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.'"
> 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.