If GPS died tomorrow because of a solar flare, would the younger generations manage?

In general, I think our adaptation has significantly increased our ability to navigate at the minor cost of using either the map and compass or the new gps and advanced map data.

Old marine maps had various landmarks on them, along with their height. This allowed you to get angle and distance, giving you the opportunity to calculate position with pen and paper even if you only had a single landmark in view.

You can't just pull over at a gas station in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and ask for directions. :-)

Studies have shown that people just cannot read maps anymore due to dependence on GPS apps in their daily lives.

Most people I know do that.

I almost always look at a preview of the GPS route and try to understand the gist of the directions before I start driving. I build a narrative like "2 left turns, 1 right, then driving for quite awhile before taking an exit". It helps my mental model of the areas of town and how they connect.

I find it a lot easier as I have a mental picture of things.

She says it's because kids don't interact with analogue clocks much anymore and Covid lockdowns meant that a lot of kids never learnt it in school either. So apparently there is now a generation of kids who are around 10 - 12 who have no idea how to read the time from an analogue clock.

On the other hand, they are unintuitive, less common with every passing year, and I'd rather my children get any recess than add "learn to use another antiquated tool" into the school curriculum. I do complicated math for a living, but nobody's offended that I didn't ever get good at using a slide rule.

I can't remember the last time I saw someone with a mechanical watch other than as a fashion statement.

25 years ago, my household had mechanical alarm clocks, a mechanical clock on the oven, and multiple mechanical clocks on the walls of different rooms. Today, I think I might have a broken mechanical watch in my "you should probably fix these things" piles.

Having taught math to children, analog clocks are a great way to learn and apply fractions. I suspect that children's inability to read analog clocks tracks pretty well with their abysmal math skills, like fractions.

So maybe we don't "add" analog clocks to the school curriculum, but we instead replace some nonsense with analog clocks and fractions.

Where we are, analog time-telling is a required part of the (common core) curriculum. So kids would have to learn it in school, though not necessarily internalize it for long enough that it would stick in the long run.

What would probably happen is that people would start asking for / giving directions again; my impression is that maps have usually been secondary to this ad hoc social process of informal directions, and it would probably re-emerge.

Personally I rarely rely on turn-by-turn navigation but instead look at the map before hand and take a mental map of the directions to get there.

He also has no concept of road names. I was describing the route I would take when he needed to travel across the Seattle metro one time and any road other than I-5 was a complete unknown to him. It's a little scary to me.

I learned to read maps when I was like 10; maybe younger. It's not that hard. I'm pretty sure they'll pick it up plenty fast enough when required.

The real problem with a map shortages and scalpers selling maps for fucktillion dollars.

It's not a skill that was lost to technology, it's a skill that most people never mastered even before we all had GPS systems in our pockets.

Not an Eagle Scout, and have mixed feeling as scouting as an org at this point, but I'm very grateful to have learned how to read maps properly.

How about planning a route from contour plots?

Or maybe figure out which direction you should go without a digital compass?

I'm not trying to be obtuse, I genuinely don't see how it is difficult to read a map.

Well, you have provided a neat definition of map reading. :)

I guess your mention of representation of elevation made me realize that you at least need to learn the conventions and the key to a map.

Imagine how easy recursion is to grok for most of us and absurdly painful for most people trying to learn programming.

I think that incident was what made me realize that map reading was a skill that actually needed to be learned.

I believe it is a valuable skill to maintain or develop. Kids most obviously develop it now through games like Minecraft, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is a correlation between navigational skills and general memory ability.

But secret: I have the absolute WORST sense of direction. I have no internal sense of orientation or distance. Seriously I get lost if I turn left out of the corner store instead of right. I can read a map with a compass and straight-edge and find where I am based on triangulation. But once I actually have to make realtime decisions using little more than a map I get anxious and frustrated, I usually just give up and look for landmarks or one-way streets that I can find and follow. Or hope that my phone's terrible compass and navigation-hostile map programs work. (Can we talk about map apps not even showing street names or one-way directions without having to pan and zoom all over the map?)

Even if you know how to read a map, they're just not a very good UX for finding where you are and making minor course-corrections in realtime.

The only real major advantage that gps systems have over the list method is that they can tell you when you're near an exit. Back in the early 00s I was driving to New Orleans from Dallas on a particularly foggy night and I missed the same exit 3 times because I could barely make out the exit signs.

A lot of people were having trouble with it because we're all used to "turn left here" instead of the top-view get-your-bearings go-that-way approach to a map.

I've met people who constantly get completely lost despite the use of the phone.

The issue with the phone is that especially under rain or trees, the position can be off of several hundreds meters, so you have to look around and find yourself on the map, because the phone really has no idea and is just guessing.

The compass thingy also works terribly on android and iphones alike, but for some reason people still think that if the arrow points a certain way, you can actually trust it.

Mounting your phone on the windshield helps with GPS some, as does getting a newer phone with L5 GPS.

GPS is great when it works and downright dangerous when it doesn't.

truth :)