Use Your Turn Signal

by Conroy

My girlfriend strongly encouraged me to write a post about one of my pet peeves: the many drivers ­– other drivers – who don’t use their car’s turn signals. Does this exasperate you as much as it does me? We’ve all been there, you’re driving along a busy road and the brake lights of the car in front of you flash bright red, and the car begins to slow, and you’re confused because there’s no reason you can see to be slowing down. Is there something wrong with their car? Is there debris in the road? Is there an accident ahead? No wait, the car isn’t going to, yes, it’s turning into a driveway. Of course you could have rear-ended the car because the driver just abruptly slowed to a virtual stop in the road with no warning whatsoever to you about what was going on. They didn’t use their turn signal. You know, the standard issue, easily accessible, simple-to-use, installed-for-a-clear-purpose turn signal. The turn signal designed specifically to alert other drivers (like you) about turns and lane changes. The turn signal whose purpose is to increase the safe operation of your car and to make the roads safer and operate better for everyone. The turn signal…wait, I’ve already started ranting.

I think her encouragement mostly stems from a hope that by writing about it I’ll stop preaching to her and berating other drivers (not that they know it), every time I see someone not use their turn signal, which seems like multiple times every single day. Lately I’ve been honking at drivers in front of me who fail to use their signals¹. It’s my attempt to shame them, but I won’t do that to my readers, so I’ll just proffer some advice, use your turn signal. But if you need more encouragement, read on.

The Lazy, the Selfish, and the Wrong
I’ve given this issue some thought and I’ve identified three possible reasons why people fail to use their signals: (1) laziness, (2) an intellectual or philosophical position that finds the use of turn signals unnecessary, and (3) a selfishness that borders on contempt for everyone else on the road. None of these reasons is justifiable and all counterarguments in support of them are untenable, but let’s take them one at a time.

Is this action really so hard?

First laziness. You’re driving along and you approach an intersection where you’re going to turn left. There’s a car behind you. But you decide it’s too much trouble to shift your left arm² a few inches to the turn signal shaft and apply a downward flick of the fingers to engage the left turn signal. An action that takes about one second and requires essentially zero energy³. You decide that the no-time-zero-effort action is still too much for you. You’d rather risk getting in an accident, endangering your safety and property (not to mention that of the driver and vehicle behind you) by not warning the driver behind that you’ll be stopping to turn. No, don’t be lame, use your turn signal.

I suppose one could take a position that turn signals are often unnecessary and therefore can go unused. After all, why do you, a competent driver, need to alert other drivers that you’ll be changing lanes on the highway? If there’s a gap between vehicles you’ll take it. If you’re going to make a turn, you’ll check your rearview mirror and slow gradually (and you might even shift slightly toward the side of the road in the direction of your turn to give the vehicles behind you some room to pass). Other drivers don’t need to know every little move you’re going to make, you’ll take care of your driving and they can take care of theirs. Wrong. We’re all using the roads together; driving is a social behavior. Turn signals are meant to convey information to all of the other drivers about what you’re going to do. I’m sure you’ve seen two drivers try and simultaneously merge into a highway lane, one from the left and one from the right, and then one or both suddenly swerve or brake to avoid a high-speed sideswipe collision.  Why does this happen? Because neither driver had their turn signal on, and so neither one knew that the other driver was planning to merge.

It’s foolishness to assume that other drivers are going to intuit or anticipate your driving behavior. It’s your job as a driver to do everything in your power to make sure everyone else knows what you’re planning to do, including and especially turning or changing lanes. Use your turn signal. And even if the road is empty with not another car for hundreds of yards, use your turn signal anyway⁴. Make it a habit. You stop at a red light or stop sign⁵ in the middle of the night for the same reason, so you’ll be conditioned to stop when traffic is very heavy. It’s same reason you put on your seatbelt no matter how short a trip or how slow you’ll be driving. Engage your turn signal whenever you merge or turn, period.

Finally, there’s that selfishness that leads drivers to totally ignore everyone else. You’re driving in your car, in your own world, your car cocoon oblivious or dismissive of everything and everyone else around you. The drivers of others cars are mere abstractions, unknown and barely glimpsed, and therefore they can be ignored. You can talk on the phone or text or fiddle with the radio and if you don’t have a hand free for the turn signal, so be it. If the other cars (and the people in them) aren’t important enough to consider then why bother with the turn signal? You’ve got your own worries, your own places to get to, and your own things to get done. All of the other drivers on the road are just obstacles in your way. There’s no chance that any one of them has anywhere equally important to be or get done, or that their destination is even more important and their timetable even more pressing than yours (that you might be in their way). Get over yourself, put the phone down, pay attention to the road, and engage other drivers on equal terms. Use your turn signal.

The decision-making (or lack thereof), the attitude, the general disregard that leads people to not use their turn signals can be defined by one word, it’s antisocial. You may not be a bad person, but if you fail to use your turn signal you are engaging in bad behavior. If a mark of maturity and wisdom is the ability to empathize and see the world from another’s perspective, then there’s no reason not do the mature, the safe, the smart thing. So please, be an adult and use your turn signal.

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NOTES:

1. A practice that I’m sure my girlfriend doesn’t always appreciate. Though she agrees about this whole failure-to-use-the-turn-signal issue.

2. If you drive on the right side of the road like in the U.S.

3. And I suppose you could suggest that inertia, Newton’s law that an object a rest (your arm in this case, and maybe your brain) will stay at rest unless acted upon by an outside force, comes into play. And that there is an effort to move your hand and engage the turn signal and it doesn’t matter how easy it is, it only matters that an action is required, and it’s the fact of the action and not the amount of energy required that is the key. Easy or hard an action is an action and therefore engaging the turn signal is much more of an effort than I’m giving credit for being. To which I’ll counter that if your energetic enough to make that argument you’re certainly energetic enough to use your turn signal. So use your turn signal and leave Newton out of it.

