February 27, 2025 • 48 mins
In a tribute to the late founder of HowStuffWorks Marshall Brain, we chose one of his great articles. Learn all about how your phone knows how to get you around without bumping into stuff or running people over in this episode. Thank you, Marshall.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. Jerry's at Cabin in the
woods even and this is Stuff you Should Know podcasting
from the future.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That's right, And we are going to take a couple
of minutes here at the head of the show to
pay tribute to HowStuffWorks dot com founder Marshall Brain, who
passed away last November at the age of sixty three.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, he is the guy who started at all and
it's really hard to understate the impact that that guy
had on our lives.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yeah, just about Marshall. He was an electrical engineer, had
a Bachelor of Science. He was a longtime professor he State,
and in nineteen ninety eight he founded as a hobby
HowStuffWorks dot Com because he wanted to. He had a
very pure goal, which was to make complex things understandable
(01:13):
and relatable to everyday people. And that is you know,
that's what we still do. We were hired as writers there.
I never met Marshall personally. I think I saw him
come through the office a couple of times early on,
but I never had the pleasure of actually sitting down
with the guy.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I met him a couple of times. He was a
good guy. He I think some of his first articles.
I think the first one might have.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Been like how air conditioning works?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, remember Scooby Doo. We did an episode on Scooby
Doo based on one of his articles.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Was that Marshall?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah totally Oh interesting, But yeah, he was a very
good guy.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
And without him, I can tell you I would not
be podcasting, And if I were, it probably wouldn't be
a very good podcast because you and I would have
never met, and I would have never met. Like the
fact that Marshall came along and founded How Stuff Works
set my destiny in a lot of ways. So I'm
really grateful to him for that.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Yeah, for both of us. He was also an author.
One of his books is called The Doomsday Book, colon
the science behind Humanity's Greatest Threats, something that Josh has
particular interest in.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, he's a transhumanist, down with Nick Bostrom and all
those guys.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah. So Marshall was also a TV host. He eventually
was the director of NC State's Engineering Opportunities Program, which
helped mentor aspiring inventors, and Marshall was survived by his wife, Leanne,
his four kids, David, Arena, Johnny, and Ian, and their
(02:50):
dog Summer. And it was just really sad to hear
the news because, like you said, Marshall wouldn't for him,
we wouldn't be here now. And we'd like to think
we're still carrying on his tradition of making complex things accessible.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I like to think that too. Yeah, So here's to you, Marshall,
rest in peace. And as tribute, we chose an article,
one of the few ones that we hadn't recorded, that
that Marshall wrote originally on GPS. And this is like
bread and butter Marshal brain stuff. There's engineering, there's science.
(03:23):
There's some more engineering, uh huh, there's figuring things out
with circles and diameters and stuff like that, like straight
up Marshal stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah, classic Marshal, classic house stuff works. And even though
our show is kind of grown and more, if it's
fun to go back and do these every now and then.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah, for sure. So let's get started, shall we.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
All Right, GPS tells you where you are the end,
There you go.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
That's that's word for word Marshall's article.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, it's actually sounds intimidating, but it's really not at all.
It's a pretty simple process, believe it or not.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, surprisingly, But what it is.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Overall, GPS is a as Marshall wrote, a space based
radio navigation system that technically GPS is the one that
the US government owns. If you had lived in another country,
it's not called GPS, it's called a GNSS.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, Global Navigation Satellite system is the generic term. And
GPS has become like the Kleenex of global navigation satellite systems,
like it's the proprietary eponym.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, exactly. But you know, that's what the system is
that tells you where you are when you take out
your little smartphone and say where in the world am
I or how in the world do I get somewhere?
If you want to get somewhere, they got to know
where you are at that moment, and that's why you
can do that twenty four seven.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah, And GPS is owned and operated by the American government,
and it's paid for by the American taxpayers. But it's
used worldwide. I think out of eight points something billion
people on the planet today, six billion of them use
GPS every day. So it's America's gift, I think, is
what I'm trying to say, because if anything, that's what
(05:11):
America is known for. It's like creating things and giving
it away to the rest of the.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
World for free.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, well, we'll see what happens with that. You never know,
but right now, that's the current situation. They do this
with satellites at least twenty four. Usually there's more than thirty.
And if wherever you are on Earth, if you had
you know, super super long vision, you could look up
(05:39):
and see four of these bad boys with your eyeballs
because you got to have those four to tell you
where you are for sure.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Technically you just need three, but let's not get into
that right now. Okay, So those satellites are up a
medium Earth orbit about eleven thousand miles above Earth. They
circle it constantly. They're not geostationary, so they circle the
Earth and they rise and set I guess every twelve hours,
so twice a day. They're like the tides basically, and
(06:12):
the GPS satellites are just one component. There's three components.
There's a satellite component, there's the control component, which is
on the ground, the Space Force runs GPS, so they're
constantly tracking, monitoring, telling satellites what to do, like really
bossing them around. And then the third component is you,
the person using GPS, or more technically your receiver that
(06:35):
is telling you where you are in the world.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Yeah, that's the important part, because I've tried. I've gone
out there without a phone and just shouted up where
am I nothing?
Speaker 3 (06:43):
They're like, get a phone.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
One of the cool things about GPS is this was
kind of roughly figured out a long time before we
even had satellites. There was a doctor, doctor Ivan Getting,
who is a physicist and American, who basically said, hey,
you know what, you could find out someone's three D
coordinates if you use radio signals and just calculated the
time it takes for those signals from different sources to
(07:10):
reach a single point on Earth and that's GPS basically.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
And the people around Getting, especially his greatest critics, were like, oh, yeah, yeah,
how are you going to do that? There's nothing up
in space, you jerk, How are you going.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
To do it?
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Exactly?
Speaker 2 (07:25):
And he said, just wait, And they sat around and
they waited, I don't know how long. They waited for
a while, and they finally went home, and then a
couple of years after that, the Soviets came to the
rescue in a certain weird way. They launched Sputnik, and
in America, in the United States, it was not a
happy time. They called it the Sputnik crisis because basically
(07:47):
at the time, we thought the Soviets were just like
some backwater backwards country, and all of a sudden they
were the first ones to launch a satellite into space,
and it took us by surprise. But doctor Getting's theory
was able to be put into use because American scientists
figured out that you could track Sputnik because it's radio signals.
(08:10):
I don't know quite how to put it. Let's say
they engaged in the Doppler effect. They dabbled in Doppler
so that when the satellite was moving away from you,
the frequency that reached you here on Earth was different
than the frequency when the satellite was moving towards you,
or when the satellite was just stationed above you. So
(08:30):
they figured out that you can track satellites based on
these radio signals, and that gave the initial rise to GPS,
which is you need to track the satellites to know
where they are because that is an essential piece of
information for GPS, and that kind of led to people saying, like, okay,
let's get getting's idea off the ground.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Literally, yeah, literally, off the ground and into space. Sputnik
was October fifty seven, and a couple of years later
we said, oh, yeah, we'll see your Sputnik and we'll
raise it five satellites or I guess raise it four
for a total of five satellites.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Sure, all aces, that's right.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
And this was nineteen sixty I'm sorry. In nineteen sixty
seven they had really precise clocks on board these satellites.
And then just five years, six years after that, in
seventy three, Navstar was formed and that is the system,
the program that is GPS basically. And then we said,
all right, now, it's just gonna take this about twenty
(09:29):
years to figure all this out.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, nineteen ninety five, the whole thing was finally operational.
They just kept shooting up satellites and tinkering with it
and get it going. And I wish we would have
kept the name Navstar. I think it's a little cooler
than GPS, but I don't know, maybe it sounds a
little more hostile or assertive. So GPS is probably okay.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
You want to talk about assertive. What about space.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Force Space forces? I don't know, it's space Forces. That's
the name.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Sounds like a movie. It does, like a mel Brooks movie.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
It us.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
But so we called the GPS and there were two
versions that they released at the same time. One was
L one. That bandwidth was used for civilian purposes, everything
from well, if you weren't in the military, let's say
you used L one, If you were in the military
used L two.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
It's much more.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Precise out of the gate. But the entire reason that
this went from what I think was originally a military
project intended just for use by the military, to one
where everybody who had a GPS receiver could use it
for free, was actually based on a tragedy that occurred
in nineteen I think eighty three with Korean Airlines Flight
(10:45):
zero zero seven.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, that was a flight intended to go from New
York to Seoul. To get there, they were flying over
Alaska and still today we don't really know why, but
it veered off course about two hundred miles into Soviet airspace.
This was not a great area of Soviet airspace to
be near because it was near some secret military installations,
(11:08):
and so they scrambled a couple of fighter jets, Soviets
did miggs I reckon, and they tried to contact the plane,
could not get in touch, and then down the plane
with a missile and killed everybody, two hundred and sixty
nine people. I remember this. I was twelve. Oh yeah, yeah,
I mean, you know, of course I didn't understand something
like that fully at twelve, but I remember it being,
(11:31):
you know, all across the news.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Well, having been raised in the United States and being twelve.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
In nineteen eighty three during the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I bet you were so mad at the Rusky Comis
for doing that.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Oh man, oh man. There was probably a song on
FM radio that you know, encapsulated this. Oh I'm sure
like that a DJ made, you know, not a real song,
right right, There were so many It used to be
such a thing.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, it was. Weirdly, it was a thing. But I'll
bet it was the survivor that sang the song.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah. Probably. What I don't fully get now. What I
do get is that, you know, airplanes and air airlines
have GPS on their airplanes, so they don't do this now.
But why did that like broaden it to the public
at large, Like, couldn't they have just said, all right,
it's for the military and for the FAA.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Maybe they just thought that there were other potential tragedies
that they couldn't foresee that could be gotcha.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
If there's one thing that I'm not it's in Ronald
Reagan's head, right, I just don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Uh. So, we have one GPS system, which is kind
of a problem. We don't have a backup yet, which
you know, we'll talk a little bit about that more later.
