RoadDave

In Shenzhen, China, a port city on the Pearl River, a bit north of Hong Kong, is going to be the home of an experiment that might just curl your hair.

According to an article in the NYTimes the authorities are taking identity cards to the next step.  The card will contain not merely the name and address of the holder, but also work history, education, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance and the landlord’s phone number.  The reason for this?  Fighting Crime, of course. 

This is a little easier in China than, oh, let’s say the US, or Canada, as the government in China can do whatever they want.  Ostensibly, we have controls here. 

This was illustrated by a comment quoted by the author, Keith Bradsher, in the NYTimes story:  "If they do not get the permanent card, they cannot live here, they cannot get government benefits and that is a way for the government to control the population in the future," said Michael Lin, the VP for investor relations at China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology. Plans are afoot to include credit histories, subway travel payments and even small purchases to the functionality of the ID Card.

Short form?  China is going to tag their citizens like cattle, put more cameras everywhere and use face recognition software to track down miscreants:  The whole system is built for it.  Interestingly enough, the whole system is GPS-based, powered by big North America companies who provide the software, hardware and skills to put the whole thing together.

China Public Security Technology, the company providing the technology, is incorporated in Florida, China Public Security has raised much of the money to develop its technology from two investment funds in Plano, Tex., Pinnacle Fund and Pinnacle China Fund. Three investment banks — Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach, Calif.; Oppenheimer & Company in New York; and First Asia Finance Group of Hong Kong — helped raise the money.

Check out their website at http://www.chinacpby.com if you want to eyeball their SEC filings, as they are an over the counter stock.

As it stands now, Britain has something like one CCTV camera per 14 citizens.  Chicago has promised the Loop will have a complete 2,000 camera remote surveillance system shortly.  They already have ‘gunshot detector’ cameras mounted in certain ‘high crime’ areas.  Toll-Road EZ-Pass data is obtainable in divorce court proceedings in New Jersey.  New York City already has 1,000 cameras in the subways, with another 3,100 monitoring city housing projects.

COMPASS, the traffic monitoring system in Ontario has 104 cameras watching over us.  Right now, I’m watching the intersection of the Airport Parkway and Hunt Club Road in Ottawa.  Traffic is moving fine, by the way.

There are no statistics about how many private CCTV systems exist, like the ones used in stores to stop shoplifters, or watch over the cash register.  For that matter, there are also no legal controls over what the store can do with the images they collect. 

The Face Recognition Vendor Test for 2006 asked for participants and got a lot of applicants.  The results were not as wonderful as the tinfoil hat brigade would suggest, in that false positive identifications were a little too high still.  Vendors in the casino industry security space, however, claim that their software can spot a cheat with little more than a blurry shot of someone’s’ left eyebrow.  The truth is somewhere between the two ends of the spectrum.

Which brings us back to the Identity Card system in Shenzen.  How easy would it be to implement in Canada?  Too easy is the accurate answer. 

If you check your drivers’ license or health card, you’ll see a big, fat, magnetic stripe and probably a bar-code readable area.  That’s all it takes to find you in the database in the sky. The question becomes what data can be incorporated into your record.  Shenzhen wants to have everything, including, if the face recognition software works out, your whereabouts at any given time based on surveillance CCTV cameras. 

It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if The Department of Homeland Paranoia is looking longingly at Shenzen and the Peoples’s Republic of China, using them as a beta test.  A beta test?  Dave, that’s a bit over the top, even for you?  Not really, the companies providing the technology are all American companies.  

I’ve worked on systems (older ones) that did license plate recognition, using infrared cameras to read your car tag, front, back or both, that could sort and match things in under two seconds.  This was before the high speed systems we have now, in the mists of time known as i386 and 486 days.  Face recognition software is another step in matching a unique metric to a person.

Faces are almost all unique.  Take four or five measurements and you can probably come up with a unique number for the face attached to the body.  These are things you can do at home, if you want to.  Measure your intraocular distance, that distance between the irises of both eyes, like your optometrist does, with his or her little steel ruler.  That’s one unique number.

Measure from the notch on your brow where your nose joins your forehand, to the tip of your nose.  Another number.  Measure from tip of nose to tip of your jawbone, then measure a triangle from ear hole to jaw tip, to ear hole, as well as the angles of that triangle.  Don’t bother noting that you have a four-colour snake tattoo on your face and enough piercings to sound like an ocarina on a windy day. Then measure the little patch of skin between the bottom of your nose and the top of your upper lip. 

You now have enough data to do a really cheap, probably effective, numerical representation of the landmarks of your face, or any face.     

Add’ em all up and then search for faces in your library that have a value near your value.  You now have come very close to recognizing a face.  Where do you get a library of faces?  Mug shots from the cops will do nicely, thanks.  Drivers’ Licenses, Health Cards, Costco Membership Cards and Company ID will also supplement the database. 

The relationships between those numbers, (your intraocular distance being .987 of the length of your nose, while nose to jaw is 1.244 of your nose length and 1.863 of your intraocular distance) is what you really want.  If you have the relationship between landmarks, then you can search by the relationships:  Find me everyone with a nose this long and at least an ear-hole to jaw distance of this number on either left or right, as most faces are close to symmetric from ear-hole to jaw, left side or right side.