4. And this applies to other vehicle-operating behaviors like turning on your headlights. It doesn’t matter if you have the night vision of a cat and even in deep twilight can see the vague outlines of the road and cars. What matters is that the normal vision humans driving other cars may not be able to see you. So turn on your headlights for them. Everyone’s safety, yours included, will be enhanced.

5. Assuming of course that you always stop at stop signs, which you should no matter how silly it may seem when no other car is at or approaching the intersection. Heck if you need any reason, do it to avoid getting a ticket from the police officer who you know is just waiting, hidden, to catch you running a stop sign so they can cite you and ruin your day.

Roger Federer and the 2012 Tennis Season

by Conroy

Roger Federer victorious at Wimbledon for the seventh time

Roger Federer collapsed awkwardly to the grass as Andy Murray’s backhand passing shot, the last stroke of the 2012 Wimbledon Championships, fell wide of the sideline. The Centre Court crowd cheered in appreciation as they watched the Swiss champion defeat their local hope¹. Federer had won another Wimbledon title, his seventh, had won another grand slam tournament, his 17^th, and reclaimed the number 1 ranking (all records). His fall to the turf was just about the only ungraceful step he took all day. His tennis was, by any measure, a sublime, vintage display as he outplayed an in-form Murray (and subdued the wildly expectant and partisan British audience) to win the competitive match 4-6, 7-5, 6-3, 6-4. With this latest win he is once again the king of tennis, the mighty Roger Federer, the greatest player of all time.

Perhaps no two points encapsulate just how well Federer played then the two points that ended the second set. The score is 5-6, 30-30 with Murray, leading the match after having won a close first set, serving to take the second set to a tiebreaker. The players engage in a neutral baseline rally before Federer rips an inside-out forehand off a short mid-court ball deep into Murray’s backhand corner. Murray plays a smart soft backhand up the line but Federer has anticipated it and streaks to cut the ball off at the service line, hitting a great drop volley that Murray, despite all his speed, can barely reach and pushes long of the baseline. Now the score is 30-40, set point. Again the players engage in a baseline rally until Federer hits a short angled forehand to Murray’s forehand sideline. Murray is forced to lunge for the ball hitting it back to Federer who then rips a backhand crosscourt to Murray’s backhand corner. The Scot scrambles madly to get to the ball, but Federer has anticipated a weak crosscourt reply and is already sprinting toward the net, where he intercepts the ball near the service line and plays one of the most exquisite drop volleys you’ll ever see, the ball landing close to the net and literally bouncing low and sideways off the turf, and making its second bounce (and stopping cold) before the sprinting Murray can reach it. The set was Federer’s and from then on the outcome of the match was never in doubt. These points highlight what Federer tennis is all about, variety, sharp ball striking, point construction and anticipation, and jaw-dropping shot making (I let out an audible gasp on seeing that set point). Match highlights (including these two points) can be viewed here.

Coming into the 2012 tennis season few projected the renaissance of Roger Federer. The whispers were of a fading champion whose time of winning had passed. When I last wrote about tennis before the major clay court tournaments leading into the French Open (Roland Garros), I suggested three likely outcomes as the tour went through the heart of the season from the European clay-court spring through the U.S. Open in September. My least likely outcome (of three possible) was Federer regaining the number 1 ranking. So how did he do it and where does that leave his main (and recently dominant) rivals Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal? And what about the rest of the men’s field?

2012 from Australia to Wimbledon
2012 has been a highly competitive year – between the three men that continue to dominate tennis. And unlike last year, when the story was repeatedly Novak Djokovic besting Rafael Nadal, 2012 has seen Federer elbow his way back into the mix. Compare the major tournament winners from the last two years:

Tournament	2011		2012
	Winner	Finalist	Winner	Finalist
Australian Open	Novak Djokovic	Andy Murray	Djokovic	Rafael Nadal
Indian Wells	Djokovic	Nadal	Roger Federer	John Isner
Miami	Djokovic	Nadal	Djokovic	Murray
Monte Carlo	Nadal	David Ferrer	Nadal	Djokovic
Madrid	Djokovic	Nadal	Federer	Tomas Berdych
Rome	Djokovic	Nadal	Nadal	Djokovic
Roland Garros	Nadal	Federer	Nadal	Djokovic
Wimbledon	Djokovic	Nadal	Federer	Murray

Federer stated after his Wimbledon win that after last year's disappointing losses he was determined to take a more offensive approach into his matches with Djokovic and Nadal. That’s been clear tactic in recent matches. Unfortunately, that approach is blunted on slow clay, but on hard courts, especially fast hard courts, and grass, it is a winning strategy. So in the table above we see Federer’s name on the winner’s line in several big tournaments in 2012 where he was absent in 2011 (including the novel, fast, and apparently very slippery blue clay featured this year - for the first and last time - in Madrid). (What this table also shows is that no other man has been able to break through and win a big tournament. 2012 has been competitive amongst the “Big 3”, but the field still lags behind. Through Wimbledon, Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic have won 30 of the last 31 grand slam titles².)

Nadal playing - and beating - Djokovic at Roland Garros

It’s also clear the Novak Djokovic has been less consistent this year than last. Last year he was winning on all surfaces, this year he hasn’t. That led to a major shift that was all the talk in the tennis world before Wimbledon, Rafael Nadal getting the better of Djokovic on the European clay courts, changing the dynamic from last year and positioning the Spaniard for greater success in 2012, more grand slams, and the number 1 ranking. The clay courts in Paris played very slow this year, conditions perfect for Nadal and his impenetrable clay court defense. He sliced through his draw (seven doomed men as Pete Bodo labeled them) and despite a temporary hiccup in the final against Djokovic³ he emphatically won his 11^th grand slam. The title was his record seventh at Roland Garros, and was correctly hailed as a historic accomplishment, leaving no one in doubt that Nadal is the greatest clay court player in history. Most pundits picked him to carry his success onto grass and claim another Wimbledon title. Instead, and as proof that all glory is fleeting, he was famously upset by unknown Lukas Rosol in the second round (it’s worth watching Rosol’s unbelievable performance⁴, see highlights here). Nadal’s 2012 was not going to be a repeat of his 2010 or even 2008.

