NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
From: Frank Reed
Date: 2013 Feb 7, 09:38 -0800
Patrick, you wrote:
"The opinion I expressed is ugly and extreme."
A little extreme maybe, but opinions are opinions :). The magazine has disappointed you. So be it. Of course if I didn't know better, I would give you an "expert" award for Internet savvy here. You got your opinion out, raw and uncensored, and then you apologized for it --the best of both worlds! :)
And you wrote:
"It would have been enough to note that, despite the magazine's title, navigation is not its primary emphasis."
As John Karl and Greg Rudzinski have noted, they cover everything else that an "ocean mariner" might worry about. And as John suggested, this is, of course, an equally valid, though distinct, meaning of the word "navigator". A skilled and experienced mariner is a "great navigator". A person who can accurately find latitude and longitude by various various means is a "great navigator". These are the same expressions with distinctly different meanings. Also, there's another aspect to this: the problem of navigation, in the sense of position-finding, is now essentially SOLVED. The smartphones of half the people you meet walking down a street are happily determining position to within a few dozen feet without the slightest intervention or skill on the part of the users. When "Ocean Navigator" was first published, navigation was not yet a settled problem. But things have changed. The very fact that the (clumsy) article on the folklore and mythology of the constellation Orion did not mention any navigational uses of those stars at all highlights the insignificance of celestial navigation today.
-FER
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