I am simplifying beyond absurdity here, plugging in some fanciful numbers.  Face recognition software uses several dozen landmarks, the more landmarks; the more accuracy, but the core concept is the same.  Reduce a face to landmarks and derive a big number from it, out to a few dozen decimal places. 

Big Math says if you can do a measurement remotely, you can narrow your search down to a few faces that come close to matching.  A database is just Big Math for comparing and searching.  Face Recognition Software is a way to automate finding and measuring landmarks, then assigning a value to it with the least amount of human intervention. 

All you have to do is say that Jerimiah Fleegus has a face of this value, a credit score of this value, a health card of this value and a drivers’ license of this value.  Add in his address, organ donor status and a few other impertinent facts, burn it onto the back of his ID card and voila!  Jerimiah Fleegus is now searchable, even in crowds of people. 

Tie in some other data, like Jerimiah Fleegus’ car was noted coming downtown a half-hour earlier on a toll-road, then he bought a sub (Chicken Teriyaki, 6-inch, whole wheat) using his debt card one block away, not twenty minutes ago.  A public CCTV camera spotted someone close to Jerimiah Fleegus’ face coming out of the restaurant and heading to the ball park. 

Then a camera at the ball park pedestrian ramp noted a face, sort of like Jerimiah’s, climbing to a seat in the high up seats.  We already know he has season tickets to the Jays and the seats are in the nosebleeds, from his credit card records. 

So where is Jerimiah Fleegus?  Probably at the ball game, watching the Jays beat the Anaheim Angles like a cheap gong, 4-1 in front of 31,978 fans.  We checked, using the cameras in the stands, and yep, there was Jerimiah, so far above the third base line that he is closer to the CN Tower Observation Deck than field level. 

He’ll check out of the car park around 10:30 PM and be on the toll road near 10:55 PM.  If the car gets off on the Hurontario exist of the toll-road, then he’s probably going home.  If we check his Rogers PVR later tonight, we’ll see that he watched an old episode of Mythbusters around midnight and skipped over the commercials.  Then he turned it off at 0040 hrs and went to bed.

So then this story,  U.S. to Expand Domestic Use Of Spy Satellites off the front page of WSJ online, by ROBERT BLOCK August 15, 2007; Page A1 would point to more societal management coming our way:

"The U.S.’s top intelligence official has greatly expanded the range of federal and local authorities who can get access to information from the nation’s vast network of spy satellites in the U.S.

The decision, made three months ago by Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell, places for the first time some of the U.S.’s most powerful intelligence-gathering tools at the disposal of domestic security officials. The move was authorized in a May 25 memo sent to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff asking his department to facilitate access to the spy network on behalf of civilian agencies and law enforcement."

The capabilities of American spy satellites are subject to much speculation, most of it ill-informed or wildly exaggerated.  They don’t need to see if Vladimir Putin shakes it with his left hand or his right hand. 

For the record, Putin is right-handed, and he doesn’t strike me as the kind of person who would take piss outside, unless he was at his dacha at Solovyovka.  Solovyovka is just off the M56, but is well wooded, so he could take a leak in the woods, if so inclined.  I’m reasonably certain somewhere in the depths of Homeland Paranoia or the DIA Mapping Branch, there exists pictures that prove or disprove Putin’s handedness, as well as his predilection for taking a piss in the forest. I digress.

We know Google Earth and MS Maps Live have the resolution needed to see license plates.  There are enough anecdotal stories about people being photographed from great height, sunbathing nude in the backyard,or coming out of peeler bars, for it to be funny anymore. 

We know that the Toronto police are using airborne Infrared cameras to find houses that have too many lights on at 0300:  This usually indicates a grow operation and as often as not, means a group of unfriendly people are coming in the door.  Unfriendly to the tennant at least. 

Data mining we’ve talked about before, but this is almost into the realm of speculative fiction until you stop and think about it.  The ability to have this level of data about everyone in a few seconds short of real time, is perfectly doable right now.  There is no magic involved, or special computers with a black hole suspended in space plasma at their center.

The issue is not the doing.  The issue is the why we’re doing it.   

Karl Rove, longtime puppet-meister of the Terror Troika of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Rove, has finally pulled the pin on his career at the top tier of politics. 

Kousin Karl, architect of President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, since Texas Governor days, said in a Wall Street Journal piece by John D. McKinnon, that; "I just think it’s time," Mr. Rove said in the interview. "There’s always something that can keep you here, and as much as I’d like to be here, I’ve got to do this for the sake of my family."

Kousin Karl has been sniffing the Bush athletic supporters and other foundation garments since 1973 when he was Special Assistant to Daddy Bush as Chairman of the Republican National Committee. 

The big break came in 1984 when Daddy said he’d fund a corporation to put some fresh, working, electronics in his eponymous son George "Give Baby a Lap Dance!" Bush and stand him up as a meat puppet for the Texas gubernatorial election.  Karl and some of the other fixers did good work and got Dubya elected in ’94 and again in ’98.

