Stoplights: Part I

This could only be so long in coming: traffic lights have been a bit of an obsession for a few years. I know they are in essence just a collection of shaped and painted bits of  metal and plastic (and a few grams of glass for the light-bulb), but they can be really interesting if you take the time to look at them.
For one thing, the lights are always there, regardless of witnesses (human or otherwise). At the main square of some grotty little town, there might be a single beat-up light on a wire across the street between the fire department and the dingy gas station. Now picture that same intersection at 2 in the morning, when the 900 or so residents are in bed, and even the night policeman is slumped against his desk, which holds a weak coffee he bought from the gas station before his shift. He's not thinking of the light outside. No one else is: they're all asleep (Our policeman isn't asleep--he's dozing. There's a difference). Certainly no one is waiting for the light to turn the shade of color that would signal a foot on the gas. Humans created those strange combinations of earthen and synthetic materials, but humans only spend a fraction of their year thinking about the lights that they made, and even less of a percentage of an entire lifetime. Right now, wherever you are, maybe reading this at your desk or sitting in the dark on the floor in the middle of the night (like the insects we all are), there are still traffic lights outside, always turning from green to yellow, to red.