, tractors, etc) I have been caught 4 times in 18 years but still have my driving license. I know of certain routes which cut 10% time in comparison to GPS-recommended ones thanks to this.
Google passes Turing test : see my journal
Satnav spelt the end of marital arguements while driving. That alone makes it worthwhile, as suddenly it didn't matter even if you took a wrong turn!
Wikipedia spelt the end of pub-style arguements over astroturf and so on - suddenly, you can look it up, just like the British Police have recently been told to!
But Google maps sure as hell increased my local knowledge. I like staring at maps. I like to pick a spot, and go there by bike.
I could see that a sat-nav on a bike will make one more courageous to explore the local area... and if you're one of those polluting road-jamming filthy bastards, you might explore the region by car...
If you look at it like that, sat-nav increases local knowledge. :D
In the parent's defense, events strong enough to distrupt GPS comms do not have to be on the scale of the Carrington Event that you mentioned. From
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2008/06may_carringtonflare.htm
In December 2005, X-rays from another solar storm disrupted satellite-to-ground communications and Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation signals for about 10 minutes. That may not sound like much, but as Lanzerotti noted, "I would not have wanted to be on a commercial airplane being guided in for a landing by GPS or on a ship being docked by GPS during that 10 minutes."
The same article says
On Earth, power lines and long-distance telephone cables might be affected by auroral currents, as happened in 1989. Radar, cell phone communications, and GPS receivers could be disrupted by solar radio noise. Experts who have studied the question say there is little to be done to protect satellites from a Carrington-class flare.
Granted, recent the recent flare-related GPS disruption didn't last several days, but large flares do happen on a fairly regular basis (the article mentions 'huge' storms in 1942 and 1989). Which confirms the parent's main point: that backup tech (like sextants) is really a necessity when lives are at stake, simply on the basis of solar flares.
Obviously, backup tech is also needed to cover everyday problems like systems breakdowns while at sea.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
I was thinking something similar -- not just about commuting though, but about the power of knowing where you are, where you need to be, and all the different options for getting there, taking detours, planning your itinerary, etc.
It's only lately that I've started putting my city of birth and local state/province together in my head. I've also started buying old-fashioned, detailed maps of the country, and a compass. All of this has been WELL worth it. Just the feeling of really knowing where you are on the earth, having a sense of your world, is powerful, in the same sort of way that knowing what to do if you're lost in the mountains is powerful when you're taking a trip in the mountains and anything could happen.
I'd always kind of shunned the old-fashioned compass stuff, but actually, it's simple to triangulate your position, or get your bearings from a map, and a lot of fun. Next step is an orientation course.
After living in England, I'd swore I'd never not have a sat-nav again. The English quite possibly have the worst markings for their roads in the free world. After moving to Tampa a few weeks ago the first I did was go buy a Garmin Navi. After a few days of driving around with the GPS I'm imputing fewer and fewer directions. If anything the GPS has given me the confidence to try all those back streets with and without destination directions since I know I can get back to familiar territory quickly. In the past I would learn the most expedient route and drive that one over and over until events or riding with someone else showed me a different one.
If they want to complain about anything destroying local knowledge then they should put the blame on the highway system, but then again who wants to have to navigate the speed traps, the low speed limits when passing through small towns every 20 miles, and trying to find a gas station that is open past 6pm, when you can just jump on the highway and do the trip in half the time and a third the hassle.
I say good riddance.
Sat-nav has for the most part, helped me learn a new area faster than I would have with maps. I've used it when business takes me to a new locale, and after two or three uses, I know the general layout enough that It's not necessary anymore. At least with sat-nav, the maps get updated. With the old fold out maps, you had to rely on whenever that edition was printed.
WWJD? (What Would Jonas Do? - Spinward Fringe by Ran
I usually run with "North up" and zoom out occasionally, so I have a better picture of how I move around. This annoys my wife endlessly, because she prefers "Track up" mode where you always seem to go straight ahead. But then she's one of those people who struggle with "which way is left" while looking at a map when you're driving anywhere but north.
So I agree that if you care about it, a GPS can assist you in building knowledge about your surroundings; just as it can be detrimental if you don't care about it.
"Good news, everyone!"
The issue is a map that already has your route marked for you, versus one in which you must create the route yourself. This process includes Step One, which is finding your present location on a map. I think you'll find that the average American driver, at least, can do this only with the greatest difficulty, and only if given multiple guesses. As for finding an unknown destination on a map, not to mention the best route to it -- well, most couldn't find water if they fell out of a boat.
Sad, really.
Sat-nav keeps damaging/destroying our property boundary wall, fucking delivery lorry drivers will blindly punch in a destination which takes them right past our house, the lane is too narrow for a lot of lorries so when they go past they often scrape the drystone wall, sometimes hitting it so hard the whole thing shifts a bit.
One time we came home from holiday ro find the wall had been knocked down by a 5 axle lorry that didn't even realise what they'd done.
Much more steps should have been taken during the writing of sat-nav code so shit like this doesn't happen, Tom-Tom, Garmin etc. should have consulted gotten local knowledge so to avoid problems like this. I read of one village that has had some serious problems with lorry drivers treating it as a rat-run, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/08/satnav_menaces_somerset_village/
Sat-nav creators should hold some responsibility for their actions, or rather inactions in forseeing shit like this happen.
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
Somewhat related: These days even the taxi drivers don't know the way any more. It used to be such that you could jump into a taxi, mention the address and off we'd go.
