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Termyn8or -> Citiscape (12/31/2008 5:48:07 AM)
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I am seeing a trend, and I thought I would mention it before I got totally used to it.
What does it mean to name something, to own it in some special way ? For example we now drive on the Troy Lee James highway, have sporting events at the Progessive (insurance) field and the Quicken Loans arena.
It's not just the commercial aspect of it. Why did our High Level bridge become Veteran's Memorial bridge ? Nothing against veterans of course, but what did they do all the sudden that warranted this ? Did this do the veterans any good ? Let me get this straight, we cut their benefits and name something after them. Seems to be the American (US) way.
Another thing, they renamed Liberty Blvd. Martin Luther King. I don't care if they named it David Duke. Why ? Isn't liberty which afforded the freedom to speak important ? What was wrong with the old name. You want an MLK Blvd, build one.
The name of my street used to be Hapgood St. but it got changed to a number street a long time ago. I can at least see some logic in that. Some cities have few named streets, most of them being numbered or in some cases lettered. But I never heard of any Hapgood. So even back in the 1800s or whatever, what made them name it Hapgood ?
Even the city itself. It was within my lifetime that they changed the spelling back to Cleveland, after having dropped the second "E" for quite some time.
It doesn't end there, but one does wonder why these people have nothing better to do.
I can think of one prime example in medical science. An area, not quite in but near the center of your retina is the most repleat with cones, which are the light receptors which opposed to the rods, render color and finer detail but require more illumination. This is the area of your retina focussed on the very words you read in most cases. Years ago this area was known as the fovea, now it is known as the macula. Why ?
Years ago a friend asserted that there was no such thing as cancer. Preposterous you say ? Just read. His assertion was that they coined the word cancer, and use it to describe a certain type of disease. These include all kinds of abnormal growths, conditions in any organ of the body. As long as they meet certain criteria, they earn the big boogeyman of the Big C. The diseases run from one end to the other, just with a few commonalities, some of which are common to diseases that don't earn the Big C. I don't know if I agree. There are, however, cancers that are so different from one another, even if I don't agree, his assertation does not defy Occam's Razor to say the least.
How many times has a doctor said "It's a form of _________" ?
He also had a similar perspective on the ozone "layer". Boiled down to this "Prove to me that there ever was an ozone layer ". If you know geometry, you can easily see that it only needs to be and ozone band, over the areas that need it. It tends towards the equator so one must consider the possibility that centrifugal (centripital now, another example) is involved. With the angle of incidence of the sun's rays at the poles, they don't need the ozone "blanket". At the equator however, you kinda need it. Taken along with all the volcanic activity that has gone on over the eons, and bombs and bomb testing and who knows what else, who is to say that it ever was, or needed to be a layer in the strict sense of the word ?
It's all in a name ?
T
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