Roger Federer nearly lost the next day as he had to fight back from two sets down to beat journeyman Julien Benneteau in the third round. He was two points from defeat on five separate occasions. A few points here and there make all the difference. He fought through back issues in his next match. But he found his best form and full fitness for the last three matches, including an impressive win over defending champion Djokovic in the semi-finals. The Wimbledon triumph was a culmination of Federer’s resurgence. Last year he repeatedly lost to Nadal and Djokovic (1-7 through the U.S. Open), but this year he hasn’t (2-3 so far and 2-1 on hard courts and grass), including beating Nadal on the way to the Indian Wells title. The balance of power in tennis rests on who wins and loses a handful of key matches. This year Federer has won some of the matches that last year he lost. Last year he was clearly number 3, this year the top 3 have been much closer.

Just consider how each man won at this year’s grand slams: Djokovic beat Nadal to win in Australia, Nadal beat Djokovic to win at Roland Garros, and Federer beat Djokovic to win Wimbledon. If any of these results were different, then the rankings and storylines would be too.

2012 After Wimbledon
So what might we expect for the rest of the season? I don’t make predictions but I feel confident in writing that the remainder of the 2012 tennis season will continue to be dominated by Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal. There is little evidence to suggest otherwise. They’ve won every big tournament so far and until someone else breaks up their hegemony (which we’ve been waiting for years to happen) there’s little reason to think they won’t continue to do so. So focusing on them, let’s first consider in a little more detail what has happened so far this year. Here are their season records through Wimbledon:

Sinking Cities

by Conroy

Baltimore flooded by Hurricane Isabel

Are America’s coastal cities facing a losing battle against the sea? Consider these facts from cities all along the U.S. East Coast: In Galveston, Texas, a long sea wall shields the city from the Gulf of Mexico. The sea wall worked for a century, but in 2008 the storm surge from Hurricane Ike overtopped the wall and flooded the adjacent streets. In the early 1980s Miami-Dade County spent $50 million to rebuild the eroding shore line of Miami Beach. Similar projects, officially termed “beach nourishment”, are common all along the Atlantic seaboard¹. In some precariously narrow sections of Hatteras Island, North Carolina, far off the mainland in the state’s Outer Banks, sand bags line both sides of the state route 12 to keep the Atlantic on one side and Pamlico Sound on the other from splitting the island. Back in 2003 when Hurricane Isabel roared up the East Coast, the island was split and an emergency project was required to stop the erosion and prevent the split from becoming permanent. Hurricane Isabel continued its movement up the East Coast flooding coastal areas of Virginia and as it moved inland its powerful storm surge funneled water up the Chesapeake Bay causing widespread flooding in coastal Maryland, and putting Baltimore, including downtown, under several feet of water. The flooding even extended far up the tidal Potomac to Washington, D.C. In 2011, the storm surge from Hurricane Irene flooded parts of Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Further north, Nantucket Island off of Cape Cod is literally eroding into the sea, taking pricey homes with it.

As these examples above demonstrate, being next to the sea has its dangers, and fighting the long-term trend of beach erosion and flooding are never-ending expensive battles. This situation is only going to get worse if a planet-wide trend continues: rising sea levels. Consider that just along the Atlantic and Gulf coasts Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Jacksonville, Miami and Southeast Florida, Tampa Bay, and New Orleans are situated at least in part at sea level. And it’s not just major metropolitan areas that are at risk, the low-lying shores of the Houston shipping channel, just inland from Galveston, are home to one of the nation’s largest ports and lined with the nation’s largest concentration of petroleum refining plants. Are all of these areas destined to be inundated over the next century?

Sea Levels Rising
Of course the first thing that has to be answered is: Are sea levels actually rising? And to answer that, we need to understand what sea level is. Sea level is harder to define than it may seem because of course the flowing, undulating sea never seems to have one level. However, the most basic definition is the average surface elevation of the oceans when surface fluctuations, like high and low tides are averaged out. This seems like a reasonable definition but it nevertheless can be hard to pin down. Note that the average sea level of the Atlantic end of the Panama Canal is nearly eight inches lower than at the Pacific end. Still, it’s fair to say that there is a local “sea level” for all places where land meets tidal water. Historically these levels have been measured from set gauges on land, and more recently satellites have been used to observe global sea levels.

The results of these measures seem to confirm that sea levels are indeed rising all over the world. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)², global sea levels have been rising by about 1.8 millimeters per year (mm/yr.). If this estimate is in any way accurate, and indicative of a continuing trend (and not a rate that may slow or even reverse in the near future), there’s probably no need for immediate panic. At this rate it would take about 555 years for global sea levels to rise by one meter or about 170 years to rise one foot. This is hardly a catastrophic rate of increase. However, rising sea levels, whatever the rate, do pose an obvious risk to coastal areas. And many estimates, including those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), put the annual sea level rise much higher than the IPCC.

But what causes sea level to change? On geologic timescales, ocean bottom elevations and plate tectonics play major roles. These occur so slowly that they don’t affect us. More important are short term causes like tides, onshore winds, atmospheric pressure, surface water temperatures, evaporation, precipitation, river runoff, and in extreme cases major storm surges and tsunamis. On the longer term sea levels can change because glaciers and ice caps shrink or expand. In the first case, melt water is freed from the land and adds to the volume in the sea. In the latter case, water is trapped in ice and global sea levels drop. Another long term trend is changes in land elevation due to groundwater depletion, erosion, or general geological subsidence. But it’s the melting glaciers and ice caps that have gathered most attention in recent decades, the result, many will claim, of rising global temperatures, which is in turn the result of man-made effects to the environment.