Last time I used a taxi, the driver asked me for directions. Then, when I couldn't provide them, I had to spell out the address for him (he hadn't heard of the street before) so that he could type it into his sat-nav.
Not sure if that's really a problem, but I somehow felt cheated. Isn't it his job to know these things?
Last I checked, GPS satnav's were still pointing people off cliffs, to invisible roads, and not particularly around construction, whereas a cheap local city map can get you around all that. Secondly, Google maps still doesn't show the right roads in my newish (3-4 year old) subdivision, and despite the subdivision being in a big-ish city (not way out in nowhere) in a nest of existing roads, GMaps still can't find my street by name. Thus, when people want to know how to get to my house, I do what has worked for centuries - I draw a simple little map. GPS doesn't make people dumb, dumb people rely on the easiest possible general solutions to anything, regardless of any flaws to those solutions. Now we're getting a good view of the sheer number of dumb people... scary, huh?
stuff |
Lots of completely irrelevant and nonsensical posts lately seem to indicate a lull in news, politics, and pop culture....I blame Michael Jackson. He should have died years ago and we could have dispensed with all the nonsense then.
But do real men use sat-nav?
Of course not -- real men navigate the same way they do everything else; with a mixture of power tools and grenades
I mod down anyone who says "I will be modded down for this", regardless of the rest of their comment
if you're capable of reading google maps you can read a normal map.
True, but Google Maps has an advantage over paper:
I disagree. For me Satnav *is* vital for travel.
Someone hands you a fun destination four towns away... lookee, you don't have time to go home and net-map it! Sure, I MAY be able to fudge the destination adhoc, but I'd lose some half hour or more in the process, and too often that's the difference between being late and on time. In my lifestyle, being late *does* translate into nasty consequences.
I had previously given up going anywhere; now I am actively going places.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Only in America. Seriously, that's virtually unheard of over here in the UK and is rather comical.
The United States mainland is much bigger than Great Britain. Texas alone, for instance, is as big as 2.8 UKs even with Northern Ireland. And when you quadruple the area, you double the drive time.
What do parents put on for kids to watch during the trip? An in-drive movie?
Yes. The screens in minivans tend to be connected to DVD players.
I worked for Philips back in the 90ies where I was a developer in the first car navigation systems. Had a good time there and I like the technology behind navigation systems. Route planning, position determination (GSP, dead reckoning, compass), database, on-line updates, voice alerts, GUI, etc...
However, I take pride in NOT using car navigation. I study maps to get where I want and then I leave these maps home. I see situations where I'm lost as oportunities to get to know the surroundings better.
A couple of weeks ago I planned a trip of 2400 km (1500 miles.) Needles to say the trip did not go as planned. West from Paris there was a huge traffic jam towards the coast. So I stopped at a service station, tried to reroute but failed.
Then from Calais to my destination in Dartford near London everything went fine and I found my destination instantly.
On my way back I wanted to avoid Paris and decided to drive through Belgium, a route I did consider only as an unlikely alternative. Sure enough, east from Brussels, I too the wrong way. Instead of driving toward Luxembourg, I was driving towards LiÃge. I deduced this from the position of the sun. At a service station, using a crappy map I found on the shelves, I rerouted. The road I took was incredibly beautiful and well worth the extra time.
After Luxembourg everything went fine through France and Germany and I home only a few hours later than expected.
My brother in law -very intelligent man, PhD, literate, etc...- on the other hand, has no sense of direction at all. It seems there's no therapy or cure for that. He would always use a navigation system, probably even to move within the city he lived in for 50 years.
My brains won't degrade by the presence of navigation systems and neither would my brother in law's.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
How many of you guys know how to shoe a horse? This was probably once considered knowledge every man should have.
In 10 B.C., one Josephus Moranivus wrote on papyrus paper bemoaning the fact drawn maps destroys the ability to navigate by dead-reckoning.
Perhaps 5-10 years ago. No modern GPS has any significant problems getting a lock in London these days. It doesn't even have skyscrapers. New York City perhaps, but not London.
I don't own a GPS device, and I've never seen anyone using GPS have a problem in London (but it's not really necessary, there are excellent maps in/outside every station and on every bus stop anyway) but remember many streets in London are much closer together than they are in New York. (example -- there are several skyscrapers (for London) on that view. For instance, look at the narrow street at the bottom of this one with streetview. Does "I'm need to get to near the dildo building" count as local knowledge?)
I have a GPS and more less from the day I passed my test about 5 years ago ( when I was about 32! ), but I still love turning it off once in a while and just wandering along roads to see what's at the end. I do the same on my push bike, I take a GPS, but only use it if I get lost. I also love just banging a point on the GPS map, say within 150 miles and just driving there, then wandering around the local area.
What is this attitude that technology is all or nothing, it's not. It can be used as much or as little as you wish, it can coexist with you, help or hinder. It's a tool, like any tool it can used as you see fit, when you see fit.
In the UK, many Sat-Nav destinations are programmed by entering the post code (which is specific to ~10 houses here). Some Sat-Navs, particularly the ones used by delivery firms, map our post code, for our house in rural Devon, to the wrong village entirely, sending the trucks up some pretty dodgy roads to a place where there aren't any locals to ask.
Sure, people don't entirely trust these things. But it's for practical reasons, not because of the angsty bullshit in TFA.
"But do real men use sat-nav?"
Absolutely. But "real men" (sheesh) have their GPS plugged into their laptop computer, plot their tracks in real-time over a fully detailed topographic or satellite imagery map, and they synchronize their camera and GPS date/time so that they can plot the exact location of any photos using GPS photo tagging software. If the trip might be of interest to others, they convert the whole thing into HTML and/or KML automatically and put it on the web for other people to enjoy.
