Dead Reckoning
I always thought that dead reckoning was a complete guess about distance traveled. Turns out, it is based on an estimation of important factors like speed and time, not just looking back over the distance covered and making a visual guess thereof:
Dead Reckoning is the process of estimating your position by advancing a known position using course, speed, time and distance to be traveled. In other words, figuring out where you will be at a certain time if you hold the speed, time and course you plan to travel.
Interestingly enough, the Lewis and Clark Expedition used dead reckoning over its 8000 mile journey, and only erred by 40 miles. That’s a half of one percent of the total distance traveled. Perhaps our human skills of survival are less useless than one would think.
Comments
Peter
You might like Edwin Hutchins’ book Cognition in the Wild , where he uses naval navigation to talk about those human skills - it’s probably gone with GPS and radar and all, but it’s wildly fascinating to see how navigators used dead reckoning in part to move aircraft carrier-sized ships..
Dig your blog, longtime lurker, first-time commenter.