Melt water on the Greenland Ice Sheet

Man-made or natural, rising temperatures will melt snow and ice. If the entire Greenland Ice Cap were to melt, global sea levels could rise by as much as 24 feet. If the entire Antarctic Ice Cap were to melt global sea levels would rise by 200 feet. These are extremely remote possibilities, Greenland and Antarctica are really cold places and it would take many thousands of years for them to melt. And Arctic sea ice melting would have a negligible effect on sea levels because these ice packs are already floating on the sea. More likely is increased melting of ice on the periphery of Greenland and Antarctica, which could still result in several feet of sea level rise. Also, if sea surface temperatures increase, water density decreases and its volume increases. So higher sea temperatures result in higher sea levels irrespective of the contribution of more water (melted ice). It’s worth noting that global temperatures haven’t increased over the last dozen or so years, which is directly contrary to the predictions of climate models. If global temperatures do stabilize then sea water temperatures and ice cap/glacier melting may not be as significant an issue as many fear.

Now I don’t know if or how much global sea levels may be rising. Like all earth systems, the various components that affect sea level are complicated and combine in unexpected ways. For example, increasing global temperatures will lead to increased precipitation, which, if it falls in the polar regions like Antarctica, will actually increase the thickness of the ice caps and the amount of impounded water, which would lower global sea levels. However, higher temperatures should result in greater calving and icebergs breaking away from the subpolar regions, which would raise global sea levels. How might these two trends interact and which is greater?³ When you consider all of these components there has to be question of how measurements of these global trends can even be made and how accurate models of these global systems can be. Let alone what predictions for future developments are possible.

It’s also worth noting that many of the flooding examples cited at the beginning of this post were the result of major storms, which are not in themselves indicative of sea level rise. Never in my memory had Baltimore flooded from the sea like in 2003, and the Galveston sea wall had stopped all storms, including hurricanes, for a century. There’s plenty of room for debate about whether American cities face an impending crisis from rising sea levels.

Nevertheless, even if the global climate doesn’t warm appreciably over the next century, America’s coastal cities would be negligent to not prepare for rising sea levels and ever more frequent flooding. Sea levels appear to be rising slowing but consistently and this can’t be ignored. And as we consider coastal flooding, we should first turn from the U.S. East Coast to an ancient city on the Mediterranean.

Reentering the Tunnel of Love

by Conroy

“There's a crazy mirror showing us both in 5-d / I’m laughing at you, you're laughing at me / There's a room of shadows that gets so dark brother / It’s easy for two people to lose each other, in this tunnel of love”
– Bruce Springsteen, “Tunnel of Love”

Bruce Springsteen surely ranks as one of the most successful and admired musicians of the rock era.¹ His career has been a rare combination of immense popularity and critical adulation, and he’s been doing it for 40 years. In fact it’s the very scope of his career and the enduring airplay of his biggest hit songs (not to mention his reputation as a colossus of arena-rock), that can obscure the fact that Springsteen was capable of startling artistic turns. It’s been 25 years since one of these turns when he released what has become an overlooked album, a forgotten masterpiece, Tunnel of Love.

Ask fans or critics to identify Springsteen’s best album and they’re likely to say Born to Run, Born in the U.S.A. or even The River. Few, I suspect, would choose Tunnel of Love. Springsteen developed a pattern of alternating between “big” accessible albums with smaller more intimate ones. He followed Born to Run (1975) with the darker Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978); The River (1980) with the down-right bleak Nebraska (1982).

But Springsteen roared back after that album, becoming a rock god, The Boss, after releasing the immensely successful album Born in the U.S.A. (1984)² and enjoying its immensely successful follow-up tour. Born in the U.S.A. was, among other things, an anthemic and exciting album. That’s why it sold so well. And naturally there was tremendous anticipation for the follow-up. When he delivered Tunnel of Love in 1987, I doubt many fans could have anticipated the sound or subject matter. Rather than traffic in the same blend of power rock, Springsteen did a 180, turning inward and stripping his music down, almost entirely removing the E Street Band from the recording sessions. He turned from the social and political to the personal and introspective. It’s a startling 12 tracks.³

Above and beyond anything else, Tunnel of Love is an album about love and doubt and marriage and disappointment. Or what I like to term a divorce album. Befitting its subject matter, the music is mostly subdued and lyrics dwell on failed marriage and love. While this may seem like a recipe for dour listening, Springsteen’s evocative lyrics paint stark pictures and his music while stripped down remains haunting. In many ways the album is a cousin to U2’s Achtung Baby, which is also a divorce album, and no less compelling for it.

I think you have to be a little careful when considering autobiography in an artist’s work, but in the case of Tunnel of Love, Springsteen’s personal life may well have inspired his art. He married actress Julianne Phillips in 1985 during the Born in the U.S.A. tour. A newly married man in his mid-30s, a mature Springsteen seemed to find disappointment instead of happiness. And it’s hard not to connect an album full of tracks about failed love with the experience of his recent marriage. Consider that it was during the Tunnel of Love tour ⁴ that he separated from Phillips and began his relationship with E Street Band back-up singer Patti Scialfa.⁵

This personal history is worth remembering when listening to the album. Here’s a track-by-track review:

“Ain’t Got You” sets the albums tone with Springsteen’s arrhythmic, country-twinged vocals backed by a spare guitar. The lyrics focus on a musician, indistinguishable from Springsteen, awash in wealth, luck, and luxury, but lacking love. The opening verse says it all:

“I got a fortune of heaven in diamonds and gold / I got all the bonds baby that the bank could hold / I got houses 'cross the country honey end to end / And everybody buddy wants to be my friend / Well I got all the riches honey any man every knew / But the only thing I ain't got honey I ain't got you.”