Two years later, after regrooving the Dubya software and putting some of the electronics in First Puppet Peggy Hill, Kousin Karl ran it for President of the Whole Shebang against Al Gore and won, more or less.  This put Kousin Karl in a position of Great Power along with the ex-Daddy Bush cronies like Shotgun Dick, Donnie Rumsfeld, Irv Libby, Rickie Pearle, Wolfie Wolfowitz, Fast Fred Fielding, Slick Rick Armitage, the Z-Man, Zalmay Khalilzad and Dougie Feith.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the chain-whipping specialists of "Larry" Ari Fleisher and Victoria "Torie" Clarke, who thought that genital electrocution was merely a prelude to permanent attitude adjustment for reporters unfriendly to the White House and Pentagon.  Larry Ari Fleischer’s weapon of choice was a bricklayer’s hammer, while TC used her Death Ray stare to boil the kidneys of recalcitrant reporters. 

We know where all that got us.

Now with Kousin Karl walking the plank, it looks like Shotgun Dick is going to drive for a while, from the Undisclosed Location.  I wonder where Karl is going to get the fresh human blood to drink?  Ah.  I forgot, Texas is his home state.

I’ve been a space case as long as I can remember.  No, not that way, but a fan of the Space program and I am old enough to remember Walter Cronkite covering the Mercury missions.  Then Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and the whole Shuttle program, including the three disasters of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia.

This morning, after the wake up music, some insipid, overly meaningful piece of pop-pap, I listened to the crew talking with the capcom, Shannon Lucid about some of the administrivia of flying people out of the atmosphere. 

Their first bit of fun happened around 0840 EDT or so.  The commander was looking for the eating utensils for the crew:  They weren’t where they were expected to be in the pantry. 

By 0854, the situation was resolved and one would assume that  Cdr. Scott Kelly (RED) could have his A-meal of Grits with Butter, Seasoned Scrambled Eggs, Beef Pattie, Tortilla, Pineapple, Grape Drink and Coffee with Cream and Artificial Sweetener.

Their second bit of fun was printing the day’s work log around 0845.  Mission Control in Houston had noted a log entry of a failed printing request, before the wakeup call. 

Cdr Kelly was right on top of it.  They had a printer jam, cleared it and have printed out the work log, so they know what they’re going to do today.  Meanwhile they had to fiddle with a circuit breaker for an oxygen cryo-tank instrument on Tank 2, then swap over to Tank 4 and run some power cables from a different power source.

Incidentally, there is a Canadian along this trip.  Dr. Dave Williams (ORANGE) is on his second flight.  Since they found the food utensils, one would assume Dr. Dave is having his Dried Pears, Oatmeal with Raisins, Granola with Raisins, Chocolate Breakfast Drink, Orange-Grapefruit Drink, Kona Coffee with Cream and Apple Cider as his Day 2 Meal A 

Yes, you can get all this hyper-trivia online at NASA.  No, Dave Williams did not bring an extra-large, double-double from Timmy’s.  Roll Up The Rim To Win is over.  There are no drive-thru’s in low earth orbit and he can’t get a Dutchie or Apple Fritter. 

What does this mean?  Even in space, you can’t find your fork, printers jam up, circuit breakers go for vacation and you have to run some extension cords once in a while.  Sounds just like life here on the planet.

I’m hoping I’ll hear one of the astronauts say either "Are we there yet?" or "Houston, Endeavor, Tracy took my Macadamia nuts! Over."

The background story on the Minneapolis bridge failure is not as complex as you might think. 

The first deep understanding you must have is that Gravity Always Works. 

The second deep understanding is this:  All Machines Break.  

Engineers look at the design of a machine and figure out a reasonable safety margin to design into the machine, based on good judgement, previous experience and then adds another percentage as a "Murphy’s Law" pad.  This is true for machines as simple as crowbars, or as complicated as aircraft.

Since all machines break, the object of maintenance is to inspect and fix small failures before they become big, expensive failures.  To inspect and fix, you need to know the expected lifetime of the machine. 

A disposable lighter has a short lifetime and the inspection consists of making sure it leaves the factory in good condition.  There is no need, or procedure for field inspection and repair.  At the end of the service life (when it runs out of butane) or if something goes wrong with the flint wheel or striker parts of the machine, you throw it out and get a new one. This no-fix mode doesn’t work for bridges.

The working machine parts of a bridge are the structures that transfer the weight of the bridge (and the things on the bridge) from one place to another, while allowing passage across the bridge over a certain length.  Usually that means over an obstruction of some sort, like a river, or a valley where it would be impractical to make those on the bridge climb or descend steep gradients or get very wet.

That’s all there is to a bridge.  Some kind of structure made of stuff, designed to last a certain amount of time, to do a particular job, to safely go over some natural obstruction. 

Weave together a bunch of swamp reeds to make a rope.  Rope works as a bridge with some planks in between, to allow individuals to cross, on foot, from one side to another.  That fulfils the basic requirements.  Except rope wears out and rots, wooden planks eventually splinter and if nobody checks these things, it becomes unsafe, breaks and someone falls to their doom. 

So far, we’re not into rocket science are we?  Now it is a question of scale.  Not just size, but financial scale too.

We know that stones work, especially if we arrange them in arches so the river below can still pass.  But it’s a bugger to figure out the math of how many arches, how wide, how tall, how many workers, how long it takes to pile the rocks and how are we going to hold the rocks together. 

