Dame Lane

Coordinates: 53°20′38″N 6°15′50″W / 53.343847°N 6.263883°W / 53.343847; -6.263883

Dame Lane (Irish: Lána an Dáma) is a narrow thoroughfare in Dublin, Ireland, with a variety of historical and literary associations.

Location

Dame Lane is located in the south of Dublin's historic city center, parallel to Dame Street. Temple Bar and College Green are found just north of the street. Dame Lane is close to Dublin Castle, St Andrew's Church (now the Dublin Tourism Office) and Trinity College. The lane stretches from Trinity Street, to Palace Street, across South Great George’s Street in an east-west direction. It also runs alongside and close to part of the "Dubline", an historic Dublin tourist walking trail that stretches from College Green to Kilmainham.

History

Dame Lane derives its name from the medieval church of St. Mary del Dam, which was demolished in the 17th century. According to some sources, the name of the church comes from a Poddle dam that originally gave its name to Dam(e) Street and to the eastern gate of the city of Dublin. These are identified as Damas Street and Damas Gate on John Speed’s map of 1610. Speed's map also shows a residential area stretching east from the walled city, the old 12th-century St Andrew's Church, and a semi-circular enclosed graveyard near Palace Street. Various spellings appear in different sources and on maps, including Damas, Dammas, Dames, and Dame's.

Lane

In the context of traffic control, a lane is part of a carriageway (roadway) that is designated for use by a single line of vehicles, to control and guide drivers and reduce traffic conflicts. Most public roads (highways) have at least two lanes, one for traffic in each direction, separated by lane markings. On multilane roadways and busier two-lane roads, lanes are designated with road surface markings. Major highways often have two multi-lane roadways separated by a median.

Some roads and bridges that carry very low volumes of traffic are less than 15 feet (4.6 m) wide, and are only a single lane wide. Vehicles travelling in opposite directions must slow or stop to pass each other. In rural areas, these are often called country lanes. In urban areas, alleys are often only one lane wide. Urban and suburban one lane roads are often designated for one-way traffic.

Capacity

Lane capacity varies widely due to conditions such as neighbouring lanes, lane width, elements next to the road, number of driveways, presence of parking, speed limits, number of heavy vehicles and so on - the range can be as low as 1000 passenger cars / hour to as high as 4800 passenger cars /hour but mostly falls between 1500 to 2400 passenger cars / hour.

Gropecunt Lane

Gropecunt Lane /ˈɡroʊpkʌnt ˈleɪn/ was a street name found in English towns and cities during the Middle Ages, believed to be a reference to the prostitution centred on those areas; it was normal practice for a medieval street name to reflect the street's function or the economic activity taking place within it. Gropecunt, the earliest known use of which is in about 1230, appears to have been derived as a compound of the words grope and cunt. Streets with that name were often in the busiest parts of medieval towns and cities, and at least one appears to have been an important thoroughfare.

Although the name was once common throughout England, changes in attitude resulted in its replacement by more innocuous versions such as Grape Lane. A variation of Gropecunt was last recorded as a street name in 1561.

Toponymy

Variations include Gropecunte, Gropecountelane, Gropecontelane, Groppecountelane and Gropekuntelane. There were once many such street names in England, but all have now been bowdlerised. In the city of York, for instance, Grapcunt Lane—grāp is the Old English word for grope—was renamed as the more acceptable Grape Lane.

Lane (hash function)

Lane is a cryptographic hash function submitted to the NIST hash function competition; it was designed by Sebastiaan Indesteege with contributions by Elena Andreeva, Christophe De Cannière, Orr Dunkelman, Emilia Käsper, Svetla Nikova, Bart Preneel and Elmar Tischhauser. It re-uses many components from AES in a custom construction. The authors claim performance of up to 25.66 cycles per byte on an Intel Core 2 Duo.

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