Lateu is the only village on Tegua island, a half-moon-shaped speck of land less than four miles long and 10 miles wide in the South Pacific.Someone please explain the width/length distinction here.
Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Wide and Long
This article on global warming and a Pacific island victim is worth reading. But, despite wanting to honor the tragedy of the story, I had a difficult time making it past this sentence:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
8 comments:
The thing is, it's the width that really matters. So, sure, you'd want to identify this thing as wider than long (especially when it's only four miles "long"!).
I still don't get it. Length and width in this case is a matter of perspective. One wouldn't say that a rectangle is 10 inches wide and 5 inches long.
So, given that the island is half-moon shaped, does this make a difference? It can't, as far as I can see. A four-mile long island in the shape of a half moon still couldn't be ten miles wide even if we counted the distance across its bay as part of the land.
Maybe a road runs from one coast to another coast, determining the "length", leaving the remaining aspect as the "width".
It reminds me of my pal, "Tuna-Can Tommy", who was two inches long and four inches wide.
This might be a good measurement system for short ,fat people. Might.
It's got to be a mistake. Either it's the shape of a crescent moon or length and width got transposed. Partial archipelagos and submerged bits of crater in general are crescents. "Half moon" is a funny metaphor for anything besides maybe a half a wheel of Jarlsberg. Can't recall hearing it applied to an island or anything else for that matter. Or one of the dimensions could be the radius of the half moon that the crescent partially circumscribes, while the other is the distance between the two ends of the island (which might not arc a full 180 degrees) or else the diameter of the implied circle. Note a radius of roughly 4 miles implies a half circumference of pi times that or roughly ten. And maybe the crescent points its concavity north on a map, thus defining what to call the width and what to call the length unequivocally in the mind of the literature or political science types who tend to write and edit news stories.
That's it, MT. It would have to be a very odd shape - kind of like a more elongated Star Trek insignia - to keep the "half moon" shape and fit the dimensions. By the time it becomes that elongated, however, it's difficult to talk about width/length in these 4/10 miles terms. Unless, of course, there's some other odd way of gauging what's length and width. Pointing north? Maybe. Funny journalstigmatists.
Oh, on the island of Roatan, off the coast of Honduras, rests a lovely little bay named Half Moon Bay. The shape fits the name.
Ah, and closer the Half Moon Bay south of San Francisco and north of Santa Cruz. That's got to be the paradigm, because half-moon bays abound. The water is the half moon, and the land is the crescent. Elementary, Watson, elementary.
Post a Comment