What We Learn About Power Lines From Tropical Storm Irene

If nothing else, I'd hope Tropical Storm Irene has pointed out the strategic advantages of putting power lines underground.  You know, instead of waving them in the air for every tree branch, gust of wind, or squirrel with a death wish to take out.

My argument in a nutshell.

I've heard the argument that we can't put power lines underground because then people would electrocute themselves when digging.  I'd like to refute this argument as a reason against using underground power lines by pointing out that:

A) There are already a significant amount of power lines underground (The Age)

B) People get electrocuted by power lines being above ground all the time, as evidenced by all those "You Can't Touch This" PSA commercials.  If you feel any safer having the power lines above ground, read this: Don't Touch This: Myths and Misconceptions

Also not safe.

If the concern is that people will dig into the power lines underground and get electrocuted then simply educating them about this danger should suffice (which we're already doing).  Power lines are dangerous above ground, too, as we've established.  Therefore, when I was a child I got a lot of instruction from my parents and from school about all the dangers of touching power lines.  Generally this is enough, not a lot of kids get killed by power lines each year.  So few, in fact, I couldn't even find any numbers or studies on the subject online, although I did find that an average of 133 workers are killed by power lines per year (www.lanl.gov/safety/electrical/docs/overhead_power_lines_module_4.ppt).  Would putting them underground, where they can't be reached by every fool with ladder or child with a kite, really make them more dangerous?

More dangerous than digging to China.

The argument that we shouldn't bury power lines due to potential loss of life is hypocritical, as well.  Power plants, particularly coal power plants, the source of the power used to power the lines in the first place, kill 13,000 a year with pollution (Huffington Post).  Even with power lines above ground, where they're more likely to come in contact with people, the number of people killed by the lines carrying the electricity is about 1% of the number of people killed by the pollution created to generate the electricity.


Now consider how vulnerable the power grid is being above ground (Reuters).  Tropical Storm Irene was, well... a tropical storm.  Imagine if Irene had been a category 5 hurricane.  What then?  The biggest problem Irene created was 5 million people without power.  That can kill people, too, you know.  It's not just tropical storms that can take power lines down, either.  General wind storms, ice storms, lack of maintenance, and drunk drivers are also adept at taking out power lines.

As far as cost goes, yes it costs more to put the power lines underground.  The Age article sited above goes into some detail about how towns have dealt with that, and while there is a higher initial up-front cost there is also savings down the road.  Like when you don't have to pay to replace all the wires that went down in a tropical storm and the crews working overtime and being bused in from around the country (who then have to be fed and housed) to replace all those cheaper wires.  For a home, while it can cost up to $11,500 to put above ground wires underground, it can also increase the value of the home by 3%, or $15,000 on a $500,000 house.  Pay me now or pay me later, I say.

And how much do you suppose it cost to do this?

Yes, there is an inherent danger to putting power lines underground, as there is an inherent danger in running electricity anywhere, no matter how we do it.  You can hit them with a shovel when digging and they're harder to repair after flooding events, so there is that to consider.  However, being that you already have to call before you dig, would putting more power lines underground really make it any more dangerous than it already is?

Entertainment: Tron: Legacy

**1/2 - Tron: Legacy should have been a half an hour long. That would have made it a better movie. Also, it looked like it was put together by amateurs. If there's one word I would use to sum up this movie, it's anemic.

THE ANEMIC CHARACTERS:

Sam Flynn is horribly acted by Garrett Hedlund.

His acting is a cheesy as his mustache.

He's one of the reasons this movie feels amateurish. He throws out some snappy one-liners, but he botches the delivery several times. He constantly looks like he wants to look off-camera to the director for his queues. He looks like he's aware that he's acting in a movie and is over-eager to deliver his lines, but he's not quite sure when to deliver them. He's not the only actor that does this, either. It looks... you know, amateurish. Like if you and your friends sat down and tried to make a Tron movie.

Maybe it's not Garrett's fault, though, the writers didn't give him much of a character to build from. When Sam is asked by his father, Kevin Flynn, if he has a job the answer is no, he doesn't. Kevin then asks if he has a girlfriend or wife. No, again. Kevin asks him if Sam went to college. No, he dropped out. Wow. There sure is a lot of depth to bring to that character. What exactly has this guy been up to his whole life? And why is he the main character in a big-budget action movie?

Kevin Flynn is played by Jeff Bridges who reprises his role as The Big Lebowski for this film.

Seriously, it's the same guy.

It's hard for to me to accept this man as some kind of techno-guru with a miracle to bring to the table of mankind when he's talking about "bio-digital jazz, man!" and says other things like "far out!" and "You're messing with my zen thing, man!" Really, they should have just dressed him in a bathrobe, boxers, and a pair of flip flops and called the movie The Big Lebowski: Legacy, This Time it's Digital, Man!

