The new management seemed to have very little interest in anything to do with MapQuest, particularly as it related to product road map and strategy. And with the layoffs and hiring freeze there weren’t enough resources to do anything substantial even if there was a good plan.

I tried to make matters clear and pleaded with the powers that be: MapQuest was a site built on map data but it didn’t make maps. In fact 98% of the map data was licensed from third parties. I knew MapQuest had to build a moat around the product otherwise someone else could swoop in, license the same data and build a better product.

And you won’t win any prizes for guessing who did.

Previously: Remember MapQuest?

Right now, Google Maps insists on turn-by turn, with three warnings for each turn. It’s dumb and annoying and interrupts whatever music or show I’m listening to.

What I want is to get in the car and say “Short directions to New Brighton Park” and have it say “Take Main to 12th to Nanaimo to 1st to Renfrew to McGill.” Then when I’m driving, I’d get one vocal warning a block out from each turn, like “Next left on Nanaimo” or some such.

Previously: ‘Map-Splaining’.

The maps know that one road is five lanes wide and the other six; both have medians. They understand that right turns between the streets can be accomplished via dedicated merge lanes that skip the red light. They appreciate that two lanes allow left turns between each of these streets, facilitated by a left-turn-arrow traffic signal. Having all this information helps the maps give their step-by-step instructions: Take the first turn lane from northbound 28th Street, then a quick right into the parking lot for Flatiron Coffee. That level of precision may be convenient for some drivers, but it comes at the price of breaking down the built environment into lots of extra segments and transitions that may trigger the display of useless routing information. Perhaps the software should just be telling you to “go past the light and make a left.”

Google Maps announced updates focusing on EVs (EV charger search, nearby chargers in the in-car map, suggested charging stops, forecast energy consumption) and sustainability (lower-carbon travel options rolling out in 15 cities, estimated flight emissions). Also, Street View came to Kazakhstan last month. Meanwhile, Ben Schoon at 9to5Google says that while Google Maps on Android Auto is “a pretty solid experience,” it’s a different matter when you use Google Maps via Apple CarPlay, an experience he calls “a bit of a dumpster fire.”

Google-owned Waze announced updates last month that include roundabout assistance and notifications for the presence of emergency vehicles, speed limit changes, and things like sharp curves, speed bumps and toll booths [TechCrunch].

Previously: Guidestar and GM’s Early Attempts at In-Car Navigation.

In a 15-minute video posted to YouTube, Adam Savage ruminates on the advantages of paper maps, the Los Angeles institution that was the Thomas Guide, and navigating by paper map in general (with digressions on the Knowledge and trap streets and such).

Previously: The Rise and Fall of the Thomas Guide.

“The physical map has the same appeal, probably, as the vinyl record. It’s tactile, it’s there, it’s present—it’s not ephemeral.”

A nice piece from CBC News on the so-called lost art of map reading and paper maps, touching many of the usual points, featuring (among others) the co-owners of my local map store, Ottawa’s World of Maps.

You must see this. Ken Shirriff got his hands on an example of a navigational device from a Soyuz spacecraft and opened it up to see how it worked. Known as a Globus (its proper name is Индикатор Навигационный Космический—roughly, space navigation indicator), it’s an incredibly complicated marvel of gears and cams, an electromechanical analog computer that showed the capsule’s position on a physical globe. The position was predicted—the Globus received no navigational data. Ken’s got lots of photos of the innards at his website. See also his Mastodon thread. He has hopes of getting the thing operational, so keep an eye out for that.

(Based on the presence of NASA tracking sites on the globe, Ken thinks this particular unit was meant for the Apollo-Soyuz program, but I kind of wonder whether that was a function of the 1967 Rescue Agreement between the U.S. and the USSR instead.)

The Mercury capsule had something similar for a while: the Earth Path Indicator. One example sold for nearly $100,000 in 2019.

Apple Maps now provides parking information for 8,000 locations in the U.S. and Canada.

Apple also launched Business Connect, a tool for businesses to upload their information to be used by Apple’s various apps: not just Maps, though that’s obvious (and something Google has been offering for quite some time: see James’s post for context). More at Ars Technica.

Google Maps

The first cars to get Google’s enhanced maps (previously), which include things like traffic lights and stop signs, will be the Volvo EX90 and Polestar 3, via Android Auto.

Meanwhile, turn-by-turn directions on Google’s Wear OS smart watch platform will no longer require a connected smartphone.

Previously: Starlink as GPS Alternative; ESA Considering Low-Orbit Satellites to Improve Galileo System.

This is a single study, and a small sample, so I’m hesitant to draw firm conclusions. And in any case it’s not necessarily a surprising conclusion: the more you rely on a tool, the less able you are to do without it. Well, yes. When we talk about how GPS is destroying our ability to navigate or read a map, there is a presumption that this is an objectively bad thing. Except that I’ve encountered too many people who couldn’t navigate their way out of a bag before GPS. A lot of people who let their GPS receivers get them lost were, I think, pretty good at getting themselves lost without it.

