Maphead_ Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks - Ken Jennings [89]
In my conversations with roadgeeks and map rallyers, I marveled at their endless compulsion for precision, which struck me as the polar opposite of the kind of Kerouacian freedom that the American road has come to symbolize. On a real road trip, I sneered, you wouldn’t worry about the typeface of the interstate signs or the history of their numbering. You certainly wouldn’t limit your sightseeing to places within a quarter-map-inch of the road you were on. Or even upon.
But maybe Dupin was right: by focusing on these tiniest, geekiest details, I’ve been missing the big picture about roadfans. If this hobby were just about arbitrary detail, Jim Sinclair could mail out a copy of The Betty Crocker Cookbook to his players every year and have them follow circuitous and confusing directions to bake Lemon Chiffon Cake. Roadgeeks could obsess about anything with a nice regular numbering system: baseball cards or tornadoes or Mozart sonatas. But instead they chose maps as their vehicle. Roadgeek photography and the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre are just ways to get as close as possible to the atlas, like zooming in endlessly on Google Earth. That’s how compelling maps are to us cartophiles. We want to enter them.
“You know how most people can’t walk past a mirror without looking?” Bart Bramley asked me. “I feel the same way about maps.” While I was working on the Massacre this year, it felt like aversion therapy: a dose of maps so strong that even I couldn’t handle it. But if so, it didn’t work—I have a feeling I’m going to be entering the rally again next year. Look out, Bramley. I’m gunning for you!
Maybe I’ll even invite the kids along again. But next time we’ll run it like a real family vacation: they’ll be in a separate row of seats, kept away from the adults by a clever safety system of straps and buckles, and plugged into a portable DVD player at all times. Family togetherness! Next year, we might even get farther than South Dakota.
Chapter 10
OVEREDGE
n.: the portion of the map that lies outside the neatline border
Look for the secrets half buried like trinkets in a field, Hope that the hidden things someday will be revealed.
—JOHN DARNIELLE
At midnight on May 1, 2001, some unnamed hero at U.S. Air Force Space Command, located on the high plains just east of Colorado Springs, pressed a button, and it affected millions of people all over the world. Most of the things the government can do at the push of a button don’t immediately improve our quality of life, but this action, ordered by the president himself, made life ten times better for map nerds everywhere. Just like magic, the Global Positioning System—an array of twenty-four satellites in medium Earth orbit—could now tell you where you were standing, anywhere on the surface of the planet, to within just a few meters of accuracy.
A cynic might point out that the only reason the military had the power to make the system so much better at the touch of a button was that it had been lying to us all along. The first GPS satellite had been launched way back in 1978, but only government users had access to the real data. Civilian owners of GPS receivers got a scrambled signal that introduced random error, so that most of the time their location information would be off by hundreds of feet. Giving citizens the wrong answers to important questions is nothing new for the U.S. government, of course; the IRS has been doing it for years. But in this case, the error was intentional, baked into the signal for reasons of national security.
But by the late 1990s, this scrambling, euphemistically called “selective availability,” was becoming obsolete. The military had figured out how to localize its GPS jamming in places where secrecy was an issue, and a new ground-based technology called Differential GPS was allowing civilians to improve on satellite data