Those silly "turn left here" things? Heck, no. What a waste of time those are, especially since all they usually have on them are the roads. I don't get lost easily -- take me to an unknown city, drop me off somewhere, and I can wander around just fine and find my way back to where I started, whether in a car or on foot. But if I'm trying to find some obscure place off in the wilderness, of course I would take a map, and "turn left" doesn't have any meaning when off road. Why wouldn't I use the modern equivalent of a good topographic map or orthophoto map?
If you're really worried about "losing local knowledge", put it in OpenStreetMap :-)
Gee, I need to get paid but today is a slow news day - what can I write about? I know, I'll manufacture a problem to make people feel sentimental, guilty and villify a piece of technology that is on its own not biased toward good or evil.
--
You know, when I use a GPS eventually I arrive at a destination - then I look around and (mostly) say - "Gee this is a pretty nifty place" - if anything GPS expands my ability to view the real world - not lessens it. There are lots of things I feel sentimental about from the past - but then I realize that it's more important to just go out and appreciate what you have in life during the present moment.
Your favorite Anti new tech question
1. Is Satnav Destroying local knowledge
2. Are calculators destroying mathematics
3. Are keyboards destroying writing knowledge
4. Are cars destroying cross country running
5. Are medicines destroying death
6. Is Cowboyneal destroying humanity
My Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
I'm all for this cattle herding technology (not that I'm not dabbling with it myself). It will free up the back roads as people use sat/nav/google maps to find a path between points. The cops will follow too. This eases congestion on my commute, saving both time and fuel cost.
Please mod me 1 or troll. It's where the truth is these days, even on Slashdot. Beware the power of moderators everywh
I drove to Ottawa to Toronto for the first time. On googlemaps the route was quite simple, get on the 401 drive to toronto easy right? Punched in the address in my satnav and it decided to take a weird route along highway 7, some back country road 7th line it was called then back to highway 7 the trip was a nightmare. When I reached my destination I checked the options and it was set to "shortest distance", which for some weird reason is not the same as "fastest route" (omg highway 401).
I must admit tho that the scenic route to Toronto was far more enjoyable than the highway trip back home, one must truely appreciate truck drivers.
did you forget to take your meds?
It is not destroying _local_ knowledge. However it makes it possible not to learn a lot of useless _not local_ knowledge and still be able to move around.
"Blah blah blah." - [citation needed]
I know how to read a map just fine. I used to drive all over the place with nothing but a map. Drove halfway across the country... All through Canada...
But I still got a GPS. A GPS will show points of interest, that a map won't. And it can announce when my next turn is coming up, instead of me trying to glance back and forth between a map and the road.
I still carry a road atlas everywhere I go. And I've got an assortment of maps of more local areas and bigger cities I might actually wind up in. But they're generally relegated to the trunk these days, and only come out once in a while.
GPS isn't the problem.. The problem is that people don't get out, don't explore, don't learn the area around them.
Used to be that if you were lost you could walk into pretty much any gas station and get halfway-decent directions. Used to be pretty much any random denizen of a town would be able to point you towards the highway, or a restaurant, or a hotel, or a school, or whatever. That is no longer true.
We've got a new employee who grew up in this town. Lived here his whole life, except for four years of college elsewhere. I grew up 1,500 miles away from here and have only lived here for the last 10 years or so. I know more about the local area than he does. He didn't know where the civic center was. He didn't know where one of the schools was. We generally have to give him very specific directions when he goes out on a call.
The key problem, as I see it, is that folks just don't get out of their house anymore. And if they do, it's a simple trip from point A to point B, usually with directions from mapquest or a GPS routing them there.
Folks don't wander the streets. Folks don't pay attention to the scenery around them. Folks don't have a feeling for the community they live in.
There's "the inside of my house" and "everywhere else."
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
I just use mine to tell me how far I am from my destination. And its fun to find out what body of water I am driving by, or the name of that industrial park. I still prefer to learn the backroads manually of an area I live in because its good to know. Also my GPS is built into a car so I need to know them when in my fiance's car. Plus, I enjoy giving people directions
You know, I have GlaDOS's voice on my GPS, and it's funny to turn it on when with somebody who doesn't understand that, well, it's GlaDOS, and it's going to give you bad directions. A right turn ahead 50m? "Ahead, turn left, and go... an infinite number of miles."
Which I suppose, were one following the surface of the earth, would eventually get you there. But so much for GPS finding more efficient routes.
Sat nav woman?? I have John Cleese on mine! =)
Ahh the salad days when a man feared for his life that a plague might ravage through the countryside and kill all him and his neighbors. It really gave a man a sense of being alive and to value his life when he surived those great smallpox epidemics of yore. These days, with the fancy-dancy "vaccine" kids will never know this great wonder of nature.
Why is it whenever some new form of technology that relieves some burden comes along there's always these dumb articles about how it's going to ruin us, and how some aspect of -old thing- was really just great? Any positive aspects of -new thing- are ignored, any negative aspect is amplified and distorted, and anything else that mitigates the negative aspect are also ignored.
Getting back to reality, there's always going to be people who don't have sat-navigation, don't use it, etc. This isn't like a telephone or the internet where you're eventually forced into the technology because everyone else has it.
AccountKiller
How about a Satnav that localised its accent when you drove into different areas?
