28
Jun
a twenty dollar idea
Here’s something that I would be happy to have but I wouldn’t pay good money for: a device that could tell me exactly where to look to see a thing, if other things weren’t in the way.
An example of the sort of thing I’d like to know is which direction to look to see a friend in California from here. By inputting my exact location and my friend’s exact location, this device that I want would illuminate a spot in the middle distance that, if I could dig a straight and true hole, my friend would be on the other end of it. So this device takes into consideration the curvature of the earth. If I wanted to know where to look in the direction of the Taj Mahal, my device would illuminate a spot in the close foreground. Maybe a spot on my sofa, or the carpet. If I dug a hole straight and true through the ground in a conforming line from my eyes into the ground at that spot, eventually I’d end up in an ornate mausoleum in India.
There’s nothing hard about this desire; all it would take is a few extra lines of code in a handheld GPS device, the ability to input the Taj’s exact coordinates, and some kind of light emitter built into the machine.
What I really want is to be able to answer my son truthfully and precisely when he asks me “Dad, where is Hawaii?” I’d fire up the machine, get a fix, and say, “There, son,” while pointing at a spot on the kitchen floor.
