Internal compass vs External GPS

I would like to think that over the past couple of months I have been able to get a firm grasp on navigating Rome. And in fact I would say this is true for the most visited areas around me. Want to get to one of the famous piazzas or monuments? Then I'm your guy. But as it turns out Rome has more than its fair share of side streets and small cobblestone roads. This makes finding more obscure places much more difficult.

Enter my internal compass. I think I have a pretty good internal compass. Star me off at a place, walk me down all different streets in all different directions, and more likely than not I can get us back to the starting point. Maybe I just have really good recall of a route, but generally I feel as though during the course of an experiment like this I would always be able to point in the general direction of the original starting place. This is a pretty valuable asset even when I'm not in Rome, and sometimes it is extremely valuable when I'm in a foreign city and am not as comfortable/familiar with the area.

I think I have talked about this internal compass a little bit in the past, but what I haven't talked about is my secret aid in case of emergency.

One of the really valuable things with having a "smartphone" (Thanks Tim for lending it to me!) is that I have GPS built in through Google maps on my phone. The GPS on this phone can calculate my position by using information to the cell towers the phone is contacting. Because it knows I am connected to a certain cell tower, and within range of two others, it can triangulate my position from this information, something that a phone is always doing in the background, tracking your location for better service and a stronger signal, and putting it to more use for the user. It then uses my internet signal though 3G to download the maps from google maps. The result is pretty incredible. On a normal basis I can get the GPS to locate me to within a hundred meters of where I'm standing. Sometimes it is more accurate and others it has a wider range of my location. The phone puts a pinpoint on the map as to where it thinks I am, and then places a radius around that blip based on the accuracy of the calculations at that point. This can range from 50 meters to 500 meters, which is a wide difference, especially when you're talking about narrow side streets that all intersect and run very close to each other.

It is a good emergency tool, and paired together with my internal compass it tends to be pretty efficient. I'm not one to use maps often, and using the GPS feels like cheating every once and a while, but most of the time it is justified because of the setup of Rome. Sure, streets have names here, but sometimes the names are harder to figure out than in the States. Finding a street sign is one issue, which are normally not signs but plaques built into the sides of buildings on corners. Normally one corner out of 4 at minimum will have the sign for that street. When you can find a street sign though, sometimes you'll find that a street has several names. One may be the official name, while others could be local or historical names for the street. It is normally the official name of the street on the plaque, but not always the same name that end up on maps, in tour books, or in other listings of a place, say for example a restaurant. When we were trying to find Tony's restaurant the other night, we had problems trying to figure out what the cross streets were. It turns out we were standing in a Piazza, unnamed on a map, which overrode the individual street names with labeling them on the plaques. After a combination of GPS and my internal sense of direction, we were able to find the restaurant. I feel like this is the perfect blend of external and internal instincts. The GPS couldn't help tell me where to go, because street names were all different and it only had a rough sense of where I was located, but it was able to tell me about where I was, for example how close to the river we were, and using this and my sense of direction, knowing where the restaurant should be in relation to everything else, we were able to find it in no time.

So yes, GPS systems are very useful, and being an endorser of all things technology, I find them to be vital instrument in our lives and in the future, but lets not forget or lose our sense of internal direction. A GPS can only get you so far.