I love my GPS

 

In ages past, people getting ready for a long trip would visit their local AAA office to get a customized 'Trip-Tik'.  These were ring-bound 5"-by-8" strip maps each showing 50 to 300 miles of major travel roads.  AAA travel consultants would select the proper set of strip maps for the journey you had in mind and stripe them with highlighter pens to show the recommended route.  The back of each sheet listed recommended hotels, motels, restaurants, and service stations related to the route on the front side, each with its AAA-rating.  It was a complete, coherent collection of all the information you would need for that trip segment.  Together with its accompanying maps, it was everything you needed to know from leaving home to getting back home again.  Pretty neat, but labor-intensive, and when your plans changed mid-trip, useless, unless you could find a nearby AAA office to give you an update.

Automation has come to the rescue, thanks to a cluster of 69 satellites being used by three different positioning systems.  31 of them are what enable the GPS in your car.  As long as your GPS can 'hear' at least three of them, the built-in software can tell you where you are within about 50 feet anywhere on the surface of the planet.

We got our first GPS in 2009 in preparation for a road trip into the American Southwest.  We used it for a few weeks to get used to it before we left on vacation, then used it in our rental car when we got there.

Our first stop was at Canyon de Chelly (shay-ye) in Arizona.  The canyon has a 'v' shape with the two legs of the canyon extending generally east from the town of Chinle, AZ.  There are 'rim roads' along the south rim and the north rim.  On our first half-day there, we explored the south rim road.  The next day was spent taking guided tours into the canyons.  On our last day, we drove out along the north rim road to catch any sights we might otherwise have missed.  When we were satisfied that we had seen everything there was to see, I programmed the GPS for the next leg of our trip: to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado with an en route pass by Shiprock, an ancient volcanic basalt core whose cone has eroded away over the eons, and which became a sort of 'mile marker' for pioneer wagon trains as they headed for California.  The GPS ordered me to turn right (east) out of the parking lot.

"No," I thought, "that's not right.  I have to go west into Chinle to pick up US-191 north."  My second thought was that this was a vacation and that I should go where the GPS pointed.  We turned east through rough wilderness via BIA-64 and BIA-12 and BIA-13 and BIA-33.  It was some time before I realized that these were Bureau of Indian Affairs roads, and the GPS was taking us directly through the Navajo (I presume) Reservation.  At one point, we were zig-zagging our way up the side of a mountain when we reached the high point and could see, straight ahead 30 miles away across the plains, Shiprock standing there like an obsidian ax blade sticking up out of the desert.  The GPS had given us a magnificent view as our reward for having faith in its ability.

You know how a GPS picks a route, don't you?  It has a vast encyclopedia of roads and facts about those roads.  It knows that from here to there, the speed limit is v and the distance is s, so the time to get from point A to point B is t.  It picks your route by adding up all the times from each possible route and selecting the smallest of those.

There are downsides to placing too much faith in a GPS, however.  Sometimes its advice is just plain wrong.  Usually this happens when you're in the vicinity of a city or metropolitan area.  The GPS may give you directions that seem to take forever!  The reason for this is simple, so simple that I'm amazed GPS-makers haven't added the SMOP (Simple Matter Of Programming) to their software that would correct it.  The mis-routing happens because the GPS doesn't allow for the time your speed will be zero because you're waiting at a red light.  The simple 'fix' is to charge 25 or 35 or 45 seconds to the route-time for every traffic light along the way.  You won't get stopped at every one of them, (unless you're on State Street in Erie PA) but when you do get stopped, it will be for several minutes.  Charging the route-time this way operates to make certain routes poor options for through traffic, and the normal GPS software will usually, then, de-select such routes even if they are more direct.

For road trips, however, most moderns have given up using AAA Trip-Tiks, and now rely exclusively on their GPSs, whether built-in or added-on.  Don't leave home without it!

 

Stop+Space+Space

 

In ages past when adolescent women took a 'business track' in high school, they studied stenography (Gr.: short writing) usually referred to as "sten and transcription".  'Stenography' is the art of quickly writing dictated words by recording their sound patterns.  'Transcription' was the process of re-converting all those mysterious cryptic squiggles back into something legible.  In general, that meant typing it onto paper.  Naturally, one also had to become proficient at typing.  One of the first lessons in typing class would have been 'double space between sentences', or 'double space after a full stop'.