In a semi-related note, one of the things I miss about the pre-GPS (and even pre-Internet days) was the adventure of driving around a new place and stumbling on hidden gems. I'd love to do that in this day and age, but my girlfriend absolutely refuses to go to any resturants (for example) without doing some kind of online/zagat research first. Her rationale is "why should we waste our time going to some crappy restaurant when the Internet could have told us it was crappy before we even went?" While I sort of agree, sometimes I love restaurants that many online reviewers don't, and vice-versa. When we moved to a more upscale neighborhood, the only restaurants getting good reviews were ones that cost $75+ for a couple, and now she doesn't want to go anywhere!
I know I know, sounds like a personal problem. Still, I see a lot of public perceptions changing based on information available online and in GPS units.
Calligraphy isn't a lost art; I know a Calligrapher. However, I don't know anybody with a sat-vav, so I don't see how it's "destroying local knowledge", at least yet. Also I don't know what "destroy local knowledge" means (maybe I should RTFA). People are using these things in their own town? I can see it if you're in a big city going to a new restaraunt, but Google Maps will do far better.
The reason men won't ask directions is because people give bad directions. The reason women do is because they're generally bad at reading maps.
Maps are sometimes inaccurate, but on the whole they'll get you where you'r going and get you there HOW you want to go there. You can determine the best route for you far better than any algorythm or stranger on the street. Do you want fast? Safe? Fuel efficient? Often these factors will give different routes. Often the shortest route isn't the best route - sometimes the shortest route will take longer and use more gasoline.
No, I'll stick to a map, whether online or paper.
Free Martian Whores!
My cheapie Mio (~$120) has a "walking" mode where it ignores one ways and allows cut-throughs. This would be useful for a bicyclist.
My fiance was driving to her brother's house for the millionth time. I was on the phone with her and the GPS told her to go north when we both knew damn well she needed to go south. But, since it had messed up she figured it was right and went North..... Not five seconds later, "This doesn't seem right." I have repeatedly heard her say that it was one of the best gifts ever, however she can't find my apartment about 50% of the time.
Tech is great when properly used. However, when it takes away from our ability to do things that we should be able to do on our own I will have to second guess it.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Im a pilot and had to quit flying for 4 years due to my medical. When I started flying again, I went up for a few hours of dual instruction just to get checked out.
I was mortified, Im 49 years old and learned to fly in a 1949 fleet canuk with minimal instumentation. One of the greatest skills my instructors taught me was to ALWAYS know where I am.
My young instructor almost laughed at my wax paper covered knee map when we sat down. I have pencil attached to it with 1" marking so I can get scale and distance easily.
We went up practiced a few things and then he said lets head for home. I started to turn to the heading I knew would take us back to the airport, my 25 year old instructor reached for the GPS. By the time he had finished, I was already on heading.
Now the technology is great, but he was really impressed that I knew the heading home, as he said he only had a general idea. I truly wonder what would happen to a young guy like that if the GPS ever failed? More importantly, I will bet he is not teaching the map reading skills that will allow new pilots to accurately, and quickly find their way home. (Just an FYI, I live in Northern Alberta, the land of few man made landmarks and a million little lakes that all look the same and change shape based on water level)
I do not think it means what you think it means. Seriously, GPS destroys local knowledge? REALLY? So what you're saying is that I won't know where my favorite bars and the local grocery is without a sat-nav? That I won't know the area within a 2 km diameter of my house like the back of my hand without it? To quote Denis Leary: www dot WHAT THE F*** dot com! Sat-Nav is a tool. End of story. I use Google Maps to plot a trek to someplace unfamiliar, but that's about it. Frankly, if somebody trusts their GPS unconditionally they're an idiot.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
I had a teacher years ago who when asked why we had to learn to do math manually instead of just using our calculators replied "what happens when your battery dies in the calculator? Do you put your life on hold?"
I agree with him. For all those folks who abdicate everything to devices and computers, they give up control of their lives. I just recently went on a road trip with a PHD and she relies on a satnav device. It was entertaining and reasonably functional, but it wasn't perfect. No we didn't drive over the cliff or any of the other fun stories that have been shared about when these devices go bad. We did however end up have a few interesting moments when the device said to do something and of course that wasn't possible. "Turn left here!" into the concrete wall?
Not that this will happen, but what if the US military degrades the accuracy of the system these devices depends on? It was done in Desert Storm. What if funding disappears. What if a solar flare takes out a handful of the satellites? What if a corporation or government agency wants to manipulate the data on the device in order to manipulate you? What if... Well for me nothing changes since I have chosen to retain the processing power for these and thousands of other functions between my ears. For my kids I hope nothing will change since I am a hard-ass and demand they use their brains for navigation or they don't drive my vehicles.
From a larger society standpoint there will always be people who chose to relinquish control and responsibility for many aspects of their lives, look at voting turnout rates. There will also be people who tenaciously hold onto control of their lives... and I suspect, get to live them more fully.
The land behind Walmart will soon become valuable.
;-).
After you buy at walmart, ask your netbook where you can buy some fresh berries, and it will show a 50% off coupon for the next 10 minutes along with reviews so you know the mechant is real and open for biz. Then you will discover hes located in a iff-ey neighborhood behind your Walmart, but its daytime so what the heck, you give it a go. If it went ok, you write a review which is published in 1 minute and others join you. Its a beautiful migration out of the big stores, a risky endeavour, but an exciting hunting expedition.
This will jumpstart mom and pops and give the feds new people to tax.
BTW, I use a Speederaser to avoid speeding. I also contribute to an open source speed limit database called Wikispeedia. I hope you will contribute there.