Then there is the problem of rocks:  They’re not consistent.  Some rocks under compression are fine, others, like slate, shatter apart and break.  Now we need someone who knows rocks as our expert and someone else who knows math and arches and someone else who can figure out where to put the strongest rocks and where we can put smaller or weaker rocks.  That starts to cost some money.  Romans figured this stuff out a few thousand years ago.  Some of their work is still up.

Abraham Darby and Thomas Pritchard figured out how to do it with cast iron in 1773 in Shropshire, UK, over the Severn River Gorge.  It was completed in 1779 and is still standing.  The first US iron box girder bridge was built in 1839 over Dunalp’s Creek in Brownsville, Pennsylvania.

Fast forward to today.  We know that steel, concrete and iron work well as parts of a bridge machine.  We know that the base for a bridge should not be on swamp, or a random pile of twigs.  Bridges are heavy things at the best of times.  We know that steel, concrete and iron will rust, weaken and degrade over time making the bridge machine less safe.  Eventually gravity, which always works, takes over and the bridge falls down.

Nothing exotic yet?  It’s simple enough to understand?  OK, just checking.

We know that if we paint and maintain the bridge every couple of years, the bridge will last a long time.  That means check the rocks, stones, nuts and bolts.  Look at the welds, scrape off the rust and patch any parts that are suspect, then the bridge will stay up and be safe for a long time. 

We also know that eventually, the bridge will be nothing but patches and paint, so we had best plan now for how to pay for a new bridge in the same place.  Are there any huge leaps of logic I’m taking here? 

Following along, the US Federal Highway Administration has studied the problem and come to the conclusion that there are 70,000 bridges that are "structurally deficient" according to their own studies, why are the bridges still open and being used?  There’s a logic gap there, that I’m not understanding very well.

Yes, it will take $188 Billion to fix all the deficient ones in the US, while the others slowly rust away and become ‘structurally deficient’ too.

But to keep some perspective, using the National Priorities Project "Cost of the Iraq War" calculator as a rough guide, Minnesota has already pumped $10.7 Billion into the Iraq war, while the total tab for the whole US is estimated at $449 Billion dollars so far.  I’ll even divide that number in half, just to take out any political hype or axe-grinding, so $224.5 Billion. 

That’s how much the US Government has dumped into enforcing a regime change and getting a nice photo of President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy in front of the "Mission Accomplished" banner on an aircraft carrier.

There is the issue of nearly 4,000 dead soldiers, but let’s leave that out of our calculations, simply because they only managed to kill 5 in Minneapolis when the bridge collapsed.  It’s cold, but we’re talking bridge fatalities, not bullet and bomb fatalities.   

Or, to put it very simply, with what the US has paid fighting in Iraq, they could have fixed all the structurally deficient’ bridges in the US and still had $36.5 Billion left over to fix some of the borderline cases. 

By the way, all that money for the Iraq War?  That’s all ‘new’ money that the US came up with out of the blue.  There was no future wars line item reserve in the US Budget in 2001, 2002 or 2003.  Unlike the various state and federal agencies who have to predict and juggle slender budget needs years in advance, the Pentagon decided they needed a couple of hundred Billion dollars, pronto. 

I wonder if someone will hang a "Mission Accomplished" banner on the wreckage of the I-35W bridge for President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy to stand in front of today when he does his tour of the site.

Since the I-35W span fell down Wednesday evening, most of the news networks have been wall to wall with coverage, including special features, in-depth reporting, investigative assignments and the rest of the news hoopla. 

For those of you living under a rock, a bridge fell down in Minneapolis, taking a big piece of the rush-hour traffic with it.  Blood and guts?  So far, five dead, perhaps a dozen missing and eighty injured.  The do have live video of the bridge actually falling, from a security camera.   It was a slow news week, so the three US majors came out in force, while the two cable news outlets are camping out on the banks of the Mississippi.

The outrage pot is being stirred.  The US Federal government knew that the bridge was ‘structurally deficient’ and the Minnesota Department of Tranport (MinnDOT) was working on the bridge at the time it went down.  The talking head brigade is speculating like mad that there is some massive infrastructure failure being covered up by the government at every level and we should all beware that the sky will fall shortly after noon on Saturday.

A reality check here:  All bridges will fail.  Bridges, regardless of size, or contstruction materials, are in tension and compression.  They are machines that need maintenance, just like your car, or your lawn mower, or your bicycle. 

Here’s a reprint of one from Road-Dave from October 1, 2006. http://road-dave.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!15F30E7F138DBB88!295.trak

Yesterday (Sept 30/2006), a 20 meter section of four-lane overpass collapsed and fell onto Highway 19 in the Montreal suburb of Laval, Quebec.  The overpass, the usual concrete and steel construction was originally built in 1970 and fell 15 meters to the road below.  At least two vehicles were pancaked under the slab.  Five people were killed.  Three vehicles and a motorcycle fell on top of the collapse, as the road disappeared from underneath their wheels.  Six people who landed on top were injured, two are in critical condition. You can follow the story at www.cbc.ca if you want.

