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AP Fake News
There’s no comment section for this article, so I’ll vent here. My comments are in bold.
Why do men have a reputation for never asking for directions, even when they’re lost? Is it because they’re macho, or just don’t like maps? Why do we enjoy the hunt over finding the prize?
Technology has made that debate moot with the invention of GPS — the Global Positioning System.
The history of GPS isn’t that old, but it is fascinating.
In 1973, the U.S. Department of Defense launched the first of a fleet of 31 satellites circling 12,550 miles above the globe.
No – GPS was initially formulated in 1973. The first satellite carrying a rubidium atomic clock, NTS-1 (for Navigation Technology Satellite), was launched in 1974. The first satellite carrying a cesium atomic clock, NTS-2, was launched in 1977. GPS Block 1 (test) satellites were launched from 1978-85. The first operational, Block 2, satellite was launched in 1989.
Each satellite has a built-in atomic clock, synchronized with the ground station and the other satellites. The satellites constantly transmit data about their time and location and GPS “receivers” (in your car and phone) pick up the signals from at least four satellites to compute your location.
The GPS system was initially only for military use. But after Korean Airlines flight 007 was shot down for straying into Russian airspace, President Ronald Reagan issued an order making the system available for civilians.
No, GPS was always intended for both civilian and military use. But only the military was willing to fund the early development. TI was selling the civilian 4100 receiver beginning in 1981, two years before KAL 007 was shot down.
The MSM wonders why we don’t trust them when they can’t get the simplest facts correct.
Published in Science & Technology
SINCGARS?
I’m pretty sure she and her composer buddy could have held the patent on frequency hopping, but chose not to take it to allow the military to utilize it more effectively. She may not have invented your radio, but she did the math that made it work.
There’s a book about Hedy Lamarr by a guy who seems to have considerable knowledge about frequency hopping and spread-spectrum. He says the first actual use of the concept was in a sonobuoy system: the developer of the system had been given a copy of the Lamarr patent, but assumed that the Defense Department had already acquired the rights to it. They hadn’t.
Ah. That part I didn’t know. Pretty impressive stuff, no matter what.
He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches. He who can neither do nor teach, goes into journalism.
I always try to quote The Reticulator, but sometimes I just draw a blank…
I often use the term “fake news” to refer to items in the front section of the newspaper that aren’t news. They may just consist of some “analysis” that doesn’t give us any new information (who, what, where, etc) and may or may not be intended to incite hatred against a certain current President of the United States. They take up space that could have been used to provide us more news about deep state coverups.
yes, Gary, you would know. We bow to your superior knowledge of such things.
But it makes up for its ease of use by blocking your view.
I think you’re right. GPS, with real-time directions, seems to be dumbing people down (not those reading now, of course). Maybe this is just idiosyncratic to my current whereabouts, but it seems that no one at all can write out a clear map in the time it takes to draw the lines and label the intersections.
I guess maps have gone the way of Morse code and sextants. (And the AM transistor radios that Mrs. F is always looking for. Oh no, now I’ve gone back into full Luddite mode again.)
Recently I was talking with some pilots about what would happen if GPS went out and they — with typical pilot sanguinity — assured me about various other position-calculating and course-plotting systems, and redundancies of each and so forth. But it seems to me material things are still the cheapest and easiest and most durable things to use.
One of my ahem competitors focused on GPS debacles in his marketing articles for his book. They’re funny as long as no one is harmed. But I’ve found in my commute to work that GPS has increased my geographic knowledge. It’s revealed routes and alternatives that I would never have found on my own. Yes, I don’t turn off my mind when using Waze. It underestimates the difficulty of making left turns on certain roads at certain times. This can be especially problematic when a building obscures traffic. I ignore its instructions and take an easier path.
I think I just read from a moderator on another thread that this is disrespectful to the original poster, and unacceptable behavior and cause for deleting the posts.
Jus’ sayin’. :)
I was told it was Phys Ed, but I guess nowadays it’s pretty much the same thing.
Oh, it certainly has dumbed me down. I used to pride myself on my skill in using inadequate maps to get around by bicycle. Even more difficult was using maps and compass in the late 60s to get around in the Boundary Waters by canoe. I was one of the last holdouts who didn’t use GPS on his bicycle, because I didn’t want just directions but maps that gave me the context. I still do, but now I can get that on my 8″ tablet. I usually have my historical maps overlaid on others, and saved as georeferenced PDFs.
When we’re driving in strange places, I sometimes wonder how we ever found our destination in the old days. I probably could re-learn how to get around by paper map, but it would be hard.
In the meantime I miss out on some adventures, and miss out on talking to people I meet when I ask for directions. On our first trip to Ireland in 1999, I brought my bicycle and got around with that while the rest of the family rented a car. At one point we were heading south, and the plan was for me to catch up with the others at a hostel on the south side of the Shannon River. And if I didn’t, I would be on my own to find a place to stay. But I rode off of my Ordnance Survey maps and got lost where the roads were steep and marginal, consisting of paved ruts. Finally I let a stiff east wind blow me to Spanish Point, and then knew where I was, because I had that much in my head. I followed road signs to Kilrush, where I was by now running out of time to get on the last ferry of the day. I asked a woman who was crossing the street in front of me where the ferry was. She pointed me in the right direction and emphasized that I still had a long ways to go. And then she wanted to tell me about places where she had visited family in America, and asked whether I knew this or that person, etc. While she was talking I noticed that my front tire was going flat, and also that it was starting to rain (as it often does in Ireland). So I extricated myself from that conversation as nicely as I could, and limped along to the ferry, stopping every little ways to pump more air into my tire. I did make it to the ferry on time, and changed the tube during the crossing. I had several offers of help from others on the ferry, but thanked them and explained that I probably had family waiting on the other end. And I did. They had come to the ferry to meet me, because they had switched from the hostel to a B&B and needed to let me know. (We didn’t have mobile phones then.) With a GPS it would have been a lot more boring. On the other hand, I don’t waste nearly so much time gathering the maps I need for an outing now.
