Just an Analog Guy in a Digital World

It looks like it’s my turn to stand on the soap box. Yes that’s what I think a blog is. Sure some of them might be accurate and full of great information. But for every one of them that is, there are probably twenty more written by ignorant people that think others care about their opinion. Most of them have nothing more intelligible to say then a gnat in a compost bin.


So on that note I’m sure you’re all dying to know what is I’ve decided to write this entry on. As I understand it, this is meant to be a technical blog on geographical related things. Typically that means technical information on new tools, techniques and whatnot relating to that field. I’ve decided to go in a slightly different direction, but I think it still falls loosely into that category.

We have been getting the term digital shoved down our throats for years now. It’s become a marketing tool in its own right. Digital is better is what the mass media force feeds us every day. But is it really true? Everything we are learning here in our course pretty much is digital information. A bunch of 1’s and 0’s stored on a computer. I’m writing about this question; what is this digital information and is it really better? And if it is indeed better, then what is it better than?


First year computer science in university they teach you the difference between a digital circuit and an analog circuit. It’s a relatively simple concept to understand. Digital is simply on or off, where as analog is on or off plus every point in between.




So when I was first told about this concept, my immediate reaction was, why would anyone want to deal in digital? Analog seems entirely more accurate. And it is... sort of. Take a speedometer in your car. There are two kinds; you can have a needle or a digital display. A digital display gives your speed in numeral form, maybe to the nearest tenth of a kilometre per hour. So it might tell you that you’re going 100.2 kilometres per hour on the highway. But you’ll never be able to tell if you’re going 100.23 kilometres per hour or 100.22 kilometres per hour, it will always just be 100.2. And this is the limitation of digital information. Now you might be saying, yeah but there’s no way a needle would be able to tell us that information to that degree of accuracy. But there is a point that the needle will be pointing to that will actually be 100.23 kilometres per hour, no matter how miniscule. It’s just a matter of finding a way discerning where that point is.


Now, pretend that your speedometer is a digital screen in your car with a needle drawn on it, and all the divisions just like your current car has. Maybe your speedometer goes from 0-200kph with divisions ever 5kph. You could probably accurately estimate your speed on this meter to the nearest 1kph. Now pretend you had a zoom button, and you zoomed in on the needle, now the meter represents a range of 20kph (10 kph on either side of the needle) over the entire distance that previous displayed 1-200kph. Then you zoom in again and maybe it’s 5kph over the entire meter, and again maybe 1kph. As long as the actual data remains analog you can zoom in as much as you want to get any degree of accuracy you desire.


We live in a digital age. We have access to more information each day then most people did in their entire lifetime only a mere century ago. We watch digital movies, listen to digital music, write digital blogs and read digital information. Because of digitalization we have so much of these things that we don’t know what to do with them all, literally. When you had to buy a record, take it out, put it away to keep it from getting scratched, you actually appreciated that music. You took the time to get that record out and take care of it because you really liked that music. People these days hit a button and instantly have thousands of songs coming on randomly. Do you really think they take the time to appreciate those songs as much? The more you have, the less you appreciate.


This doesn’t just apply to music. We look at information from Lidar and we have thousands upon thousands of points of data to work with. There was a time when people would have to physically go to a location, and take readings. We hammer through and process our data without even really thinking about it. But the person years ago who actually went to the location, took the readings knows what that place smelled like, what it looked like, what it felt like. That piece of data meant something to him. Of course Lidar is going to be more accurate, but is it really better?


We breath in analog, we love in analog, we live in analog. We take this planet and we try to convert it into a series of 1’s and 0’s to make it simple and turn it into something we can deal with. But ultimately it’s just a digital representation of the real thing. We just don’t have a way of accurately measuring the real thing. I think it’s good for us to examine our roots, to take care and appreciate how things used to be. Go out and take some readings manually, and perhaps even use an analog method. Then when you come back and look at that digital data again you might just have a little bit more appreciation and passion for that data.


Then again, maybe I’m just an analog guy living in a digital world.