The Bay Area's Traffic Apocalypse

Today a funny thing happened. For reasons yet unknown, about 2:15 am a fire broke out--perhaps because of metal theft--in a building under construction in West Oakland. As amazing as it seems, real estate is so precious that new buildings are going up in the shadow of transit tracks, and proximity of this fire damaged the electrified "third rail" of the BART system. The nightmare scenario happened: All trains leading into San Francisco were shut down for the morning.

The BART system was created the 1970s to serve a much smaller population. Since that time, the Bay Area's population has greatly increased, both in numbers and in geographic distribution. The serpentine Washington Metro--which in many ways borrowed ideas from BART--is designed so that one is never more than a brisk walk from a nearby station. But BART runs only in narrow corridors, far away from large population centers, so that commuters must in many cases drive several miles just to fight for a scarce parking space at a BART station. At many stations, all available parking is consumed by 7 am. (This hardly seems designed to encourage people to get out of their cars.) Nonetheless, hundreds of thousands of commuters use this system daily, especially using the transbay tube to get to San Francisco from the East Bay.

Today that route was unexpectedly shut down.

Here are some of the things that resulted:

• Gridlock. Very quickly, all freeways leading to the Bay Bridge became virtual parking lots. Mornings are often difficult near the snarl of 4 freeways merging into one in the lead-up to the Bay Bridge toll plaza, but those "red" delay today became thick "black"
• Accidents. In the middle of this snarl, it was inevitable that cars would break down and accidents would happen. A motorcycle accident on the upper deck of the Bay Bridge added to the misery and the delays; cars queued to pay the $5 fine to enter the Bay Bridge sat for many minutes at a time without moving
• Bus shortages. Buses tried to fill the gap and accommodate commuters. But they filled up so quickly in earlier stops that people waiting to get on a transbay bus found that the buses were jam-packed and didn't even stop. People waited in lines around the block for buses that would not stop
• Ferries jammed. The ferry system seemed like a good idea to many people--so many, in fact, that the boats were quickly filled, and parking at ferry stations became impossible. 

The reason we should think about these problems is the geology of the Bay Area. Someday soon, certainly within the next thirty years, an earthquake on the Hayward fault will damage BART to such an extent that it will be completely shut down. According to BART experts, the system will be off-line for a minimum of 2-3 years--and perhaps several years longer if the rebuilt BART infrastructure is to upgraded to higher earthquake standards.

In other words, today is but a tiny taste of the future post-quake Bay Area commuting. We are going to lose BART soon, and not for one day but for years.

One of the frustrated commuters interviewed by morning news stations pointed out that the transit system seemed to have no "Plan B." They don't.

There is no Plan B when a major artery such as BART is closed. There are no legions of empty buses and ferries waiting to be pressed into service. There are no extra drivers and pilots at the ready. There is no excess capacity on freeways to handle an instantaneous doubling of the traffic. There are no alternate parking lots for commuters to park in order to use alternate routes. There is no plan at all.

Everything, everywhere is completely overwhelmed on a daily basis by the population crush. The traffic arteries of the Bay Area resemble someone with severe heart blockages; the slightest problem, the slightest strain throws the whole system into crisis.

It didn't have to be this way. The expansion of the Bay Area's population could have been managed and planned in a rational way. We could have avoided the crazy freeway system, which seems designed to produce regular, unnecessary backups (why, for example, does someone wanting to go from Richmond to Fremont have to deal with the same traffic as those trying to get on the Bay Bridge to San Francisco?). But instead we've chosen to spread authority over a Holy Roman Empire of competing, antagonistic jurisdictions who cannot agree on something as simple as whether BART should go to all airports. No one is in charge--and no one can be blamed. And what he have today is the result of this unplanned, undesigned chaos. And one day soon, it's going to be much worse.

Prometheus, Intelligent Design, and the Fountainhead of All Evil in the World

Let me start by saying how excited I was about Ridley Scott taking the helm at his second venture in the Alien series; the original Alien movie still ranks for me as one of my favorite films. So the idea of Scott giving this a second go--in essence, an opportunity to repeat the magic of the first film--was very intriguing. Scott primed the excitement pump by saying that he would focus on the Space Jockey from the first film, sitting in his navigation chair, with his chest busted out--who was he? Why was he there? Part of the greatness of the original film was showing us glimpses of such things, but not delving too much into what or why; like the characters on their ship, the audience was stumbling around in the dark without easy  answers. So the idea that there might now be answers made me, like many others, obsessively watch the trailers for clues.