Stop and think about how many bridges you go over, or under, on your way to work, grocery shopping or doing the myriad things you do every day.  Bridges, even the smallish ones that cross highways, or creeks are marvels of engineering.  Thousands of cars, buses and trucks gallop along pounding the pavement every day. 

To understand what bridges do, find a five pound bag of sugar or flour.  Hold the bag in your hand and raise your arm straight out from the side of your body at right angles.  Keep it there for five minutes without letting your arm sag, tremble or move.  You are now, officially, a cantilever, one of the essential engineering structures that define a bridge.  You can put the bag of flour down now.  And stop you arm from throbbing. 

The Laval bridge was only 36 years old.  This is middle-aged for bridges.  The problem is that in most of Canada we have winter.  Winter means ice and snow on the roads, which, especially in Eastern Canada, means salt on the roads.  Salt eats steel.  To keep this corrosion in check, bridges get inspected, usually yearly, depending on the budgets. 

Uh-oh  I said a bad word:  Budgets.  Budgets for infrastructure have been cut to the bone year after year.  Budgets for inspections have just about disappeared.  Politicians have twin demons of getting re-elected, or doing what needs to be done.  Getting re-elected means not raising taxes, or making sure that voters see what their tax money is paying for. 

Bridge inspections and preventative maintenance are not things that a voter can look at and say "Yup.  We need it and we’re payin’ for it, as we should."  Nor for that matter is replacing or fixing the estimated 30 percent of sewer and water systems in most cities that leak.  Pipes are underground and until you get raw sewage backing up into basements, or find a huge sinkhole in a road, the pipes might as well be on Mars.  The electrical grid in this corner of North America is held together with spit, paper clips, gaffer tape and fervent prayer. 

The ugly fact is that the Great Infrastructure Buildout of the 1950’s and 1960’s was a long time ago.

Did the Laval bridge collapse from a lack of maintenance?  We don’t know yet.  I do know that the inspection process these days is pretty rudimentary:  "It is still there?  Yep.  Is it on fire but shouldn’t be?  Yep.  Passed.  Next!" 

Ontario is a good example of how not to do things.  The TSSA (Technical Standards and Safety Authority) in this province is in charge of inspecting elevators.  TSSA is a private company that slurped up the Technical Standards Division of the Ministry of Consumer and Corporate Affairs for the province.  TSSA sets fees to perform inspections, as required under law.  They are non-profit but are expected to cover their entire budget from license and inspection fees. 

There are more than 43,000 elevating devices in Ontario.  This includes escalators, passenger elevators, freight elevators and personnel lifts.  There are 43 inspectors listed on the TSSA website for the whole province.  This means each inspector, including the managers, has to inspect approximately 1000 elevating devices per year to make sure the old stuff is still safe and the new stuff is installed correctly.

By the way, there are 261 workdays in a year, assuming you get Saturday and Sunday off.  Let’s call it 250 workdays a year, as folks do get sick, have to take training, statutory holidays, vacations, or to go to the doctor. 

That means each inspector, having 1000 elevating devices to inspect, must do four a day.  Two in the morning, two in the afternoon.  I’m not counting travel time, lunch, buildings being closed, people not available, time to do the paperwork and so on.  In the downtown core, this might even be doable, except the inspection time is basically 90 minutes per elevating device.  Or, "Is it on fire and plummeting to the basement from the 28th floor with a load of lawyers?  No?  Passed.  Next!" 

To add to the impossibility of inspecting things, the TSSA in Ontario also inspects fuel standards, boilers and pressure vessels, upholstery and stuffed articles, ski lifts, power plants and amusement rides.  I checked the number of inspectors for each category and at first glance the same names are in all the areas of authority.     

How to fix infrastructure failures?  First, it is going to cost a LOT of money that has to come from somewhere.  Somewhere means you and me and our pockets.  Second, we have to have some priorities as we can’t afford to fix it all.  Someone has to look at all the infrastructure components and decide each year where the bulk of the money has to go to keep things from breaking down completely.

As an example, there is a rail bridge that crosses a major road here in Mississauga, not far from where I live.  This bridge carries the GO Train, freight trains and passenger trains.  If that bridge failed and fell across a major north-south artery, Mississauga would stop from a traffic perspective and a big piece of the GO Train metro system would be out of commission for several weeks. 

Now, make that train a freight, carrying anhydrous ammonia, propane, new cars and bulk sulfur, which is a load I have personally seen on that line.  The bridge fails and two dozen freight cars fall into the boulevard, cutting off traffic and burning for a while.  You would have to evacuate most of Mississauga, which means 600,000 people have to go somewhere because of one rail bridge. 

That is the hidden danger of infrastructure failure.  The failure isn’t just one thing, it becomes, very quickly, several dozen things of ever-increasing danger and impact.

However, we don’t know what parts of our infrastructure are in the worst shape.  We have no clue what bridges are merely looking old and tired and which ones are teetering on collapse from abuse, neglect or bad construction in the first place.  Why?  Because inspecting infrastructure is not a glamorous use of taxpayers’ money.  It isn’t sexy like a convention centre, or a modern toll road.  It doesn’t get the politician any publicity mileage whatsoever, therefore what will get cut first?

Bridges, roads, sewers, natural gas pipes, the electrical grid and all the other infrastructure things we rely on daily will last for several decades as long as regular, comprehensive inspection and repairs are carried out. 

