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Title: Pinpoint

Subtitle: How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

Author: Greg Milner

Narrator: Eric Michael Summerer

Format: Unabridged

Length: 9 hrs and 50 mins

Language: English

Release date: 05-03-16

Publisher: Tantor Audio

Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 64 votes

Genres: Science & Technology, Technology

Publisher's Summary:

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.

Critic Reviews:

"Funny, scary, and tremendously readable." (Andrew Blum, author of Tubes)

Members Reviews:

This is not a book.

This is not a book. It is a series of articles related to navigation and eventually the GPS system that are stitched together rather clumsily. Several times while listening to the recording, I stopped and rewound thinking I had missed something. I could forgive all that if the scientific explanations and the historical explanations were more informative, but they were kind of general. I purchased this book because it was recommended by a science podcast, but I think it was recommended more based on its title and subject then on its content. It is a disappointment bordering on the waste of time.There is not much science here. The GPS system does deserve a decent treatment.

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.

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.

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.

I'm going to listen to the entire book again!

The book was phenomenal, exceeds my expectations.