Having just seen Prometheus, I can attest that my level of excitement is matched only by the magnitude of my disappointment. It's like that feeling 10 minutes into The Phantom Menace... "But-but, it's the same director! The same universe, the same characters! How could it suck?"

One of the more interesting things about Prometheus is the attention it has received from the community promoting the flavor of creationism known as intelligent design. To wit, here and here. It's rare that any film these days initiates discussions of topics scientific, philosophical, or moral (Avengers and Transformers, anyone?) .

So let's consider how Prometheus might involve ID ideas. [Spoilery from here on...]  The opening of the film shows a protean planet, presumably Earth, on which a solitary humanoid (called an Engineer in Prometheus, but I'm going to stick with the original moniker of Space Jockey) is left behind by a large disk ship (not a U-shaped ship, interestingly) and who immediately, and without apparent hesitation, ingests some painful poison that causes him to disintegrate into strands of DNA. This seems all a bit melodramatic--if he wanted to seed the Earth with genetic material, why not take a quick leak and hop back in the ship?

Later we learn from a sample on the alien planet that this DNA exactly matches human DNA. Which does not make a lot of sense. Human DNA is pretty unique and has been around a long time, picking up various oddities such as the fusion of chromosome 2. We humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes; related hominids have 24. So what happened was sometime after our evolutionary split from other primates, two of our chromosomes fused. They still have 24, but we and our descendants have 23. Chromosome 2 is the largest of our chromosomes, and contains in the middle of it markers that are usually found at the ends of chromosomes; it fits perfectly, in other words, with the hypothesized fused chromosomes.

Did the Space Jockey have his chromosome fused? Did chimps unsplit their chromosome 2 to yield 24 pairs? It doesn't make sense.

Half a billion years after this DNA seeding, archaeologists find a pattern of stars in numerous human civilizations, which the character Elizabeth Shaw imagines is an "invitation" to visit. Hence the circle comes to its conclusion, and the crew of Prometheus meet their makers--in both senses.

This seeding of a nascent planet with DNA is not really an argument for intelligent design; in fact, it is so badly constructed that even by the standards of creationism it does not make sense.

And this raises the issue of what Ridley Scott was trying to say with this. The idea of panspermia is interesting--we do know that microbes are capable of at least limited space travel, as we found out from the critters that survived being on the moon with the Surveyor probe and were brought back alive and healthy by Apollo 12--but it doesn't really address ultimate origins. And if there were some sort of panspermia left behind by enterprising Johnny Appleseed aliens, then what we evolved into several billion years later would be nothing like that original genetic material. Prometheus isn't advocating intelligent design; in fact, it's not really advocating anything intelligent at all.

So what was Ridley Scott on about with this film? There are several religious references, and the main character conspicuously wears a cross. At one point a red shirt character scoffs at that Dr. Shaw's ideas because they might conflict with "Darwinism."

However, Ridley Scott is not subtly evangelizing to moviegoers. In fact, in an interview with Esquire, Scott reported that, "The biggest source of evil is, of course, religion." [Which is going a bit far, really. Even religion cannot explain Carrot Top.]

But what is, then, the root of all evil? What is the fountainhead of all pain and misery and vice and destruction in this world and others?

Clearly, it is Damon Lindelof.

Lindelof was one of the writers of Prometheus. Lindelof has been involved with such masterpieces as Cowboys & Aliens, Nash Bridges, and Avatar. No, not the James Cameron Avatar, but some freaking cartoon. Lindelof's greatest affront, however, is his complicity with the LOST series.

LOST shares many features with Prometheus. A lot of interesting questions... without any satisfying answers. I still feel burned as a LOST fan, burned worse than the ridiculous Starbuck-is-an-angel-because-we-can't-figure-out-another-way ending to BSG. It is clear to me now, after the passage of several years, that I will never get over it. I will never get back the hours I spend watching LOST, thinking it was a "mystery" show, following the normal writing structure of coming up with an ending first, then writing backwards to fill in how we get to the surprise ending. No. No, LOST was a mishmash of spooky scenes assembled by laying rail in front of a speeding train whose chief engineer--Lindelof--had no idea of the ultimate destination, and no concern for how abrupt the final stop would be.

The Sopranos (rightly) never resolved what really happened to The Russian in the Woods from the episode "Pine Barrens." But that didn't matter to the show. In LOST, dozens of major plot lines were left hanging, as Lindelof thumbed his nose at duped viewers as he made his way to the bank.

Prometheus does the same thing. Sets up a lot of questions to which we want answers, then ends by refusing to answer them as the heroine Shaw, inexplicably, seems to dash off into the universe in search for further questions.