Quorra is well-played by Olivia Wilde and represents the last of a new form of digital life, called the ISO's, that has spontaneously come into existence. They're really wise but really naive creatures, or so Kevin tells us. But when talking about playing the game Othello with Kevin, Quorra says her style of play is more "aggressive" than Kevin's, so I'm not sure where the naivety comes into play. She also doesn't say anything wise, so I'm not sure what that was about either. I say Olivia Wilde plays her well because she does do a good job of looking around wide-eyed like she doesn't know what's going on half the time, so she does convey the sense that Quorra is rather new to the world.

Kevin Flynn is eager to bring this new life form into the real physical world because she will revolutionize everything we know, but he never explains how, and she never does anything spectacular other than some fighting and some gymnastics, so it's hard to be excited about this.

CLU is a program copy of Kevin who turned on Kevin. He is also played by Jeff Bridges, but a digital version. They used the same technology that brought the Na'vi to life in Avatar to create a digital version of Jeff Bridges that looks twenty years younger. I am curious to see how this digital technology advances in the future, although for now it is still a little distracting. CLU's face looks a little numbed in his responses, I guess because of the limitations of digital technology. He looks more like someone wearing a young Jeff Bridges mask that an actual young Jeff Bridges. But it is a good application of this new technology and I hope filmmakers continue exploring it's potential.

"I look exactly like a young Jeff Bridges. So long as I don't move."

Unfortunately since CLU is a copy of Kevin (who is stuck at the maturity level Kevin was when he created CLU) there's not much to learn about his character that we don't already know from the real Kevin from the last movie (before Jeff Bridges was a hippie). CLU's kind of there, he does some stuff, but other than the movie needing a bad guy there isn't much point to CLU.

Tron (Bruce Boxleitner). We're reintroduced to Tron from the original film (again a digital creation of Bruce Boxleitner to what he looked like 20 years ago), the program who "fought for the users". For most of the movie he's a bad guy, though, working with CLU although we're never told why. Later Tron spontaneously turns into a good guy again (he shouts out, "I fight for the user!" suddenly in a scene that made me laugh), but we aren't told why that happened either, so that didn't do much to further the story or the character.

Overall, the problem is that none of these characters has a story arc. Sam kind of grows up and decides to take over his dad's company when he returns to the real world. But that's it. Two hours for someone to decide to do something. Sam doesn't really develop his character, he just decides to start having one. Kevin's different than he was from the last movie, but we don't get to see the change as it's already happened before the movie started. Quorra's Quorra, no real room for change in a character that's supposed to be mankind's salvation. CLU doesn't change either, he really can't as he's a program that's doing exactly what he was already programmed to do. So the movie feels more like hanging out with friends, talking about nothing of consequence, rather than watching a story unfold. Nothing changes.

"What do you guys want to do today?"

"I dunno, what do you want to do?"

"I dunno."

...

"Far out, man!"

THE ANEMIC PLOT:

If you haven't seen the movie already I'm about to "ruin" it for you. I pulled this synopsis off of IMDb: "The son of a virtual world designer (Sam) goes looking for his father (Kevin) and ends up inside the digital world that his father designed. He meets his father's creation (CLU) turned bad and a unique ally (Quorra) who was born inside the digital domain of The Grid." Aaaand, that's about it. Really. That's the whole plot. The son, Sam, finds his father and then heads straight for the exit. That's it. But for some reason it takes a little over two hours to tell that plot.

What makes it worse is that the movie sets this plot up somewhat as a mystery, when there's no mystery to it at all. The story is pretty standard and it doesn't require a lot of thought to figure out. As an example it isn't revealed that Quorra is the last of the ISO's until towards the end of the movie, but if you'd been paying attention (and by paying attention I mean not sleeping) you'd have already known this the second The Big Lebowski.... I mean Kevin explains what the ISO's are.

Oh, the ISO's are unbelievably naive Lebowski says? And he hangs out with this chick who looks perpetually confused by what's going on around her? Gee, I wonder if she's an ISO? Guess I'll have to wait another hour to find out. Fun!

But, I guess in order to have a movie that was longer than half an hour they had to stretch it out, like we're waiting to find something out that we don't already know. But we never do. Which makes it boring. The first time I watched Tron: Legacy I actually did fall asleep. Literally. When I woke up I still knew exactly what was going on in the story. When the plot has no more depth than the synopsis what you're left with is long stretches of the movie where no new information is being fed to you. We're left watching Sam do... stuff, while we're waiting for him to hit the next plot point.

