eBooks - Literature - Modern Fiction - Adam Felber - Schrodinger's Ball
Schrodinger's Ball eBooks
by Adam Felber
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Platforms
Windows 98SE+, Mac OS X+, Palm Features
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Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
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Platforms
Windows 98+, Tablet PC, Pocket PC 2003 Features
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Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
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Platforms
All Palm & Pocket PC handheld devices plus all Windows and Macintosh computers. Features
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Availability:
Download Now Price: $9.95
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Schrodinger's Ball Summary
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Chapter 1 There’s a cat in a box in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It’s about three-quarters of a mile from the firehouse in Central Square, which means that if someone launched a rescue operation now, the trucks could be there in half an hour. Or so. Boston’s roads started out in the colonial days as tracks and paths, routes for people and horses and cattle to travel from All Over to certain Important Places. In the fullness of time, the roads widened, lengthened, and were finally paved for the automobile, that newfangled machine whose basic operation still confounds most Boston natives. So it’s pointless to speak of Boston’s “grid.” Boston’s roads were never meant to be urban thoroughfares—they intersect at odd, often precipitous angles, with frequently interesting results from an urban-design standpoint. Often, three or four roads will intersect in more or less the same place. When this happened in an area unburdened with history, landmarks, or valuable real estate, the twentieth-century Bos- tonians created enormous disks of pavement where the roads collided, which they called “rotaries.” The traffic laws governing how you enter and exit a rotary are poorly understood and rarely followed. Fortunately, the fact that a rotary is at the intersection of many roads ensures that there will be easy access for emergency vehicles, which spend a great deal of time cleaning up the messes that happen inside rotaries. However, when many roads intersect in places that are historic, landmark-laden, or filled with valuable real estate (a set of conditions that can be best described as “almost everywhere”), the planners and pavers of Boston opted to create Squares. From a design standpoint, this roughly means, “Do nothing and name the place after the principal reason why we can’t have a rotary here.” ... |
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eBooks - Titles - Authors - Literature - Modern Fiction - Adam Felber - Schrodinger's Ball eBooks