But there is more than one GPS because it's not
like China and Russia are like, hey, we'll just you know,
use your GPS when we want to bomb something.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
We want to shoot a missile at you.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, exactly. So China and Russia and the EU all
have their own GPS, and I think they all have
backups even and we don't.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Right, it just takes too many floppies to back up
our GPS.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So we're just.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Going without right now. Yeah, you want to take a break.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah, let's take a break. I think it's a fantastic setup.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Okay, and when we come back, we're gonna really wing
it by trying to explain how GPS works.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
All right, So if you want to geo locate something
or somebody you're gonna need and you're on Earth, you know,
you can just use longitude and latitude and that'll do
a pretty good job.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
GPS is like, hey, what if you want to find
out where you are relative to C level, we can
do that and you can't longitude and latitude. Yeah, and
GPS does that with microwaves. They decided not to use
radio waves for reasons we'll talk about, but they use
microwaves sent down to Earth.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
They do.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And so these microwaves I've seen both, Chuck, I've seen
that they're constantly beaming transmissions like basically uninterrupted from the satellites,
or that they do it like on a repeating pattern.
Regardless however this information arrives, it contains a few really
important pieces of information. And one thing we should point
(14:44):
out apparently there's a misunderstanding that a lot of people
think when you open up like your location services or
whatever on your phone, your GPS antenna ping satellites, that's
not the case. It passively listens for GPS, the four
GPS satellites broadcasting constantly or intermittently, and it picks them
up right, and so the information it gets is the time.
(15:06):
And this is a really important component. And we've talked
before about atomic clocks and just how ridiculously precise they are,
and on a GPS satellite there's multiple atomic clocks that
are keeping time together and to make sure that they
stay synchronized. And then the satellite sends its own location.
(15:26):
Apparently they figure out their location using celestial landmarks like quasars,
so the satellite knows where it is at all times,
so it can tell you or your GPS receiver. And
then there's a satellite ID that says I'm me and
that is good.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Enough, that's right, And that is in the form of
a pseudorandom code. And one of the cool parts about
that is it it's going to tell you like, yeah,
it's coming from this satellite. Here's my pseudorandom code. But
it also uses us a slightly differently all frequency, so
(16:03):
the frequencies don't jam one another. So all these satellites,
because the frequencies are just slightly varied, can all talk
to each other because you don't want satellites up there
jamming each other.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
No, but they can also talk to you too, virtually
at the same time, if not at the same time,
because don't forget, you're getting information from four different satellites
to figure out where you are. So you don't want
to get one from one wait a couple of minutes,
get one from the other. You want them all to
be coming in basically at the same time, and by
slightly altering their frequencies, they can all arrive.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Right. And this is one final bit of key key
information here. All these satellites, great, they're beaming microwaves down. Fine,
If we didn't know how fast those microwaves traveled, then
none of that would do us any good. We have
to know exactly how fast that stuff travels in order
to measure a distance, and in this case, we know
(16:58):
that electromatic wave microwaves travel at speed of light one
hundred and eighty six two hundred and eighty two miles
per second.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Right, So now they have all the basic information. I
think this is why you were saying at the outset.
This is actually kind of a simple.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Setup. GPS is if you take it.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So if that satellite sends you an information piece of
like a signal, and it says I sent this exactly
at one forty five pm and it arrives at one
forty five pm and one second. And you know that
microwaves travel at the speed of light, you can use
that information to calculate the distance between you and the satellite. Okay,
(17:41):
when you know that the satellite is located here in space,
and then you figure out your distance from the satellite,
you start to have your first piece of information about
where you are. Because now you know where you are
relative to one satellite. That's not enough information to tell
you where you are on Earth, but it's a real
good start.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
That's right. And you might be thinking like, yeah, but
what about stuff getting in the way, Like if this
stuff is supposed to be exact, then you know, what
about a tall building or what about you know, weather
in space like that can throw all this off, right, guys,
And that's true. But they have a very pretty brilliant
(18:22):
workaround for that. One method is called differential GPS, And
they have these antenna on Earth that are that are
locked in. They're stationary, They're not going anywhere. We know
exactly where they are. They're called known points for that reason,
and since we know exactly where those are, they're receiving
these transmissions from GPS, and so they can calculate whether
(18:45):
or not the location is off and that you know,
if this thing is locked in place, but the calculation
coming from the GPS is off by a little bit, Hey,
it must have gone through some thick shrubbery or bounced
off a building or something. But either way, we're locked
in place. So we know exactly what that should be,
and thus we'll know what that discrepancy is and we
(19:06):
can account for that.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
So, once that that nome point has that discrepancy, it
sends that out, that information out to all the GPS
receivers in the area, so they can use it to
adjust their own GPS readings that they're getting from those
satellites that were slightly off. But they didn't have any
way to remedy it. Now they do because the nome
point is like, hey, so like be as off? I like, right,
(19:31):
nano seconds, don't tell it, but yeah, I just wanted
to let you know.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Yeah, and hey, listen, I won't tell everybody. I'll just
adjust it on my end and they'll never know that.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
You screwed up, right, And also there's something in your teeth, right,
Oh it's cool.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Gross cale is so gross.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
You don't like gail.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
I can't. I have to choke it down. And gross
is the wrong word. It's just too harsh.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, yeah, too much kale, like a salad with only kale,
or like God forbid you eat a bag of kale
chips like this, you would die.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
You wouldn't be able to breathe any longer.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
It's too much at once. Yes, oh boy, all right,
so now we get to try lateration. Take it away, friend.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Oh no, you're the trilateration expert between us. Let's tell
everybody what happened.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Well, first of all, let me explain that try lateration
is not the same as triangulation, because we're not talking
about ankles. We're talking about distance. And somewhere in there
is the key of where I was screwing up. Because
you had sent me this and very elegant, sort of
simple to explain.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Way, Hey, this is lot, this is Marshall.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Okay, I'll have Marshall brain. It was explained about, you know,
like a Venn diagram, three circles overlapping and then the
point where they overlap is where you are. We'll explain
that more thoroughly. But I was just drawing three random circles,
and I'm like, three random circles don't always intersect it
a point, right, Like they might overlap in an area,
and so the center of that area maybe is what
(21:03):
we're talking about. But then I realize you can't just
draw three random circles and expect them to have a
tangent point because they don't always. Right in the case
of GPS, I guess it's just a very exact measurement
from one place to another, and in that case they
will intersect.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right, Okay, Okay, So I think you should also tell
everybody that when you sent me a picture of your
three circles with.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
The like the part where they overlap, they all overlap.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
You would put a point in there re morote bingo
with an exclamation point.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
You're like, case, I.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Thought I really figured out something here.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
I think you may have discovered something else that we're
not aware of yet, So I don't.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Someone will tell us just put it to this.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
No, I think like you might have just intended like
a new way of calculating things.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
No, I'm sure there's a name for it, and some
science person's gonna say, oh, chuck, that's just blank.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
I wish they would because I don't know either. But
I like, it's off to you because man, I can't
tell you how many circles. I guess you probably drew
just trying to get this to work. And I don't
blame you. I was smart and was like, there's madness there.
I'm just going to try to understand this as best
I can. I'm not going to try it myself.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
I got a freaking compass at one point because you
were like, it's because the circles are willy nilly, and
I was like, okay, I'll draw them perfect.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Okay, So well, let's talk about trilateration because in theory,
I guess it's very simple. And the way that Marshall
described it was, let's say you're lost. You're in the
United States, and you ask somebody where you are, and
that person says you are six hundred and twenty five
miles from Boise, Idaho.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And you say, thanks a lot. That doesn't tell me much, right.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
You actually push them down as they're walking away.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
After you get away, you're chased by the police, but
you make it down an alley and hide behind some
garbage cans as they pass by. You have a good idea,
you go buy a man and you spread out your map.
Maybe you buy a compass as well, I'll a chuck,
and you draw a circle around Boise, Idaho, using Boise
as the center point that is six hundred and twenty
(23:13):
five miles in diameter, or at least represents that by scale, right,
And you're like, Okay, I am somewhere on this circle
that has a diameter of six hundred and twenty five
miles around Boise. Kind of helpful, it's a little bit
narrowed it down, but I need more information. So you
go find somebody else and you say, hey, do you
(23:34):
know where I am?
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Is this where I could come in?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Hey, well I'm not going to tell you that, but
how about this. You're six hundred and ninety miles from Minneapolis.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Okay, So that's great.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
At least they didn't repeat the Boise thing, right, because
if they said that, you'd just be like, man, that
didn't help it all. But now you know where you
are from Minneapolis, and you can do the same thing
with Minneapolis using that as the center point of a circle.
You draw one a circle with a radius of six
hundred ninety miles around Minneapolis. Now you're really close because
what you'll find is the circle around Boise and the
(24:09):
circle around Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
They overlap, right, Yeah, you get little football in the middle.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, it's like a ven diagram. And if you look
at a ven diagram where those two circles overlap, there's
two points where they intersect, right where they cross each other.
Those lines cross each other. And because you are six
hundred and twenty five miles from Boise and six hundred
and ninety miles from Minneapolis, you are somewhere where those
(24:39):
two circles overlap. With those two points, one of those
is right, the other is off by hundreds of miles,
So you still need to narrow.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
It down right.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
So you're like, is there one more wiseacre in this
town who will tell me? By not telling me where
I am where I am right? And so you go
into this final the only other gas station in town. Guys,
Someone told me how six to twenty five from Boise
didn't help much. Someone else said six' ninety from Minneapolis.
Please just tell me where I am. They said, oh, oh,
(25:07):
you're six hundred and fifty miles from Tucson val.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Do you just trash the place at this point.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah, you just lay waste. You find the nearest broom,
and you just start knocking everything.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Off the shelves. My collector beer steins. All right.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
So now you got three circles though, And this is
where I got super tripped up because I was like,
oh cool, let me draw this out. And I drew
it out, and I was like, these don't intersect it
at a common point, right, But if you're using exact
GPS calculations distance from a satellite or in this case,
points on a map, then that's that's you know exactly
(25:44):
where you are because it's going to intersect it at
only one place. At three points.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Yeah, all three circles will overlap with one another, so
they intersected two different points. Each circle intersects with the
other at two points, but all three of them will
only intersect it one single point. And you have just
trilater related your position. Now you know where you are.