Tougher Than the Rest and All That Heaven Will Allow
The song is clever and a bit funny, and its longing leads directly to the second—and standout—track, “Tougher Than the Rest.” A slow ballad backed by an insistent drum-bass line and a mild synthesizer drone (this is still a mid-80s album after all) the lyrics show hope for true love: “Well if you’re looking for love / Honey I’m tougher than the rest.” But a hope full of compromise:

“Well ’round here baby / I learned you get what you can get / So if you’re rough enough for love / Honey I’m tougher than the rest,” and “Well it ain’t no secret / I’ve been around a time or two / Well I don’t know baby maybe you’ve been around too / Well there’s another dance / All you gotta do is say yes.”

“All That Heaven Will Allow” carries on much in the same musical and lyrical vein, but the compromise isn’t with love, but with circumstance. This is the last time on the album that belief in love triumphs over all: “Rain and storm and dark skies / Well now they don’t mean a thing / If you got a girl that loves you / And who wants to wear your ring.”


Spare Parts, Cautious Man, and Walk Like a Man
The albums falls from its tenuous hope on the next three tracks. “Spare Parts,” a country-rocker that tells the story of a man who runs out on his pregnant fiancé. “Cautious Man,” the album’s sparest track, is a somber ballad of a loner who battles his demons and his desire to walk away from his wife. Then there is “Walk Like a Man,” another slow ballad, that sounds like a message to Springsteen’s father conveys the sentimentality and hope attached to marriage:

“I remember ma draggin’ me and my sister up the street to the church / Whenever she heard those wedding bells / Well would they ever look so happy again / The handsome groom and his bride / As they stepped into that long black limousine / For their mystery ride.”

Tunnel of Love
Having firmly established a grim and soul-addled mood, Springsteen speeds up the music with one of the album’s best tracks, “Tunnel of Love.” The title track is awash in synthesizer (it’s easily the most musically robust track) and jangling guitar. It also introduces the albums central metaphor, comparing love and relationships to a funhouse ride, it’s worth quoting at length:

“Fat man sitting on a little stool / Takes the money from my hand while his eyes take a walk all over you / Hands me the ticket smiles and whispers good luck / Cuddle up angel cuddle up my little dove / Well ride down baby into this tunnel of love/

I can feel the soft silk of your blouse / And them soft thrills in our little fun house / Then the lights go out and it's just the three of us / You me and all that stuff were so scared of / Gotta ride down baby into this tunnel of love/

There's a crazy mirror showing us both in 5-d / I’m laughing at you you're laughing at me / There's a room of shadows that gets so dark brother / It’s easy for two people to lose each other in this tunnel of love/

It ought to be easy ought to be simple enough / Man meets woman and they fall in love / But the house is haunted and the ride gets rough / And you’ve got to learn to live with what you can't rise above if you want to ride on down in through this tunnel of love.”

Prometheus and the Alien Saga: Revisited

by Conroy

A few months ago I posted on the then upcoming film Prometheus and how it may or may not relate to the Alien movie franchise. While I was excited to see a film where director Ridley Scott went back to the “Alien universe”, I was nervous that Prometheus might fail to live up to Alien or Aliens or even undermine some of the mystery that was crucial to the first film. Now having actually seen Prometheus and having thought about it for a few days, I can discuss what the film does and doesn’t accomplish.

[SPOILER ALERT…CRITICAL DETAILS ABOUT PROMETHEUS FOLLOW]

Prometheus and the Alien Universe
The story of Prometheus “exists”, without question, within the Alien universe [1]. For instance, in Prometheus a science mission travels far across space to a moon (LV-223) in search of the “Engineers” a humanoid species apparently worshipped several millennia ago by primitive cultures all over Earth. The Engineers turn out to be the Space Jockey species glimpsed aboard the derelict spacecraft in Alien. And the spacecraft of the Engineers is of the same design as the Space Jockey ship seen in Alien. The humans are soon confronted with a host of creatures that share characteristics with the iconic alien, including an unremitting hostility, caustic blood, and a terrifying lifecycle. There is even a xenomorph-like [2] creature “born” at the end of the film. One of the more interesting aspects of the Alien movies was the existence of androids and their relationship to humans. Prometheus continues this, and indeed one of its most interesting characters, David portrayed excellently by Michael Fassbender, is an android whose nuanced but company-first behavior hints strongly of the android Ash in Alien. And while I'm on characters, Prometheus continues the Alien franchise’s tradition of strong female leads, this time with Noomi Rapace playing Elizabeth Shaw as a scientist turned survivor.

Beyond these direct connections between Prometheus and the Alien movies, there are the stylistic and thematic similarities. Like all Ridley Scott movies Prometheus is wonderfully rendered, but it maintains the dark tones and sharp division between dirty grays, browns, and blacks, and crisp almost sterile whites that are such hallmarks of the Alien movies. This isn’t to say that there isn’t ample color in the movie (there certainly is, especially inside of the ship Prometheus) but the movie more or less adheres to the color palette established by Scott in Alien. Perhaps the most incongruous thing is that Prometheus in 2012 includes a vision of late-21^st-century technology (holographic survey models, advanced smart-phone/iPad like computers, robotic surgical capsules, etc.) that were entirely (and intentionally) absent from Alien in 1979, a story which ostensibly takes place long after the events in the later film [3].

