Jonathan: That’s what us civil engineers do with things we design. Roads in particular. We draw sections across the road at regular intervals, and sections along the centreline so that we can convey to others the essentials of the design. These days we use specialist software to design 3-d models based on a survey of the existing landscape and an alignment (a theoretical centreline consisting of straights and curves in both in plan and vertically): generating the section drawings from these models is a largely automated process. But when I started in highway engineering as a young man around 1998 (okay okay, 1978 – it was just a typo, honest!), whilst there were mainframe computers to calculate complex alignment geometry, from there on it was all with a pencil and paper, drawing first the sections and from these the plans could be drawn – completely the opposite way around! The Appleby Bypass (on the A66 in Cumbria) was about 4km long, so would require around 400 individual cross-sections to be drawn, all tediously by hand by a junior engineer (all young men with a career ahead of them), first in pencil, then traced over onto film by the ‘tracers’ (almost all women, and low-paid).  I’d spend months bent over a huge drawing board or engineers desk (these things are almost non-existent now) with long rolls of squared section paper, pencils, scale rules and erasers, constantly cross-referencing between what I was drawing and the survey plan, and the fan-fold print-outs of the alignment data. The leaning forward resulted in backache and headache and even nausea: it was boring, so tedious, and I hated it so much that at one point I was desperate to find a more exciting career … but never did.   In fact I persisted with the nitty-gritty of design work to such an extent that I developed an exceptionally intuitive approach for design processes, which is what – I feel sure – enabled me to adopt interactive computer modelling with such ease and success. What effect that had on my brain and its way of working is an interesting question: has it influenced the way I see things and handle problems, and thus my life experience? Probably yes; but in what way? Well, I feel sure that the primary models I work with are not in the computer, but are first and foremost in my head.  Denise, with exceptional clarity of logic, says that means if anything should be sectioned, it should be me. :~(