And Marshall said, this is Denver, by the way, that's
where you are is Denver. Because I think if we
(26:11):
hadn't have included that, some people would have been really upset.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, but you knew you're in Denver because you can't
catch your breath and it smells like weed everywhere.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
That's right, And now you have to figure out what
to do even though you're dead.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, and liberals and conservatives are smashed together and everyone's like,
what kind of state is this?
Speaker 3 (26:27):
It is? It's crazy like that, isn't it?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah? I love Colorado. I think it's interesting that way.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
It's like all of these shows we've done in Denver.
It's like a wedding, like split.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Down the middle.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
The people on one half of the room all have
guns out. The other half are all playing Hackey Sack. Right,
it's an interesting place.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
And one guy goes, hey, you ever try to shoot
a Hackey sack? Admit air watch this kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Okay, So let's trilater elation. That's two D trilater relation,
because what you've done has found your If you were
a flat point and the Earth was flat, which it's not,
that's all we would need to do. But the Earth
is a sphere. It's round, and so what GPS uses
is three D trilateralation, which rather than flat circles, it
uses spheres. And when the three or four usually could
(27:19):
use four satellites where those spheares all intersect the one
point that's where you are, because now you not only
know where you are longitudinal latitudinally, you also know where
you are at altitudinally.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
My friend, I hate to break it to you, but
you did the old Josh Clark insert an extra consonant.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Thing, trilateralizational.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
It's trilateration, I know.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
And I've been wanting to say trilateralization for so long.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Well you aren't even taking it out. You were saying trilateralation.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Okay, all right, So.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Now that's three ways.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
So trilateration, trilateration.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
That sounds made up like space force, I know, all right,
trilateration isation, yeah, elie station.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
So that's it.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
That's how you figure out well, I should say, that's
how your GPS receiver figures that out. It has it
knows where those three or four satellites are because they
tell it where they are. It figures out the distance
between you the in your receiver for each of those four,
and it tells it, oh, here's where I am, because
here's where all those that information intersects.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Right, And I think you mentioned the spheres while I
was obsessing about the extra l right, Yes.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
I did, Okay, And there's a really pretty image out there.
I can't remember what website I found it on, but
if you search like how GPS trilateration works, it will
come up, I'm sure. But it shows like the four
spheres created by the satellites and they're all in four
different primary colors and it's so pretty.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
I saw it.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, I understand that there are three primary colors, but
whatever the fourth one is, it's basically a primary color
as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Okay, should we take our second break?
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:09):
I think so, Chuck. We earned it with that trilater
relation trilateration explanation exploration.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
We'll be right back, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
So there's one other thing, kind of like a little sidebar.
I felt what we should talk about. If you've ever
tried to figure out where you are and your phone's like,
turn on Wi Fi and we'll get a better reading.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
I've never understood that until you explained it.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
So what it's trying to do is it's prompting you
to turn on your Wi Fi based positioning system. And
that is based essentially on the same thing that doctor
getting was getting at, which is you can use information
from different sources in comparing those sources to figuring out
(30:20):
where you are, and so rather than using satellite information
this it bases it on the known strengths of different
Wi Fi network towers, antenna and so, depending on how
strong one signal is compared to where you are, in
addition to comparing it to another signal, and another signal
(30:43):
and another signal. It's like, oh, you're you're in Denver, right.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
You don't know how dumb I am.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
I don't think you're dumb, and I know you're not dumb,
but let's hear what.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
You have to say.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
I say this out loud at the risk of losing
listeners that might be new listeners are like, I can't
listen to this guy.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Oh this is really dumb.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Up until said yesterday, whenever my phone or my car
or something said that, you know, turn on your Wi
Fi to improve accuracy of your location. It's like, I'm
not near my house. What is this thing asking me
to do. I'm not near my WiFi.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
You weren't like, you're not the boss of me.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
No, I was just that's pretty dumb.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
It's not everywhere. It doesn't have to be your house
Wi Fi.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
So yes, that's one way it does it, and it
does it in your house too, but that's because your
router is a big blabbermouth and tells everybody where you are.
So I not get it.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
It's like they don't know I'm not near my house.
Why is it asking me to turn on my wife?
Speaker 3 (31:41):
So stupid?
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Oh boy? All right, So, speaking of the opposite of stupid,
your smartphone? How accurate are those things? When GPS first
started they said, and this was again like ninety five ish,
they said it's gonna be accurate to within one hundred
meters ninety five percent of the time, which at the
time was like, hey, that's not bad at all, Like
(32:04):
that gets me in the in the neighborhood of where
I want to be. They've gotten much much better now
they say two meters within two meters of six point
six feet, but it's really closer than that. They did
some measuring in twenty twenty one and the global average
across all users was about just a little more than
two feet. And you know again that that depends on
(32:26):
a lot of things. If it's got tall buildings in
the way, space, weather, atmospheric conditions, Apparently, like a really
dense like jungle canopy or a thick shrubbery can actually
degrade the accuracy of that signal.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, you got a hickory tree. Well ts for you
because GPS isn't gonna work.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Is that a thick tree, thick canopy?
Speaker 3 (32:46):
I would, Yeah, I think so. I mean it's a
known shade tree.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
No a, oh, it's a uh, it's a it's a KST.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Put it on the If it could broadcast information, it
would also be a known point.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
So there's a there's a couple of other things that
can mess with your GPS signal coming from the satellite
because remember I said that they navigate celestially. Well, if
the Earth's position itself relative to the satellite, satellite can
know where it is. But if the Earth shifts a
little bit, like the magnetic core slashes around just enough
(33:25):
that the Earth kind of wobbles a little bit, or
if the c currents are particularly strong, it can like
slow the rotation of the Earth. Those things, I mean,
just the tiniest, tiniest changes can alter the accuracy of
the signal that it gets. But that's just the signal
that they're like, we're going to get you within six feet.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
They don't guarantee.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Your receiver, and your receiver typically adds a little bit
of inaccuracy. I think five meters is usually what you
what you're going to get from like your average dumb gpsceiver.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah, and I get. I mean, it's amazing we're here
because if you're like GPS to just say this is good.
If you're five feet away from the restaurant or your
friend and you don't see them, that's on you.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Yeah, just look up.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
So we're getting better though, you know.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Now, No, it's getting I mean I imagine they're going
to have it. I think March twenty four. If you're
an ideal, if it's clear skies, you're out in the
middle of the desert or something, they can they can
be as accurate as thirty centimeters.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Which is five double A batteries end to end. We're
going to get even better than that, though, chuck, because
right now there's some really good GPS antenna that are
starting to pop up in smartphones, and those those are
dual band, dual band, dual frequency receivers. One of those
two and that uses the L one, the standard civilian
(34:56):
GPS band that has been around since the beginning but
has gotten better over time. And it also uses the
new wiz Bang L five and this is like the
next generation of GPS. It's not widespread enough yet. There's
not enough satellites out there that are L five for
an intended to just rely on that. But when you
put L one and L five together, it gets pretty good.
(35:19):
The thing is is you might ask yourself, like, why
would you need to get like within centimeters of the
restaurant that you're going to. It doesn't make sense. Well,
some people use GPS for more than just finding the
restaurant that they're going to.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yeah, that's right. And your parents and grandparents might be
using their garments still, so just have patients with them.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
I think that garment was actually one of the original
GPS devices.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, and it's still being used in certain cars in
certain people's families.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Are those things even supported any longer?
Speaker 1 (35:56):
I don't know. Man. It's pretty funny though. It's like
looking at at a MySpace web page or something when
you look at it. Oh, Ben, it is, But yes,
I took us off task. You were talking about other
things that this is used for a lot we talked
about landing airplanes. That's pretty important. Accuracy is pretty important,
maybe not down to the centimeter, but if you want
(36:19):
to track soil moisture, you can do that via GPS.
If you want to measure the size of a glacier
and whether it's shrinking or moving, you can do that
very very accurately, and not just sort of ballpark things anymore.
Migration patterns. If you want to see where that school
of whales is headed and how they know when they
(36:39):
get there, and how far there are from where they started,
you can do that with great accuracy.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Also things use it to basically stay in position, like
modern agricultural equipment like harvesters, they go in a straight
line by themselves thanks to really precise GPS. Same as
self driving cars. Oh sure, yeah. Like apparently it's just
grown so ubiquitous and so reliable that contractors use it,
(37:07):
like like digital blueprints will have GPS coordinates for like
a nail or an electrical outlet or something like that,
so you can know exactly where that thing's gonna go,
Which I mean that's got to cut down on construction
costs and time dramatically.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Yeah, I thought the thing on tunneling was kind of cool.
I never really thought about that. But if you're tunneling
through two sides of a mountain to ideally meet in
the middle and have a one long tunnel, that's not
one tunnel with a little zigzag in the middle because
they were off by a little bit. You can do
that down to the centimeter, you know, or thirty centimeters rather.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, a tunnel that goes through a mountain with like
a hairpin turn.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
In the middle area.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
That sounds great.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
And if you put all this stuff together, all these
different uses for GPS, which again the American taxpayers give
to the world for free, it generated I think in
twenty twenty ninety four billion dollars worth of stuff, right,
all of that receivers that were sold, all the tunnels
that were drilled correctly, Like, all that stuff came to
(38:10):
generate ninety four billion dollars and in the next five
years it's expected to hit almost three hundred billion. So
it's a big deal. Like, we rely on GPS a lot,
and so because we rely on something this much, and
because like you said, we don't have a backup of
GPS in particular.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
It can be pretty delicate.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
I guess you could say to put it delicately, because
it can get screwed up pretty bad, pretty easily, and
in fact, on a very local level, you or I
could go screw up somebody's GPS for fun anytime we wanted.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, that was a little disconcerting to learn. I thought like, oh, well,
surely this thing has just some weird, robust government shield
that can be hacked, right, And that's not true. In
fact the military, I mean it's part of military, just
regular operations to jam GPS for another country, they're planes
(39:12):
and drones, or to spoof it is when you send it,
you know, jam it and make it nonoperable. But you're like, oh,
here's some fake coordinates that you're going to think are real, right, Yeah,
like they do that all the time. Countries do that
to us all the time. But like you said, any
schmow that's got three hundred bucks can get a software
defined radio and figure out how to use it and
jam somebody's GPS. And so your neighbor's walking around wondering
(39:35):
where that restaurant is.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
I know, they're like a Friday's, right, I want to
go to Bennigan's. Yeah, so you were talking about spoofing. Apparently,
Iran in twenty nineteen, just for kicks, spoofed British cargo
ships GPS and told that it was in international waters
(39:57):
when really they had drifted into Iranian waters. So Ron
was like, Oh, you're our ship now, and you're our
crew now. And they held the whole thing for ten
weeks just by being jerks.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
Apparently.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
I can't figure out what the point would have been
for that, other than to flex.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, that is a little odd. I'm sure somebody knows,
or maybe it was a flex.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah, and the kids still say that, right, they flex.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Oh you're asking the wrong guy.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Okay, well let's say they do.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
I mean, Ruby says things I don't understand, and I
just don't even ask.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
I know, I know my niece Mila was schooling a
son slang and I'm like, there's no context for that.