David, the complicated android

Many of Prometheus’s themes align with Alien and Aliens. In general, the Alien universe is a hostile place. Individuals like Ripley and the other major characters have few or no friends, love is distant or hidden, trust is fleeting, and ultimately, survival becomes the entire focus of Ripley and those around her. These themes, along with others, are all front and center in Prometheus. In the purest sense of the word Prometheus isn’t a prequel to Alien, the end of Prometheus does not lead to the beginning of Alien or even demand that the story ultimately get there. But it is a movie that takes place in the Alien universe sometime before the events of the first film.

Unanswered Questions
Prometheus is a thoughtful film in that is raises questions about the creation of man in an original way. The film suggests and then later seems to confirm that humans were created not in the image of God (at least not directly) but in the image of the Engineers, an advanced extraterrestrial species. Following clues unearthed in archeological finds all over Earth, a team of scientists determines that the Engineers came from a distant star system invisible to early man, and interprets this as a message from the Engineers to find them when man is ready [4]. A scientific expedition funded and directed by the Weyland corporation [5] travels to the star system in the hopes of finding the Engineers and gaining answers to some of the eternal questions that have haunted man throughout history. Where did we come from? Who made us? Where are we going?

The expedition arrives at moon LV-223 only, seemingly, to find a long abandoned station with no living Engineers left. However, like the eggs in Alien, things inside the station are in fact dormant, not dead. As events unfold it becomes clear that the station isn’t a place to find answers but a place entirely toxic – hostile, to hammer home a theme of the Alien universe – to humans. And the Engineers aren’t interested in teaching man but seem to have been planning for man’s eradication. The original questions remain unanswered and many more arise. Why are the Engineers ready to eliminate the human species? Where are they really from? What went wrong at this “dead” station?

Readers of this blog will know that I like this type of uncertainty and unknowing. The more I study the universe the weirder and more indifferent to humanity it seems [6]. Questions of man’s origin, be it God or nature or the product of alien Engineers, should be left obscured in art so they can better reflect the obscurity of reality. Several reviewers have criticized Prometheus for leaving too many unanswered questions, a point-of-view that I fundamentally disagree with. Humans have learned so much in the last several thousand years, but there is vastly more that we don’t know. I appreciate a movie like Prometheus that asks a lot of big questions and shows us an original idea but that doesn’t pretend to have an insight on all the secrets of the universe.
 

The Ultimate Map

by Conroy

One of the first books my parents gave to me as a child was an atlas, a gift that I credit with kindling my life-long fascination with world geography. I loved the bright color maps of countries and regions I hadn’t even heard the names of before. I studied the accompanying photographs, charts, and statistics with great intensity. After that first atlas I couldn’t get enough, wallpapering my bedroom with the maps that came in National Geographic magazines, getting new and bigger atlases [1], and memorizing lists of the largest islands, longest rivers, most populous cities, etc. I think this all appealed to me because atlases and maps provide one way to imagine and relate to the rest of the world. Maybe it was this early childhood exposure, but for me the world is organized in my head as one big map, and everything else, cultures, languages, histories, places, current events, and even some memories, are just layers to be accessed from this underlying picture. Is this the way you think?

I’ve explained geography to others as having two fundamental components: (1) the physical reality of our world, like the oceans, great rivers, and high mountain ranges, and (2) the relationship of one place to another, like how Great Britain is separated from mainland Europe by the narrow English Channel. These fundamental components are, well, fundamentally important to the long development of human civilization and the common facts of everyday experience. San Francisco has its remarkably consistent temperatures because of its location on a peninsula adjacent to the Northern Pacific and the cool California Current that flows along America’s west coast. Great Britain avoided invasion in World War II because Hitler’s war machine lacked the naval craft to cross the 20-mile wide Straight of Dover. India and China border one another but their civilizations have little in common because they’re physically separated by the highest mountain range on Earth. Geography is central to these facts. The story of history and the interactions of civilization are substantially informed by the geographical relations of people and places; that’s what the term geopolitics means. And the facts of everyday life, the language you speak, the weather you experience, the types of outdoor activities you participate in are inextricably linked to geography.

The wonderfully stylized London Underground map

Anyway, for me, it’s the results of geography, the histories and cultures and climates and sights, which make maps, our most basic visualization of geography, so endlessly interesting.  In fact, my girlfriend finds it amusing that even now whenever I’m confronted with a map I can’t resist studying it with terrific focus. And maps are more than functional tools, they can also be art. A few years ago the Walter’s Art Museum in Baltimore had a wonderful exhibit on maps. It included ancient tapestries of the then known world to the modern stylized depiction of the London Underground system. And it’s hard to not appreciate the clarity and simple beauty of the London Underground system map or the wonderful detail and color of the (very best, in my opinion) road maps provided by companies like ADC [2].

An ADC road map of Washington, D.C.

A Mapping Revolution
There’s only one drawback to traditional maps – they’re static. Any given map is set at one scale and depicts just one area (even if it’s the whole world). You need an entire book (an atlas) to show maps of different locations, details, and data, and that still doesn’t allow for reader configuration of the format or content. But the internet, smart phones, and the massive proliferation of information is changing all that, and more interestingly, proposed enhancements from Google and Apple might take maps to their fullest expression.

Starting in the 1990s Mapquest and other sites began to offer digital maps, usually for road directions. I didn’t care for these maps because you could only see an area the size of your computer monitor and the maps themselves were rather dull to view. But when Google Maps came out in the early 2000s the aesthetics began to improve and over time they have added important enhancement like an ability to scroll across the entire globe, zoom in an out for greater or less detail, and new layers providing satellite imagery and terrain.

Google’s companion Google Earth application added the ability to change perspective and included 3-D buildings in major cities. Later Google added Street View shots taken from cars mounted with cameras providing 360 degree views that let you actually see – not imagine – what a place looks like. This is a massive shift, converting a map to a far more sensory and immediate experience. Now it’s possible to view, say, the streets of Rome without ever having traveled there. Certainly this is no substitute for actually being there in person, but it does bring views of places all over the world right onto your computer screen.

