Gongol.com Archives: May 2025
May 28, 2025
Short on a sign isn't always short on the brain
The City of Cedar Rapids is in the process of approving an ordinance to simplify new street names. It's a community with a heavy dependence on numbered streets, with avenues going east-west, and streets going north-south. Add in four identifying quadrants, and there are intersections like the corner of 9th Avenue SW and 9th Street SW. ■ Unfortunately, as sympathetic an idea as it might seem to manage those street names so as to avoid confusion and improve emergency response, the city council is in the process of imposing a 14-character limit on new street names -- which is counterproductive to cultivating better, clearer street names. ■ It's uncomfortable to criticize an idea that comes from a helpful place, but the plain fact is that numerical complexity isn't the same as complexity to the human mind. We don't remember things in discrete letter-based units, we remember them in clusters or chunks. ■ This is something we know, often without realizing it: American telephone numbers are usually recited in 3-3-2-2 form -- three for the area code, three for the prefix, then two and two. Area codes tend to form familiar chunks, as do prefixes. We don't try to remember ten digits at a time, we really just try to remember four chunks (if we bother to remember them at all). The same goes for everything else we try to remember; that's why mnemonic devices work...which is why you may remember to Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally. ■ Shorter street names will not only be less diverse (by pure mathematical definition), they will also tend to favor nonsensical portmanteaus and meaningless made-up words that will have less "catch" in human memory than longer names anchored to things people remember. Short letter clusters can be smashed together, leaving them brief by letter count, but basically meaningless to the human memory. ■ An artificial mashup like "Sunbrook Drive" may be 14 characters, but it has no staying power whatsoever, whereas "Harvest Moon Boulevard" takes 22 characters, but it actually means something that people will remember (even if they're not Neil Young fans). Likewise, it's pretty easy to remember that airport in Cedar Rapids is on Wright Brothers Boulevard, even though "Wright Brothers" alone exceeds a 14-character limit. ■ Memory works in chunks, and comprehension comes in batches. What appears like a long string of characters to a computer may in fact be very light on the human memory -- which is why passphrases are much more secure than artificially complex passwords: The first verse of your favorite song probably doesn't include any "special" characters, but it's many times longer than any jumble like "pA$$w0rd1" (making it much harder to crack) and yet vastly easier for you to remember. ■ Those who set the rules, whether they apply to computer security or just street names, have to bear in mind how minds actually work, because good intentions can still beget unintended outcomes. Letter count alone is almost useless as a metric.
