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Short Synopsis
In the tradition of The Information and The Shallows, Pinpoint tells the story of GPS and how it is affecting our brains, our technology, and our culture.

Full Synopsis
Over the last fifty 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.

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

"Pinpoint dissects the modern age of mapping and shows the hidden dangers of a world where nothing is hidden at all." ---Chuck Klosterman, author of Downtown Owl

"GPS guides our world. Here at last is the amazing and well-told story of where it came from, how it works, and where it and we are going." ---Richard Rhodes, author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb

"Pinpoint excels . . . it makes clear that GPS is an engineering marvel, a global utility and a source of new threat all at once." ---New York Times

Pinpoint

How GPS Is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

Author Greg Milner

Narrated by Eric Michael Summerer

Publication date May 3, 2016

Running time 10 hrs

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