Benoit Mandelbrot Needs a Cane

      Helge von Koch, Swedish mathematician, created the Koch Snowflake Curve, which introduced the idea of a "fractal," which is largely the reason you are entitled to handicapped plates on your car.  You're entitled to these plates, and the good parking spots if your doctor determines that you can't walk more than 200 feet without resting.  Here's why that number, 200 feet, is the benchmark.  First though, fractals.

     Imagine a parking lot that full of cars, shopping carts, barriers that could be stepped over, and crowds of shoppers.  Remove these items, and imagine a parking spot 400 feet from the door of a mall door.  If the lot were empty, and I were 15 feet tall, 400 feet would be a very short distance, call it 40 steps from my parking spot to the door;  similarly, imagine the steps required for a small child to travel that same distance might be 600 steps.  The distance is the same for both, but one, the giant will reach the door with much greater ease than the child and will also reach it quicker than the child. 

     Now lets add a guardrail every 100 feet that is 2.5 feet tall.  The giant would still walk directly to the mall by stepping over the guardrails while the child would have to walk all the way around the rails to travel the same 400 feet.  Now the difference in time required to reach the door, distance traveled to do the same and number of steps required of the giant and the child become vastly different.  The trip is much longer for the child, harder, and a twisting line of travel for the kid, while the giant is able to make the same trip he originally made, as if the impediment weren't even there.  The obvious conclusion is that the larger the traveler, the distance from the parking space will never be longer than 400 feet, not will it ever be harder than with a smaller traveler, who may have to walk around the barrier to travel the same 400 feet, making the kid's journey say, 800 feet because of the zigging and zagging to get from the car to the mall.

     The same is true of walking along the beach.  Mandelbrot, another mathematician, applied the notion of fractals to geometry.  Try this example, the Eastern seaboard from Maine to Florida is a relatively uniform line that is about 2500 miles long.  If instead one used a map that included rills and capes etc., the Eastern seaboard, in greater detail is 7,500 miles long.  If you walked it, staying within a yard or so from the Atlantic. it is 25,000 miles long.  The closer you get to the shoreline, the more jagged its' shape.  The same is true of our parking lot when brought to real life.

      While the distance from a satellite may show the distance of a particular parking spot to the mall door to be 400 feet, we know that it, like the shoreline, is also fractal; the closer you get to the actual lot, the more detail must be added.  That detail must be walked around, stepped over, pushed aside etc.  We also know that the quality of travel from spot A to spot B, depends upon the size, and in our case, condition of the traveler.  Thus, the 200 foot trip from car to mall, may in fact be 600 feet of actual walking leaving us in the middle if the road.

     Clouds aren't circles, horizons aren't straight horizontal lines, trees (consider the bark) aren't straight vertical lines, and the walk from your car to the door of the mall isn't "as the crow flies."  These are all fractals.

     Bash the windshield to little glass nuggets of any shit bird's car that unlawfully sits in a handicapped space.

     It's your life.  I can't pirouette out of the way of a speeding car in a parking lot.

     Can you?

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Comments

[CrazyTruckDriver]

It is rather maddening when I see people in handicap spaces who not only have no placard, but equally upsetting are people who don't need them. I still have my placard from the days I needed it. I technically still qualify to have one after two back surgeries. However, I leave the spaces for people who are worse off than I now am. There are times it's tempting. I have used it at a large mall and didn't feel one bit guilty. Other than that it is unused.