It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I'm trying to think
of one example. I know I'm gonna get wrong.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
No cap no, something like skibbity Oh uh, Skibbity's toilet.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yes, and I.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Understand, yes it's a web video or whatever, but the
videos itself make no sense whatsoever too.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yeah. Hey, you know all we did in the eighties
was short and awesome, to OUs and unass.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
That our big contribution that was.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
As sophisticated as we got. I don't know about the
skippity stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah, And I don't mean to complain. I mean the
generation like builds on the mask, comes up with its
own stuff. I'm happy about that. I just don't understand it.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Well, that's the point I think.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
You know, I think you're right, actually, and I'm kind
of hurt by that.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, it's it's you know, kids and teens come up
with their own language, so adults don't know what the
heck we're talking about, and they can laugh behind our backs. Yeah,
we did the same thing.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
We said that's very unaus and our parents were like,
what are they saying?
Speaker 3 (41:35):
I can't make heads or tails of it.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Airlines can get jammed. There was a study that found
intentional jamming of airlines was a problem in three regions
only three. More than seventy thousand flights were jammed between
February and August of twenty twenty two. And that you know,
once you jam it up, you can't reset it. Like
that plain Lands and then the unjamming happens.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, you have to turn the whole thing off and
reset everything. You can't just reset the GPS antenna.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
And they need to work out all that stuff, don't
you think.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
They definitely do. But something about those flights being jammed,
Those are civilian flights being jammed by bad actors and
sometimes governments and militaries. So what you're trying to do,
essentially is to crash a plane full of people.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Like that's your shot. It's not like a really.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Dedicated shot at it, but that's pretty much the goal
of doing that to an airliner.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yeah, and you have no idea how much I put
my hand over my mouth when you said bad actors,
and I almost shouted out a few names of actors.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Who are you gonna name?
Speaker 1 (42:43):
No, I can't because you know, you never know people
might listen to this. Where I'm sensitive to hurting people's
feelings now here in my fifties.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
I think that's great, man, Well text me some names
then I will. Okay.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
There's another thing that spoofing, I believe I think they
spoofing for it is to cheat at games like Pokemon Go. Yeah,
where you can fake where your own GPS coordinates are
to say like, oh, I'm at the I don't know
Pikachu's layer or something like that. So give me the
(43:15):
egg that Pikachu's guarding, which I can turn into like
some ski ball tickets and get a comb.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Or skibbity toilet. I hope that doesn't mean something dirty, right.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
It means nothing from what Mela's told me, Like, it's
just basically a thing you say. Okay, I hope I'm
not outing Mela is uncool though.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Well, I'm just glad that you have someone in your
life that's a down with that kind of stuff, because
it's pretty vital these days.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
I don't know if it's vital that I know that
skibbity toilet exists.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
But maybe not that. But Skibbity toilet has its own
Wikipedia entry.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Oh, I believe it. Have you seen the videos though
that it's based on.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
No, But I see a screenshot now and their MESMERI
it doesn't pull me in.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
You should watch a second or two of it. You
don't need to watch much. You get the gist of
it really quick. But it's like like you'll find that
your mouth is open, not in awe, but just because
you're like you're glazed over right. So, like you said,
the United States is not unaware of the vulnerability. That
was what I was saying. It was in a delicate position.
(44:25):
It's vulnerable. It's a very vulnerable system, and you know,
like globally and also locally. So they are taking steps
to update it and that is going to come in
the form of adding more and more L five satellites.
But for now, if you want to be a little shocked,
(44:46):
taking into consideration how dependent we are a GPS, the
average age of a GPS, specifically the United States is
Global Positioning System satellites is thirteen years.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Yeah, that is real the old for a satellite.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
But Chuck tell him how old the oldest satellite in
the constellation of GPS satellites is.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Uh, that would be twenty seven years old, is that right?
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Yeah? Yes, that thing has circopania. Oh I guess that's
it for GPS. Huh.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah. This was more fun than I thought. And you
know what, I'm glad we had some fun and had
some laughs because it feels like a lighter tribute for Marshall. Yeah,
something else for sure.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Hopefully we made you proud, Marshall, and thanks again for everything.
And since we said thanks to Marshall Brain and I
think it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
I'm gonna call this forget Rice. How about some peace
and love? Hey, guys, A big fan of the show.
I love listening when training for marathons and loved the
recent marathon episodes. While listening to the history of refrigeration,
the Rice method for managing a musculo skeletal injury was mentioned.
Did you know guys that in twenty twenty the medical
(46:07):
world throughout the Rice method and transitioned it to Peace
and Love.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
I don't even remember mentioning that, let alone knowing that
did bit.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
I think I probably did so for peace and love.
We have protection avoid activities at cospain for two to
three days elevation. The A is avoid anti inflammatories because
apparently that reduces healing, and you should avoid ice too.
Speaker 2 (46:33):
I have heard that that anti inflammatories are actually not
very good for you.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
I just I never take those anyway, because I don't
really need to.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
But yeah, lucky, some people really need them.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
I know. I'm sure where I was a so down
to c compression e education, which is avoid a necessary
passive treatments. Your body will heal, so I guess educate yourself.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
They were like, you really need an e here.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Yeah, yeah basically, and then we and is not spelled out,
but love is load. Let your pain be your guide, optimism,
condition your brain, vascularization, pain free cardio and exercise, restore
mobility through active approach. And Sarah says this is a lot.
(47:22):
I hope people can learn to avoid ice and anti
inflammatories for optimal recovery. But it's having a hard time
catching on.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
And I imagine why.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
That is from Sarah pt bird Nerd Hollingsworth and she's
a bird nerd and loves our bird episodes.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
That's awesome. Thanks Sarah, way to spread the good word.
I know there's a lot of good advice and information
in there, but it's just going to take months of
digesting that information to try to figure out those acronyms. Yeah,
if you want to be like Sarah and put something
on our radar that we weren't aware of before, we
love that kind of thing. You can send it to
us via email like Sarah did to Stuff Podcasts at
(48:00):
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too. Jerry's at Cabin in the
woods even and this is Stuff you Should Know podcasting
from the future.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
That's right, And we are going to take a couple
of minutes here at the head of the show to
pay tribute to HowStuffWorks dot com founder Marshall Brain, who
passed away last November at the age of sixty three.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Yeah, he is the guy who started at all and
it's really hard to understate the impact that that guy
had on our lives.
Speaker 1 (00:52):
Yeah, just about Marshall. He was an electrical engineer, had
a Bachelor of Science. He was a longtime professor he State,
and in nineteen ninety eight he founded as a hobby
HowStuffWorks dot Com because he wanted to. He had a
very pure goal, which was to make complex things understandable
(01:13):
and relatable to everyday people. And that is you know,
that's what we still do. We were hired as writers there.
I never met Marshall personally. I think I saw him
come through the office a couple of times early on,
but I never had the pleasure of actually sitting down
with the guy.
Speaker 2 (01:29):
I met him a couple of times. He was a
good guy. He I think some of his first articles.
I think the first one might have.
Speaker 3 (01:37):
Been like how air conditioning works?
Speaker 2 (01:39):
Yeah, remember Scooby Doo. We did an episode on Scooby
Doo based on one of his articles.
Speaker 1 (01:44):
Was that Marshall?
Speaker 3 (01:45):
Yeah totally Oh interesting, But yeah, he was a very
good guy.
Speaker 2 (01:48):
And without him, I can tell you I would not
be podcasting, And if I were, it probably wouldn't be
a very good podcast because you and I would have
never met, and I would have never met. Like the
fact that Marshall came along and founded How Stuff Works
set my destiny in a lot of ways. So I'm
really grateful to him for that.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Yeah, for both of us. He was also an author.
One of his books is called The Doomsday Book, colon
the science behind Humanity's Greatest Threats, something that Josh has
particular interest in.
Speaker 3 (02:23):
Yeah for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:24):
Yeah, he's a transhumanist, down with Nick Bostrom and all
those guys.
Speaker 1 (02:29):
Yeah. So Marshall was also a TV host. He eventually
was the director of NC State's Engineering Opportunities Program, which
helped mentor aspiring inventors, and Marshall was survived by his wife, Leanne,
his four kids, David, Arena, Johnny, and Ian, and their
(02:50):
dog Summer. And it was just really sad to hear
the news because, like you said, Marshall wouldn't for him,
we wouldn't be here now. And we'd like to think
we're still carrying on his tradition of making complex things accessible.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
I like to think that too. Yeah, So here's to you, Marshall,
rest in peace. And as tribute, we chose an article,
one of the few ones that we hadn't recorded, that
that Marshall wrote originally on GPS. And this is like
bread and butter Marshal brain stuff. There's engineering, there's science.
(03:23):
There's some more engineering, uh huh, there's figuring things out
with circles and diameters and stuff like that, like straight
up Marshal stuff.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
Yeah, classic Marshal, classic house stuff works. And even though
our show is kind of grown and more, if it's
fun to go back and do these every now and then.
