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11/15/23
11:40 am
Poppy, Rory,
This edition of the Driving Advice series focuses on two words:
EV and GPS. These are not words, of course, but acronyms.
Electric Vehicle and Global Positioning System.
EV
When your parents were your age there were no electric cars to buy.
Today there are many. Every manufacturer is producing an EV.
“By 2035 all new cars and passenger trucks sold in California must be zero-emission vehicles” – which means they will be electric.
We are living in revolutionary times. The last automobile revolution
was when we went from horses to gas-powered cars.
The first gas car was produced in 1896. “In 1908, New York’s 120,000 horses produced a pungent 60,000 gallons of urine and 2.5 million pounds of manure every day on the city’s streets.”
What a big change! The horses could retire and take it easy.
Where would the gas come from? In 2014 I purchased the electric
BMW i-3. It was sold to Jon and Robin in 2021 with the nephew
discount and the nephew limited warranty. I now drive the VW ID.4.
On my website you can read much more about the EV Revolution:
GPS
In 1956 the science fiction writer, Arthur C. Clarke saw the
development of satellite relays and predicted:
“No one on the planet need ever get lost or become out of touch with the community, unless they wanted to be.”
I was 7 years old in 1956 and today Clarke's prediction
is true. Due to tremendous efforts by engineers (software,
hardware, electronic, telemetry, aerospace, etc., etc.), system planners,
government, financial, business, analysts, etc., etc. today we
have the magic and incredible convenience of GPS (see gps.gov)
How did we ever live without it?
Road maps (mostly from AAA and Rand McNally), pay phones,
yellow pages, personal address and telephone books, etc.
I gift you with some road maps from the 1970s (and 1980s)
and present two challenges:
Rory – How would you travel from Rock Lake, ND (east of Dunseith)
to the corner of Lexington and Sycamore in San Francisco? (I used to live
in Rock Lake!)
Poppy – How would you travel from Raisin, CA to Winston Ct in Benecia?
Have fun and if (when) you get lost just take
a deep breath and ask for directions from the next person you see.
In my last letter I asked, given a line segment
AB
which points C in the plane would form an
isosceles triangle with C as the “apex vertex”?
The answer is all points on the
perpendicular bisector of
AB.
Today the question is, given the line segment
AB,
what points C in the plane would form an isosceles triangle
with A as the apex vertex?
Love,
guJon
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