The question isn’t whether GPS use atrophies an individual’s ability to navigate: that’s like worrying that a calculator reduces your ability to do sums in your head, or that a word processor excuses you from knowing how to spell. Of course it does. Those of us who are good at navigation (or sums, or spelling) and think an important skill is being lost will clutch our pearls, but making something easier also makes it more accessible. The question is whether people are, on balance, at a societal level, getting lost less often. That’s not a question neuroscience can solve, nor something you can test with an fMRI. I’m not sure how to measure it, or even if it can be measured. But I’d love to find out.

Previously: Wayfinding: A New Book about the Neuroscience of Navigation; Satnavs and ‘Switching Off’ the Brain; McKinlay: ‘Use or Lose Our Navigation Skills’; ‘Could Society’s Embrace of GPS Be Eroding Our Cognitive Maps?’; How GPS Eats Our Brains.

The clock system was an attempt to solve a specific problem: well into the 20th century, farmhouses in the United States lacked proper addresses. Without a street number or even a street name, navigating to a given farmhouse could be a real challenge. Plato’s solution, invented while he was trying his hand at farming in Colorado, was to assign each farmhouse an identifier based on its clock position, with the clock centred on the nearest town. The clock system saw its greatest uptake in upstate New York, where Plato relocated shortly thereafter and started his business selling the maps and directories based on his system. In a marketing turn worthy of Phyllis Pearsall, Plato cultivated his previous status as a farmer, citing as his inspiration a sale lost because his buyer couldn’t find his house.

It’s tempting to think of the clock system as the what3words of a century ago: a proprietary navigational aid promising to make wayfinding simpler. And apart from the considerable curiousity value of an obsolete but unusual (and therefore interesting) system, the story of Plato and his system is pure American hustle: the rise and fall of a business from patent to product to collapse in the face of the Great Depression, to an unsuccessful attempt at restarting in Ohio. The indefatigable Plato even persisted with his system while working for the federal government in various capacities during the 1930s. Meanwhile, after Plato’s patent had expired, a modified compass system—using compass points rather than hours on a clock face—persisted in upstate New York until 1940.

Apart from his system, and the maps and ephemera it produced, Plato left few traces in the historical record, which makes him a challenging subject for a biographer. Monmonier gamely reconstructs what he can from patent filings, tax rolls, employment records and news coverage. Lacking more verbose evidence, Monmonier even resorts to producing maps of Plato’s life from those records, which seems appropriate given the subject matter and even helps illuminate several points. The end result is necessarily fragmentary and inductive, but a portrait of Plato nevertheless manages to emerge: a restless man who after dabbling in many things, changing gears and relocating many times, hit upon an idea that was kind of neat and tried to ride it for all it was worth.

I received an electronic review copy of this book from the publisher.

Clock and Compass: How John Byron Plato Gave Farmers a Real Address
by Mark Monmonier
University of Iowa Press, 12 Apr 2022
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TomTom’s routing and location technology recognizes that the shorter route to Koli National Park is on winding unpaved roads, made up of sand and gravel, and it takes that into consideration when computing a route for a driver. It places significant importance on this information. […] Even though the unpaved route is shorter, it’s still not considered “better” than the longer paved route when all things are considered. If map data didn’t include this contextual data about the specific road, the unpaved road would most likely be the default route suggestion.

Previously: The Lost Art of Finding Our Way.

In Monday’s xckd, Randall Munroe points out that when it comes to coordinate precision, there is such a thing as too many decimal places.

This is not the first book on the subject: Greg Milner published Pinpoint in 2016 (previously). See also: Satnavs and ‘Switching Off’ the Brain.

She also distinguishes between surface and deep knowledge, and associates digital maps with the former and paper maps with the latter, but there’s a risk of getting cause and effect spun around. “A 2013 study showed that, as a person’s geographic skill increases, so does their preference for paper maps,” she writes; but it doesn’t follow that paper maps lead to geographic skill. Those with poor map-reading abilities may do the bare minimum required to navigate, and nowadays that means using your phone. [WMS]

By early 2018, the World Magnetic Model was in trouble. Researchers from NOAA and the British Geological Survey in Edinburgh had been doing their annual check of how well the model was capturing all the variations in Earth’s magnetic field. They realized that it was so inaccurate that it was about to exceed the acceptable limit for navigational errors.

As a result, the WMM is being updated a year early—this month, in fact, though the U.S. government shutdown is pushing back the release of the updated model.

The argument for paper maps is getting ever more insistent, even shrill, but it seems to me to be mainly coming from the tech side of things. My impression is that the people who rely too much on mobile maps haven’t lost the ability to read maps; they never had it in the first place.