Speaker 3 (03:40):
Yeah, for sure. So let's get started, shall we.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
All Right, GPS tells you where you are the end,
There you go.
Speaker 3 (03:46):
That's that's word for word Marshall's article.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, it's actually sounds intimidating, but it's really not at all.
It's a pretty simple process, believe it or not.
Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah, surprisingly, But what it is.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
Overall, GPS is a as Marshall wrote, a space based
radio navigation system that technically GPS is the one that
the US government owns. If you had lived in another country,
it's not called GPS, it's called a GNSS.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
Yeah, Global Navigation Satellite system is the generic term. And
GPS has become like the Kleenex of global navigation satellite systems,
like it's the proprietary eponym.
Speaker 1 (04:32):
Yeah, exactly. But you know, that's what the system is
that tells you where you are when you take out
your little smartphone and say where in the world am
I or how in the world do I get somewhere?
If you want to get somewhere, they got to know
where you are at that moment, and that's why you
can do that twenty four seven.
Speaker 2 (04:49):
Yeah, And GPS is owned and operated by the American government,
and it's paid for by the American taxpayers. But it's
used worldwide. I think out of eight points something billion
people on the planet today, six billion of them use
GPS every day. So it's America's gift, I think, is
what I'm trying to say, because if anything, that's what
(05:11):
America is known for. It's like creating things and giving
it away to the rest of the.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
World for free.
Speaker 1 (05:16):
Yeah, well, we'll see what happens with that. You never know,
but right now, that's the current situation. They do this
with satellites at least twenty four. Usually there's more than thirty.
And if wherever you are on Earth, if you had
you know, super super long vision, you could look up
(05:39):
and see four of these bad boys with your eyeballs
because you got to have those four to tell you
where you are for sure.
Speaker 2 (05:50):
Technically you just need three, but let's not get into
that right now. Okay, So those satellites are up a
medium Earth orbit about eleven thousand miles above Earth. They
circle it constantly. They're not geostationary, so they circle the
Earth and they rise and set I guess every twelve hours,
so twice a day. They're like the tides basically, and
(06:12):
the GPS satellites are just one component. There's three components.
There's a satellite component, there's the control component, which is
on the ground, the Space Force runs GPS, so they're
constantly tracking, monitoring, telling satellites what to do, like really
bossing them around. And then the third component is you,
the person using GPS, or more technically your receiver that
(06:35):
is telling you where you are in the world.
Speaker 1 (06:37):
Yeah, that's the important part, because I've tried. I've gone
out there without a phone and just shouted up where
am I nothing?
Speaker 3 (06:43):
They're like, get a phone.
Speaker 1 (06:47):
One of the cool things about GPS is this was
kind of roughly figured out a long time before we
even had satellites. There was a doctor, doctor Ivan Getting,
who is a physicist and American, who basically said, hey,
you know what, you could find out someone's three D
coordinates if you use radio signals and just calculated the
time it takes for those signals from different sources to
(07:10):
reach a single point on Earth and that's GPS basically.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (07:16):
And the people around Getting, especially his greatest critics, were like, oh, yeah, yeah,
how are you going to do that? There's nothing up
in space, you jerk, How are you going.
Speaker 3 (07:23):
To do it?
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Exactly?
Speaker 2 (07:25):
And he said, just wait, And they sat around and
they waited, I don't know how long. They waited for
a while, and they finally went home, and then a
couple of years after that, the Soviets came to the
rescue in a certain weird way. They launched Sputnik, and
in America, in the United States, it was not a
happy time. They called it the Sputnik crisis because basically
(07:47):
at the time, we thought the Soviets were just like
some backwater backwards country, and all of a sudden they
were the first ones to launch a satellite into space,
and it took us by surprise. But doctor Getting's theory
was able to be put into use because American scientists
figured out that you could track Sputnik because it's radio signals.
(08:10):
I don't know quite how to put it. Let's say
they engaged in the Doppler effect. They dabbled in Doppler
so that when the satellite was moving away from you,
the frequency that reached you here on Earth was different
than the frequency when the satellite was moving towards you,
or when the satellite was just stationed above you. So
(08:30):
they figured out that you can track satellites based on
these radio signals, and that gave the initial rise to GPS,
which is you need to track the satellites to know
where they are because that is an essential piece of
information for GPS, and that kind of led to people saying, like, okay,
let's get getting's idea off the ground.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
Literally, yeah, literally, off the ground and into space. Sputnik
was October fifty seven, and a couple of years later
we said, oh, yeah, we'll see your Sputnik and we'll
raise it five satellites or I guess raise it four
for a total of five satellites.
Speaker 3 (09:07):
Sure, all aces, that's right.
Speaker 1 (09:09):
And this was nineteen sixty I'm sorry. In nineteen sixty
seven they had really precise clocks on board these satellites.
And then just five years, six years after that, in
seventy three, Navstar was formed and that is the system,
the program that is GPS basically. And then we said,
all right, now, it's just gonna take this about twenty
(09:29):
years to figure all this out.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
Yeah, nineteen ninety five, the whole thing was finally operational.
They just kept shooting up satellites and tinkering with it
and get it going. And I wish we would have
kept the name Navstar. I think it's a little cooler
than GPS, but I don't know, maybe it sounds a
little more hostile or assertive. So GPS is probably okay.
Speaker 1 (09:49):
You want to talk about assertive. What about space.
Speaker 3 (09:51):
Force Space forces? I don't know, it's space Forces. That's
the name.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Sounds like a movie. It does, like a mel Brooks movie.
Speaker 3 (09:59):
It us.
Speaker 2 (10:02):
But so we called the GPS and there were two
versions that they released at the same time. One was
L one. That bandwidth was used for civilian purposes, everything
from well, if you weren't in the military, let's say
you used L one, If you were in the military
used L two.
Speaker 3 (10:21):
It's much more.
Speaker 2 (10:22):
Precise out of the gate. But the entire reason that
this went from what I think was originally a military
project intended just for use by the military, to one
where everybody who had a GPS receiver could use it
for free, was actually based on a tragedy that occurred
in nineteen I think eighty three with Korean Airlines Flight
(10:45):
zero zero seven.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Yeah, that was a flight intended to go from New
York to Seoul. To get there, they were flying over
Alaska and still today we don't really know why, but
it veered off course about two hundred miles into Soviet airspace.
This was not a great area of Soviet airspace to
be near because it was near some secret military installations,
(11:08):
and so they scrambled a couple of fighter jets, Soviets
did miggs I reckon, and they tried to contact the plane,
could not get in touch, and then down the plane
with a missile and killed everybody, two hundred and sixty
nine people. I remember this. I was twelve. Oh yeah, yeah,
I mean, you know, of course I didn't understand something
like that fully at twelve, but I remember it being,
(11:31):
you know, all across the news.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
Well, having been raised in the United States and being twelve.
Speaker 3 (11:38):
In nineteen eighty three during the Cold War.
Speaker 2 (11:40):
I bet you were so mad at the Rusky Comis
for doing that.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Oh man, oh man. There was probably a song on
FM radio that you know, encapsulated this. Oh I'm sure
like that a DJ made, you know, not a real song,
right right, There were so many It used to be
such a thing.
Speaker 2 (11:57):
Yeah, it was. Weirdly, it was a thing. But I'll
bet it was the survivor that sang the song.
Speaker 1 (12:02):
Yeah. Probably. What I don't fully get now. What I
do get is that, you know, airplanes and air airlines
have GPS on their airplanes, so they don't do this now.
But why did that like broaden it to the public
at large, Like, couldn't they have just said, all right,
it's for the military and for the FAA.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:23):
Maybe they just thought that there were other potential tragedies
that they couldn't foresee that could be gotcha.
Speaker 3 (12:30):
I don't know. I don't know.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
If there's one thing that I'm not it's in Ronald
Reagan's head, right, I just don't know.
Speaker 1 (12:41):
Uh. So, we have one GPS system, which is kind
of a problem. We don't have a backup yet, which
you know, we'll talk a little bit about that more later.
But there is more than one GPS because it's not
like China and Russia are like, hey, we'll just you know,
use your GPS when we want to bomb something.
Speaker 3 (13:00):
We want to shoot a missile at you.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Yeah, exactly. So China and Russia and the EU all
have their own GPS, and I think they all have
backups even and we don't.
Speaker 2 (13:08):
Right, it just takes too many floppies to back up
our GPS.
Speaker 3 (13:11):
So we're just.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Going without right now. Yeah, you want to take a break.
Speaker 1 (13:16):
Yeah, let's take a break. I think it's a fantastic setup.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
Okay, and when we come back, we're gonna really wing
it by trying to explain how GPS works.
Speaker 1 (13:51):
All right, So if you want to geo locate something
or somebody you're gonna need and you're on Earth, you know,
you can just use longitude and latitude and that'll do
a pretty good job.
Speaker 3 (14:03):
Sure.
Speaker 1 (14:04):
GPS is like, hey, what if you want to find
out where you are relative to C level, we can
do that and you can't longitude and latitude. Yeah, and
GPS does that with microwaves. They decided not to use
radio waves for reasons we'll talk about, but they use
microwaves sent down to Earth.
Speaker 3 (14:22):
They do.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And so these microwaves I've seen both, Chuck, I've seen
that they're constantly beaming transmissions like basically uninterrupted from the satellites,
or that they do it like on a repeating pattern.
Regardless however this information arrives, it contains a few really
important pieces of information. And one thing we should point
(14:44):
out apparently there's a misunderstanding that a lot of people
think when you open up like your location services or
whatever on your phone, your GPS antenna ping satellites, that's
not the case. It passively listens for GPS, the four
GPS satellites broadcasting constantly or intermittently, and it picks them
up right, and so the information it gets is the time.
(15:06):
And this is a really important component. And we've talked
before about atomic clocks and just how ridiculously precise they are,
and on a GPS satellite there's multiple atomic clocks that
are keeping time together and to make sure that they
stay synchronized. And then the satellite sends its own location.
