When I took a bike tour in southern England back in the 1980s, I had a terrible time navigating until I realized that Americans navigate by lines, the English by points. In the US, when you want to locate yourself at a point on the map, you go to an intersection, read the signs, and look for the place on the map where those two roads intersect. In England, when you want to find a road on the map, you find a signpost pointing to two places, and look for the road that connects those two places.
I wanted to say that the American and British systems are geometric duals, until I remembered that dual solids swap corners and faces, but keep the same number of edges. On the other hand, maps are planar, and the sides -- lines -- in polygons correspond to faces in solids. (But since every regular polygon is its own dual, as I've just defined it, the concept is rather meaningless.) No doubt the Motorways have changed all that by now. It was probably already changing when I was there -- I know the system was underway, because I vividly remember blundering onto an M road by mistake. (*very* narrow shoulder, lethal warning bumps between me and whizzing motorcar traffic, sheer drop to the Dover river: I didn't care *where* that side road went!) I suspect that Americans used the British system at first because a *lot* of old roads are named after where they go: Lafayette Road, Thorntown Gravel (which was paved before I was born), SR 29 used to be the Michigan Road, back when it went between The Sycamores instead of around them. The Sycamores are an avenue of sycamore trees reputed to have originated when green logs used to build a corduroy road through a swampy approach to crossing Deer Creek sprouted at both ends. If so, the present trees can't possibly be the originals. I was startled twice by the bypass. The first time I went by there after the new bridge was built, we pulled off in the old road, I got out, and looked down to see that I was standing right on the yellow line. That doesn't sound very startling to a Brit, but on this side of the pond, a yellow line doesn't mean "no parking" -- a yellow curb used to, but I haven't seen that lately. We use a yellow line to separate traffic going thisaway from traffic going thataway, and we don't bother to paint them unless traffic is heavy enough to make standing in the middle of the road uncomfortable at best. The next time, and all subsequent times, I look at the old road and say "We used to have *two way traffic* on THAT!?" No wonder the trees are all banged up. Pity roadside parks have gone out of style. A stub of road leading to a bridge that is no longer there would be a perfect spot for one. -- Joy Beeson http://joybeeson.home.comcast.net/ http://roughsewing.home.comcast.net/ http://n3f.home.comcast.net/ -- Writers' Exchange http://www.timeswrsw.com/craig/cam/ (local weather) west of Fort Wayne, Indiana, U.S.A. where cottonwoods are cottoning. To unsubscribe send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] containing the line: unsubscribe lace-chat [EMAIL PROTECTED] For help, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
