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.

[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.