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A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

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Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#111

Post by zeteo »

zeteo wrote: post #99
SamBam wrote: post #17

The name is perfect. "Etak" refers to a system of navigation used by Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers to navigate from island to island in the vast Pacific Ocean. Much like this device, it operates by "augmented dead reckoning" (as it says in TFA). The etak system of navigation involves navigating by stars and ocean swells to get the heading, but a key issue when navigating by dead reckoning over long distances i…

That sounds fascinating, but it's not really clear to me how imagining islands beyond the horizon can help with dead reckoning. Maybe there are changes in observable phenomena, such as ocean currents, that are associated with these unseen islands? It does sound like a very complex system based on the beginning of this article; I'm wondering if anyone here has read the books mentioned in it: https://www.jstor.org/stab…

I've found a bit more information about the topic in a publicly available research article [1]:

"A depth of only 25 fathoms is quite enough to give some surface indications: coloration, wave phenomena, perhaps fauna. Is this the explanation of the ghost island? Some lost traveller, perhaps en route from Yap to Guam, seeing and remembering these phenomena, later reifying them as an inhabited land? Or is it possible that a real island once existed here, as the Carolinians say? [...] Any Carolinian navigator worthy of the name can give a whole set of radiating courses under all the navigation stars from every island of the Carolines, not just from Kaafiror. [... N]avigators do learn them, together with the courses from real islands, and they make no distinction among them. It is perhaps not altogether in the realm of fantasy to speculate that the curriculum of the schools of navigation was established in a time when Kaafifor was more than a discolored patch of water."

[1] https://micronesica.org/sites/default/files/the_ghost_island...

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#112

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

btbuildem wrote: post #98
SamBam wrote: post #17

The name is perfect. "Etak" refers to a system of navigation used by Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers to navigate from island to island in the vast Pacific Ocean. Much like this device, it operates by "augmented dead reckoning" (as it says in TFA). The etak system of navigation involves navigating by stars and ocean swells to get the heading, but a key issue when navigating by dead reckoning over long distances i…

I've read somewhere that part of the method they intuited their way was to read the waves. As faraway land masses can affect the shape of waves, supposedly these navigators could "see" beyond the horizon due to how the swell was behaving. I can sort of see that in a mind's eye, with rings of waves spreading as they bounce off obstacles in water. But that's bird's view of a miniature -- and seeing that from the surfac…

I think more than viewing a ring of waves bounce of objects in the water, they observed waves diffracting around an island

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#113

Post by fuzzfactor »

bsenftner wrote: post #76

My first job after undergrad ('88) was creating a Mac-like GUI for Etak for a vehicle tracking company in Los Angeles. GUIs were still new, DOS was still king, I had experience working on the Mac OS as a beta OS developer, and I'd been working in a 3D graphics research lab (yeah, 3D graphics was research back then), and this company named TeleTrak needed a real time updating map. So I made the GUI for their mapping a…

Remember what it was like when you have wonderful kilobytes of memory and megabytes of storage?

Your programming is constantly focused, not on the limitations this imposes, but on the opportunities opened up by this vast blank canvas like never before.

Imagine what it would be like if programmers still got as much user-utility per user-kilobyte as they did when that's all they had.

Back in 1982 with the mass-production of Ataris I thought it would be good to have a cartridge for each city which had the map data plus the visual landmarks. Like a 3-D driving simulator but using real maps. Which could be played as a racing game, I guess something like GTA. And with further development would provide a framework for on-board navigation using a battery-powered computer.

Just one of the many things you never expect early-adopters with more resources to not already be doing.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#114

Post by YouWhy »

iainmerrick wrote: post #71
YouWhy wrote: post #20

Highly inspiring! Will share with my team (and I don't do that often!) It seems that Etak was to navigation systems what Jodorowsky's Dune was to 1980s sci-fi: a trail blazing endeavour that was wild and wildly innovative, did not fulfill its intended mission but rather set up an entire field for subsequent success. Also: the design must have included several masterpieces when considering the state of tech in the 198…

Do you mean David Lynch’s Dune? Jodorowsky’s attempt was in the 70s and was never released.

I concur with you that Etak delivered a functional product, albeit not a commercially successful one, which is farther along than Jodorowsky's Dune project, which stalled mid-way in development.

What I wanted to point out is that both projects produced massive amounts of reusable knowledge, and that knowledge set up the stage for a whole field of influential and exciting derivative works.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#116

Post by mvkel »

stavros wrote: post #91
mvkel wrote: post #27

Fantastic story. > When I worked on the Apple Maps team, 12 of my colleagues were Etak alumni. What a legacy! It's gratifying to hear of these long-dead companies/products with incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code with the best of them.

> incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code with the best of them. I'd think that it's everyone else at Apple who's slinging code with the best of them.

Yes, sorry. That's exactly what I meant to say! Pioneers.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#117

Post by brk »

defrost wrote: post #107
brk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Authorities usually intercept unwanted (consumer) drones by blocking the signal >between the pilot and the drone; Curious which country you are in where you see this occurring.

Singapore, Germany, the UK, USA, Australia, .. countries with airports that want domestic security, etc. https://www.trd.sg/ https://hp-jammer.de/en/drohnenabwehr/ etc. Once you start looking at GPS spoofing, etc. it gets quasi-military, non-commercial, requires credentiuals | LEO contacts, ways to work around checks and balances: https://www.regulus.com/ is Israeli miltech, other companies in other countries are sim…

It's definitely not happening in the US. I've heard of it a bit in UAE, but not much elsewhere, so I was curious where the OP was observing this.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#118

Post by gizmo »

One the one hand this is a cool story about real technology pioneers. On the other hand, this is a story about people building technology that was so ahead of its time that it had no chance of turning into a good product. Too expensive, too unreliable, too complicated.

I think there are some obvious parallels here to General Magic and the Apple Newton. Very cool technology. Impressive demos. But ultimately the products didn't deliver on the vision. It wasn't until the iPod and capacitive touch screens and tiny hard drives came to the market that the iPhone became possible. Being 20 years early doesn't help.

Similar catastrophically flawed research projects get started today. In the past couple of days the Humane AI pin has been in the news. It's a wearable AI gadget that seems cool but it doesn't work. The tech has to catch up to the vision. It's at least a decade ahead of its time.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#119

Post by giraffe_lady »

zeteo wrote: post #99
SamBam wrote: post #17

The name is perfect. "Etak" refers to a system of navigation used by Micronesian and Polynesian seafarers to navigate from island to island in the vast Pacific Ocean. Much like this device, it operates by "augmented dead reckoning" (as it says in TFA). The etak system of navigation involves navigating by stars and ocean swells to get the heading, but a key issue when navigating by dead reckoning over long distances i…

That sounds fascinating, but it's not really clear to me how imagining islands beyond the horizon can help with dead reckoning. Maybe there are changes in observable phenomena, such as ocean currents, that are associated with these unseen islands? It does sound like a very complex system based on the beginning of this article; I'm wondering if anyone here has read the books mentioned in it: https://www.jstor.org/stab…

You know how if you turn the light on for a second you can then move through a dark room without touching anything?

The boundary between "imagining" and "visualizing" is somewhere between these two experiences but conceptually they are not that different.

Re: A curious phenomenon called 'Etak'

#120

Post by epstein »

mvkel wrote: post #27

Fantastic story. > When I worked on the Apple Maps team, 12 of my colleagues were Etak alumni. What a legacy! It's gratifying to hear of these long-dead companies/products with incredible engineers who are still out there slinging code with the best of them.

Now I understand why apple maps so bad.
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