Previously: Popular Mechanics Proselytizes Paper Maps.

In a piece I wrote for Tor.com, “The Dúnedain and the Deep Blue Sea: On Númenórean Navigation,” I try to puzzle out how they could have navigated the oceans of a flat world. I come up with a solution or two, within the limitations of my math abilities. (I’m sure readers who have more math than I do will be able to come up with something better.) It assumes a certain familiarity with Tolkien’s works, and it draws rather heavily on John Edward Huth’s Lost Art of Finding Our Way, which I reviewed here, not at all coincidentally, last month.

For my part, I can’t get lost. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible for me to get lost: that has, in fact, been known to happen. I mean that I can’t allow myself not to know where I am under any circumstances. I’ve got a pretty good cognitive map, but if I’m in a strange city without a map of said city, I’m deeply uncomfortable if not upset; provide me with a map to get my bearings with and I’m immediately at ease. In my case, having an iPhone—with multiple map applications—means I don’t have to get to the nearest map outlet as soon as freaking possible. It’s not, in other words, an either-or situation.

John Edward Huth is firmly in the former camp. He’s a particle physicist at Harvard who’s worked on the Higgs boson who for years has been running an interesting side gig: he teaches a course on what he has called “primitive navigation”—the ancient means of navigating the world that existed prior to the advent of some later technology. The course, and the accompanying book, The Lost Art of Finding Our Way (Belknap/Harvard University Press, 2013), are an exercise in recapturing those methods.

Said methods include some you’d expect: celestial navigation, dead reckoning, the use of a compass; but also some that are much more subtle, that rely on observation and situational awareness—on mindfulness. Understanding how winds, waves and currents work in a given location, or the migration patterns of animals, enables you to use them as natural compasses, or to make corrections in your course—that is, if you pay close attention to them. These are ancient tricks of the trade, not all of which are reliable (moss on the north side of trees) or whose reliability needs to be qualified.

What Huth posits, then, is the need to be connected to and aware of your surroundings—the antithesis, some might say, of staring at a smartphone screen all day. But that connectedness is also stubbornly local: I might know the patterns of winds and birds where I live, but put me on another continent and I’ll flounder. Not everything in this book scales.

The book is a resolutely practical guide, with hundreds of figures, but its most valuable lesson, I suspect, is to demonstrate just how good human beings can become, unaided, at navigating their surroundings—at getting unlost—with practice and skill. It’s something we haven’t needed to do for a while. It’s useful to be able to do it, even if it doesn’t come up very much.

More on Huth and his work from The New Yorker and Harvard Magazine. Also see this YouTube video:

Amazon

Developmental topographic disorientation is a neurological disorder that prevents people from making cognitive maps. People suffering from DTD literally get lost in familiar surroundings: their home, to and from work. As someone who literally cannot get lost, I have a hard time imagining what that could possibly be like. Enter The Woman Who Gets Lost Every Day, a short film about Sharon Roseman, a woman with DTD who shares how she experiences and navigates the world in her own words. [The Atlantic]

There have been a number of news articles on DTD since the Walrus article I told you about in 2011. See, for example, this 2015 article in The Atlantic.

Part of Oxford University Press’s Very Short Introductions series, Navigation discusses the tools and methods used by mariners and navigators to find their way across the seas, beginning with various cultures’ ancient navigational techniques, moving through tools like cross-staffs, backstaffs and octants, dealing with the matter of longitude (on which Bennett has some opinions regarding the popular narrative), before wrapping up, too briefly, with modern techologies like radio beacons, inertial navigation and GPS.

There are some illustrations that are a great help in understanding concepts and tools whose use is not immediately obvious, but, as the subtitle suggests, this is not a book that goes into much depth. At only 144 pages—20 percent of which is taken up by front matter, glossary and index—it can only give the barest of introductions to the subject. That can be maddening for the reader, particularly when its coverage is so uneven: there’s a fair bit on the tools and techniques used during the age of sail, but only a paragraph on LORAN and Loran-C, for example. Another frustration is Bennett’s extremely discursive style, as though he were giving a posh invited lecture; I kept feeling that more could have been included had his prose been tightened up.

All the same, there’s value in a book that styles itself, modestly, as an introduction. An introduction is where you begin. It’s the first step, not the finish line. It sets out the parameters of the field and gives you just enough to know what’s out there. For someone like me, it tells me where the gaps are in my knowledge. To paraphrase someone, it lets you know what you do not know. It tells you where to go next: the most useful part of the book may well be its “Further Reading” section; you just need the preceding 116 pages of text to know how to use it.

And for all my concerns about brevity and prose, it’s a good deal more accessible, and easier to read, than the equivalent Wikipedia page—and it went through an editorial process, too. And while it’s not free, it’s very modestly priced. So I have no regrets about buying it.

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