I submit to you, dear readers, two photos: one of nuclear fusion in the sun and the other, an overhead view of the Kappy's intersection in Medford where route 28 meets... well, everything else. Note the random direction of the randomly accelerating vectors in both cases.
In a further case study, another image below shows the difference between the purported and the actual location of our voting place. The green arrow on the left shows the official address of the location, while the red circle on the right shows the actual physical location. The difference between them can take as much as two hours to navigate (Our observant readers may have noticed the large body of water between the two).
On the plus side, Jingle Bells was written in Medford, MA (possibly).
7 comments:
This kind of stuff shocks me, since I now work with the folks who design these roads (and we have an office in Boston and an employee there who has my last name) which makes me feel responsible for your shitty Boston roads.
I consistently ask the engineers "Do you curse at yourself when you sit in traffic?" -- they are never amused. Fuckin' engineers.
Help others by editing the Google Maps address. If you ask for an address and are logged into a Google Account, you can click on an "Edit" link in the arrow bubble that comes up just after you search for the address. Then you can drag the arrow to the correct location. If it's close enough to the original, it moves immediately for everyone to benefit. If it's too far, they have to inspect the change manually, but it's only taken a day before for it to move for me.
The ironic thing is that the intersection was clearly designed with traffic capacity in mind, yet traffic is as bad as ever! Meanwhile, if anyone wants to walk or bike through there they are pretty much screwed. What a shame...
Another ironic thing is that the intersection is not officially "The Kappy's Intersection" but is called "Wellington Circle". Now I have a math teacher's license and I've taught Geometry to hundreds of students. I see a whole bunch of cool geometric shapes in that map. What I don't see is anything even vaguely reminiscent of a "circle".
Google maps is part of the problem. That school did not exist when the tiger line files were made - it was a fetid illegal dump and swamp over there. The map utilities use census files and tend to mess up street numbers in areas with sparse and discontinuious numbering - they just assume that address is proprotional to distance.
There was no address for the McGlynn School, and I don't even see the access road in the map!!! That right there tells me that the map utility misplaced the address, not that the address was misspecified.
charlie d:
I walk to work every day through that intersection and I count it as nothing short of a miracle that I haven't gotten hit yet. I feel like I'm playing a real-life game of frogger every morning and night.
And the other day, the traffic light was out!
BTW, I will edit the google maps address - that's cool I did not know you could do that.
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