If you think about what technologies have changed our lives the most, there are a few obvious choices like fire, electricity, computers, or even washing machines.

Another technology that you also use pretty much every day is GPS, even if you don’t realize it. Opening a maps app is kinda obvious, but that weather widget uses location data to show you the forecast for where you are right now.

GPS was originally launched by the US Military to solve the problem of “Where the hell am I right now?” for military units. Eventually, it was also enabled for civilian use after a Korean airliner strayed into Soviet airspace due to a navigational error, and was shot down (YouTube). Today, it allows you to pinpoint your location down to a meter or three anywhere on Earth¹.

I briefly described how GPS works in Issue #75, and why it wouldn’t be possible without accounting for time dilation effects as predicted by Einstein. To recap: GPS satellites have an atomic clock on board, and broadcast a signal that contains their ID as well as a timestamp of when that signal was sent. Your phone then listens for those signals, and if it’s receiving them from at least four different satellites, it can then compute your location by triangulation (and accounting for relativistic effects (YouTube)). The fourth satellite is needed because while your phone contains many amazing things, it does not contain a clock precise enough for GPS-related calculations, so the signal from the fourth one is used to make up for that.

As useful as GPS is, you’ve probably also noticed that it tends to drain your battery rather quickly. Partly this is due to the complexity of getting a fix on the GPS signal, and then continuously calculating your position from that. While it’s doing that, the phone can’t go to sleep, thus preventing battery conservation. Even worse, if the signal is bad (because you’re inside a building, or even just between two high buildings), the phone needs to do even more work to calculate your position.

Side note: You might be thinking, if I’m using Maps, I’m not putting my phone to sleep anyway, so why does that matter? Well, modern computers (including your phone) are very, very fast. So fast, they spend most of their time doing nothing, even if you’re actively using your phone. So, to save power, the CPU inside will actually go to sleep a lot, and only wake up if there’s something to do. It can’t do that if you’re e.g. playing a game (these usually require a lot of computing power), or using something like GPS.

Some fault is also due to the age when GPS was invented. Back then, you couldn’t really carry computers around, so GPS was never designed for the smartphone age. While some add-ons to GPS like Assisted GPS can significantly decrease the amount of work your phone needs to do (without A-GPS, for example, it would take your phone up to 12 minutes to get a precise fix on your location, depending on satellite visibility)

Still, even with these faults, we have become dependent on this service that GPS (and other systems like Russia’s GLONASS or Europe’s Galileo) provide to us. “Where am I?” can be answered by a simple glance at your phone. And due to its ubiquity and ease of use, runners have even used to make drawings with it (YouTube). While we’re still missing the jetpacks and flying cars, everything else in our present is still quite futuristic.

Uncomfortably Comfortable

“Leave your comfort zone” is common refrain by productivity experts. Not doing so means you’ll never go anywhere in life. But as it turns out, we have comfort zones for a reason: Please stop telling me to leave my comfort zone

Fashionably Ill

Our lifestyle dictates a lot in our life: How we dress, what we eat, what we watch — and how we get sick: Gout Is Gaining on Wellness in 2019

Failing into the New Year

2018 will not go down as a great year for humanity in general. IEEE’s Spectrum has gathered the biggest IT failures of 2018. And yes, privacy violations and data leaks did make the top lists, thanks to Facebook, “the market leader in the field of apologizing for privacy violations”.

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