Other functions allow you to toggle on features like up-to-date traffic information, user photos, labels, and links to Wikipedia articles. And this doesn’t even touch on the powerful linking of maps with GPS, which shows you just where you are and can direct you to just where you’re going, anyplace and anytime. Now Google has announced that they plan to add even more functionality to their maps, including more 3-D buildings and street view shots taken by pedestrians of places where cars can’t go, allowing a user to view cities as if they were in a helicopter, or see nature along hiking trails from thousands of miles away.

These changes have been added incrementally over the last decade so you might not realize just how incredible they really are. No longer are maps 2-D static views limited to a specified area and providing limited information. Google Maps, and probably Apple’s soon to be released map application, provide users a map or satellite photo of any place on the globe, street-level views along a growing network of roads and soon along non-road areas of interest, links to encyclopedia articles, and access to real-time information like traffic conditions or the proximity of coffee shops. And you can do it all from you mobile phone. Enhanced views, more information, and real-time data; that is a mapping revolution.

I wrote above that in my mind I view the world as a large map with much of my knowledge and experience layered onto the underlying structure. Aren’t these new and improving interactive digital maps getting closer and closer to this mental image? The more functionality that is added, the more information is linked, the closer we get to a version of a map that I could have only dreamed of as a child.

Maps as Art

If there is one area where static maps still beat their digital cousins is in presentation. Static maps, done well, are far more visually appealing than Google Maps or any other product available on the internet. There will be no museum exhibits showcasing digital maps (at least not in their current form). And there is an inherent limitation to maps that are restricted to showing only an area the size of a computer monitor or the even more restrictive smart phone screen. I have little doubt that Google and Apple will continue to improve the visual presentation of their map programs, but who can say if they’ll ever be as good as a printed version. I still have a large map of the United States hanging on my home office wall and I still find myself studying it from time to time. Next to my office desk are several atlases and I do occasionally pick them up and flip through their pages. But it’s to the computer I mainly turn for maps now. The functionality of digital maps is just too useful. Hopefully one day the style will match the substance, and then we might really have the ultimate map.

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NOTES:

[1] Including an old one my uncle had from the late 50s that included a lot of post-World War II/early Cold War names and notations and anachronisms like Japan regaining full sovereignty after the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco or South Africa still ruling Namibia (or Southwest Africa as labeled).

[2] Whose motto is “The Map People.”

Hurricane Guesswork

by Conroy

This past week tropical storm Alberto churned off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, ushering in an early start to the Atlantic hurricane season [1]. For residents along the U.S. Atlantic and Gulf coasts, the hurricane season is a period of low-grade angst. There’s a relatively remote chance that coastal areas will be hammered by a truly devastating storm, but it happens. Since 1950 there have occurred, on average, 11 named storms [2], 6 hurricanes [3], and 3 major hurricanes (Category 3 or higher [4]), per year. A fraction of these, one or two hurricanes each year on average, will hit the U.S. mainland. And rarely, maybe once or twice a decade, a major hurricane makes landfall with catastrophic results, as witnessed by the deaths and damage caused by Camille, Hugo, Andrew, and Katrina, to name only the most prominent.

Recognizing the danger of hurricanes, it’s without question important to identify and follow every tropical depression as it forms, predict its storm track, warn people living in potentially affected areas as far in advance as possible, and prepare for emergency response as warranted. The news media and various local, state, and federal public agencies do the first three very well. Sadly, as vividly demonstrated by Katrina, emergency response can sometimes be hindered by bureaucratic obstacles and lack of initiative.

Hurricane Forecasting
The interest in hurricanes also leads to far more dubious types of planning and forecasting, namely the annual Atlantic Seasonal Hurricane Forecast. The most prominent of these is published as part of the Tropical Meteorology Project of Colorado State University [5], which was previously led by Professor William Gray and is now led by Professor Philip Klotzbach.

Gray and Klotzbach will explain that they use Atlantic and Pacific water temperatures, global weather patterns like El Nino and La Nina, and other climate factors to predict hurricane activity and probabilities for strikes in the Caribbean and North America. For example, this year’s forecast (from April) predicts a relatively quiet season with a total of ten named storms (tropical storms or hurricanes), four hurricanes, and two major hurricanes.  In addition, it places the probability of a hurricane making landfall somewhere along the U.S. coast at 42%.

Call me a skeptic, but I doubt the ability of anyone to accurately predict the number and intensity of Atlantic hurricanes, let alone the location of where they might develop and track, for any given season. Meteorologists can’t predict the weather for any one location with much accuracy even a week in advance. How can they predict the development of major weather systems over huge expanses of the equatorial and North Atlantic many months ahead of time (the Atlantic hurricane season usually peaks in early- to mid-September)? Add to that the fact that the dynamics of hurricane (or any tropical cyclone) formation are not entirely understood and the various factors that lead to hurricanes are specific to local weather conditions and cannot be predicted in advance.

Yet predictions are made each year, and each year they are given mention in the news. For that reason, Gray’s and Klotzbach’s forecasts deserve to be tested for their accuracy.

Bad Predictions
One way to check whether forecasts have any predictive value is to examine how previous forecasts have aligned with actual hurricane activity. This table summarizes predicted versus actual Atlantic hurricane activity from 1999 (the first year of Gray and Klotzbach forecast data available on-line) through 2011.

Still Searching for the Great American Novel

by Conroy

I’m slowly making my way through the American literary cannon, a book at a time, in search of the elusive Great American Novel. I just completed David Foster Wallace’s massive tome, Infinite Jest, one of the more recent nominees for this title [1]. At over 1,000 pages (included over 90 pages of footnotes [2]) Wallace’s dense and multi-layered story certainly has the size of an epic. But his semi-parodic near future America and focus on a Boston tennis academy, the residents of an adjacent halfway house, wheelchair-bound Quebecois separatists, and an illicit movie so entertaining that it’s lethal to all viewers is in my mind a bit too idiosyncratic [3] to fit the bill as the Great American Novel. But what does fit the bill?

