Friday Link Salad with Commentary

[chris_gerrib]

Like the label on the tin says...

A) Coming home from work yesterday, the road leading to my house was blocked. Three ambulances, two cop cars and two fire trucks were called out for an acid spill at the local wading pool.

B) Gollancz, the SF and Fantasy imprint of the Orion Publishing Group, announces the launch of the world's largest digital SFF library, the SF Gateway, which will make thousands of out-of-print titles by classic genre authors available as eBooks. Yeah!

C) A fascinating report on the raid that got Osama Bin Laden.

D) A reminder that paper maps will never be completely obsolete. Since I will be traveling in these same areas, I've already gotten my paper maps.

E) Found via dinking about, a reminder that there were no libertarians in the 17th century Scottish highlands. Libertarianism, as a philosophy, is a symptom of effective government.

Comments

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Thank you much for item E, I enjoyed that immensely.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Glad to be of service.

[jetfx.livejournal.com]

Other than the point that digital services can fail, I found his other arguments to be kind of weak. If anything, paper maps would be worse at detecting road closures, and online mapping services can't trace GPS units to see if a pass is closed, because GPS is receiver only.

One thing I've noticed is that paper maps force people to make judgement calls and thing about their routes compared to GPS navigation. I've heard a number of stories about people blaming their GPS for leading them astray, but paper maps suffer from the same data errors too. The only difference is you can't passively receive instruction from a paper map.

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

I've occasionally been in a GPS-equipped car, and I find that, rather than the GPS passively providing information, it's more like the "Voice of God."

What also happens is that, with a paper map, the driver has a general idea of where things are in relationship to each other. Just relying on GPS means that the driver has no clue where they are if (when) the device goes wrong.

[jetfx.livejournal.com]

Exactly. With paper maps, you've got to interpret them yourself. However most people aren't great at reading maps, and prefer to let the machine tell them what to do.

To be clear though, I meant the driver was the passive one.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

I actually find it quite hard to drive without GPS now, I've had built in GPS in all the cars I've owned since I moved to the US and I bought myself a portable unit for business travel too.

And yes, to a certain extent I don't know where I am, but compared to driving around holding pieces of paper, I know which I prefer ;)

[chris-gerrib.livejournal.com]

Different strokes for diferent folks, but not knowing where I am bugs the crap out of me.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, for a lot of my travel - it involves finding ways around fairly identical tech parks so having something that can do that thinking for me helps.

Also when we moved here, it helped to have one less thing to think about while learning a) a new city and b) a new side of the road to drive on 24/7