Pinpoint
How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds
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Narrated by:
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Eric Michael Summerer
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By:
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Greg Milner
About this listen
Over the last 50 years, humanity has developed an extraordinary shared utility: the global positioning system. Omnipresent, free, and available to all, GPS powers everything from your phone to the Internet to the Mars Rover. Greg Milner tells the sweeping story of GPS, from its conceptual origins as a bomb guidance system to its present ubiquity.
While GPS has revolutionized methods of timekeeping, navigation, and seismological prediction, it has also altered human behavior, introducing phenomena such as "death by GPS", in which drivers blindly follow their devices into deserts, lakes, and impassable mountains. Milner also shows the desperate vulnerabilities in the system we now use to predict the weather, track prisoners, and land airplanes.
Delving into the neuroscience of cognitive maps and spatial recognition, Milner's inventive and timely book is at once a grand history of the scientific urge toward precision and perfection and a revelatory philosophy of how humans understand themselves in the world.
©2016 Greg Milner (P)2016 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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With his signature wit and thought-provoking insights, Neil deGrasse Tyson - one of our foremost thinkers on all things space - illuminates the past, present, and future of space exploration and brilliantly reminds us why NASA matters now as much as ever. As Tyson reveals, exploring the space frontier can profoundly enrich many aspects of our daily lives, from education systems and the economy to national security and morale.
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The least helpful review of Space Chronicles.
- By Joshua Kring on 06-17-15
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The Pentagon's Brain
- An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
- By: Annie Jacobsen
- Narrated by: Annie Jacobsen
- Length: 18 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Discover the definitive history of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, in this Pulitzer Prize finalist from the author of the New York Times best seller Area 51. No one has ever written the history of the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science R&D agency. In the first-ever history about the organization, New York Times best-selling author Annie Jacobsen draws on inside sources, exclusive interviews, private documents, and declassified memos to paint a picture of DARPA, or "the Pentagon's brain".
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Scientia Est Potentia/Knowledge is Power
- By Cynthia on 10-08-15
By: Annie Jacobsen
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Applied Minds
- How Engineers Think
- By: Guru Madhavan
- Narrated by: Sean Pratt
- Length: 5 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Through narratives and case studies spanning the brilliant history of engineering, Madhavan shows how the concepts of prototyping, efficiency, reliability, standards, optimization, and feedback are put to use in fields as diverse as transportation, retail, health care, and entertainment. Equal parts personal, practical, and profound, Applied Minds charts a path to a future where we apply strategies borrowed from engineering to create useful and inspired solutions to our most pressing challenges.
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excellent edifying book; great narrator too.
- By Phillip on 01-16-22
By: Guru Madhavan
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You Belong to the Universe
- Buckminster Fuller and the Future
- By: Jonathon Keats
- Narrated by: Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 5 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.
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Bucky, Bucky, Bucky
- By Amazon Customer on 08-25-18
By: Jonathon Keats
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Confessions of an Alien Hunter
- A Scientist's Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence
- By: Seth Shostak
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 10 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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This engaging memoir reveals the true story of the Search for ExtraterrestrialIntelligence (SETI), and discloses what we may very soon discover. Chronicling the program’s history with insight and humor, SETI senior astronomer Seth Shostak assures us that if there is sentient life in the universe, we are within decades of picking up its signal.
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Somewhat Disappointed...
- By Tim on 11-12-10
By: Seth Shostak
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Wired for War
- The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
- By: P. W. Singer
- Narrated by: William Hughes
- Length: 20 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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A military expert reveals how science fiction is fast becoming reality on the battlefield, changing not just how wars are fought, but also the politics, economics, laws, and ethics that surround war itself. Singer’s previous books foretold the rise of private military contractors and the advent of child soldiers - predictions that have proved all too accurate. Now he explores the greatest revolution in military affairs since the atom bomb: robotic warfare. We are now seeing a massive shift in military technology....
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Good book of fact sprinkled with left-wing opinion
- By Jeffrey on 04-13-13
By: P. W. Singer
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Autonomy
- The Quest to Build the Driverless Car—and How It Will Reshape Our World
- By: Lawrence D. Burns, Christopher Shulgan
- Narrated by: George Newbern
- Length: 11 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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In Autonomy, former GM executive and current advisor to the Google Self-Driving Car project Lawrence Burns offers a sweeping history of the race to make the driverless car a reality. In the past decade, Silicon Valley companies like Google, Tesla and Uber have positioned themselves to revolutionize the way we move around by developing driverless vehicles while traditional auto companies like General Motors, Ford, and Daimler have been fighting back by partnering by with new tech start-ups.
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Easy listen, non-technical perspective
- By James S. on 09-14-18
By: Lawrence D. Burns, and others
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Burning the Sky
- Operation Argus and the Untold Story of the Cold War Nuclear Tests in Outer Space
- By: Mark Wolverton
- Narrated by: John Lescault
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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After the Soviet Union proved to the United States that it possessed an operational intercontinental ballistic missile with the launch of Sputnik in October 1957, the world watched anxiously as the two superpowers engaged in a game of nuclear one-upmanship. Amid this rising tension, eccentric physicist Nicholas Christofilos brought forth an outlandish, albeit ingenious, idea to defend the US from a Soviet attack: detonating nuclear warheads in space to create an artificial radiation belt that would fry incoming ICBMs. Known as Operation Argus, this plan is the most secret and riskiest experiment in history, and classified details of these nuclear tests have been long obscured.