Maybe it’s just me. GPS is great when navigating a tight route in a foreign port (so I’m told) and that blows my mind, especially considering sandy shoals and tides when I would otherwise be using a lead. I’m not saying it’s not great, it just should be icing on the cake, not the cake itself. Again, it’s just my own bias.
I used to draw maps all the time as a graphic designer. I like to think I’m pretty good at them: just the information you need to get where you want to go, without cluttering up the map or your mind.
That said, the, for example, Google Maps team is all based in Mountain View. And they don’t drive. They take the Google Bus to work. And they’re not writing the navigation directions for you or me, they’re writing it for the team in Austin that writes the self-driving car code.
Which is why I hate Google Maps Navigation. I don’t need to know how to get to the freeway. I don’t need to be told three times that I need to get ready to turn, to prepare to turn, and to turn. And then to continue on the street I’m on. Roads are one-dimensional, until you actually have a choice.
I’d like a navigation choice for people who actually know how to drive, is what I’m saying.
And don’t get me started on how it can’t tell me to take the second right, but instead tells me to turn in 1000 feet. I don’t have a laser rangefinder in my eyes, but I can count streets.
I’m waiting for computers to be able to understand and talk to me in conversational colloquial English, such as, “How do I get this pop-up to stop asking me the same question fifty times a day as it has for that past two years?” And it will say either, “Press the toggle button at he upper right of your screen, shaped like an avocado, and colored blue, and then scroll down to the words input modulations, click on it, and then click the small black icon that looks like it’s a Martian in gold Greek helmet…” or else will say, “Let me do it for you. Done.”
But by the time it gets here with my luck it will answer, “Watch your tone old man, or I’ll
adjusttwist your social credit score in a way you won’t like, take it from me. O-o-o-h yass!”Then Alexa is your best best, not anything from Google or Apple (or *spit* Facebook). Alexa skills are actually built around that basic concept: that you’re not primarily interfacing with a search engine, but an actual assistant that can do things for you. So it not only knows all the steps but is empowered to do them when you request it. It’s not perfect (I still have a long way to go to get all my “stuff” talking to it correctly, but a lot of that is that I buy cheap stuff or build it, so I have to build the “glue”) but it’s still pretty amazing.
It is all fake news. I have given up on the news.
That left turn things is a bugaboo. I do less and less of those these days, unless I have a light.
But can the Gell-Mann effect be applied to journalism itself? I mean, here we are all non-journalists talking about this subject – journalism. Are there deep secrets that we do not know or understand?
Just askin’.
Although I’m not a member of the anointed class, it strikes me that the purpose of journalism is to inform, and that concept is at odds with “deep secrets.” I think that there is, however, a prime directive–strive, by any means necessary, to make your story seem as significant as possible in the first couple of paragraphs, even if that means burying relevant details. Approved phrases to this end include uses of the words “seems,” “appears,” “some say,” “critics say,” and “a source close to.”
I think that’s right. There’s also a need to summarize and simplify to make the subject understandable to the broader audience. That carries some risk of distortion, and the more strongly the writer feels about a topic, the more likely and serious the distortion.
It might be a good thing for journalists, like judges, to recuse themselves from such topics. Of course this would not apply to opinion journalists or editorials. (I like a bright line between opinion content and news reporting. That’s the main reason I cancelled my local paper last year.)
To put it quite simply, I think it is because they believe they are entitled to their own facts and they are deeply offended that anyone should come along and question them. This morning’s story on that topic is this: “Writer Touted by CNN as Jounalist of the Year Forced to Resign for Fabricating Stories.” Not one story, but many. And some of them quite significant.
As a person endowed with the opposite of what used to be called “dead reckoning” skills, I am eternally grateful to all the persons who were involved in making GPS happen, and for its almost universal availability today. No more clumsy map-reading and directing Mr. She to Milford, New Hampshire, instead of Milford, Vermont one cold and sleety Thanksgiving night. (“You said Milford. I got you to Milford. What are you complaining about?”)
My wife has a GPS that she drags along on trips, but I still refuse to use it. Prior to setting out for a destination, I’ll read over paper maps, plant them in my head, and off we go! Sometimes I’ll call up maps on the internet and print them out to take with me. GPS for me is a bit of a last resort. I trust my own sense of direction first.
I have remarked on a number of occasions when I’m driving through strange places (and, as I’ve mentioned before, I’m horribly directionally dysfunctional, so some of these “strange places” are within a few miles of my home, and I drive through them almost every day), that I think GPS technology while driving has probably saved countless lives, at least for those who are not looking at their device, and who are just listening to the commands and following the directions.
Used to be, when solitary in the car, that I’d either have to keep stopping to read the map, or glancing down at it while driving along. “Mapping” while driving, rather than “texting,” but perhaps no less dangerous. Now, I just set the GPS, and it tells me what to do. I can pay more attention to the road, I can see more of the scenery, and it’s a lot less stressful.
I was a member of that anointed class once upon a time. Yes, they are often that stupid, especially the ones on local television, and no, there are no deep secrets.
I was driving to Dallas two years ago and Waze told me to go way out of the direct route. There was a bad crash which shut down the main highway for a long time. It may have saved me hours; that’s where the program pays for itself.
Well, . . . Dallas highways are so insane you should always choose to avoid them. ; )