When the details are important

Sometimes careful pencil-work is vital.

Last week we pointed out that making a drawing, creating a visual version of a problem or idea, was often helpful or even necessary.  And, we noted, sometimes the rougher the drawing the better it conveyed the idea behind it.  Too much detail or accuracy can be distracting.

Not always, of course, and when turning ideas into reality it pays to have serious precision.  If the blueprints are off, the building will be too, perhaps dangerously so.  Making accurate detailed plans used to be a skilled and painfully slow process.  Our navigator tells us that, during a certain period of rapid technological change in the 20th century, the US Navy delayed the design of several new classes of ships for years because there simply weren’t enough draughtsmen to draw up the plans.

But we are thinking now about something more widespread than designing ships: navigating them.  This was done using carefully printed charts, exact representations of water and land.  On these, pencil lines representing bearings to lighthouses, ranges to rocks, and other clues were drawn, and the intersection showed the ship’s position.  These were legal documents: if something went wrong, they were evidence of where the ship had been, and how well the navigating crew knew its business.  And the charts had to be kept up to date.  Changes in buoys, lights, recommended channels and all were sent out frequently.  Sometimes the navigator would spend hours cutting and pasting (very literally).  The charts were a precise analog of the real world, and the skilful laying-down of a pencil line was much valued.

Maneuvering the ship to avoid other ships was also done in analog.  Rays representing the courses and speeds of ships, and their relative positions, were manipulated with parallel-rulers, compasses and pencils.

Though these skills are still required of licensed officers, tested each time they come up for renewal, they are now seldom practiced at sea.  Charts are electronic, and radars automatically track other ships and recommend courses to avoid hitting them.  This is certainly overall a very good thing.  The ship is no longer dependent on the skill of someone’s pencil-line.  And it is very easy to make mistakes, in the dark of the midwatch on not enough sleep, even for good officers.

One could argue that the manual method gives a better feel for courses and speeds, and relative motion; we’re not so sure.  Our navigator holds that, for the most skilled officers, it indeed works that way; but for the less skilled, it’s probably just another way of being confused.

This is probably true in general for all the old, analog ways of dealing with the world.  For the best, they led to John Henry moments; for those not so skilled, it’s good that the computers can take over.