Will it eventually turn out that the bridge in Laval fell down because of a lack of inspection and general neglect?  Again, I don’t know for certain, but I can make a well-educated guess.  The answer is yes.

On Friday in Phoenix, two television station helicopters crashed into each other, then crashed to earth and burned.  The news copters were following an escaping bad guy, wanted by the police, doing the live eye in the sky thing that television stations love.

KTVK and KNXV both lost their pilots and their videographers in the crashes.  One of the reporters was covering the ground chase live to air when the collision happened.  This is tragic in a number of ways, not the least being for the various families of the dead. 

The part that I find more surprising is that it hasn’t happened sooner.  Major metro stations in the US know that live footage of police chases, fires, floods and so on are ratings grabbers of the first order.  Helicopters and small aircraft have been used as traffic report platforms for decades, then with the advent of microwave downlinks, as Live-Eye-In-The-Sky, bringing you pictures as they happen.

About a decade ago, as satellite links became affordable and stabilized camera mounts more common, the live-eye evolved further, using some very nifty technology to deliver dropout-free, gyro-stabilized, gen-locked pictures to the dazed eyes of viewers at home.  The more famous live-eye shots have been the OJ Simpson low-speed Bronco chase:  Riot coverage from LA.  The three days of coverage of Hurricane Katrina by pool reporters in New Orleans.  I’m leaving out the car chase action that happens daily in LA, as the news departments fight for ratings.

By definition, helicopters are 10,000 highly-stressed aluminum parts flying in close formation.  Helicopters do not naturally fly:  You use horsepower and rotors to force the thing to go in the air.  If you lose horsepower, you fall.  Technically, you can auto-rotate to a landing as long as you have some forward speed, a minimum of 300 feet of height and a lot of room to decide where you’re going to engage in a controlled crash.  Losing a main rotor, or a tail rotor means gravity and physics take over immediately and it will probably kill you.

Fixed wing airplanes naturally glide, as long as you have enough forward speed and some height, even a 767 will glide.  Just ask the passengers of G-GAUN (cn22520/47) the Air Canada Gimli Glider.  As long as most of the airframe is intact, fixed wing aircraft of almost any size will glide at least for a while.  Eventually, the same physics and gravity take over.  At the end of the day, helicopter or fixed-wing, as long as you walk away from the landing, it was a successful flight.

Where it goes wrong is the control room, or the news producer pushing for more, closer, better, more striking news footage:  The pressure on the pilots and the videographers to get right into it for better coverage. 

Three or four helicopters, fighting gravity, the machine, uplink connections, the sun, hydro wires, towers, building, updrafts, downdrafts, other copters’ rotor wash, other air traffic and still trying to follow a terrified felon being chased by the cops, (in a helicopter too), at low altitude and not much forward speed, means the odds are stacked up against each news copter.  Add one small mechanical failure, or even just a little mechanical bobble and it is all over.

The issue is really why do we feel it necessary to see, up close and personal from the live-eye in the sky, a car chase, or smoke billowing from a garbage fire?  We know the news stations will cover it, using all the resources they have at their command, including helicopters.  Each station fights to give the viewer the most impressive pictures of the action.  On more than a few occasions, the Michael Jackson motorcade to the police station comes to mind, the news copters seem to miss each other by mere feet.  I don’t care how skilled these pilots are, that’s pushing your luck to get the ‘story’, such as it was. 

The other side of the problem is the pilot in command.  The pilot is the person ultimately responsible for the safe operation of the aircraft.  With extraordinary pressures on him or her from the newsroom, they can sometime be persuaded into making decisions that they might not want to make. 

I’ve shot commercials and industrial films from several helicopters, small aircraft and even hot-air balloons.  Before unpacking cameras and gear, we would have a safety meeting, often at my insistence.  My rule was always the pilot decides and I said it out loud.  If they feel safe doing what I suggest, then we’ll do it, but they can call it off at any time for any reason.  I have survived one emergency auto-rotate landing in a Hughes 500.  I never want to do that again as it almost as bad as falling down a flight of stairs. 

The pilot, a year later, in the same aircraft, was killed in a shoot for a television station in Hull.  He nailed some hydro wires on a high speed pass over a lake.  The Transportation Safety Board brought the tape to where I worked, to find out what happened. 

You saw the copter doing a fast, low pass (called gettin’ the skids damp in the slang of the day) over a beautiful lake and heard a very distinct sound when the wires hit the engine nacelle and turned it all into a spray of aluminum parts. people and camera equipment.  There wasn’t enough time for the four occupants to say "Merde!" when the tape ended abruptly.

What happened in Phoenix is utterly predictable.  If the NTSB does some digging, they’ll probably find the control room, or the director was calling for some really close shots of the perp being chased.  They’ll probably find that three or four helicopters, at a low level, in hot conditions (not as much lift from the air) doing weird acrobatics to keep the camera on the subject, resulted in two of them coming together, showering parts, people and fuel over Steele Indian School Park in Phoenix.

Where we fail as a society, is letting television stations feed us this madness.  It isn’t news.  Mikey Jackson driving to court does not need five copters in the air, covering every mile.  Paris Hilton does not require air cover to get to prison.  Wildfires are smoke, smoke and more smoke with the occasional flame outbreak.  Heck, just replay the same footage from last season and we’ll never know the difference. 