(15:26):
Apparently they figure out their location using celestial landmarks like quasars,
so the satellite knows where it is at all times,
so it can tell you or your GPS receiver. And
then there's a satellite ID that says I'm me and
that is good.
Speaker 1 (15:43):
Enough, that's right, And that is in the form of
a pseudorandom code. And one of the cool parts about
that is it it's going to tell you like, yeah,
it's coming from this satellite. Here's my pseudorandom code. But
it also uses us a slightly differently all frequency, so
(16:03):
the frequencies don't jam one another. So all these satellites,
because the frequencies are just slightly varied, can all talk
to each other because you don't want satellites up there
jamming each other.
Speaker 2 (16:12):
No, but they can also talk to you too, virtually
at the same time, if not at the same time,
because don't forget, you're getting information from four different satellites
to figure out where you are. So you don't want
to get one from one wait a couple of minutes,
get one from the other. You want them all to
be coming in basically at the same time, and by
slightly altering their frequencies, they can all arrive.
Speaker 1 (16:35):
Right. And this is one final bit of key key
information here. All these satellites, great, they're beaming microwaves down. Fine,
If we didn't know how fast those microwaves traveled, then
none of that would do us any good. We have
to know exactly how fast that stuff travels in order
to measure a distance, and in this case, we know
(16:58):
that electromatic wave microwaves travel at speed of light one
hundred and eighty six two hundred and eighty two miles
per second.
Speaker 2 (17:06):
Right, So now they have all the basic information. I
think this is why you were saying at the outset.
This is actually kind of a simple.
Speaker 3 (17:14):
Setup. GPS is if you take it.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
So if that satellite sends you an information piece of
like a signal, and it says I sent this exactly
at one forty five pm and it arrives at one
forty five pm and one second. And you know that
microwaves travel at the speed of light, you can use
that information to calculate the distance between you and the satellite. Okay,
(17:41):
when you know that the satellite is located here in space,
and then you figure out your distance from the satellite,
you start to have your first piece of information about
where you are. Because now you know where you are
relative to one satellite. That's not enough information to tell
you where you are on Earth, but it's a real
good start.
Speaker 1 (18:01):
That's right. And you might be thinking like, yeah, but
what about stuff getting in the way, Like if this
stuff is supposed to be exact, then you know, what
about a tall building or what about you know, weather
in space like that can throw all this off, right, guys,
And that's true. But they have a very pretty brilliant
(18:22):
workaround for that. One method is called differential GPS, And
they have these antenna on Earth that are that are
locked in. They're stationary, They're not going anywhere. We know
exactly where they are. They're called known points for that reason,
and since we know exactly where those are, they're receiving
these transmissions from GPS, and so they can calculate whether
(18:45):
or not the location is off and that you know,
if this thing is locked in place, but the calculation
coming from the GPS is off by a little bit, Hey,
it must have gone through some thick shrubbery or bounced
off a building or something. But either way, we're locked
in place. So we know exactly what that should be,
and thus we'll know what that discrepancy is and we
(19:06):
can account for that.
Speaker 3 (19:07):
Right.
Speaker 2 (19:07):
So, once that that nome point has that discrepancy, it
sends that out, that information out to all the GPS
receivers in the area, so they can use it to
adjust their own GPS readings that they're getting from those
satellites that were slightly off. But they didn't have any
way to remedy it. Now they do because the nome
point is like, hey, so like be as off? I like, right,
(19:31):
nano seconds, don't tell it, but yeah, I just wanted
to let you know.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Yeah, and hey, listen, I won't tell everybody. I'll just
adjust it on my end and they'll never know that.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
You screwed up, right, And also there's something in your teeth, right,
Oh it's cool.
Speaker 3 (19:48):
Gross cale is so gross.
Speaker 1 (19:51):
You don't like gail.
Speaker 3 (19:52):
I can't. I have to choke it down. And gross
is the wrong word. It's just too harsh.
Speaker 1 (19:58):
Yeah, yeah, too much kale, like a salad with only kale,
or like God forbid you eat a bag of kale
chips like this, you would die.
Speaker 3 (20:07):
You wouldn't be able to breathe any longer.
Speaker 1 (20:09):
It's too much at once. Yes, oh boy, all right,
so now we get to try lateration. Take it away, friend.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
Oh no, you're the trilateration expert between us. Let's tell
everybody what happened.
Speaker 1 (20:23):
Well, first of all, let me explain that try lateration
is not the same as triangulation, because we're not talking
about ankles. We're talking about distance. And somewhere in there
is the key of where I was screwing up. Because
you had sent me this and very elegant, sort of
simple to explain.
Speaker 3 (20:39):
Way, Hey, this is lot, this is Marshall.
Speaker 1 (20:41):
Okay, I'll have Marshall brain. It was explained about, you know,
like a Venn diagram, three circles overlapping and then the
point where they overlap is where you are. We'll explain
that more thoroughly. But I was just drawing three random circles,
and I'm like, three random circles don't always intersect it
a point, right, Like they might overlap in an area,
and so the center of that area maybe is what
(21:03):
we're talking about. But then I realize you can't just
draw three random circles and expect them to have a
tangent point because they don't always. Right in the case
of GPS, I guess it's just a very exact measurement
from one place to another, and in that case they
will intersect.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
Right, Okay, Okay, So I think you should also tell
everybody that when you sent me a picture of your
three circles with.
Speaker 3 (21:27):
The like the part where they overlap, they all overlap.
Speaker 2 (21:31):
You would put a point in there re morote bingo
with an exclamation point.
Speaker 3 (21:35):
You're like, case, I.
Speaker 1 (21:38):
Thought I really figured out something here.
Speaker 2 (21:40):
I think you may have discovered something else that we're
not aware of yet, So I don't.
Speaker 1 (21:45):
Someone will tell us just put it to this.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
No, I think like you might have just intended like
a new way of calculating things.
Speaker 1 (21:52):
No, I'm sure there's a name for it, and some
science person's gonna say, oh, chuck, that's just blank.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
Oh.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
I wish they would because I don't know either. But
I like, it's off to you because man, I can't
tell you how many circles. I guess you probably drew
just trying to get this to work. And I don't
blame you. I was smart and was like, there's madness there.
I'm just going to try to understand this as best
I can. I'm not going to try it myself.
Speaker 1 (22:15):
I got a freaking compass at one point because you
were like, it's because the circles are willy nilly, and
I was like, okay, I'll draw them perfect.
Speaker 2 (22:22):
Okay, So well, let's talk about trilateration because in theory,
I guess it's very simple. And the way that Marshall
described it was, let's say you're lost. You're in the
United States, and you ask somebody where you are, and
that person says you are six hundred and twenty five
miles from Boise, Idaho.
Speaker 1 (22:42):
And you say, thanks a lot. That doesn't tell me much, right.
Speaker 3 (22:46):
You actually push them down as they're walking away.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Yeah, but.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
After you get away, you're chased by the police, but
you make it down an alley and hide behind some
garbage cans as they pass by. You have a good idea,
you go buy a man and you spread out your map.
Maybe you buy a compass as well, I'll a chuck,
and you draw a circle around Boise, Idaho, using Boise
as the center point that is six hundred and twenty
(23:13):
five miles in diameter, or at least represents that by scale, right,
And you're like, Okay, I am somewhere on this circle
that has a diameter of six hundred and twenty five
miles around Boise. Kind of helpful, it's a little bit
narrowed it down, but I need more information. So you
go find somebody else and you say, hey, do you
(23:34):
know where I am?
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:37):
Is this where I could come in?
Speaker 3 (23:39):
Yeah? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (23:40):
Hey, well I'm not going to tell you that, but
how about this. You're six hundred and ninety miles from Minneapolis.
Speaker 3 (23:44):
Okay, So that's great.
Speaker 2 (23:46):
At least they didn't repeat the Boise thing, right, because
if they said that, you'd just be like, man, that
didn't help it all. But now you know where you
are from Minneapolis, and you can do the same thing
with Minneapolis using that as the center point of a circle.
You draw one a circle with a radius of six
hundred ninety miles around Minneapolis. Now you're really close because
what you'll find is the circle around Boise and the
(24:09):
circle around Minneapolis.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
They overlap, right, Yeah, you get little football in the middle.
Speaker 2 (24:14):
Yeah, it's like a ven diagram. And if you look
at a ven diagram where those two circles overlap, there's
two points where they intersect, right where they cross each other.
Those lines cross each other. And because you are six
hundred and twenty five miles from Boise and six hundred
and ninety miles from Minneapolis, you are somewhere where those
(24:39):
two circles overlap. With those two points, one of those
is right, the other is off by hundreds of miles,
So you still need to narrow.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
It down right.
Speaker 1 (24:47):
So you're like, is there one more wiseacre in this
town who will tell me? By not telling me where
I am where I am right? And so you go
into this final the only other gas station in town. Guys,
Someone told me how six to twenty five from Boise
didn't help much. Someone else said six' ninety from Minneapolis.
Please just tell me where I am. They said, oh, oh,
(25:07):
you're six hundred and fifty miles from Tucson val.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Do you just trash the place at this point.
Speaker 1 (25:13):
Yeah, you just lay waste. You find the nearest broom,
and you just start knocking everything.
Speaker 3 (25:17):
Off the shelves. My collector beer steins. All right.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
So now you got three circles though, And this is
where I got super tripped up because I was like,
oh cool, let me draw this out. And I drew
it out, and I was like, these don't intersect it
at a common point, right, But if you're using exact
GPS calculations distance from a satellite or in this case,
points on a map, then that's that's you know exactly
(25:44):
where you are because it's going to intersect it at
only one place. At three points.
Speaker 2 (25:48):
Yeah, all three circles will overlap with one another, so
they intersected two different points. Each circle intersects with the
other at two points, but all three of them will
only intersect it one single point. And you have just
trilater related your position. Now you know where you are.
And Marshall said, this is Denver, by the way, that's
where you are is Denver. Because I think if we
(26:11):
hadn't have included that, some people would have been really upset.
Speaker 1 (26:14):
Yeah, but you knew you're in Denver because you can't
catch your breath and it smells like weed everywhere.