-jim
Blog
A sat nav is a crutch for people who can't or won't navigate. GPS on the other hand is quite useful. I use google maps on my phone, and it comes in very handy for the times when I get close to my destination, but can't quite find it. GPS shows you where you are in relation to your destination, not where to go. I also have TomTom on the phone, and it is crap for what I need. I usually need to use google maps as well as TomTom to get an accurate fix on the destination. So why use TomTom at all ?
I've driven across the states 3 times east to west and back, and most of the way around Australia, and the worst that ever happened was I had to back track 5 miles. I never had a sat nav or gps then. I have a box full of maps for each county in the UK. The best method is to plan the journey ahead of actually leaving. Work out the main route, motorway or whatever, then find where that road meets the large scale map of the town, and then locate your destination. All you have to do when you reach the town is have a quick look at the map to find the turning before yours and you are all set. You can easily do that while sat at the lights.
I drive a truck, so sat nav is right out anyway. Even the ones that claim to know about low bridges and restrictions don't get it right. A lot of firms have banned their use completely, due to idiots doing what they're told instead of making an informed choice. A sat nav doesn't differentiate between a normal size road and a tiny country lane. A map, and a visual inspection, does.
About the only saving grace for a sat nav is the ETA function. That's useful on occasions, but for navigation, forget it.
Just use phone numbers as an example. When I was a kid (ok I am showing my age now) we had to actually memorize phone numbers. I think that I have like 3 numbers that I can call off the top of my head, otherwise I need my cell phone. If my cell phone dies I am f-ed ( I have them archived somewhere though). The same will happen with the wider use of GPS'. The more we lock in way points and destinations we will lose the need to recall them on our own....at least until Dec. 2012 when the satellites fall from the sky but the world will erupt into a fire ball then anyway so it won't matter. (It is a joke people..haha laugh)
"...a civilian some of the time, a soldier part of the time and a patriot all of the time." -Brig. Gen. James Drain
"I'm sorry, could you repeat that? I'd partially deaf to bullshit. "
That may be true, but I bet you can smell a cock you'd like to suck a mile away.
Only for people who use it who would have gotten by just fine without it. For people like my wife, who lack the gene for direction sense, it's a godsend. For me, don't need it, won't use it - just another distraction, to compete with the plethora of things that already distract us in the car - cell phone, ipod, the Whopper that you are mostly wearing by the time you are done and the inability to find a decent block of music on the radio (hence the ipod).
Heh, the captcha is "quantity"
Am I the only one bothered by the fact that this guy assumes that (1) men don't like/use satnav, and (2) the reason they don't is that it sounds like a woman? We're not all a bunch of insecure sexists (ok, I'm insecure about plenty of things, but gender isn't one of them). Maybe Joe has a bad marriage, or had an overbearing mother... He can always change the voice to Dr. Doom like a friend of mine did if that'll make him feel better. "[deep]You approach a right turn.[/deep]." He finds it reassuring, like owning a particularly scary breed of dog...
snarky bastard, are we?
I went to a party on July 4 where the directions were clearly given, along with the admonition "Do not follow Google Maps or your GPS, or you will likely end up on a road that will destroy your car." Even the road they recommended was pretty hard on the average passenger car, and it was one of the few times living in Los Angeles that I felt I had a significant benefit from having a 4WD vehicle. It's not like this was way out in the sticks either, it was just north of the 118 freeway in Chatsworth.
On the other hand, having access to real-time traffic reports was exceptionally useful yesterday when the 405 was slammed due to the fire near the Getty Center. It still took well over twice the usual time to get home, but at least I had the option of choosing the least heinous route.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
...after the Mudd's wife in the original Star Trek series episode "I, Mudd."
I still prefer real, paper maps as well as our GPS for navigation away from cities. You really don't need the GPS away from big cities and the paper map tells you much more about what's nearby (and even not so nearby). Can't beat the GPS though for getting around or through big cities when you're on a road trip.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Just reportin' the news as I find it...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
When I was growing up not only did we have rotary phones and then touch tone phones, but there was no such thing as "speed dial", so you ended up memorizing all of the phone numbers that you needed to regularly use such as close friends and family. However, now that I have "Grandma" in the phone's memory, I never actually see her phone number.
No, I don't think that a satellite navigation aid will destroy local knowledge.
In my local area, I only occasionally use my non-built-in GPS-based navigator tool. When I do use it, it adds to my store of local knowledge. It has occasionally taught me a new connection between two places that I otherwise would not recognize. For those of us who are "good" at finding our way around an area in which we spend a lot of time, it enhances local knowledge, not erases it.
I suspect that for those who never would have been good at finding their way around an area even though they spend a lot of time there, it will be a boon (most of the time) because it will give them a capability they didn't have on their own. It may, to a certain extent, become a crutch that keeps them from achieving a slightly higher level of unaided navigational skill through practise. But I bet most will accept this tradeoff.
For areas in which I am not familiar, and which I will be in only briefly, it saves me from having to spend 15 minutes studying a map to get from point A to point B, and it saves me from well-meaning but ultimately inaccurate directions given by folks who have local knowledge but can't accurately recall *all* of the turns/landmarks that I will need as an outsider without local knowledge.
For me, ultimately, it is a navigational aid. I still have my hardcopy maps, and on long trips I take MapQuest/GoogleMaps-planned routes with me. The sat-nav is exceptionally useful in telling me *quickly* exactly where I am, how far it is to my destination, etc. Best of all, however, are the millions of POI in the sat-nav... gas stations and food being the most useful. All taken with a grain of salt, of course, because the data is partially out of date even before I get it loaded, and after a year or two has gone by not every POI listed is still going to be there.