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Extraordinary interesting history
- By Magnus Almgren on 10-23-20
By: Mark Wolverton
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Rocket Billionaires
- Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race
- By: Tim Fernholz
- Narrated by: Erin Moon
- Length: 10 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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For the larger-than-life personalities now staking their fortunes on the development of rocket ships, the new race to explore space could be a dead end, a lucrative opportunity - or the key to humanity's salvation. Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos take center stage in this fast-paced narrative as they attempt to disrupt the space economy, feed their own egos, and maybe even save the world.
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Interesting book; hard to listen to
- By K. Thai on 04-12-18
By: Tim Fernholz
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The Imagineers of War
- The Untold Story of DARPA, the Pentagon Agency That Changed the World
- By: Sharon Weinberger
- Narrated by: Hillary Huber
- Length: 16 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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The definitive history of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon agency that has quietly shaped war and technology for nearly 60 years. Founded in 1958 in response to the launch of Sputnik, the agency's original mission was to create "the unimagined weapons of the future". Over the decades, DARPA has been responsible for countless inventions and technologies that extend well beyond military technology.
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Blandly written story about DARPA politics
- By Syed on 04-18-17
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The Idea Factory
- Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation
- By: Jon Gertner
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 17 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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In The Idea Factory, New York Times Magazine writer Jon Gertner reveals how Bell Labs served as an incubator for scientific innovation from the 1920s through the1980s. In its heyday, Bell Labs boasted nearly 15,000 employees, 1200 of whom held PhDs and 13 of whom won Nobel Prizes. Thriving in a work environment that embraced new ideas, Bell Labs scientists introduced concepts that still propel many of today’s most exciting technologies.
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Great story -- horrible pauses
- By Rodney on 01-29-13
By: Jon Gertner
What listeners say about Pinpoint
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Luke Gordon
- 03-20-21
How did we live before gps
very engaging. I was completely unaware of how important gps is to our everyday life, beyond just Google maps
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- Peter
- 08-22-17
great book on the unseen infrastructure of navigat
some reviewers found the non-linear chronology of this book frustrating. However, if you look at it from a perspective of the development of navigational concepts and technology, it flows very well. It is a well written and narrated book, but may be a bit technically heavy for the non-techies. I loved it though. Definitely a great addition to my library of modern infrastructure books.
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- Randy Fischer
- 04-06-19
Really found this interesting
My early IT career included support for a land surveyor who purchased one of the first generation surveying systems made by Trimble. The very little information i remember from working with him left me with terms relating to gps and a fascination with its use. This book really filled in the gaps in my understanding of the system and a renewed appreciation and amazement of what it is...
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- Brian Corbin
- 05-15-16
Great information!
I had no idea of the history and many uses of GPS. It did put a little fear in me about its security!
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1 person found this helpful
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- keith Kirkland
- 06-15-18
A ridiculous wonderful story of a seemingly boring topic: GPS
The story starts off in a place that is far flung from the expected trajectory. Pinpoint is riddled with riddles. How we figured out what “here” is and what “there” is; a seemingly trivial thing in today’s age of smartphones enable with GPS.
But what it really points to is humankind’s ingenuity. The scale and affect of GPS is outside the scope of grasping for most, yet this book, littered with empathetic story driven content, shows as clear of a path and navigating to your local watering hole.
I started listen because GPS is critical in my work. I run a company called WearWorks that develops haptic navigation devices, Wayband, for the blind and visually impaired. We had issues with reliability especially for navigating blind users who may not be aware that GPS inaccuracies are leading them to the place down the street, but not the place they want to be.
It was a wonderful education of a tech we all have almost taken for granted. Highly recommended if you want to dig into the science behind what it mean to be “here”.
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- Andrew
- 07-09-16
Interesting Historical and Technical Background
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
Not unless the friend had a lot of extra time to waste.
Were the concepts of this book easy to follow, or were they too technical?
I am a PhD physicist and found it easy to follow. I cannot judge for others.
Do you think Pinpoint needs a follow-up book? Why or why not?
NO, NO, a 1000 times NO!
Any additional comments?
This is a fun book to waste a few hours with. But, it is MUCH, MUCH too long for the value of the content. I thought it would be insightful and technical, and it was really just entertainment about the history of navigation and GPS, the fight of the lone individual against all the dumb "higher ups" in the DOD who didn't want GPS, etc. It is a prototypical American novel of an individual overcoming the bureaucracy and I have grown tired of such fantasies over the years.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Dr. Jonathan L. Kramer
- 07-26-16
And engrossing and thorough history of GPS
I had no idea of how deep and how long the development of the modern GPS system Took them came about. This is an outstanding history of navigation and GPS. Absolutely recommended.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Ron
- 02-20-19
Really enjoyed this book
this is a quite interesting book There is enough technical information to be informative without being overwhelming and enough stories to keep things interesting.
it really shows how important GPS has become in the modern world in ways that I never knew about.
kept my attention through the entire book.
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- RealTruth
- 11-15-17
Well researched and written
History of gps and also technical details of implementation, geography and geodesy. Interesting. Stories of early navigation by James Cook and Tupaia, although I am not sure what Rube Goldberg has to do with Mars☺ . Also good talk about NGA and space program.
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- _swede
- 10-09-17
I'm going to listen to the entire book again!
The book was phenomenal, exceeds my expectations. I will listen to it again to pick up anything I missed the first time!
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