The reason for the double-space was to give a visually-clear indication that one sentence was ending and another beginning. In the age of word processors, the habit of 'double space after a full stop' has become deprecated. That is, it is no longer taught, and is now considered improper. We live in a world of 'single space between sentences'. Most word processing software will actually remove what it considers 'extraneous blanks' between sentences. Even if you deliberately period-space-space as you type, MSWord may just erase all those 'errors' the first chance it gets. Well, really, does it make any difference? Let's see. To illustrate the change in visual clarity engendered by that change in policy, this paragraph has been keyed as 'single space between sentences'. All the others are keyed 'double space between sentences'. Can you detect the difference?

Admittedly, the change may be hard to detect, but as you read the text with your eyes there's a voice in your head that 'reads the text aloud' to you.  It has a different pacing and you may be able to actually feel the presence or absence of a... pause?... between the sentences.

I am a great fan of that old double-space.  Everything I write uses it.  It's old-style.  Why would anyone be such an old stick-in-the-mud?  (Aside, that is, from enjoying being a curmudgeonly fuddy-duddy.)

When writing fiction (as I often do) control of pacing is something greatly to be desired.  I want my readers to hear, to feel that pause between thoughts that often accompanies dialog between characters.  Similarly, when writing a letter to someone who will personally read it, one may also want to control that pacing.  That might mean eliminating that pause between thoughts to transmit a sense of urgency, or to include the pause to gently nudge the reader into a thoughtful mood.

Thankfully, in recent times it has become possible to customize one's word-processing software settings to prevent it eliminating all those laboriously typed spaces.  For those who (like me, occasionally) write in HTML, there's a way to prevent the HTML processor from compressing the text: the non-breaking space.  A non-breaking space is never eliminated; it is always kept.  Its symbol is ampersand-nbsp-semicolon ( ).  Each place where your eyes detect 'too many spaces' is the probable result of a non-breaking space after a period plus a regular space such that the reader software is forced to insert an empty character after the period and before the single space character that cannot be further compressed.

I hope that your own eyes will urge you to the position that the second paragraph here is the least easy to read, and that you'll come to value an extra space here and there in your own writing.

 

Hunter Biden, Director

 

Why all this focus on Hunter Biden?

Some people have a tendency to not 'connect the dots'.  They may look at all the attention paid to Joe Biden's son Hunter and his employment on some obscure Ukrainian energy company's board (Burisma) and jump to the obvious conclusion:  the Republicans can't find anything on Biden, so they go after Biden's family.  If that's true, it would be despicable, and we would all be justified in heaping scorn on the GOP for such dirty politics.

There's a spare dot in the middle of this picture that's hidden from view.

Ukraine, like many other countries, is a recipient of U.S. foreign aid.  The threat of withholding that aid can be used to move their politics in any desired direction.  "Aha!" you say, "so Ukraine leans on Burisma to put Biden's son on their payroll and pay him a pile of loot so that they'll have an 'in' when it comes time to collect some more foreign aid!  That seems like a sound business decision!"  and you just missed the hidden dot.

The hidden dot is that Burisma has deep connections to the Ukraine government itself, the same government that gets all that foreign aid.  Burisma can pad its invoices to cover Hunter Biden's hefty (and likely unjustified) directorial 'salary' and Ukraine winds up paying that bill.  Burisma just passed Hunter's salary through to the Ukraine government which paid that salary using U.S. foreign aid money.  Hunter Biden is not being paid by Burisma, he's being paid by you.  Foreign aid money is being 'laundered' from your pockets right back into the pockets of the Biden family.

Hunter sits on several such boards in several similarly-situated countries despite the fact that Hunter Biden has no experience in the workings of the oil and gas industry.  His only 'experience' is as the son of a long-term U.S. Senator and Vice President.

Who wants to bet that if the U.S. cuts off aid to Ukraine, Hunter Biden would be flushed from Burisma's board within the week?

Lord Peter Bauer once pointed out that "Foreign aid is an excellent method for transferring money from poor people in rich countries, to rich people in poor countries."  And to rich people in rich countries, too, it seems.

 

P.s.:  Paul Pelosi, Nancy's husband, just resigned from a board in a country that looks very much like a laundry.