Dead Reckoning: What Is It? Why Did I Chose It?
Introduction
I first heard of the phrase “Dead Reckoning” in May 2022. I have historically been a fan of the Mission Impossible movie franchise, and they announced the title of the next movie when releasing the first big trailer, called Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1. At the time, I didn’t think much of the title besides wondering what it meant. I understood what the two words meant, but together, it was an all new phrase to me. I brushed it off and put it out of my mind for a couple weeks.
Then one day, I was looking at an iceberg chart, which is a chart with a tier list. The top tiers are mainstream ideas/objects/topics, and as you move down the list, the tiers become more and more unknown. The particular iceberg chart that I was looking at was a chart of human emotions/feelings. I got down to the last tier on the list, and I saw Dead Reckoning. I was confused, and I decided to finally do some research into what it meant. I found 3 relevant examples of dead reckoning and they are:
By far the most common usage of “dead reckoning” is for navigation. It is the process of calculating the current position of a moving object using previously determined position, speed, heading, direction, and course over elapsed time. This can be applied to numerous types of navigation, including maritime, automotive, aviation, and even in many animals.
Next, is PDR, or Pedestrian Dead Reckoning. I did not look into this as much as the other because it is not as relevant, but it involves the use of accurately tracking people using the GPS in their cellphones.
Last is the definition I found which corresponds with human emotion. The feeling of dead reckoning is to find yourself bothered by the death of someone more than you would have expected, as if you assumed they would always be there, leaving you one less landmark to navigate by.
For my purposes, I am using the navigational definition(s) of dead reckoning. I believe that it is a term that aptly fits my life right now, and would be cohesive in the theme of how I am going to approach my writing. We are entering uncharted waters as a society. We now have issues at the top of our cultural and political spheres of influence which we have not had to face before. With our unstable economy, inflation out of control, shortages of nearly every type of good, and the sharp divides among tribes, we don’t know what will happen or how it will play out. Your guess is as good as mine.
I don’t want my introduction post to be too long, so if you want to know more about dead reckoning, read the sources that I link to below, and do some research of your own. I will regularly emphasize that you, the reader, need to research issues on your own. It is not good to listen to anyone and just blindly believe what they say, not the government, not a corporation, not your favorite podcaster, and not even friends and family. People are wrong. It happens. I may be wrong in some of the things that I will post, and I encourage people to double check what I say and let me know where I am wrong.
I also want to say that Dead Reckoning will consist of posts containing different articles, facts, statistics, and other sources which may be related. This is not conspiracy theory. I will present evidence about a certain topic in a coherent manner which should hopefully shed some light on what is happening regarding the topic.
I will also write occasional opinion pieces about something that I either support or oppose. These opinion pieces will have evidence and supporting material, but I will advocate my preferred plan of action or what I believe to be right.
We are in a position. How did we get here? What past actions, policies, inventions, and ideas led us to our current position? Where are we going? How can we calculate our future position by analyzing our current position in relation to how we got to that position?
References:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning
https://icebergcharts.com/i/Human_Emotions_and_Feelings
https://www.dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com/post/55017468713/dead-reckoning
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29867027/