The Media gives us what we want and if that’s live eye footage of the trivial, the unimportant and the merely titillating, then this will happen again.

There’s always something tasty in the Friday Inbox.  Today we hear from The Almighty.

From WOAI in San Antonio:  A 50-year-old pastor from a church here in San Antonio was killed Tuesday afternoon after he was hit by a bolt of lightning while hiking with his two teenage sons, authorities told News 4 WOAI.

The man and his two sons were hiking in the Lost Maples State Natural Area near Vanderpool close to 1:30 p.m. Tuesday. It started raining and the family went to seek cover under a cedar tree, Bandera County Sheriff Don Berger said. The father was then hit by lightning and died instantly, officials said.

God was heard to say "Shit, I missed!  I wanted to get that bear that was sneaking up behind them.  Sorry!"

From the Miami Herald:  A Broward prisoner on trial, accused of illegally masturbating in his jail cell, was found guilty of indecent exposure Tuesday.  Terry Lee Alexander, 20, had been fighting the charge, which had been brought by a female Broward Sheriff’s Deputy who saw him commit the sex act in his cell.

In reaching the guilty verdict, jurors found that an inmate’s jail cell is ”a limited public place” where exposing oneself is against the law.  The jury recommended that Alexander be sentenced to 60 days in jail, that on top of the 10-year sentence he is currently serving for armed robbery.

The case drew snickers in the courtroom Tuesday, especially during jury selection, when the jurors were quizzed about their masturbation habits.  The awkward questioning was posed by defense attorney Kathleen McHugh, who faced 17 prospective jurors and asked point-blank who among them had never masturbated.

No hands went up.

Then, she went one-by-one, asking each prospective juror if he or she had ever masturbated.  All nine men said yes, two of the 10 women said no.

God was heard to say "Bullshit!" while covering his mouth to cough and added "I know McHugh’s got a selection of power tools in her lingerie drawer that would make a sex store envious and Juror #2 can only get wet knuckles while watching The Shopping Channel.  You tell me, does the defendant polishing the handrail really deserve 60 days?" 

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – Some call it the number of Satan, but the city’s taxi commission sees no reason to get rid of taxi medallion No. 666.  Cab driver Michael Byrne asked the agency to retire the number that was assigned to him last year, saying it has brought him nothing but bad luck.

Some other cabbies, however, brought a touch of levity to the debate Tuesday as they argued against retirement.  "How dare you take Lucifer’s number away?" said Thomas George-Williams, president of the cab drivers union, who was sporting red horns. "This is a serious issue."

The commission voted 5-1 Tuesday to keep No. 666 on the streets.

Commissioner Ton Oneto said the 666 medallion had been around for at least 30 years and San Francisco has somehow survived.

God was heard to say:  "Well, at least Satan is working again as there’s nothing worse than the Prince of Darkness taking a couple of years off to re-evaluate his career.  Good to have him back, but driving a cab?  Oy!"

No Diamonds Around Uranus

Irene Klotz, Discovery News  July 25, 2007 — Given enough carbon, pressure and time, diamonds can form — but apparently not everywhere, say researchers who developed new modeling methods to parry the notion that small diamonds could spontaneously form in the skies of giant gas planets like Uranus and Neptune.

The discovery three years ago of a white dwarf star with a solid diamond core bolstered theories that the carbon-containing atmospheres of the large outer planets were celestial diamond factories even closer to home.

"Our simulations indicate that it is extremely unlikely that diamonds could ever have nucleated from the carbon-rich middle layer of Uranus and Neptune," a team of Dutch physicists wrote in paper to be published in Physical Review Letters.

God was heard to say:  "Dave, I betcha a nickel you can’t transcribe that headline without biting the end off your tongue, Deal?"  Deal.

Framingham MA MetroWest Daily News Sherborn – A Sherborn teen was charged yesterday with having sex with sheep at a farm near his home, and police reports suggest the encounters may have gone on for nearly a year.

Roger Henderson II, 18, was arraigned yesterday in Natick District Court on charges of bestiality, cruelty to animals and breaking and entering in connection with an incident police say took place at Boggastow Farm on June 27.

According to a police report, the farm’s barn had been the target of at least a dozen break-ins between August 2006 and June 2007, prompting the property owner to install surveillance cameras.

Between 3 and 4 a.m. on June 27, according to police, the camera captured and filmed a person identified as Roger Henderson II. The man grabbed a sheep by its hind legs and dragged it to the corner of the stall, according to police. The man removed his clothes and appeared to have sexual relations with the sheep. After finishing, the man put his pants back on and left the barn with his shirt in his hand, according to the report.

Following his arraignment yesterday, Henderson was released to the custody of his parents, on the condition he stay at least 30 yards away from the farm, and animals in general. The teen also was ordered to "report immediately to Leonard Morse (Hospital) to continue current mental health treatment," according to court documents. A woman at Boggastow Farm yesterday shouted, "no comment" to reporters before later threatening to call police.

God was heard to say:  "I saw that.  Damn, but he picked an ugly one. When’s the surveillance video going on YouTube?"