Speaker 3 (26:18):
That's right, And now you have to figure out what
to do even though you're dead.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Yeah, and liberals and conservatives are smashed together and everyone's like,
what kind of state is this?
Speaker 3 (26:27):
It is? It's crazy like that, isn't it?
Speaker 1 (26:30):
Yeah? I love Colorado. I think it's interesting that way.
Speaker 2 (26:33):
It's like all of these shows we've done in Denver.
It's like a wedding, like split.
Speaker 3 (26:38):
Down the middle.
Speaker 2 (26:39):
The people on one half of the room all have
guns out. The other half are all playing Hackey Sack. Right,
it's an interesting place.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
And one guy goes, hey, you ever try to shoot
a Hackey sack? Admit air watch this kind of fun.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
Okay, So let's trilater elation. That's two D trilater relation,
because what you've done has found your If you were
a flat point and the Earth was flat, which it's not,
that's all we would need to do. But the Earth
is a sphere. It's round, and so what GPS uses
is three D trilateralation, which rather than flat circles, it
uses spheres. And when the three or four usually could
(27:19):
use four satellites where those spheares all intersect the one
point that's where you are, because now you not only
know where you are longitudinal latitudinally, you also know where
you are at altitudinally.
Speaker 1 (27:33):
My friend, I hate to break it to you, but
you did the old Josh Clark insert an extra consonant.
Speaker 3 (27:39):
Thing, trilateralizational.
Speaker 1 (27:42):
It's trilateration, I know.
Speaker 2 (27:44):
And I've been wanting to say trilateralization for so long.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
Well you aren't even taking it out. You were saying trilateralation.
Speaker 3 (27:53):
Okay, all right, So.
Speaker 1 (27:54):
Now that's three ways.
Speaker 3 (27:56):
So trilateration, trilateration.
Speaker 2 (27:59):
That sounds made up like space force, I know, all right,
trilateration isation, yeah, elie station.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
So that's it.
Speaker 2 (28:10):
That's how you figure out well, I should say, that's
how your GPS receiver figures that out. It has it
knows where those three or four satellites are because they
tell it where they are. It figures out the distance
between you the in your receiver for each of those four,
and it tells it, oh, here's where I am, because
here's where all those that information intersects.
Speaker 1 (28:31):
Right, And I think you mentioned the spheres while I
was obsessing about the extra l right, Yes.
Speaker 2 (28:36):
I did, Okay, And there's a really pretty image out there.
I can't remember what website I found it on, but
if you search like how GPS trilateration works, it will
come up, I'm sure. But it shows like the four
spheres created by the satellites and they're all in four
different primary colors and it's so pretty.
Speaker 3 (28:56):
I saw it.
Speaker 2 (28:56):
Yeah, I understand that there are three primary colors, but
whatever the fourth one is, it's basically a primary color
as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Okay, should we take our second break?
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (29:09):
I think so, Chuck. We earned it with that trilater
relation trilateration explanation exploration.
Speaker 3 (29:16):
We'll be right back, okay, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (29:45):
So there's one other thing, kind of like a little sidebar.
I felt what we should talk about. If you've ever
tried to figure out where you are and your phone's like,
turn on Wi Fi and we'll get a better reading.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
I've never understood that until you explained it.
Speaker 2 (30:00):
So what it's trying to do is it's prompting you
to turn on your Wi Fi based positioning system. And
that is based essentially on the same thing that doctor
getting was getting at, which is you can use information
from different sources in comparing those sources to figuring out
(30:20):
where you are, and so rather than using satellite information
this it bases it on the known strengths of different
Wi Fi network towers, antenna and so, depending on how
strong one signal is compared to where you are, in
addition to comparing it to another signal, and another signal
(30:43):
and another signal. It's like, oh, you're you're in Denver, right.
Speaker 1 (30:48):
You don't know how dumb I am.
Speaker 2 (30:50):
I don't think you're dumb, and I know you're not dumb,
but let's hear what.
Speaker 3 (30:53):
You have to say.
Speaker 1 (30:54):
I say this out loud at the risk of losing
listeners that might be new listeners are like, I can't
listen to this guy.
Speaker 3 (30:58):
Oh this is really dumb.
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Up until said yesterday, whenever my phone or my car
or something said that, you know, turn on your Wi
Fi to improve accuracy of your location. It's like, I'm
not near my house. What is this thing asking me
to do. I'm not near my WiFi.
Speaker 3 (31:14):
You weren't like, you're not the boss of me.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
No, I was just that's pretty dumb.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (31:21):
It's not everywhere. It doesn't have to be your house
Wi Fi.
Speaker 2 (31:25):
So yes, that's one way it does it, and it
does it in your house too, but that's because your
router is a big blabbermouth and tells everybody where you are.
So I not get it.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
It's like they don't know I'm not near my house.
Why is it asking me to turn on my wife?
Speaker 3 (31:41):
So stupid?
Speaker 1 (31:42):
Oh boy? All right, So, speaking of the opposite of stupid,
your smartphone? How accurate are those things? When GPS first
started they said, and this was again like ninety five ish,
they said it's gonna be accurate to within one hundred
meters ninety five percent of the time, which at the
time was like, hey, that's not bad at all, Like
(32:04):
that gets me in the in the neighborhood of where
I want to be. They've gotten much much better now
they say two meters within two meters of six point
six feet, but it's really closer than that. They did
some measuring in twenty twenty one and the global average
across all users was about just a little more than
two feet. And you know again that that depends on
(32:26):
a lot of things. If it's got tall buildings in
the way, space, weather, atmospheric conditions, Apparently, like a really
dense like jungle canopy or a thick shrubbery can actually
degrade the accuracy of that signal.
Speaker 2 (32:38):
Yeah, you got a hickory tree. Well ts for you
because GPS isn't gonna work.
Speaker 1 (32:43):
Is that a thick tree, thick canopy?
Speaker 3 (32:46):
I would, Yeah, I think so. I mean it's a
known shade tree.
Speaker 1 (32:50):
No a, oh, it's a uh, it's a it's a KST.
Speaker 3 (32:55):
That's right.
Speaker 2 (32:56):
Put it on the If it could broadcast information, it
would also be a known point.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (33:02):
So there's a there's a couple of other things that
can mess with your GPS signal coming from the satellite
because remember I said that they navigate celestially. Well, if
the Earth's position itself relative to the satellite, satellite can
know where it is. But if the Earth shifts a
little bit, like the magnetic core slashes around just enough
(33:25):
that the Earth kind of wobbles a little bit, or
if the c currents are particularly strong, it can like
slow the rotation of the Earth. Those things, I mean,
just the tiniest, tiniest changes can alter the accuracy of
the signal that it gets. But that's just the signal
that they're like, we're going to get you within six feet.
Speaker 3 (33:46):
They don't guarantee.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
Your receiver, and your receiver typically adds a little bit
of inaccuracy. I think five meters is usually what you
what you're going to get from like your average dumb gpsceiver.
Speaker 1 (34:02):
Yeah, and I get. I mean, it's amazing we're here
because if you're like GPS to just say this is good.
If you're five feet away from the restaurant or your
friend and you don't see them, that's on you.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Yeah, just look up.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
Yeah.
Speaker 3 (34:16):
So we're getting better though, you know.
Speaker 1 (34:19):
Now, No, it's getting I mean I imagine they're going
to have it. I think March twenty four. If you're
an ideal, if it's clear skies, you're out in the
middle of the desert or something, they can they can
be as accurate as thirty centimeters.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Which is five double A batteries end to end. We're
going to get even better than that, though, chuck, because
right now there's some really good GPS antenna that are
starting to pop up in smartphones, and those those are
dual band, dual band, dual frequency receivers. One of those
two and that uses the L one, the standard civilian
(34:56):
GPS band that has been around since the beginning but
has gotten better over time. And it also uses the
new wiz Bang L five and this is like the
next generation of GPS. It's not widespread enough yet. There's
not enough satellites out there that are L five for
an intended to just rely on that. But when you
put L one and L five together, it gets pretty good.
(35:19):
The thing is is you might ask yourself, like, why
would you need to get like within centimeters of the
restaurant that you're going to. It doesn't make sense. Well,
some people use GPS for more than just finding the
restaurant that they're going to.
Speaker 1 (35:36):
Yeah, that's right. And your parents and grandparents might be
using their garments still, so just have patients with them.
Speaker 2 (35:44):
I think that garment was actually one of the original
GPS devices.
Speaker 1 (35:48):
Yeah, and it's still being used in certain cars in
certain people's families.
Speaker 3 (35:53):
Are those things even supported any longer?
Speaker 1 (35:56):
I don't know. Man. It's pretty funny though. It's like
looking at at a MySpace web page or something when
you look at it. Oh, Ben, it is, But yes,
I took us off task. You were talking about other
things that this is used for a lot we talked
about landing airplanes. That's pretty important. Accuracy is pretty important,
maybe not down to the centimeter, but if you want
(36:19):
to track soil moisture, you can do that via GPS.
If you want to measure the size of a glacier
and whether it's shrinking or moving, you can do that
very very accurately, and not just sort of ballpark things anymore.
Migration patterns. If you want to see where that school
of whales is headed and how they know when they
(36:39):
get there, and how far there are from where they started,
you can do that with great accuracy.
Speaker 3 (36:44):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (36:44):
Also things use it to basically stay in position, like
modern agricultural equipment like harvesters, they go in a straight
line by themselves thanks to really precise GPS. Same as
self driving cars. Oh sure, yeah. Like apparently it's just
grown so ubiquitous and so reliable that contractors use it,
(37:07):
like like digital blueprints will have GPS coordinates for like
a nail or an electrical outlet or something like that,
so you can know exactly where that thing's gonna go,
Which I mean that's got to cut down on construction
costs and time dramatically.
Speaker 1 (37:25):
Yeah, I thought the thing on tunneling was kind of cool.
I never really thought about that. But if you're tunneling
through two sides of a mountain to ideally meet in
the middle and have a one long tunnel, that's not
one tunnel with a little zigzag in the middle because
they were off by a little bit. You can do
that down to the centimeter, you know, or thirty centimeters rather.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah, a tunnel that goes through a mountain with like
a hairpin turn.
