The Art Of The Chart

摘要

I have in my airplane a microchip miracle: a small, expensive, ever-changing, dead-on accurate, utterly magical moving-map cockpit display. Driven by an assemblage of silicon powerful enough to run Rhode Island—well, at least to operate all its traffic lights—the unit sniffs data sent to it by Global Positioning System satellites. It instantly and continuously does the arithmetic necessary to say to me at all times, "Here you are, dummy, right where the little airplane symbol on the map is."