Available:*
Library | Item Barcode | Shelf Number | Status |
---|---|---|---|
Searching... Niagara Falls Public Library | 34305010269408 | 910.285 MILN | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Over the last fifty years, humanity has developed an extraordinary shared utility: the Global Positioning System. Even as it guides us across town, GPS helps land planes, route mobile calls, anticipate earthquakes, predict weather, locate oil deposits, measure neutrinos, grow our food, and regulate global finance. It is as ubiquitous and essential as another Cold War technology, the Internet. In Pinpoint, Greg Milner takes us on a fascinating tour of a hidden system that touches almost every aspect of our modern life.
While GPS has brought us breathtakingly accurate information about our planetary environment and physical space, it has also created new forms of human behavior. We have let it saturate the world's systems so completely and so quickly that we are just beginning to confront the possible consequences. A single GPS timing flaw, whether accidental or malicious, could bring down the electrical grid, hijack drones, or halt the world financial system. The use, and potential misuse, of GPS data by government and corporations raise disturbing questions about ethics and privacy. GPS may be altering the nature of human cognition--possibly even rearranging the gray matter in our heads.
Pinpoint tells the sweeping story of GPS from its conceptual origins as a bomb guidance system to its presence in almost everything we do. Milner examines the different ways humans have understood physical space, delves into the neuroscience of cognitive maps, and questions GPS's double-edged effect on our culture. A fascinating and original story of the scientific urge toward precision, Pinpoint offers startling insight into how humans understand their place in the world.
Author Notes
Greg Milner is the author of Pinpoint and Perfecting Sound Forever, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. His writing has appeared in Wired, New York, Slate, Village Voice, Salon, Spin, and Rolling Stone. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.
Reviews (3)
Kirkus Review
What universal digital service is essential to the world's infrastructure and our daily lives? Yes, the Internet, but more fundamentally, the Global Positioning System. Obsessed with the Internet, which depends on GPS, the media has paid little attention, but journalist Milner (Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music, 2009, etc.) remedies this with an admirable popular science introduction, one of the first about GPS. Navigation is an ancient obsession, but Milner dates pinpoint navigation to the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik in 1957. Although considered a national humiliation for the United States, it galvanized American scientists, who quickly discovered that one could use the satellite's radio signals to precisely find one's location. This concept attracted significant attention from the Navy, which needed an accurate fix for its missile submarines. By 1960, satellites of its pioneering Transit network were operating, although they were expensive, slow, and imprecise. During the 1970s, the U.S. military created a top-notch, multibillion-dollar satellite system entirely reserved for its own use. In 1983, after a Korean Airlines flight strayed into Soviet airspace and was shot down, killing 269 people, President Ronald Reagan made GPS available for civilian use. During the 1990s, the weight and cost of receivers limited their use to shippers and airlines, but after 2000, both had shrunk enough to be a routine feature on cellphones. Thanks to Milner's narrative, readers will learn the technical details without too much effort and marvel at its value, which extends to astronomy, meteorology, seismology, criminology, and agriculture. The author also offers the obligatory warnings about its vulnerability to sabotage, less-than-perfect turn-by-turn advice, and ruination of our sense of direction from allowing technology to navigate for us. Milner has done his homework, assuring readers will be satisfied, educated, and occasionally amazed. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Death by GPS has become the label park rangers apply to the sad consequences of tourists' mindless reliance on the global positioning system (GPS) now in many vehicles' and smartphones' navigation systems. But Milner here focuses chiefly on life with GPS. From helping bomber pilots to deliver their lethal payloads with uncanny precision, to steering taxi drivers to unfamiliar locations, to assisting farmers in the most productive planting of their crops, to endowing geologists with eyes for new oil deposits, to helping corrections officers track parolees, GPS carries ever-increasing advantages for ever-growing numbers of users. But the dazzling benefits of GPS do not blind Milner to its attendant perils loss of personal privacy to intrusive government agencies, misuse of locational data by terrorists, disruptions by hackers, breakdowns due to electronic malfunction. More subtle but pervasive is the risk that those who routinely turn to GPS will lose the mental ability to navigate. Dramatically illustrating just what the GPS might be taking from the human race, Milner recounts the feats of early Polynesian seafarers who traversed wide Pacific expanses guided by nothing but their dauntless minds. The gap between ancient courage and modern expertise yawns wide in this fascinating probe into an increasingly ubiquitous technology.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2016 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
HOW EVERYTHING BECAME WAR AND THE MILITARY BECAME EVERYTHING: Tales From the Pentagon, by Rosa Brooks. (Simon & Schuster, $17.) As a former high-ranking Pentagon official, Brooks was, as she put it, "part of a vast bureaucratic death-dealing enterprise." In her book - equal parts memoir and history - she charts the United States' shift in military strategy, accompanied by an uncomfortable blurring of boundaries between peace and war. THE INSEPARABLES, by Stuart Nadler. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $15.99.) In this wise and witty novel, three generations of women suffer indignities in a time of increased scrutiny: Henrietta, widowed and desperate to improve her finances, has approved the reissue of the book she wrote decades earlier (and has regretted ever since); her daughter, Oona; and her granddaughter, Lydia, reeling and humiliated after a nude photo of her circulated among her classmates. JACKSON, 1964: And Other Dispatches From Fifty Years of Reporting on Race in America, by Calvin Trillin. (Random House, $18.) As a reporter, first for Time and now The New Yorker, Trillin has covered over five decades of the civil rights movement and its aftermath. His book comprises essays and reporting from across the country, standing as a reminder of the progress that has, and has not, been made. THE SUNLIGHT PILGRIMS, by Jenni Fagan. (Hogarth, $16.) At the outset of Fagan's novel, it's 2020 and the residents of a fictional Scottish town are bracing for an unthinkably cold winter. The story centers on three characters: Dylan, a hapless Londoner; a woman, Constance; and her transgendered child, Stella, whose transition depends on getting the hormones she needs. Stella's inner turmoil matches the impending storm; our reviewer, Marisa Silver, praised how "ordinary, even banal, life dramas unfold while the existential noose is tightening." PINPOINT: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds, by Greg Milner. (Norton, $16.95.) Milner examines how the Global Positioning System, better known as GPS, soared from its military origins to become a staple of everyday life, with a focus on its success as an engineering and technical marvel. Along with history, Milner looks at practical considerations that spring from knowing our exact location. HEROES OF THE FRONTIER, by Dave Eggers. (Vintage, $16.95.) Fleeing suburban life, a woman brings along her two children on a road trip to Alaska. The children, Ana and Paul, soulful and intelligent, form the novel's emotional core; our reviewer, Barbara Kingsolver, called them "a dynamic duo who command us to pay attention to the objects we find in our path, and stop pretending we already know the drill."