Speaker 3 (37:47):
In the middle area.
Speaker 1 (37:48):
That sounds great.
Speaker 2 (37:49):
And if you put all this stuff together, all these
different uses for GPS, which again the American taxpayers give
to the world for free, it generated I think in
twenty twenty ninety four billion dollars worth of stuff, right,
all of that receivers that were sold, all the tunnels
that were drilled correctly, Like, all that stuff came to
(38:10):
generate ninety four billion dollars and in the next five
years it's expected to hit almost three hundred billion. So
it's a big deal. Like, we rely on GPS a lot,
and so because we rely on something this much, and
because like you said, we don't have a backup of
GPS in particular.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
It can be pretty delicate.
Speaker 2 (38:36):
I guess you could say to put it delicately, because
it can get screwed up pretty bad, pretty easily, and
in fact, on a very local level, you or I
could go screw up somebody's GPS for fun anytime we wanted.
Speaker 1 (38:50):
Yeah, that was a little disconcerting to learn. I thought like, oh, well,
surely this thing has just some weird, robust government shield
that can be hacked, right, And that's not true. In
fact the military, I mean it's part of military, just
regular operations to jam GPS for another country, they're planes
(39:12):
and drones, or to spoof it is when you send it,
you know, jam it and make it nonoperable. But you're like, oh,
here's some fake coordinates that you're going to think are real, right, Yeah,
like they do that all the time. Countries do that
to us all the time. But like you said, any
schmow that's got three hundred bucks can get a software
defined radio and figure out how to use it and
jam somebody's GPS. And so your neighbor's walking around wondering
(39:35):
where that restaurant is.
Speaker 2 (39:37):
I know, they're like a Friday's, right, I want to
go to Bennigan's. Yeah, so you were talking about spoofing. Apparently,
Iran in twenty nineteen, just for kicks, spoofed British cargo
ships GPS and told that it was in international waters
(39:57):
when really they had drifted into Iranian waters. So Ron
was like, Oh, you're our ship now, and you're our
crew now. And they held the whole thing for ten
weeks just by being jerks.
Speaker 3 (40:06):
Apparently.
Speaker 2 (40:07):
I can't figure out what the point would have been
for that, other than to flex.
Speaker 1 (40:12):
Yeah, that is a little odd. I'm sure somebody knows,
or maybe it was a flex.
Speaker 3 (40:17):
Yeah, and the kids still say that, right, they flex.
Speaker 1 (40:20):
Oh you're asking the wrong guy.
Speaker 3 (40:22):
Okay, well let's say they do.
Speaker 1 (40:24):
I mean, Ruby says things I don't understand, and I
just don't even ask.
Speaker 2 (40:27):
I know, I know my niece Mila was schooling a
son slang and I'm like, there's no context for that.
It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I'm trying to think
of one example. I know I'm gonna get wrong.
Speaker 1 (40:41):
No cap no, something like skibbity Oh uh, Skibbity's toilet.
Speaker 3 (40:48):
Yes, and I.
Speaker 2 (40:48):
Understand, yes it's a web video or whatever, but the
videos itself make no sense whatsoever too.
Speaker 1 (40:56):
Yeah. Hey, you know all we did in the eighties
was short and awesome, to OUs and unass.
Speaker 3 (41:01):
That our big contribution that was.
Speaker 1 (41:03):
As sophisticated as we got. I don't know about the
skippity stuff.
Speaker 2 (41:06):
Yeah, And I don't mean to complain. I mean the
generation like builds on the mask, comes up with its
own stuff. I'm happy about that. I just don't understand it.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
Well, that's the point I think.
Speaker 2 (41:17):
You know, I think you're right, actually, and I'm kind
of hurt by that.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
Yeah, it's it's you know, kids and teens come up
with their own language, so adults don't know what the
heck we're talking about, and they can laugh behind our backs. Yeah,
we did the same thing.
Speaker 3 (41:30):
I didn't.
Speaker 1 (41:30):
We said that's very unaus and our parents were like,
what are they saying?
Speaker 3 (41:35):
I can't make heads or tails of it.
Speaker 1 (41:40):
Airlines can get jammed. There was a study that found
intentional jamming of airlines was a problem in three regions
only three. More than seventy thousand flights were jammed between
February and August of twenty twenty two. And that you know,
once you jam it up, you can't reset it. Like
that plain Lands and then the unjamming happens.
Speaker 2 (42:02):
Yeah, you have to turn the whole thing off and
reset everything. You can't just reset the GPS antenna.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
And they need to work out all that stuff, don't
you think.
Speaker 2 (42:10):
They definitely do. But something about those flights being jammed,
Those are civilian flights being jammed by bad actors and
sometimes governments and militaries. So what you're trying to do,
essentially is to crash a plane full of people.
Speaker 3 (42:23):
Like that's your shot. It's not like a really.
Speaker 2 (42:27):
Dedicated shot at it, but that's pretty much the goal
of doing that to an airliner.
Speaker 1 (42:33):
Yeah, and you have no idea how much I put
my hand over my mouth when you said bad actors,
and I almost shouted out a few names of actors.
Speaker 3 (42:41):
Who are you gonna name?
Speaker 1 (42:43):
No, I can't because you know, you never know people
might listen to this. Where I'm sensitive to hurting people's
feelings now here in my fifties.
Speaker 3 (42:49):
I think that's great, man, Well text me some names
then I will. Okay.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
There's another thing that spoofing, I believe I think they
spoofing for it is to cheat at games like Pokemon Go. Yeah,
where you can fake where your own GPS coordinates are
to say like, oh, I'm at the I don't know
Pikachu's layer or something like that. So give me the
(43:15):
egg that Pikachu's guarding, which I can turn into like
some ski ball tickets and get a comb.
Speaker 1 (43:23):
Or skibbity toilet. I hope that doesn't mean something dirty, right.
Speaker 2 (43:27):
It means nothing from what Mela's told me, Like, it's
just basically a thing you say. Okay, I hope I'm
not outing Mela is uncool though.
Speaker 1 (43:37):
Well, I'm just glad that you have someone in your
life that's a down with that kind of stuff, because
it's pretty vital these days.
Speaker 2 (43:45):
I don't know if it's vital that I know that
skibbity toilet exists.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
But maybe not that. But Skibbity toilet has its own
Wikipedia entry.
Speaker 3 (43:53):
Oh, I believe it. Have you seen the videos though
that it's based on.
Speaker 1 (43:57):
No, But I see a screenshot now and their MESMERI
it doesn't pull me in.
Speaker 2 (44:03):
You should watch a second or two of it. You
don't need to watch much. You get the gist of
it really quick. But it's like like you'll find that
your mouth is open, not in awe, but just because
you're like you're glazed over right. So, like you said,
the United States is not unaware of the vulnerability. That
was what I was saying. It was in a delicate position.
(44:25):
It's vulnerable. It's a very vulnerable system, and you know,
like globally and also locally. So they are taking steps
to update it and that is going to come in
the form of adding more and more L five satellites.
But for now, if you want to be a little shocked,
(44:46):
taking into consideration how dependent we are a GPS, the
average age of a GPS, specifically the United States is
Global Positioning System satellites is thirteen years.
Speaker 3 (44:58):
Yeah, that is real the old for a satellite.
Speaker 2 (45:01):
But Chuck tell him how old the oldest satellite in
the constellation of GPS satellites is.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
Uh, that would be twenty seven years old, is that right?
Speaker 3 (45:13):
Yeah? Yes, that thing has circopania. Oh I guess that's
it for GPS. Huh.
Speaker 1 (45:23):
Yeah. This was more fun than I thought. And you
know what, I'm glad we had some fun and had
some laughs because it feels like a lighter tribute for Marshall. Yeah,
something else for sure.
Speaker 2 (45:34):
Hopefully we made you proud, Marshall, and thanks again for everything.
And since we said thanks to Marshall Brain and I
think it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 1 (45:47):
I'm gonna call this forget Rice. How about some peace
and love? Hey, guys, A big fan of the show.
I love listening when training for marathons and loved the
recent marathon episodes. While listening to the history of refrigeration,
the Rice method for managing a musculo skeletal injury was mentioned.
Did you know guys that in twenty twenty the medical
(46:07):
world throughout the Rice method and transitioned it to Peace
and Love.
Speaker 3 (46:13):
I don't even remember mentioning that, let alone knowing that
did bit.
Speaker 1 (46:17):
I think I probably did so for peace and love.
We have protection avoid activities at cospain for two to
three days elevation. The A is avoid anti inflammatories because
apparently that reduces healing, and you should avoid ice too.
Speaker 2 (46:33):
I have heard that that anti inflammatories are actually not
very good for you.
Speaker 1 (46:38):
I just I never take those anyway, because I don't
really need to.
Speaker 3 (46:42):
But yeah, lucky, some people really need them.
Speaker 1 (46:46):
I know. I'm sure where I was a so down
to c compression e education, which is avoid a necessary
passive treatments. Your body will heal, so I guess educate yourself.
Speaker 3 (46:57):
They were like, you really need an e here.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Yeah, yeah basically, and then we and is not spelled out,
but love is load. Let your pain be your guide, optimism,
condition your brain, vascularization, pain free cardio and exercise, restore
mobility through active approach. And Sarah says this is a lot.
(47:22):
I hope people can learn to avoid ice and anti
inflammatories for optimal recovery. But it's having a hard time
catching on.
Speaker 3 (47:29):
And I imagine why.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
That is from Sarah pt bird Nerd Hollingsworth and she's
a bird nerd and loves our bird episodes.
Speaker 2 (47:37):
That's awesome. Thanks Sarah, way to spread the good word.
I know there's a lot of good advice and information
in there, but it's just going to take months of
digesting that information to try to figure out those acronyms. Yeah,
if you want to be like Sarah and put something
on our radar that we weren't aware of before, we
love that kind of thing. You can send it to
us via email like Sarah did to Stuff Podcasts at
(48:00):
iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 1 (48:05):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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