There is no way I would ever have "local knowledge" of these routes and locations since I am but briefly "local" to them.
you insensitive clod!
but cliches aside, new technology always pushes old stuff aside. There will always be a contingent of fogeys young and old who maintain or revive the old arts. For instance, I am active in both calligraphy and fountain pen clubs, and a straight razor shaving club.
In Soviet Russia jokes are formulaic and decidedly non-humorous.
Who can find her way back to a place once I've driven there once? I admit it is a bit harder when the stores change from year to year... And this was even before I started drawing maps as part of my job. I still love giving directions along the lines of "Turn right where the X used to be", drives newcommers nuts.
GPS doesn't destroy local knowledge. If anything, it may destroy people's ability to navigate with a map and compass. Talking turn-by-turn GPS is dumbed down to the point that (assuming it works right) you'll arrive at your destination without ever having to read a map. However I don't think it's really an issue. So many people ALREADY don't have a clue with a map and compass that I doubt GPS will make matters worse. It's like trying to argue that audiobooks encourage illiteracy--might be a tiny amount of truth to it but really it's not an issue.
Bottom line: learn to read a damn map. Learn to dead reckon without landmarks. You will become a better person, and your instructions will be far FAR less annoying to your map-literate friends.
I can even read ancient Dwarven runes on maps to find a 5' x 6' door in the side of a mountain.
I could probably thatch a roof in a pinch, too.
Clearly we have passed another milstone on the way to the world envisioned so long ago on Usenet's alt.pave.the.earth. What is behind you does not matter, and all dissenters go to the hydro-pits!
I don't know about most men, but I appreciate that the satnav woman never gets irritated or upset no matter how many wrong turns I make.
Sent from my iPhone
Have you ever noticed how many non-technical writers use the word 'Cartesian' like an insult? Dipshits.
I'm a wee bit overloaded in situations where I don't know where I am and there's lots of sensory input -- so imagine what a place like Houston or Chicago or even London feels like to me.
Satnav took a good chunk of bad out of that. That alone was worth the price of admission.
That it has a few quirks, sure. But it's still better than the alternative.
Also, I find with a GPS unit I can get to know this town better, and I've been here for 10 years. The satnav has shown me things I didn' know were here. So if anything, it has increased my knowledge of my own local area. My experience kinda deflates the question posed.
As for the thing about men not liking a female voice telling them where to go and when to turn -- BS. I don't mind Suzie the TomTom computer, she does alright, albeit she absolutely mangles some street names... and I bet many more men don't mind.
The ones that do mind, I'm willing to bet have issues with being told what to do by *anyone*, not just a computer's voice. 40 years ago their ancestors probably refused to pull over to ask for directions, and thought maps were for lining the bottom of the glovebox. Just my theory, no evidence to support it, blabla.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
... I get car sick from the movements and shakings. :( So I have to enjoy the outside (not focus on anything), close my eyes (even sleep), etc.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
There are places where there are no (useful) signs, even where population densities are pretty high.
Just north of Houston, Texas is a very large "bedroom community" that grew like crazy and has become a full-fledged city of its own. It's called "The Woodlands."
There's a (probably apocryphal) story that one of the driving forces behind the early conceptualization of The Woodlands development said that the community standards for roads, landscaping, and signage should ensure that "if any uppity n****r from Houston comes up here, he'll be too lost to find a house to break into." That's probably not exactly what happened but the result is the same.
In an attempt to create a so-called "livable" environment, everything that anyone might think of as "visual blight" is hidden from view. Street signs are low and/or painted in woodland colors like brown and off-white, instead of high and painted in flourescent white on a contrasting background so that drivers can actually read them. Streets are typically hemmed in by a wide median where the thick pine trees remain uncut, making it impossible to see anything bordering any main route. Frequently, you find yourself driving down the street in front of a shopping center or the large shopping mall in The Woodlands, with large stores literally 50 yards on either side, but you have no clue there are any buildings anywhere near. Added to all this, nearly all the main streets take random curves, changing directions every few miles to create the furtherest possible thing from a simple grid. It's the worst possible "spaghetti bowl" freeway interchange you've ever seen or heard of, flattened out and spread over the surface of many square miles of land. Even if you could find someone to give you directions, you could never follow them on that crazy quilt of streets; it's like civil engineering on acid.
In short, if you don't live there, you cannot find anything. Period.
That is, unless you know how to read a map (very difficult while driving and in The Woodlands, you generally can't see any place to pull off to read the thing) or you have a satnav.
I thought satnavs were silly toys until I started trying to find my way around The Woodlands. There are places where satnav is, frankly, a necessity.
We just need more control over the output. Like you should be able to have loud house beats playing behind her so she has to scream the directions to you, and then maybe program her to add some completely unrelated phrases like "Let's go get another drink", or "Let's go out to the parking lot for a BJ".
Ah yes, NASA is less credible than SciAm. You're seriously deluded if you think that minor solar storms cause problems on the level that someone might want some backup instrumentation if their life depends on it. GPS is fail, and so are you.
I'd vote you up simply because of your use/invention of the backwards car analogy, I've never seen it before and I'm in awe!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
In 2009, I find it amazing at how many people simply cannot read a map. Not only can they not read a map, they can't even guesstimate their orientation based on landmarks and/or the position of the sun. As far as orientation goes, out here in Phoenix, Arizona, most people seem to get that due to the way the metro area is laid out and the fact that everyone gets "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west".
