BryanUT wrote:
> On Jun 27, 4:58 pm, Fred True <fredt... RemoveThis @gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Jun 26, 4:35 pm, James Egan <jegan... RemoveThis @comcast.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> No, paper maps are NOT de rigeur any longer. Navigators are more up
>> to date and a reliable enouigh that they can be depended upon. Maps
>> require that you know where you are in order to use them and I for
>> one do not intend to arry a sextant and a set of charts to shoot the
>> sun.
>
> You've got to be kidding me. Are you implying you sometimes don't
> know where you are to start with?
For modern land navigation, where one can travel a thousand miles or
more in a single day, a sextant is rarely useful--the precision is low
and you can usually only take your position once a day--it's difficult
to do a star sight with an artificial horizon, so you have to rely on
the noon position. In the days when one travelled on foot or on the
feet of an animal it was more helpful, but generally pilotage and local
knowledge work better on land.
Still, there are times when one does _not_ know where one is except in
the most approximate way--generally they are survival situations though
that it is difficult to imagine one getting oneself into on a
motorcycle.
There are other problems though--for example it's easy to write yourself
a set of directions that say "turn left on Elm Street". So you're riding
along at 3 AM in a heavy rain and you come to an intersection. No sign
on the cross street. So is this Elm street? Dunno. Ride a little
longer, come to another street, again no sign. Three or four of those
and then ten miles with no cross street, so which one was it? You ride
around aimlessly for a while looking for a place with enough shelter
that you can look at your map without it getting instantly soaked
through and finally give up and get it out in the rain and look at it
with your flashlight. Well, there's Elm street, but it doesn't show the
others, or if it does it's so soaked with rainwater that you can't tell.
So you backtrack, and ride down the first one until you find a sign.
Nope, not Elm Street. So now you go to the second one, still not Elm
street, so go to the third one, finally you're on Elm Street. Meanwhile
you've spent half the night looking for Elm street, where if you had a
GPS then you would have hit it right the first time.
And _now_ you've got to find Myrtle Avenue. And it's starting to snow .
.. .
For ocean navigation, one did indeed sometimes not know where one
was--imagine being blown about by a storm for several days while not
having had an opportunity to check one's position for a week or more due
to overcast skies, the whole time going 200 miles a day in one direction
or another, with the water under you going in another direction. In the
ocean there are no convenient landmarks or helpful bystanders.
As for "navigators" being reliable, perhaps they are, but the handhelds
still won't run a full day on a set of batteries and they are all highly
pilferable and attractive to thieves. Further, on a motorcycle they
_can_ fall off and by Murphy's law when it does fall off there will be
an 18-wheeler behind you that manages to visit your fallen GPS with as
many of those 18 wheels as will bear.
If getting lost can endanger your life or make you totally miserable in
some other way, don't rely on only a single means of finding your
position and route.
A modern GPS with built in maps for most of a continent in one pocket
sized package is a damnable convenient and useful piece of equipment,
but it _can_ let you down. You can also get your paper map too close to
the campfire--they can let you down too. If you've got both odds that
both are going to fail at the same time are pretty small.
--
>
> Sheesh. People are getting dumber. There is no doubt about it. I'll
> bet you can't calculate a tip without a calculater.
--
--
--John
to email, dial "usenet" and validate
(was jclarke at eye bee em dot net)
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