Paddington Station
I took a trip in to Paddington today to collect my mother-in-law and her friend Tina. They had just arrived from the United States that very morning, although not by train. The vast majority of their journey was conducted under the auspices of North West and took place within a shapely aircraft produced by those wonderful people at Boeing. Specifically a Boeing 767 which, confusingly for many, is considerably smaller than a Boeing 747, a true jumbo jet if ever there was one.
My own travel was almost as easy as being flown. At least it was after I discovered that my mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson C903, includes an efficient route finding programme called, easily enough, Navigator. It was that discovery that brings me to my topic for today. Satellite Navigation systems or Sat Nav’s.
We’ve all heard the horror stories about roads which lead across farmers’ fields, through buildings, off cliffs and across impassable gorges but the more common problems are always the most unsavoury, not least because the common problems are the ones you are probably going to have to experience yourself. After all, no one worries too much about the person who drives off a cliff following a merry yet authoritative voice’s instructions. We can console ourselves with the sheer remoteness of the possibility that this might ever happen to us. It is horrible of course, yet most people have untold capacity for ignoring those horrid things which happen to others as long as their personal occurence remains most improbable.
When the probability of something untoward occuring personally increases, man’s ability to defer his concern reduces in directly inverse proportion. Terror becoming certain when the terrible thing itself become certain. So it is with satellite navigation. The notions that your battery might give out on you, that you may lose that precious signal or that you may pay too much attention to the screen and not enough the world in which you are driving are not only unpleasant but pretty likely too.
What surprises me really is that we render so little attention to the fact that a pocket portable device which can retain a charge for over a hundred and twenty hours can tell me where I am and show me where to go so that I might arrive at where I am going. Most of us are less concerned with the how than we are with what it sounds like when it rings or the colour of the case it comes in. For example, did you know that sat nav systems have to account for relativistic differences in time, produced by the distance and relative speed of the satellites, when calculating your location from the signals they receive? Thank you Einstein. Thank you Sony Ericsson.
Now, if only my C903 had come in glossy red.
Word of the Day: Insatiate
- Adjective1 – Insatiable: insatiate greed
2 – not satiable; incapable of being satisfied or appeased
