Antique maps are pretty fun, too. It's always interesting to compare your neighborhood now to the way it was hundreds of years ago. And original prints can be pretty collectable, too.
Paper map sales are booming
271–280 of 326 posts
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#272Anybody remember Triptiks from AAA? You'd go to a AAA office or call them on the phone, tell them where you were going, and in return you'd get a printed spiral top-bound pad with your trip broken down in to multiple legs, the roads/routes pre-highlighted, gas stops and prices estimated in, a list of sites for stopping off at, etc. All human curated and human annotated (the roads on your route were literally gone ove…
Yep, TripTiks we’re awesome. With map apps I feel as though I’m constantly battling them as I always expect the top of the map/phone to represent north.
Maybe it was because I grew up in a rural area but I much prefer NSEW directions and looking at a physical map.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
Next you'll be telling me that people don't know how to darn their socks any more.
I'd even argue that darning socks might be more relevant to everyday life than map reading, even though map reading is more important in emergencies and people should probably know both. If you can darn socks you can probably fix holes in your pants, and if you have a car charger, getting lost happens a lot less than clothes repair, at least in the city.
I dunno man, I think most people would be lost without the iDarn app.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#274Anybody remember Triptiks from AAA? You'd go to a AAA office or call them on the phone, tell them where you were going, and in return you'd get a printed spiral top-bound pad with your trip broken down in to multiple legs, the roads/routes pre-highlighted, gas stops and prices estimated in, a list of sites for stopping off at, etc. All human curated and human annotated (the roads on your route were literally gone ove…
Old-school AAA TripTik® Walkthrough [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcMih8fjq5Q
Thank you from those of us not in the US.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#275Anybody remember Triptiks from AAA? You'd go to a AAA office or call them on the phone, tell them where you were going, and in return you'd get a printed spiral top-bound pad with your trip broken down in to multiple legs, the roads/routes pre-highlighted, gas stops and prices estimated in, a list of sites for stopping off at, etc. All human curated and human annotated (the roads on your route were literally gone ove…
When I was a child, my parents took the tribe around the country for 2 months. We towed our trailer behind an International Traveall. To prepare, my mom worked with AAA to design the route we were going to take starting from our home in California, up to Seattle, across to Yellowstone and Glacier, across the midwest to Philadelphia, down the east coast to Florida then back home through the south, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada. The trip require a dozen of these books. I remember spending hours pouring through these prior to our leaving, just fascinated with all the roads, and cities, and attractions. We kept them for years afterwards and I continued looking at them for several years. Not sure what happened to them, however. Great times.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
When Lonely Planet guides were popular, there was a trend of investors buying popular hostels/attractions from the guide and running them into the ground before the next Lonely Planet was published and warned of the demise. I haven't seen this as much lately (maybe due to rise of online reviews), but cross-referencing Lonely Planet with TripAdvisor is the sweet-spot.
You have to take TripAdvisor and similar sites with a very large grain of salt. I recall a low-star "review" of a nearby (and excellent) bird sanctuary where the text said something like "It would be okay if you like birds, I guess". Left unstated was why someone who didn't like birds would go to a bird sanctuary in the first place. Now, in that case, the poor quality of the review was apparent, but it's not always t…
Ah yes, there are many bargains to be had on Amazon if you just read the reviews in depth. Like you mentioned, a lot of bad reviews because the manual is confusing, etc even though the product is great!
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#277I'm a small scale collector of historic and antique maps with a collection of about 20 maps. The earliest map I own is from the 17th century which I treasure because it shows California as an island. Most of them are of the United States, primarily the west. I find just looking at these maps immensely satisfying in a way digital maps can never be. I consider them works of art.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#278Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been growing pretty dissatisfied with the state of electronic maps. Basic things that are usually either impossible or difficult while using Google Maps or Apple Maps for directions: - What road am I on? What town am I in? - and other flavors of "where the hell am I, anyway?" - This is especially annoying when on the phone and the person is asking where you are, and the best you can answer is "Google says I'm X…
There's no way to see a street name on Apple Maps without zooming in entirely. And sometimes even then, I'll see something like Route 99 instead the name by which everyone refers to the road: "Broadway".
This annoys me too. I've submitted map feedback (holding and tapping 'Report a problem' on the map) before but who knows if that could make much of a difference. I assumed the route numbers are more of an American thing (although your comment seems to imply perhaps not)? We have them here but nobody I know here in Australia uses them or knows them, apart from major motorways. Maybe the other routes are used by truckers? Normal drivers though I would think only care about the street names.
It frustrates me to no end how hard it can be to see the names of streets in Maps, it's one of the most important things!
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#279Anybody remember Triptiks from AAA? You'd go to a AAA office or call them on the phone, tell them where you were going, and in return you'd get a printed spiral top-bound pad with your trip broken down in to multiple legs, the roads/routes pre-highlighted, gas stops and prices estimated in, a list of sites for stopping off at, etc. All human curated and human annotated (the roads on your route were literally gone ove…
In a lot of ways, electronic maps are still inferior to the Triptik. Even the Rand McNally showed highway rest areas and picnic areas. The Triptik also showed gas stations. Electronic maps often lack this entirely, at least in easy form. The Triptik shows what you need to know while on a long motor trip. The electronic map emphasizes details I don't need. At a glance the paper map tells me whether a road is free limi…
Former land surveyor here. Big fan of paper maps, even though I still use Gaia, FarOut, etc. My faves are the USGS topographical map sets. There's just something you can't replace about the experience of navigating using topo maps and a compass.
Re: Paper map sales are booming
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
It makes life easier at the expense of some indescribable sense of "quality" or connotations of "wealth", the feeling that the product makes a statement about the skill of the maker and the user, that there's real skill involved not just a technological cheat code in real life. Which seems to be very culture specific, it's important to some but not others. I don't have much doubt that people get lost less with phones…
Rather than a subjective cultural "quality", I think there's an issue where folks are dependent upon technology and that handicaps their ability to learn or perform advanced skills. In the US, younger students are performing worse in mathematics than previous cohorts; calculators aren't a singular cause but their ubiquity does encourage a mentality both from children and adults that basic arithmetic and even algebra…
It's the same problem math has always had for my whole life. The fundamentals are important to reach the high level stuff but no longer directly useful, and people aren't always sure whether they want to go into a field that needs it, until they are past the age where people used to learn the basics.
Algebra is not useful to an average person directly, and the path to actually getting a job that needs math is long enough that nobody in school is going to think through their future like that, we don't really have a culture of kids thinking a decade ahead. I sure didn't.
Plus, the main thing educators seem to talk about is this mysterious "New way of thinking" you get from math. But nobody just trusts their teachers on that, since it's not something that can be explained easily.
It probably doesn't help that they still like to pretend you're going to actually directly do long division IRL. Even if there's a reason to learn it, I don't see why we need to tell people they'll actually use it directly, when it seems pretty clear most people don't.
But that seems like a matter for educators to solve rather than tech or tech culture.
Is there a different optimal curriculum that takes into account the existence of calculators and the fact we learn math for different reasons now? Or is the best way to teach it unchanged?
Philosophically I suppose phone-dependent people are perpetually lost, but I think a practical definition would be "Unable to navigate to their destination with available equipment".
Someone who's phone dies isn't really experiencing what most know as lost unless they have no power bank or car charger, only then are they going to really be experiencing some panic.