From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Thu Feb 07 2002 - 21:41:38 MST
In my ignorance, I wrote:
>Isn't there usually a hardware timer inside the things that
>switches from red to green and back at pre-set intervals?
A bit of googling to baby-talk sites assures me that many busy city streets
do indeed use hard-wired timers. Nowhere there for magick or psi to weave
its spell, I assume.
But there are plenty of other cute gadgets: induction coils set in the
pavement near the intersection, waiting for a heavy steel vehicle body to
sit over them and close an induction loop. If you didn't know it was there,
the lights would seem to change by... wow... *magic*. And there are
variants: rubber hoses with air, squeezed by the weight of the vehicle;
laser beams; digital cameras... Not many of those are vulnerable, you'd
suppose, to magickal interventions, although their routine functioning
might make a cave man (or me, dope that I am on a bicycle) think there was
something awfully animist and car-besotted about this street corner...
Damien Broderick
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