I grew up in a town of notoriously confusing street names. I remember distinctly writing down directions like “Take Any Way, to That Way, left on Oyster Creek Drive and right on Circle Way… ”

When is the last time anyone took down directions on pen and paper? In the Hyper-geo-located post-iphone/android world amateur cartographic way-finding is becoming a lost art.

The future of the coordinate-grid-for-the-air-strike-is-the-the-same-as-your-zipcode is here, and I’m still not sure it’s a good thing.

From the attempting to solve problems we didn’t know had department, comes the Army’s one-size-doesnt-fit-all, universal radio.

In 1997, the Defense Department began its quest for the perfect family of radios: software-defined radios that, like computers, could be reprogrammed for different missions and could communicate with everything the US military used. Digital signal processing could adaptively use available radio spectrum based on the needs of the moment, turning soldiers, tanks, planes, and ships into nodes of a broadband radio-based network.

Great idea, accept the hardware has trouble with  heat, takes 15 minutes to boot and doesn’t really work unless you happen to be able to break a few laws of physics.