Greg Milner > Quotes

“When you have two notes from two different performances Auto-Tuned, it sounds like a car horn. And then you add harmonies, and it starts to sound like baby seals honking." - Tom Lord-Alge on Auto-Tune”
― Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

“This is... an attempt to find some of the important fault lines in the narrative of "recorded history"--the points where people with access to the technology decided that *this* was how recordings should sound, and *this* is what it means to make a record. Ultimately, this is the story of what it means to make a recording of music--a *representation* of music--and declare it to be music itself.”
― Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

“Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead, the Columbia University robotics engineer Hod Lipson and”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“The significance of the chronometer cannot be overstated. Its effect on the world rivals that of any other invention, including the printing press and the microchip.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“We don’t have GPS on Mars,” says Tomas Martin-Mur, an engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who has done navigation work for several Mars missions, including the Mars Science Laboratory, the ambitious mission that brought the rover Curiosity to the red planet in 2012. Nor is there any GPS for the solar system, he adds, which would be a useful way to correct for the effects of solar radiation—just one of the many things that can send a spacecraft off-course. The only GPS we have is on Earth, so we’ve harnessed it for space travel.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“Houses near the tracks seem to fly by, while mountains in the distance keep pace with the train over long distances. In etak, the canoe is the train and the stars the mountains. The stars are fixed in the sky. The islands, like the houses, are in motion.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“What happened in World War II was a travesty,” Parkinson says. “There was no precision weapon delivery. Bombs were delivered helter-skelter everywhere. They were as much an element of terror as an element of actually destroying things.” The Air Force clung to this approach in Vietnam. “They were accustomed to the World War II tradition of carpet-bombing,”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“Asia and the Pacific, where the adoption rate has been almost viral, from nearly nobody in 2006 to 17 percent of the world’s installed GPS precision agriculture systems in 2015,”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“Knowledge of GPS coordinates allowed tanks and mechanized infantry to move quickly, cutting down on the risk of accidents and friendly fire, especially during the first forty-eight hours of the war, when bad weather caused visibility to drop to as little as five meters.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“The potential problem with these arrangements is that the exchange clocks, like so many extremely accurate clocks in this world, receive their time signal from GPS.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“information would be sent back to Washington, converted into punch cards, and programmed into the computer. Between seven to nine hours after liftoff, the computer would have enough data to compute the satellite’s exact orbit and velocity.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“beets were washed, sliced, and boiled to extract a syrup, which was then filtered, carbonated, combined with lime and sulfurous acid, evaporated, crystallized, and centrifuged to produce white sugar.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“They find no need and therefore have had no practice in explaining to someone like myself who starts out thinking of a voyage as a process in which everything is fixed except the voyager.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“If you knew exactly where that moving object was, at any given moment, wouldn’t that tell you the exact location of the observer on the ground?”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“By 2009, more than half of all offenders in the U.S. subject to GPS tracking were sex offenders. And sales of GPS monitors were on the rise, amounting to a third of all monitoring systems in use, with more added each year.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“Perhaps the major tenet of Pinpoint is that GPS barely exists—not just because the signal itself is so weak, but also because GPS is a remarkably diffuse concept. At root, GPS is just a radio signal, maintained and perfected by a vast infrastructure that is ultimately linked to the United States Department of Defense.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“Adorno’s dim view of popular music was rooted in a belief that the only reason people liked such music was because it was cynically tailored to mirror their world. In a capitalist society, both they and the music were “kneaded by the same modes of production.” (We can assume that, for Adorno, “it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it” was the ultimate expression of this false consciousness.) He talked about music mostly as an abstract entity, rather than as a material object, like a record, so he never quite figured out how to apply his critical theory to recordings per se. At two different points in “The Curve of the Needle,” an oddly disjointed essay that he started in 1927, at the dawn of the electrical recording era, and revised in 1965, four years before his death, he declares, “The relevance of the talking machine is debatable”—the repetition and the span of decades suggesting that he never did find a side to take in that debate. He was pretty sure he didn’t like what the phonograph represented (“stems from an era that cynically acknowledges the dominance of things over people”), but mostly reserved judgment for another day: “For the time being, Beethoven defies the gramophone.”
― Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

“GPS fleet management system—for companies with more than 350 vehicles, the adoption rate is approaching 60 percent. The worldwide fleet management industry, valued at $12 billion in 2014, is on track to be worth more than $35 billion by 2019,”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“Russia’s most prominent military scientist noted that Desert Storm showed that terms like “front lines” and “flanks,” and the idea that winning a war means occupying enemy territory, were no longer relevant.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“we are just now beginning to take stock of how GPS can affect the cognitive map. We may be witnessing the mass narrowing of the human cognitive map—as a construct (a decrease in navigational ability), but possibly also on a more literal level, an actual reordering of our neurons.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“The Transit system was fully operational by 1964.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“The United States Air Force never really wanted GPS.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds

“The general principle is called passive ranging. Imagine you and a friend who lives far away each possess highly accurate synchronized clocks. In addition to your clock, you have a live video feed showing the face of your friend’s clock. You notice, from looking at the feed, that your friend’s clock is just slightly off from yours. What does this tell you? Perhaps one of your clocks is malfunctioning. But if you can rule out that error, and know with absolute confidence that both clocks are working perfectly, this discrepancy becomes information. The lag is caused by the time required for the image of your friend’s clock, traveling at the speed of light, to reach you. The speed of light is constant and stable. Your clocks are constant and stable. The lag is directly related to the distance between you and your friend. You now have tools in place for a satellite-based passive positioning system.”
― Greg Milner, Pinpoint: How GPS is Changing Technology, Culture, and Our Minds