Lost art, but not dead yet.

Many years ago my wife gave me a sweatshirt that I still have. It is very beaten-up these days, but I won't part with it yet. I think it has an important message about the human condition, especially the agnate half of the human condition.  

Why don't men want to ask for directions? 

I realize that's an exceptionally broad sweep, but within every truism is some truth. My dad did not like to ask directions and neither do I, nor do most guys I know. It's not like we sat down at the lodge meeting and voted on it -- "All right, boys, remember, from this point in, no asking directions." I think it's just instinctive to the male side of the species. When you're a stranger and you're lost, you are in a position of weakness, and asking directions is akin to admitting weakness to someone you don't know in a place with which you're unfamiliar. When we look at it that way, it's no surprise that the situation sets off alarm bells deep in our psyche. 

In fact, it's not surprising at all that men don't want to ask for directions. It's much more surprising that women do—even when they don't have a guy with them that they can force to ask for directions. I think prudence enters the conversation then, saying that getting more lost is even worse than admitting being lost. This is another sweeping generalization, but I think by and large women are stronger in the virtue of prudence than men are. 

The reason I bring this all up is that a friend of mine is taking his son to West Point today. Despite all the wokeness that has descended on BSA (please, don't call it Boy Scouts anymore), and the fact that they're allowing icky girls in because all Girl Scouts do is sell cookies, some boys are still working on their achievements. Today these scouts are going to work with actual soldiers on their orienteering merit badge. 

When my pal mentioned this, I thought he meant cartography, but no. In fact, much to my surprise, the BSA has never had a merit badge for cartography or mapmaking, according to Steve Henning's research-filled page on the topic. There I was, thinking that Orienteering is just another wussy, watered-down skill that replaced the more demanding cartography, as General Science replaced Zoology, but no. What it did replace was Pathfinding, which had been discontinued anyway in 1952; Orienteering came on the scene in 1973 and has remained a badge ever since. Furthermore, the Orienteering badge has a 10-page workbook with all the stuff you have to do; it made me tired just looking at it. No wonder I never got past the blue uniform.

So I've decided Orienteering really is useful. In the age of GPS we usually don't need it; nor do we need to ask directions as much as we used to. However, if it helps these boys grow into men who don't have to ever ask for directions, then I'm all for it. They're fulfilling the First Rule of Manhood, and making us old guys proud.

Fred's Book Club: Does Anybody Know What Time It Is?

Greetings, book fans! Welcome again to our Wednesday book feature, the Humpback Writers, called so because of the day of the week on which it falls (Hump Day), not because of any actual hunchbacks. We might have called it the Full of Woe Writers, but knowing writers as I do, I think that might have been a little too on the nose. Alas!  

Today's author should not be full of woe anyway. Dava Sobel accomplished a number of things with this book, giving us a brief and riveting history and becoming a best-seller that has remained in print since first publication in 1995. I refer to Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. 

This is the tale of John Harrison, a clockmaker in the 18th century who invented the first accurate chronometer that could be used at sea. This was a huge deal -- while latitude could be calculated from the sun at noon, longitude could only be calculated if one knew the time at a fixed point (like the ship's point of origin) at a known time aboard (such as noon). As Sobel writes, "Since the Earth takes twenty-four hours to complete one full revolution of three hundred sixty degrees, one hour marks one twenty-fourth of a spin, or fifteen degrees. And so each hour's time difference between the ship and the starting point marks a progress of fifteen degrees of longitude east or west."  

And therein lay the problem: "Precise knowledge of the hour in two different places at once -- a longitude prerequisite so easily accessible today from any pair of cheap wristwatches -- was utterly unattainable up to and including the era of pendulum clocks." A pendulum is more useless on a rolling ship than I am. So Parliament offered a prize of up to £20,000 to the inventor who could solve this vexing problem. Harrison not only solved it -- he solved it five times, each of his chronometers getting better and smaller as he progressed.

Fascinating, especially since he came out of nowhere: "Harrison started out as a carpenter, spending the first thirty years of his life in virtual anonymity before his ideas began to attract the world's attention." Not unlike Jesus in that regard. As a youth hungry for knowledge, Harrison borrowed a textbook on natural philosophy and made his own copy of it by hand. And clocks seemed to compel him early on:

Harrison completed his first pendulum clock in 1713, before he was twenty years old. Why he chose to take on this project and how he excelled at it with no experience as a watchmaker's apprentice, remain mysteries. Yet the clock itself remains. Its movement and dial -- signed, dated fossils from that formative period -- now occupy an exhibit case at The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers' one-room museum at Guildhall in London.

