JF Ptak Science Books Post 1572
If (and only if, (iff)) eliminating left turns in auto traffic is a good idea, perhaps getting rid of the left-sided newspaper page is a good idea, too. (?)
A post appeared earlier in this blog on dis-inventing the left-hand traffic turn, which for better or for worse was laid at the feet of Le Corbusier, who imagined a new network of inner-city traffic turns as follows:
which appeared in his Radiant City (edition of 1930). He beautifully includes the following crib sheet for the incremental development of right-turns-only in cities, which I think can stand on its own as the template for x-number of short stories:
This is nestled into one of many plans, though Le Corbu's recipe for mega-sameness seems desperate to me--this one called for a massive complex of 220-meter-tall structures nested in 400-meter squares, going on and on.
But I think at its base that eliminating left hand turns for cars in cities seems like a good idea--making the left turn a series of three rights seems at it base to make traffic flow smoother, and since enormous amounts of time and energy and everything else comes as a result of volatility in traffic flow, and since a lot of that volatility comes as a result of the formation of lines behind cars that are crossing traffic for a turn, then getting rid of the cause of volatility seems the logical response. Unless of course it causes volatility elsewhere.
In 1905--one of the greatest years for ideas in the history of ideas, ever, though the following is not one of them--George Ebenezer Morrison proposed to eliminate a source of unease and volatility in publishing advertising revenue by destroying the idea of the left-hand page of text. He made the case that the value of advertising space on the left-hand side of newspapers and magazines and such was far less than the ads that appeared on the right-side pages--this because, he said, people tend to hold what they are reading with the right-side centered in front of them, leaving the poor left-side abandoned on, well, on the left. So, with attention centered on the right, ad space was at a premium.
Mr. Morrison's solution--his idea, for which he was granted a patent in the U.K. 1905/105291--was to print the left-hand pages upside down, so that once the right-side was read, the reader would turn the newspaper etc. upside down to read the second half, and thus the left-side page would be entirely eliminated. So, all things being equal, everything would now be right-sided.
I am not sure if--like finding new traffic problems in multiple right-hand turns--eliminating the left page doesn't create the same issue with the left side of the all-right-hand page reading material.
I am sure that Facebook and Kindle and etc.--having already gotten rid of the pages in toto--are now at work in eliminating the left side of our monitors.
And whatever it is going on right now, the same thing seems to be going on, it politics.
Notes:
1. I'd share the patent image, but it is just a rectangle divided into eighths.
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