The movie starts out wasting time. There's a brief synopsis of the original Tron, but since this movie stands on it's own pretty well and because everything you would need to know about the original Tron is explained later on this synopsis is really useless. Then it goes into some detail about what's happened to Kevin's company since the last movie but since it's never touched on later on in the film and has no bearing on the plot this is all useless as well. The film then "explores" some father/son issues, but if you're a son who has a father, or know a son who has a father, or know anything about human beings at all, then you already know everything you'd need to know about this relationship. They don't cover anything particular to this father/son relationship. So that's useless. Again. Half an hour into this film and we haven't touched on anything of consequence. My family actually walked in on the movie at about this point and asked what they had missed and I answered, "Nothing. That's Sam, he's looking for his dad."

"So what happened at school today, son? Nothing? Oh, well, that's insightful. Glad we wasted two hours of everyone's lives to establish that relationship."

There is a framework for a good story here. There's a lot of ideas and relationships that could have been explored. But since they aren't explored, at all, it's just an empty shell of a story with gaps big enough for the entire movie to fall through.

The ISO's could have been explored better, but all we really know about them is that they sprang into existence out of thin air and were then brutally murdered out of existence via genocide by CLU. That could have been interesting too if we knew why CLU decided to eradicate them. Especially since CLU was created to design the perfect world, and the ISO's are established as sort of being perfect digital beings, you'd kind of think CLU would have kept the ISO's around and murdered everyone else who was less perfect than the ISO's. But he doesn't and we never find out why. So the ISO's were born without reason and are destroyed without reason. That doesn't give much depth to the story.

CLU himself is a mystery to me when he could have been the best character in the movie. If you've ever seen any Star Trek episode where one of the characters, like Kirk, gets split into two or more versions of themselves (like a Good Kirk and a Bad Kirk) you know that there's a lot of material to be mined here for a story in this scenario.

"I sense a character study coming on."

But the movie doesn't go into any of this. We do find out CLU felt Kevin had abandoned him, which Kevin did as he grew older and matured and CLU couldn't mature with him. But that's about it. How that leads to genocide I don't know. And if CLU was designed to create the perfect system boy is he bad at what he does. Kevin's basic plan to rid the world of CLU is to sit back and do nothing as CLU is sowing seeds of unrest in "the Grid" and is about to be brought down by revolution anyway. Really? That's the perfect system CLU was created to design?

The movie also touches on some issues of created beings rebelling against their god that it doesn't bother to develop either. Basically Kevin is god to the Grid, he made it and everything in it. CLU turning on Kevin should be as dramatic as the Devil turning on God, but it's not. This relationship is never looked into. Kevin has basically abandoned the Grid to it's own devices when he really should have taken some responsibility to heal the wounds between him and his lost creations before the end of the movie. But he doesn't. So that's a wasted story line as well.

The main threat of the movie is CLU's attempt to get out into the real world in the same way Kevin got into this fake world. CLU even develops an army to bring with him into our world. But how that would be a threat is never explained so there's no real drama for us as the audience. How exactly would digital programs exist in the real world, and how would they be a threat to us? CLU's army isn't that big and it looks like any division of the National Guard alone could overpower it. Would CLU have any of the digital powers he has in The Grid once he arrives in the real world? We never find out, and therefore never know what kind of a threat CLU would be to us in the real world, if any at all.

THE ANEMIC CONCLUSION:

What the filmmakers should have done is simply remake the original Tron. Seriously, why not? It's kind of what they did anyway, isn't it?

Separated at birth? You decide.

My reasons for this are as follows:

1. As far as I can tell the whole point of making Tron: Legacy was to "reboot" the franchise as is the trendy thing to do with movie franchises these days. This is to introduce the brand to a new generation. That would be better accomplished by just remaking the original, especially now that they could make it more along the lines of what the original was meant to be.
2. They wouldn't have been bogged down with having to explain what's happened since the last movie, since it has been 18 years.
3. Nothing of consequence happens in Tron: Legacy, so why not just start from the beginning?
4. They've shown that they can use digital technology to recreate a young Jeff Bridges, along with all the other actors. Why not just remake the entire original Tron this way, with a young Jeff Bridges? It could have been the greatest remake ever.

This underscores other odd decisions the filmmakers made. For one, the sets they chose to use. The original Tron had a lot less computer imagery than you would think. A lot less. In 1982 there was no way to composite live action footage with computer animation, so every shot that has a person in it contains no computer animation. What you think is live action actors interacting with a digital universe is just clever set design, lighting, and traditional special effects.

Now that you can film live actors with a digital background, the way Tron was originally meant to look, they don't. Like the original they use sets dressed up to look like digital backgrounds, and do a worse job. This makes no sense to me. All three Star Wars prequels extensively used computer animated sets for the actors to play in. With Tron: Legacy being a movie that is supposed to take place inside a computer, you'd think they would use a computer to create the sets.

Because they don't, the original Tron was much more successful at convincing the audience that they were watching a drama unfold inside a computer. Tron: Legacy looks more like a European techno dance club vomited all over the real world.

Inside a computer.

European techno dance club vomit.

The same goes for the costumes.