      Aside from the fact that the great John Harrison built it, the clock claims uniqueness for another singular feature: It is constructed almost entirely of wood. This is a carpenter's clock, with oak wheels and boxwood axles connected and impelled by small amounts of brass and steel. Harrison, ever practical and resourceful, took what materials came to hand, and handled them well. The wooden teeth of the wheels never snapped off with wear but defied destruction by their design, which let them draw strength from the grain pattern of the mighty oak. 

It's hard to escape the idea that Harrison became obsessed with the longitude project. It took him five years to build his first sea chronometer, H-1, and three years for the second, H-2. When he set forth to build the third sea chronometer, H-3, it took him nineteen years. Sobel points out in the text that this was five more years than the Statue of Liberty from conception to building, five more years than the carving of Mount Rushmore. But hey -- those great monuments didn't require things like an innovative friction-free design! 

Sobel's book is not long, and every page is fascinating. She goes through the history of time measurement and sea exploration in short order to bring us to the problem of longitude, and studies how the single-minded Harrison attacked the problem with a perfectionism that seemed to admit no end to the amount of time available. Every page of the book has some beguiling detail on the man, the mechanisms, and the history. And later editions, like the 2005 one above, also include a foreword by Neil Armstrong, worth reading on its own.

Harrison did eventually get some money out of Parliament, but the whole prize was never awarded to him or anyone. Maybe it would have been if Harrison had been a big name like Astronomer Royal Edmond Halley, but Harrison was little more than the autodidact whose genius was matched by his persistence. We've seen that sort of expectation again. It was, after all, Professor Samuel Langley of the Smithsonian who was supposed to solve the problem of powered flight, not a couple of young bicycle mechanics from Ohio. 

If you heard of John Harrison and his clocks after the year 1995, it's probably because of this book. In addition to the number of prizes it won, and a large illustrated version that followed, a dramatic television series with Michael Gambon and Jeremy Irons aired in 2000. 

Harrison would have been surprised but probably pleased by this belated popularity. Sobel writes, "When John Harrison died, on March 24, 1776, exactly eighty-three years to the day from his birth in 1693, he held martyr status among clockmakers." She notes that by 1860, when the Royal Navy had fewer than 200 ships, it owned almost 800 sea clocks. Harrison's idea of using clocks for longitude at sea had taken over so thoroughly that the man himself had returned to obscurity -- until Sobel's book made him famous.

I can't recommend the book enough to people who like a good popular history book. There is a reason this one has been so popular in the last quarter century -- it's a terrific science history and a ripping good yarn. 

Just a-walkin' the dog.

Everyone who walks his or her dog has favorite routes. In countries it might be a good country road; in cities maybe you look to avoid nasty blocks or veer toward the coffee place with window service. Here in suburbia, and in my general state of fitness, we have but two small preferences: 

1) Sidewalks if possible;

2) Ability to return home alive. 

With the dog park closed -- well, we think it is, because the main park is closed, although the dog park looks open, but anyway is probably full of Chinese Death Virus Zombies, or so my wife thinks -- I'm walking the dogs more that I had been a year ago.  Here are my well-drawn maps of our favorite paths around the neighborhood:

Rand McNally wishes they had a cartographer with my mad skillz, don't you think?

That last big triangle, as I've noted, was one I haven't done with either of the dogs since my back went bust last February. The hypotenuse (c) is a very steep climb; the (a) side is a sidewalk-free road with blind curves and not one I like to walk with a large dog except when very few people are driving around. Large dog Tralfaz and I used to walk it every Sunday morning when the weather was cool. Maybe we can try it again before it gets snowy.

I have a friend who lives on a cul-de-sac that is the end of a long road. Every morning walk with her dog has to at least begin with the same ol' sidewalk, and the dog is bored with it. It's not like she has time to drive the pup somewhere else and walk around before work; she's doing the best she can. Her only other choice would be to go running through her neighbors' backyards into the wooded areas, and she's a nice person and probably wouldn't do that. Or perhaps she just would hate to have her reputation ruined among her neighbors. 

Anyway, if we ever move, I hope it will be to a place where there are multiple trails outside the door for dog walking. Bored dogs without enough exercise can be real trouble while you're trying to work, even if you work from home as I do. Remind me to tell you about the dinette floor sometime. 

Lost amid plenty.

My favorite supermarket is completely rejiggering itself. Walls painted, floors replaced, and most of all, departments moved around willy-nilly. Meanwhile, it's open for your shopping pleasure! 

Pleasure is not the word. This kind of thing brings out my inner Rain Man. 

Here's a simplified -- well, maybe stupified -- map of the store layout to which I have grown accustomed over more than a decade. 

