Hipsters.The Naval Academy stopped teaching celestial navigation in the late 1990s, deeming the hard-to-learn skill irrelevant in an era when satellites can relay a ship's location with remarkable ease and precision.
But satellites and GPS are vulnerable to cyber attack. The tools of yesteryear -- sextants, nautical almanacs, volumes of tables -- are not. With that in mind, the academy is reinstating celestial navigation into its curriculum. Wooden boxes with decades-old instruments will be dusted off and opened, and students will once again learn to chart a course by measuring the angles of stars.
As it rebuilds the program, the Navy is getting help from the US Merchant Marine Academy, which never stopped teaching celestial navigation.
Sort of non-news, since most every other maritime academy still teaches sextant navigation. As far as I know the USGC still has celestial navigation questions on their master's exam as well. You'd be an idiot to pursue any seagoing maritime career and not know how to use a sextant (I'm still learning myself).
Basically we should be training everybody to reconstruct modern civilization from scratch, starting from everything that's required to build a lathe, because once you have that, everything else kind of falls out naturally.
Fun book.
It's nonfiction? Damn.
Here's a fictional take, of sorts.
For your specific problem: http://www.amazon.com/Build-Metal-Working-Complete-Series/dp/1878087355/ref=pd_sim_14_15?ie=UTF8&refRID=13EN2YB4AQ1MY4QE2WH9
Ta. Just bought it on Kindle.
The existence of a Kindle version misses the point almost magically.
Thanks, I'm making my way through this now. Here's the reference for getting your way to a lathe: http://gingerybookstore.com/MetalWorkingShopFromScrap.html
Nice. Last I knew, the USPS also still taught celestial navigation; partly for this "emergency backup" reason, and I think partly for the "we're a priesthood" reason.
One of the classic textbooks, "The American Practical Navigator," (usually known by it's author's name "Bowditch"), written in the late 1800s, was based on the premise that if a Navy ship were so injured that a midshipman or senior seaman found himself in charge, he could read this book and figure out how to sail the ship back to port.
We've still got copies of Bowditch onboard the replica tallships that I work on. And it's still a legit nav textbook.
That also reminds me of the story of Mary Patten, the wife of a captain who navigated her husband's ship around Cape Horn after he fell ill. While she was 19 and pregnant. I guess it is conceivable that she had a copy of Bowditch's guide onboard too. http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/mary-patten-19-pregnant-takes-command-clipper-ship-1856/
We've still got copies of Bowditch onboard the replica tallships that I work on. And it's still a legit nav textbook.
That also reminds me of the story of Mary Patten, the wife of a captain who navigated her husband's ship around Cape Horn after he fell ill. While she was 19 and pregnant. I guess it is conceivable that she had a copy of Bowditch's guide onboard too. http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/mary-patten-19-pregnant-takes-command-clipper-ship-1856/
I can't read "USPS" as anything other than "United States Postal Service", so now I'm imagining just how seriously those folks take the "neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night" creed that they're ready to navigate by the stars to bring me my latest drunken ebay purchase.
I don't want to live in a world where the United States Postal Service does not teach celestial navigation to its carriers.
Just don't ask about Mrs. Cake
Lovely read. Didn't watch film
http://books.outpost10f.com/scifi/earth/the-postman.php
Yeah, I can't add enough minuses to my googling to make anything other than the postal service come up in the results, so I'd really like to know what other organization uses that abbreviation that's teaching celestial navigation.
https://www.usps.org/
You might like a mechanical clock simulation in WebGL.