Panel Finds Astronauts Flew While Intoxicated
Jul 26, 2007 By Frank Morring, Jr./Aviation Week & Space Technology

A panel reviewing astronaut health issues in the wake of the Lisa Nowak arrest has found that on at least two occasions astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so intoxicated that they posed a flight-safety risk.

The panel, also reported "heavy use of alcohol" by astronauts before launch, within the standard 12-hour "bottle to throttle" rule applied to NASA flight crew members.

A NASA spokesman declined comment on the findings, which were obtained by Aviation Week & Space Technology. At the direction of Administrator Michael Griffin, NASA Chief Medical Officer Dr. Richard S. Williams set up the panel to review astronaut medical and psychological screening after Nowak was arrested in Orlando, Fla., Feb. 5 on charges of attempted murder and attempted kidnapping for allegedly stalking and threatening a woman who was dating another astronaut. The attempted murder charge was subsequently dropped.

God was heard to say:  "I told them, no Two for One Shooters Night at the International Space Station.  And the nachos up there are just crap.  Stick with the draft beer, at least that’s cold." 

Thursday, July 26, 2007 By LESLIE BARBARO / HERALD NEWS

PATERSON — Someone stole 1,000 gallons of water from Daisy Valdivia’s backyard. And they didn’t spill a drop.

Valdivia woke Wednesday morning to find that her family’s inflatable pool, hip high and 10 feet in diameter and filled with water, was stolen from her backyard in the middle of the night. There is no evidence that the water was poured out, pumped out, evaporated or drunk.

"I’ve never heard of a pool being stolen, let alone one with water in it," Valdivia said.

According to Valdivia, the theft must have occurred between 1 a.m., the time her husband went to bed, and 5 a.m., the time she woke to put out the recycling.

"For them to do something that fast, that’s what amazes me," she said.

Valdivia, a lifelong city resident, moved into her home on McBride Avenue just five weeks ago. She and her husband purchased the bright blue pool for their three children less than a month ago. They never expected that it would be stolen in a neighborhood Valdivia described as "a nice, quiet area."

Although Valdivia said she is grateful nothing else was stolen, she was surprised that the thieves went through all that trouble for a pool. "We have two grills, chairs, umbrellas, they’re much easier to take," she said.

According to Lt. Anthony Traina of the Paterson Police Department, it’s clear that this was carefully planned. "Someone took a little time and effort thinking about this," he said. "This wasn’t just walking by and snatching a bike. That tells us something, too."

In light of the theft, Valdivia said she is considering putting up a fence, She also has questions for the thieves who stole her pool.

"I just want to know what the heck they did with the water," she said.

God was heard to say:  "They needed some good wine on the International Space Station and, well, you know, just up to my old tricks."

We give thanks to The Almighty for offering his comments on the news of the week.  This afternoon I’ll toss a nickel off my apartment balcony.  If He catches it, He can keep it.  I always pay my debts.

There have been some more revelations from the Tour de France aside from the usual nonsense.  Alexandre Vinokourov, one of the premiere riders. tested positive for homologous blood doping and the team he rides for, has been invited to go away by the Tour de France organizers and to take Vinokourov with them.

Cycling at the professional level requires a level of physical fitness that you and I can only dream about.  The Human, being a reasonable efficient machine, on a bicycle, also a reasonably efficient machine, can perform remarkable things.  It is competition of the most elemental, aside from boxing, and that is the attraction of watching the Tour de France.  The riders are amazingly fit, fast and fluid, using every last erg of energy in their bodies to propel a bicycle up a hill, down a hill, or around city streets for hours at a time.

Previous winners, like Lance Armstrong, Greg Le Mond, Floyd Landis and the rest, have always been surrounded by unproven allegations of Better Cycling Through Chemistry.  It seems impossible for mere humans to survive the Tour de France without some kind of assistance.  Homologous blood doping, the charge against Vinokourov, is merely another method to jack up human performance.

Science and money, being what they are, make sure that the human machines are as effective as the science and the money can make them, within the rules.  Wednesday, rider Cristian Moreni and the entire Cofidis squad took to the international departures lounge at the nearest airport and pulled out too.  Moreni failed a doping test.

Then earlier today, the Maillot Jaune, the leader of the Tour de France, Michael Rasmussen got the gate from his team, Rabbobank.  Rasumssen was already in a mess with the Danish Cycling Federation as he wasn’t telling them where he was, every hour of every day, missing what are called out-of-competition tests.

Aside from the daily embarrassment of having to piss for the doctors and give them vial after vial of blood, the riders, depending on their status or standing, have to diary their location and ask for permission to go places.  The idea is to keep riders away from countries like Mexico, Panama, the Czech Republic or other countries where the controls on performance-enhancing chemistry are the punch line to a bad joke.

So far, with three riders and two teams out of the Tour, it is looking like the beauty of professional cycling has taken another half-dozen shots to the scrotum from a foot encased in a steel-toed boot.  Does this mean the Tour de France is now Officially a Crock of Manure? 

It is getting to the point where any competition is going to be considered bent if more than one person is entered.  Professional Wrestling is starting to look like the last bastion of ‘pure’ competition.  Pure, meaning Pure Theatre.