SATNAV makes us lazy... VERY lazy, like most modern gadgets, it takes away the need to know the basics about anything. It goes along with kids now being REQUIRED to use a calculator in jr high school math. They're not learning the basics, so when the gadget that does a function is taken away (in this case your Garmin or other GPS device), you're left helpless, unable to do anything because your gadget is no longer in arms reach. To make this more relevant to the Slashdot crowd, think of life without your current favorite IDE of the moment, be it Eclipse, NetBeans, or what have you. Imagine having to code in JUST a text editor, without all the fancy features you rely on. Imagine building a website without Dreamweaver or somethig like that. You now exist in a world that I come from. While I appreciate the ease in which things can be done, I can still hand-code HTML, and can still write code with nothing more than VI or even ed if it came to that. Same thing for GPS and though I don't own one, I can see where it could be handy but since I can read a map, it's simply not necessary.
Maybe it's a generational thing too. A lot of my generation (Gen X) has these basic skills intact even though a lot of us embrace technology; we can live with it or witout it. The current gen knows nothing of a world without this technology, so to NOT have it would be near catastrophic. At the same time, there are those who precede my genreation that dove in head first with technology, yet still enjoys life without that tech.
Fifty watts per channel, baby cakes.
Personally, I like maps:
1) They're fun to read.
2) They're reliable. I don't want to worry about batteries, cellphone signals and fragile gadgetry wile I'd driving the back roads of northern Nevada.
3) They help me connect with the local landscape. I actually have to *think about where I am*.
...for a GPS company to allow you to upload samples of your wife's voice to nag you about the directions... :)
Most of the time she takes you the wrong ways to the right place. You end up going through construction you knew you could have avoided. Long scenic routes when there were obvious shortcuts. And, sometimes they even get confused to the point where they have you driving in circles for no reason caught in some sort of feedback loop. And, it is not always aware of new roads. This all happens on a $1000 Garmin Nuvo.
I'm pretty sure nobody misses the fact that every man, woman and child use to know how to gut a fish or a deer, mild a cow and churn their own butter. Technology improves, the world changes, map reading is a skill the average person does not need when a GPS device costs a mere $50 via a sale or $99 everyday.
Those that need suc skills (ex: topography experts, employees at the DOT, survival hikers) will go learn it as needed, so no harm no foul. Anyways, is there really a difference between finding a highway on a paper map vs a LCD screen. Given the GPS takes you to it automatically, the act of driving doesn't turn you into a zombie, you take a trip one or two times and you'll have it memorized despite using a paper map or a GPS, it's called memory and you use it either way.
This article is mostly FUD, nothing to see here people.
I'm reminded of the old New Yorker cartoon ... a map of the US drawn from a New Yorker's perspective. There's Manhattan, the Hudson River, New Jersey, then nothing but blank space until L.A. and San Francisco. Everything else is ignored. "Flyover country" seems to be the common term.
SatNav means being able to go some place by car w/o having experienced what's in between. That may not always be a good thing and the question arises as to whether or not ignorance is indeed bliss.
This article is so true. Relatedly, I don't remember how to churn butter anymore, either.
What, hard S&M?
Heh, ironically it's because of commercial air traffic that civilians even have access to GPS (due to Korean Airlines Flight 007). But I'd have to wonder, wouldn't landing be made nearly impossible anyway? Since anything strong enough to knock out GPS would likely kill tower communications too. Though I suppose there's some sort of procedure to follow in such events. If you read this, let us know if there's anything of the sort that you know of, I'm curious now, lol.
With [online and GPS] Maps, . . . for example are making it possible to both know exactly where you are, but also where everything they are interested in advertising round about you is, how to get to it and making it possible to share it instantly with anyone else who might generate some revenue.
*shrug* If he hadn't tried that ad hominem at me in the second half of his post, I wouldn't have added an one against him to mine.
Now see, I grew up in a time when GPS was a military application only, and those with cell phones toted around a huge case for the battery. If I didn't know where I was, I wandered around until I figured it out. The sun or stars tell me north and south. I'm capable of using US highways and Interstates to determine where in the US I am. Mountains, buildings, and airports can be used as a general landmark in cities. Addresses hint at which side of the road I should find a business or house.
As for the GPS in cell phones, I won't be using one of them either. I don't have a cell phone and don't intend to get one. "What about emergencies" blah blah blah. Well, I'll tell you. Last summer I was traveling down the back road when my tire went out. Because it was my girlfriends truck and I wasn't familiar with it, there was no spare. I started walking towards what I suspected the most likely town to have a tire shop open on a Sunday. Not too long later, I hitched a ride to that town. The tire shop drove me back to the truck and all was well. If it had been a medical emergency, I'm not sure the medics would have gotten there any quicker than we could get to them, and I'd bet there was no cell service where I was at anyway.
So take your GPSes and iPhones and get off my lawn.
Existing Local knowledge isn't being destroyed in an active sense, but when using a GPS, you're less perceptive to the local knowledge.
Before GPS, you'd be looking for that funny billboard to turn left at. And because you were looking for the billboard, you noticed other landmarks too.
With GPS, it's easy to tune out your immediate surroundings, because you know you'll get that reminder a few hundred feet away.
And I agree 100% about map reading skills becoming obsolete. Backpackers that don't carry and know how to use topo maps as backups are ripe for disaster when their technology fails.
You stereotypers are all the same...
