Pinpoint

How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

De: Greg Milner

Narrado por: Eric Michael Summerer

Over the last 50 years, humanity has developed an extraordinary shared utility: the global positioning system. Omnipresent, free, and available to all, GPS powers everything from your phone to the Internet to the Mars Rover. Greg Milner tells the sweeping story of GPS, from its conceptual origins as a bomb guidance system to its present ubiquity.

While GPS has revolutionized methods of timekeeping, navigation, and seismological prediction, it has also altered human behavior, introducing phenomena such as "death by GPS", in which drivers blindly follow their devices into deserts, lakes, and impassable mountains. Milner also shows the desperate vulnerabilities in the system we now use to predict the weather, track prisoners, and land airplanes.

Delving into the neuroscience of cognitive maps and spatial recognition, Milner's inventive and timely book is at once a grand history of the scientific urge toward precision and perfection and a revelatory philosophy of how humans understand themselves in the world.

©2016 Greg Milner (P)2016 Tantor

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Funny, scary, and tremendously readable." (Andrew Blum, author of Tubes)

great book on the unseen infrastructure of navigat

some reviewers found the non-linear chronology of this book frustrating. However, if you look at it from a perspective of the development of navigational concepts and technology, it flows very well. It is a well written and narrated book, but may be a bit technically heavy for the non-techies. I loved it though. Definitely a great addition to my library of modern infrastructure books.

Really found this interesting

My early IT career included support for a land surveyor who purchased one of the first generation surveying systems made by Trimble. The very little information i remember from working with him left me with terms relating to gps and a fascination with its use. This book really filled in the gaps in my understanding of the system and a renewed appreciation and amazement of what it is...

How did we live before gps

very engaging. I was completely unaware of how important gps is to our everyday life, beyond just Google maps

Interesting Historical and Technical Background

Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?

Not unless the friend had a lot of extra time to waste.

Were the concepts of this book easy to follow, or were they too technical?

I am a PhD physicist and found it easy to follow. I cannot judge for others.

Do you think Pinpoint needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?

NO, NO, a 1000 times NO!

Any additional comments?

This is a fun book to waste a few hours with. But, it is MUCH, MUCH too long for the value of the content. I thought it would be insightful and technical, and it was really just entertainment about the history of navigation and GPS, the fight of the lone individual against all the dumb "higher ups" in the DOD who didn't want GPS, etc. It is a prototypical American novel of an individual overcoming the bureaucracy and I have grown tired of such fantasies over the years.

And engrossing and thorough history of GPS

I had no idea of how deep and how long the development of the modern GPS system Took them came about. This is an outstanding history of navigation and GPS. Absolutely recommended.