One Less Real Life Grid Example

 

As I write this, I am in my hotel room located in Sydney, Australia enjoying a nice laid back day.  I spent some of the day online looking for some tours so I could see more of town.  Many of the tours do not pick you up at a hotel so I was on google maps trying to see if the point of departure or return was within walking distance of my accommodations or if there was another hotel near mine so I don't have far to walk. 

Google maps are so different from their predecessors because they automatically identify where you are and you input your location.  It gives routing from where you are to where you want to go so you could go by car, bus, or walking.  In the old days, we'd use a variety of maps which used grids.  You might check out the map section in the phone book, a map, or those books used by real estate agents.  

All of these use the same process.  You look the address up in the index, go to the correct page and the focus on the part of the grid containing the street.  It is at this point, you actually start your search. For instance, you might look up the road in the phone book map section and it sends you to page 45 to look for section I-5 and that was all you did to find the location.  

I mentioned a book because a friend of mine who lived in Los Angeles had this huge book used by real estate agents, listing every road, every street, every anything so if she had to go to a new place, she could find her way there.  Every page in the book was part of a larger grid, so if you took every page out and put them together, you'd get a huge map but it didn't suggest routes at all.  Instead you were expected to flip pages forwards or backwards looking for the previous or next part of the grid, until you figured it out.

Since I've never really lived in large places, so I could get by using the map section in the phone book for local things and a regular map when I needed to cover a longer distance since it contained enough info but maps did have grids to help narrow the search on a map.  

I've been using Google Maps quite a lot recently and just the other day I realized that google doesn't use grids at all.  I suspect this is because google is set up to show your location and you choose the other location and voila, you see it all.  There is no need to search through the phone book, a map book, or a paper map because it's done for you.

I'm a bit sad about this because students no longer have to learn to read the usual maps with their grid systems.  In fact, I'm not sure many of our high school students know how to read a map or even identify a map.  It is a skill that is no longer needed but that means it is one less real life examples I've used in the past but I really can't use it anymore. 

It's like watching one of the original Superman episodes where Clark Kent would dash into a telephone booth to change into his alter ego Superman.  By the 1970's or so, the full length telephone booth had morphed into those new ones with the phone attached to a half sized one and then by the time cell phones took over, no more phone booths of any sort.  In fact, we can't even talk about cell phones or rental cars with the base rate plus so much per text or call or mile so those are out because we don't operate that way anymore.  

I'm still working on finding a replacement example but it's slow.  Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear.  Have a great day.