Well...in a way, yes it is. It's destroying the driver's knowledge of the surrounding area that they would have otherwise gained from either (i) getting lost, or (ii) stopping to talk to the locals and get directions. It's also destroying the passenger's knowledge as they won't have the varied experiences they had before since the driver (i) didn't get lost, and (ii) didn't stop to ask for directions.
Honestly, half the fun of driving is getting lost in a new area and learning your way around. A sat-nav system takes that away.
But it also degrades the social aspects of traveling - meeting new people, or finding the hole-in-the-wall establishments that you might have not otherwise gone to but it was the only place you could find and you really enjoyed it in the end, or a whole host of other things. Instead, people are just plugging in the "I need food" and selecting what they already know they will like, or "I need gas" and going to the closest place.
So, think of it this way - if we related it to the movie 'Cars', sat-nav does basically what the highway did to the town (in a sense); and there's a whole new adventure waiting just off the road if only you'd take a look.
Though, to be fair, it will likely open up some other possibilities too - meeting more people at the places you are going, and such. So it really is a double-edged sword.
But I still say - getting lost is half the fun.
And no - I don't use or own a GPS nav system.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
(as she turns her head to look at the offramp we're passing)... "Oh, I think that was your exit"!
Just for reference, there is no GPS approved for guiding any aircraft in to land. They are only used inroute far inbetween destinations.
For assisted landings there are several other methods used, all of which require local support at the airport and the use of things such as laser altimeters and such. When an assisted landing occurs, you could turn off the GPS signal any time during it and not notice the difference.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
GPS is not a map is not "local knowlege". Get the right tool for the job.
As a pilot, flying into a new airport is always a bit... unnerving. You have to review the maps in advance, ensure that you are at least reasonably sure of the types of airspace you'll be flying in, and without a GPS, there's always that haunting fear that you won't be able to find the !@# airport.
And let's not be kidding here - when flying into a large metropolitan area at night, finding the !@# local airport can be quite vexing. Imagine looking for a row of lights in a city comprised of... row upon row of street lights. It can be maddening. Sure, the big Int'l airports are usually rather easy to find, but I usually stay away from those because the fuel is usually more expensive, there's often ramp/landing fees, and who wants to try to focus on landing your mosquito-of-a-4 seat plane while a big, fast, 737-600 is behind you, while being told to "expedite clearing runway"... ?
Sorry, no.
But with a GPS, you're never unsure. You know exactly how many miles, in what direction, at what altitude, and can even make radio calls with this information heading into an airport you haven't even seen, yet. It makes all the difference, and as a pilot who purposefully trained without using the GPS, (and still glad I did) I can still say with confidence that I would much, much rather fly with a GPS, especially when flying into new territory!
Get the right tool for the job.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
The problem with SatNav is that all the devices I've used are only good for giving you directions when you know where you want to go already. They suck horribly at browsing around when you want to look at a map to decide where you want to go, so for now maps win for me.
I am a man. I have a TomTom with a female guide voice, and I have no qualms at following its instructions (excepting the occasional wild, obvious inaccuracy). I read instruction manuals where appropriate, and use my skills and knowledge when applicable.
In my opinion, the stereotypical male who refuses to ask for directions or read instructions hasn't actually existed for some time, if at all. Give it a rest already.
Sat Nav is causing bad driving. I've had several instances of following an erratically behaving car, including turning the wrong way up a one-way street, wobbling, erratic speed changes etc. Sooner or later you eventually find out the idiot in charge of the car is using a sat nav and spending so much time looking at it that they are not concentrating on actually looking at the road, where the are going or the road signage. I'm surprised there haven't been any sat-nav induced deaths by now (or maybe they are not being reported).
I imagine that many people are losing the ability to read a map because of Sat-Nav.
I can usually get anywhere I need to without a Sat-Nav, with the single exception of Milton Keynes (UK) which is laid out in a rather stupid grid style with roundabouts so that the entire place looks identical at each roundabout. Very easy to get lost in that environment.
GPS is one of things that for some reason I haven't taken a shine to. This annoys me because I see myself as embracing technology and progress in all walks of life, except this. Strange. I use a poor-man's GPS by printing out Google Maps with the route marked on and if it is multiple pages, taping them together.
Personally I enjoy researching maps and satellite imagery of destinations. I find my method of studying sattellite imagery *really* helps when looking for landmarks around a new location, when I get there in real life I can relate to my surroundings.
I was astounded when I used Google Street View for the first time to do a reccie on a location in Nottingham, UK. I 'walked' the last few miles of the virtual route and took in the surroundings (road signs and landmarks). When I arrived in real life It felt like I had been there already.
Are lighters destroying the skill of starting fire with sticks?
Are street lights destroying low light vision?
Did video kill the radio star?
Are pen/print and paper destroying rote memorization?
Technology is pretty much all about destroying the old way of doing things. Instead of going out in the woods to chop down trees to cook, i turn on my electric oven. i don't need to know how to calculate square roots if i have a calculator. As navigation tools, maps suck. My Garmin tells me where to turn so i don't have to squint at a map.
Technology off loads work we don't want to do, or can't do. Like move 60 MPH. i can't do that. So i bought a car. i don't want to carry bags of groceries, so my car has a trunk. My life is fairly dull so i watch movies of people with lives more troublesome than mine. My walls are blank and boring, so i put paintings and posters on them. i find gathering cotton and weaving boring and time consuming so i went to Target and bought a t-shirt.
This is what we do. We try to make our lives easier. Keywork: try. Can we stop asking obvious and meaningless question yet? Is there a technology for 'Getting Over It Already'?
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!