Looks like circuit boards come to life.

Looks like a questionable fashion statement.

Because they now have the technology to make suits that actually light up, instead of just making them look like they were lit up like the original Tron, they decided to do it this way when it accomplishes nothing for the audience except making the suits look watered down from the original. Now the suits don't look like walking circuitry, they look like... I don't know. The worst is Kevin's light up hoody. This does nothing to make it look like he's a person in a computer, it looks more like "Hey! Look what we can do!"

There's the bathrobe. Now it's officially "Lebowski: Legacy". Get him a White Russian.

Bottom line is that with all it's limitations the original Tron was more successful convincing us that we were inside a computer.

Maybe this is because the filmmakers don't seem to understand computers period. I got this sense right from the beginning. The rich guys who run Kevin's company in his absence talk about how their new operating system is so secure it cannot be copied, which makes no sense if you plan on selling this software, since you're selling copies. The way real companies, like Microsoft, lock down their software is by limiting how you can register the software, not copy it. Every computer that runs Windows has a copy of it, so selling an operating system that cannot be copied is like trying to bite you're own teeth. You can't do it. You can't distribute software without distributing it.

The movie tries to make some hippie points about how information should be free and companies trying to make a profit for investing time, work, and resources into a useful product are evil. But they didn't release the movie for free, so as far as I'm concerned that's a bunch of malarkey.

Also, when Sam breaks into his dad's old office, which no one has been in since 1989, the computer Sam finds, and has to wipe 18 years of dust off of, looks exactly like the computers everyone else is using in the movie in 2010. Shouldn't it look like a 1989 computer?

I must have been more deprived as a child than I thought. That's not what my Commodore 64 looked like, at all!

Lastly, we're told that, like in the original, the discs the digital people wear on their backs in The Grid is their data disc. This is key because Kevin remains in hiding because he doesn't want CLU to get his disc and therefore his knowledge which CLU could use for evil. Why doesn't Kevin just leave the disc at home when he goes out? It's kind of explained that people on The Grid can't survive without their disc, which makes sense, but in the middle of the movie Kevin does have his disc stolen from him yet he doesn't die. In fact, nothing bad happens to Kevin at all even though it takes the second half of the movie to get the disc back. So if he could last that long without the disc why didn't he just leave it at home?

It feels like the filmmakers tried to make the movie deep and profound but just didn't have the goods to actually do it. It's like a kid trying to tell a story when they don't know what they're talking about. They tell you a character is really cool but if you ask them what makes that character cool they can't give you an answer other than something like, "Well... he's just like really cool."

"Seriously, guys! Tron: Legacy will be even cooler than a Truffle Shuffle!"

The profound truth Kevin tries to teach CLU at the end is, "The thing about perfection is that it's unknowable. It's impossible, but it's also right in front of us all the time." Huh? I don't even know what that means. It sounds like either A) the statement is so profound it went over my head or B) this is supposed to sound deep but doesn't make any sense. I'm going to guess it was B.

This movie should appeal people who like eye-candy and who want to feel like they've watched something deep and profound but without having to actually think about anything.

Tron: Legacy really is cool.

You're An Idiot

From cracked.com. I realized this a few years ago myself, and it absolutely true. We're all idiots, always will be, and here's why:

Here's what's going to happen. At one point, you will honestly believe that you have every single thing figured out. You reach an epiphany where you understand yourself, you know what you want to do with your life, you know what kind of woman or man you're looking for, and you've figured everyone else out, you're a good judge of character. Exactly two years later, you'll say "Man, I was an idiot two years ago when I thought I had life figured out, but now I've REALLY got it figured out." You'll calm down a little bit and look back on your youthful ignorance and laugh. "How could I think life was all about [X] when it's CLEARLY all about [Y]? So young."

Two years later, you'll do the exact same thing- scrapping all of your old, childish assumptions in favor of your current, brilliant assumptions. In fact, you'll repeat that process every two years. Life, from what I've gathered so far, is largely about looking back on your past self and realizing how stupid you were. And you'll keep convincing yourself that, even though you were clueless two years ago, now you've got it figured out, until you finally reach a tipping point, and then you'll say "Man, I was an idiot two years ago, and two years before that, and two before that, so- you know what? Even if I think I have things figured out, I'm probably an idiot right now."

Opening Up

So I've decided to reopen this blog. Or at least start posting to it again. At least for awhile. Got some stuff I'd like to write that's a little too long for Facebook. Nice to see how far social networking sites have come, though. There was no Facebook back when I started this blog and we used to have to do all this by hand.

Look around at stuff I wrote here over four years ago, it's amazing how much as changed since then. How much I was right about, how much I was wrong about. Marvel at how it used to make sense to write a whole article on how GPS works on a phone, back in 2007, when it was still a jaw-dropper. It's like four years ago we were living in the stone-age or something.