In concept, the Great American Novel is a title given to the novel, written by an American, which best encapsulates the American Experience, the spirit of the nation and the people, or better described by borrowing a term from German, the work that captures the zeitgeist of America. It’s the American equivalent of the national epic; America’s Les Miserables, Ulysses, or War and Peace. There’s no shortage of candidates for the title; here’s a shortlist (in chronological order):

• Moby Dick by Herman Melville (1852),
• Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (1885),
• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925),
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (1929),
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (1939),
• The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (1951),
• The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Below (1953),
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov (1955),
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (1960),
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon (1973),
• Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985), and
• Underworld by Don Delillo (1997) [4].

Many of these books sit on my bookshelf, and many of them were rich rewarding reads, and certainly each captures a portion of the American Experience. For instance, in Moby Dick [5] there is the struggle of democracy, equality, and power, which echoes American pre-Civil War struggles with slavery; in Blood Meridian we are shown in stark tones  the violence that accompanied the settling of the American West; The Grapes of Wrath explores the crushing poverty of the Great Depression; and Underworld gives us lives lived in the low heat of the Cold War during the last half of the twentieth century.

But like the still view of a photograph each of these novels and all the others listed above can at best only capture a facet or a few facets of America, a limited angle, nuances and not the whole. After all America is too large, with a huge diverse population drawn from all over the world, and a history and culture too sprawling to ever be captured by one writer in one novel no matter how kaleidoscopic the story or how broad the cast of characters. And the same could be written about the efforts of a single filmmaker or historian or journalist. But this isn’t meant to diminish the writers (and other chroniclers) that attempt great novels or reach to express what America means. In fact I much admire the ambition of writers that yearn to express the soul of America even if the best they can achieve is partial success.

Whenever I think on novels and literature I always fall back to James Joyce and Ulysses because I’ve never read anything better. Joyce set out to write an Irish national epic and perhaps he succeeded (it’s worth keeping in mind that Ireland is a much smaller country than the United States), but what really speaks to me when reading Ulysses isn’t the Irish elements. Instead, when I strip away the structural and stylistic flourishes and place the literary, philosophic, and religious (and many other) correspondences in perspective, I find the most alive book I’ve ever read. Joyce’s Leopold Bloom, Stephan Daedalus, Molly Bloom, and what seems to be the whole population of Dublin come alive through their thoughts, emotions, motivations, memories, physical urges, biases, their interactions with each other, and their shared histories. Ulysses takes place over less than 24 hours, but it gives us the fullest glimpse of life and lives of any fiction I’ve read or watched or listened to [6]. Scholars and academics may be kept busy dissecting Joyce's techniques and allusions, but for me it’s the life of the novel that makes it important and worthwhile.

And indeed, while I can say pretty emphatically that Wallace’s Infinite Jest is not the Great American Novel, it is a book teeming with truths. Wallace’s collection of tennis prodigies, recovering (and not recovering) alcoholics and drug addicts, terrorists and government agents, and everyone they interact with, is vivid and bursting with life. At the core, after you’ve taken his weird future in stride, Wallace’s characters struggle with what it means to be a family, to make and sustain human connections, and to cope with the burden of being alive. It’s his take on the plight of what he considers to be the sad post-Cold War generations and our collective need to find some distraction, be it drugs or entertainment or sexual conquests, from the day-to-day struggle. And his remarkably fluid writing style (the words seem to have flowed onto the page from his mind), massive vocabulary (Wallace makes you keep your dictionary close), and talent for perfectly expressing detail (that tool that all great novelists must have) make Infinite Jest a first-rate and worthy read [7].

I’ve always believed that great artists, and especially novelists, are better equipped to describe the workings of the mind, from our motivations and emotions and rationalizations to our physical cravings and how we perceive the world, than science or religion or philosophy. Novelists like Joyce and Wallace offer insights into what is means to be human. As the great critic Harold Bloom noted, reading a novel isn’t going to make you a better person, but hopefully reading a great novel will provide at least a tiny explanation of life. If an author can do that, he or she has achieved a great success.

So I’ll continue searching for the Great American Novel. I doubt I’ll ever find one book that expresses all that “America” means or is, but I am certain that what I will find is even more important, glimpses of truth and life. That’s all we can seek from any art.

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NOTES:

[1] Infinite Jest was published in 1996, when Wallace was just 33-years-old.

[2] Anyone familiar with Wallace’s writing, fiction and non-fiction alike, knows of his very effective use of footnotes, which I must admit is a bit of an inspiration for my own notes.

[3] This is but the barest synopsis of Infinite Jest, which is rich in characters, sub-plots, themes, and exquisite detail.

[4] And this list could be expanded to include Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Robert Penn Warren’s All the Kings Men (1946), Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy (1925), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1953), Wallace’s Infinite Jest (1996), Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), John Updike’s Rabbit series, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five (1969), Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926), John Dos Passos’s USA Trilogy (1938), and Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove (1902), to name but a few.

[5] A work I must admit that I don’t particularly care for.

[6] I’ll be returning to discuss Ulysses much more fully in future posts.

[7] After reading the novel and Wallace’s descriptions of the crushing weight, the unendurable weight, of clinical depression, it is less of a surprise that he killed himself in 2008. He suffered from depression all his life and eventually the medications stopped working for him. It’s deeply sad and will deprive us of any more work from this gifted American writer. He left behind not only Infinite Jest but a large collection of entertaining, informative, and incisive essays and non-fiction pieces along with a couple of short story collections and a couple of other novels (the last of which, The Pale King, was unfinished upon his death and published posthumously).