Crackerwax

It’s true. Today was a voyage of discovery for me that lead to my uncovering of two amazing gems.

The first is that we have Ronald Reagan to thank for GPS navigation! Well, a point of clarification perhaps, he didn’t invent it but he was responsible for allowing its use by civilians.

After a Korean Airlines flight got lost over Soviet territory and was shot down by fighter jets in 1983, it was Reagan that decided that GPS should be declassified. GPS then moved from being a military only doodad to being accessible by the general public!

Additionally in 1996 Bill Clinton authorised the phasing out of selective availability. That’s the noise that’s injected into the signal to prevent it from being too accurate.

So a combination of Clinton and Reagan has meant that I can now locate my nearest McDonalds on my iPhone without batting an eyelid.

The other amazing fact is more of an epiphany.

At the end of Mr Blue Sky by ELO I always thought the robotic voice said ‘Mr Blue Sky’. No! I was wrong!

It actually says ‘please turn me over’, how mad is that? For the past twenty years I’ve thought it said ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and now I find out it says nothing of the kind.

Thing is, I now can’t hear anything other than ‘please turn me over’ no matter how hard I try.

My life is amazing isn’t it?

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 18th, 2008 at 12:15 am and is filed under Announcements, Gadgets, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.