John Linnell writes for Impose Magazine
Questions like this justify the aimless afternoons staring at the ceiling.
My mind wanders as I’m heading down Interstate 87 to New York. I’m staring at something I’ve been staring at for decades of driving, namely the little signs that very precisely measure the distance from the road’s terminus. A green rectangle with white type marks each mile. Every tenth of a mile is marked with a smaller white sign indicating the mile, decimal fraction, and a reminder of the name of the highway. Between those are even smaller white rectangles on posts with nothing written on them that appear every quarter of a tenth of a mile. I know there’s some good reason for making the highway into a gigantic yardstick, but when I see the numbers going by I sometimes imagine myself performing an experiment that would in practice be a stupendously bad idea. Here it is: What if the mile markers were my personal speed limit? What if for some perverse reason I had to exactly match my speed to the number on the signs at every point?
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