We're left with glaring plot holes. The first characters to die are left behind in the U ship, yet when their fellow extravehicular shipmates return to their vehicles, they report that one is missing, and the missing two must have taken it. If they didn't move the vehicle, who did?

 If Prometheus should have done one thing, it might have explained what happened to the Space Jockey in the U ship, who clearly had had a chest buster come out of his right side. Yet in Prometheus, our inexplicably hostile Space Jockey gets chest busted in the middle of his chest on another ship entirely. What is poor Ripley going to find a few decades later, an empty navigation chair?

Another hole involves the hostility of the Space Jockeys towards humans. Why would a race that seeded the galaxy with their DNA suddenly change gears and created a network of biological weapons to eliminate their progeny? It just doesn't make any sense....

----

Okay, now that I've got all that off my chest, there is room for praise for a number of the actors. Noomi Rapace rocked in a very physical, very demanding role. Just as she did in the original Dragon Tattoo movies, she owned the screen and was the most interesting thing happening. But Charlize Theron was also icily brilliant and inscrutible. Michael Fassenbender shows a great range of skill and command of the screen. And Idris Elba--the amazing Stringer Bell of The Wire--played a very sympathetic character who, quite heroically, literally sacrifices himself to save all of humanity. Supposedly Scott takes a very hands-off approach to directing his actors, giving them wide berth to flesh out the character as they see fit while Scott worries about the lighting and framing. This may explain why these great actors were able to rise to their roles, even as the plot they could not control fell apart around them.

Rapace's auto-surgery scene was the highlight of the film and was somewhat difficult to watch. I'm sure Scott, at some point in the past decades, wondered--"Hey, if you found out you were carrying one of these alien critters in your gut, could you save yourself by cutting it out in time?" Hence, the scene. Pretty gruesome.

But this scene stands out in having some actual drama in a film that is mostly people talking to each other in rather non-dramatic, no-tension situations. I didn't expect the Alien prequel to have a lot in common with The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. The only fear Prometheus left me with was of a possible sequel.

Outlawing sea-level rise?

A new bill in North Carolina (http://www.care2.com/causes/nc-ignores-science-tries-to-make-sea-level-rise-illegal.html) takes science denial to a new level--or rather, a new low. HB 819 (http://www.nccoast.org/uploads/documents/CRO/2012-5/SLR-bill.pdf) restricts which state scientists may address sea level change and restricts the methods state scientists may use in determining such future sea level rise.


Section A announces that:

(a) No State agency, board, commission, institution, or other public entity thereof shall adopt any rule, policy, or planning guideline addressing sea-level rise, unless authorized to do do under this Article.

Are geology professors at a public university considered part of a "public entity"? Then conceivably, they could violate the law by discussing guidelines to address sea level rise. 

Section E is even more onerous: 

(e) The Division of Coastal Management shall be the only State agency authorized to develop rates of sea-level rise and shall do so only at the request of the Commission. These rates shall only be determined using historical data, and these data shall be limited to the time period following the year 1900. Rates of sea-level rise may be extrapolated linearly to estimate future rates of rise but shall not include scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise. 

"Historical data" is a strange limitation to the methods scientists use. What HB 819 attempts to do here is banish computer modeling, which is one of the effective tools scientists have to understand and predict what may happen in the future.

To see why this is so silly, imagine that a bill on airline safety restricted aeronautical engineers to using only "historical data" to assess airplane safety. New plane designs are often tested using computer modeling; this technique is very useful to engineers. But now this new anti-modeling law forbids engineers from using computer to assess safety; they can only rely on past accidents. However, those past accidents involve old designs that may not be relevant to the modern issues. 

This is the dilemma here for climate scientists; the historical record involves climate in a cooler world, with far less CO2 than today, and hence the past may not necessarily be an indicator of future climate behavior. 

Even worse are the restrictions on using data only after the year 1900. Why 1900? Well, for one thing, this cuts out a much longer record over geologic time. In general, the more data you can assemble, the better you can judge what is happening. The decades after 1900 are a small snapshot of processes that occur over much longer time periods. What we really want to use are data sets such as the Vostok ice core data--but HB 819 artificially forbids such data. 

Stranger still, HB 819 forbids scientists from using "scenarios of accelerated rates of sea-level rise." Why? This is a bizarre restriction that usurps the judgment of professional scientist with the political machinations of politicians. This gross example of science denialism is a glimpse into an alternate reality where scientific truth can be manifested by legislation.