A new piece at NewYorker.com about the stars, GPS, and a physicist: "As a species, humans lack many of the biological gifts that allow other animals to get around. A loggerhead turtle, for example, begins to take its bearings within a couple of hours of hatching, using magnetite crystals in its brain to sense Earth’s magnetic field. (Spiny lobsters, monarch butterflies, and termites have similar compasses.) Honeybees get from nectar to hive and back in part by judging the position of the sun, which they can sense, even on a cloudy day, from patterns in polarized light. Where biology has failed humans, we have substituted culture. Throughout our evolutionary history, we have created ad-hoc systems of knowledge that organize environmental information and make it transmissible to the next generation. Often, difficult and monotonous landscapes—desert, sea, ice—resulted in more intricate systems. Several thousand years before the magnetic compass was invented, Pacific Islanders had worked out how to navigate by star compasses and read ocean swells for information about nearby land." Read the rest...