Posted on 08/31/2025 4:41:54 PM PDT by kawhill
Just what I needed this holiday weekend - another reminder I’m slowly becoming a dinosaur. Good maps & the ability to use all their features far surpasses using a mapping device/GPS, IMO. The USArmy placed a high value on map skills and I took it seriously. As another poster noted, the lack of survey markers really devalues the new topo map series. These were vital for those of us in the artillery.
I wish schools still taught how to draw maps by hand. But, nowadays, if you study cartography in college, the courses focus on mapmaking software, satellite images, etc.
I D F K for Vermont and New Hampshire.
Sums up my opinion as well.
Stacey Abrams ate Georgia.
My Dad’s office at the old Missouri School of Mines was a USGS map depository. Rows of file cabinets with wide and deep drawers just maybe 3” tall or so full of maps. He had a huge table that was used for viewing aerial photograph pairs with stereoscopic viewing glasses that made features and terrain pop up out of the pictures. There was also a pantograph like device for tracing contours.
He had a wonderful old Zenith Transoceanic tube type radio he carried with him during the war when he could. We would listen to short wave broad casts at night.
He taught surveying and we would go out for star shot sessions at night with the class. Very cold sometimes but always memorable.
He also would have study sessions at our little duplex and Momma would make spaghetti red, navy beans and cornbread for the starving students. The cornbread was a new Southern thing to the northerners.
That was all in the 50’s.
Look at google AI. It places county seats with 50,000 and 100,000 population in a county 200 miles away. Google AI hallucinates places, it does not make a distinction between places in legit fiction and places in fact. There are certain place names that are not politically correct. Try finding them in google AI.
The last thing we need is AI involvement
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Bravo. Fact is anything and everything that man creates is eventually corrupted.
7-1/2” topo quad maps were the best ever made.
In the 1980s, the method of calculating latitude and longitude changed when the government went from NAD27 to NAD83 (and then NAD84). In some places, such as Texas, longitude changed by as much as 7 seconds.
The best mapping is probably LIDAR which is mapped from a plane. That made 2’ between contours available compared to 20’ for topo maps.
Satellites have nothing to do with it.
I ordered some 7 1/2 quads when back in Boy Scouts.
My town was at the corners of 4 of them.
So it took 4 to cover my local area.
My current town is on the edge of 2. Maybe I need to buy land in the middle of a quad.
I can’t help but notice that the big “I don’t know” section vaguely resembles a somewhat cubist elevation of a pig. There is some genius in that, whether intentional or not.
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