[Magdalen] Windy, waiting Williston

James Oppenheimer-Crawford oppenheimerjw at gmail.com
Tue Apr 26 05:05:52 UTC 2016


When the emergency vehicle comes, they don't know the area, but they have
to find the location they seek instantly.  Thus, a street address is
essential, and each building has to have its number displayed for quick
reading.

College addresses illustrate this problem so well, since the folks on
campus know just which building is the music building, but nobody else
does, making such a locator useless for 911 purposes.  Now that GPSs have
street maps, all you have to do is plug in the address and the GPS not only
knows where you're going, but can calculate the best way to get there --
make sure that GPS is upgraded annually, of course!

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 10:10 PM, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I still remember our ridiculous address in Muskego, a suburb of Milwaukee:
>
> S67 W13882 Hardwicke Place
>
> It was explained at some point that this grid system was applied for
> emergency services.
>
> Similarly, at some point the Michigan State University campus adopted
> regular addresses. Previously an address there would be simply "136
> Music Building, MSU, East Lansing, MI 48824" but the post office
> wanted a street address as well, so it became "253 West Circle Drive,
> Room 136" or something. Saint Meinrad Archabbey's campus now has its
> buildings all with addresses as <some number> Hill Drive. It's not
> that big a place, but I guess whether for mail purposes or pinpointing
> an emergency, that's how things are now.
>
> Here in Chicago we have our trusty grid system: eight hundreds to a
> mile, so our address of 6311 N Glenwood Ave tells you (if you're
> grid-savvy) that we're just north of Rosemont Avenue and just south of
> Devon Avenue, which is 6400 North or exactly eight miles north of
> Madison Street.
>
> On Sun, Apr 24, 2016 at 8:59 PM, Sibyl Smirl <polycarpa3 at ckt.net> wrote:
> > My little town, even though unincorporated, was platted
> > and street-named, and they just ignored our street names and arbitrarily
> > changed them to names of birds.  Our land is flat enough that it was
> pretty
> > easy when it was being settled to lay out roads along the grid lines of
> > square miles, with a few exceptions for the river, and now our roads are
> 10
> > (invisible)(not even any thought of ever paving them: it'd sure mess up a
> > lot of farm land!) "blocks" apart.  It does have its positive points, but
> > the system is still a pain in the neck.  I'm guessing that North Dakota,
> > with a lot fewer humans per square mile, is going through the same (@%$#%
> > process.  Got to have everybody pinned down to the square inch!
>
>
>
>
> --
> Scott R. Knitter
> Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA
>


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