When the weekly list is set, I rewrite it in the order of the aisles as I will encounter them. I might say I could shop it in my sleep. I couldn't quite shop it blindfolded, because a can of corn feels much like a can of peas. But if I did shop it blindfolded, I would probably bring home stuff we would use. I wouldn't be groping blindly for canned tomatoes in the cleaning goods aisle.

But that was before. I can't quite figure out what the final plan is supposed to be now. Something like this:

It doesn't make any sense. Worst of all, things were in the process of being moved while I was shopping, so some products wound up in multiple aisles while others were nowhere to be found. 

I appreciate that they want to update the look of the place and make it fresh and clean, but I wish they'd taken the hit and closed entirely until it was done. But there were probably good reasons beyond just money lost that they chose not to do that. 

I will have to avoid them for a couple more weeks until I'm sure it's all over. Maybe a month. They're certainly doing this now to get ready for the big Halloween / Thanksgiving / Christmas / New Year blob that brings in the big dough, and they'll surely be done with the reno by the middle of October.

At least that is my hope. I hate when I have to curl up on the floor in Frozen Foods out of sheer anxiety. The managers aren't keen on it either.

In old New York.

Hat tip to Jon, fellow Bleatnik on the Great Lileks's site, for this amazing time suck for all of us who grew up in New York City, or the nearby area, or just like New York:

Street View of 1940s New York

Between 1939 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration collaborated with the New York City Tax Department to collect photographs of every building in the five boroughs of New York City. In 2018, the NYC Municipal Archives completed the digitization and tagging of these photos. This website places them on a map.

As Jon pointed out, what this essentially does is turn a map of New York City c. 1940 into a Google Street View. I found it to be a delightful time suck on a busy week. (There's also a 1980s version available, but I didn't find it to be as complete.)

Here are some photos of New York locations found through this "Street View," to give you a taste. The watermarks are unavoidable; the signs in front were some location or tax code used by the photographers and not a clear indicator to the streets.

Columbus Circle. The Majestic Theatre had become the Park in 1911.

Near the Lincoln Tunnel (less than five years old at the time)

West side downtown, near what would be the World Trade Center . Streets downtown were paved
with ballast stones from ships, some of which are still visible at the South Street Seaport.  

South Ferry area, where a man in a hat is immortalized unawares 80 years later, along with a few palookas

The Porto Rico line sailed between Manhattan and Puerto Rico for 75 years; more at this link if you're curious

These are not pictures of all the great, well known structures, the Penn Stations and Ebbets Fields. These are the places where people lived and worked, from a time when New York had just started replacing so many old walk-ups with the glass towers that line its streets today.

And yet so many things look familiar to me, even though they were gone long before I came on the scene. It may have been shorter, but it was still the New York I once loved.

He has a feel for the material.

"When you said they were having a reading, I didn't think
you meant a map reading."

Where in Hell am I?

In giving out directions to our house, we and those who receive them have noted that they differ in small but potent ways from those offered by Google Maps, Garmin, and other GPS services. It's not surprising. Good as these technical assistants are, they don't live here.

Determinism supposes that to know everything is to be able to predict everything, but even Google doesn't know everything. The locals would know which road is shorter even if less direct, which road is a total speed trap, which road takes you to the part of town where drug dealers rule the streets.

The latter happened to us in the scenic and historic town of Paterson, New Jersey, the state's tenth most dangerous town (but they try harder!). It's a town full of dead factories and abandoned buildings. While trying to get back to I-80 one night, Garmin sent us all over the place, and eventually straight to the worst neighborhood in town. Twice. In my brand-new car.

I thought I'd done something stupid, until I happened to hear another guy complain that the exact same thing happened to him, in Paterson.

Garmin was either trying to kill us, or just didn't have all the facts.

Sometimes I would fight Garmin over an issue, like I got wind of a backup ahead due to a tractor trailer incident or something ("Major problems on the 287 where a truck full of condoms has collided with a truck carrying chicken parts; police blame delays on rubbernecking"). If I pulled off the highway to seek another route, it would try to direct me right back to the problem I was trying to avoid. Eventually it would say huffily, "Recalculating." I'd offended it.

Look, Garmin, if your directions require me to drive through Hell, I'm not doing it, okay?

Norway's a little out of my way.

It makes me worry that self-driving cars and trucks are going to be a problem. Not that I think they'll crash through "Bridge Out" barriers and plunge into lakes---although we can't rule that out---but that I think they'll be forced to take bad routes, be hijacked constantly, and run things and people over to protect their own contents. They'll make instantaneous but poor judgments. They may even be worse drivers than we are!

Go figure.