Combining instruments

Doing some things the old-fashioned way is getting difficult.

Our navigator recently went out shopping for a watch.  (For reasons we won’t go into, his cheap but surprisingly reliable one became unavailable.)  He hasn’t tried to buy one for many years, and it turned out to be rather difficult to find what he wanted.  Most items on sale were intended as fashion statements (and priced accordingly); that is, to be seen, not used.  In fact actualy telling the time from many of them is difficult or impossible (harder even than walking in some fashionable clothes).

Of course people rarely buy watches to tell time nowadays.  They have the time on their ubiquitous smart phones, if they need it.  It occurs to us that a very connected person might not actually tell time much at all.  The reminder app will notify them when something needs to happen.  Even meeting up with someone else need not be at a specified time (and place), if you can always call them to find out where they are and agree to proceed toward each other.

Our navigator did not need to replace his compass, a swinging magnetic needle of the sort used by generations of Boy Scouts.  It still works.  But the smartphone also has a compass.  And a barometer, in function identical to the barometric altimeter he has used for years.  So a pocketful of separate instruments has been replaced by a small part of this modern necessity.

There is as yet no thermometer on his phone.  There is a temperature function, but it only displays what a weather station has recorded recently somewhere in the area.  Neither is there a psychrometer, something to measure relative humidity, which is sometimes of interest.  Perhaps forthcoming models will have them.  They already have accelerometers, which none of our consultants owns as a separate instrument.  And, of course, each has a remarkably capable cameras.

It is a truism that a machine able to do many things does none of them as well as a special-purpose machine.  We’re not sure that applies here, at least as a practical matter.  All of the smartphone instruments seem to be as accurate and easy to use as the old, separate ones, and certainly work as well as almost everyone really needs.  Using the camera seems sometimes a bit awkward, compared to the devices in our photographer’s closet, but that might be just familiarity.

So why did our navigator want a separate watch at all?  Partly, he admits, to avoid being one of the crowd continually referring to a smartphone screen.  Mostly he wanted to have his own timepiece to calibrate, something he had control over.

Doing something yourself, from start to finish, is getting harder.  Some of us still think it’s worthwhile.