I heard on NPR the other morning that the group studying tolling in the planned waterfront tunnel has figured out how much they’ll need to charge to pay for the City’s share of the thing.

$4 at peak.

For a ride that’s something like 4 miles long. They claim that in the scenarios they studied, people won’t divert to the surface streets in most cases during peak hours because the tunnel will be the least congested option. But I don’t know, $4 is a lot. I grew up right next to the Dulles Access Road (now the Greenway) and the alternative always had terrible traffic but we still never took the toll road.

They better be sure about those diversion numbers because we’re not going to have the money to provide improved transit or surface road improvements. Everything that’s left after the 520 bridge is getting sunk into this tunnel, down into the mudflats. Whatever people are saying they’re willing to fund besides these projects is going to disappear when the cost overruns start. That’s my prediction.

I’ve been looking around for more information on why our healthcare is so expensive and does such a poor job of covering the people who need it the most and found a really informative article from 2006. This bit in particular blew my mind:

 A mere shift of power from Republicans to Democrats would not, in itself, be enough to give us sensible health care reform. While Democrats would have written a less perverse drug bill, it’s not clear that they are ready to embrace a single-payer system. Even liberal economists and scholars at progressive think tanks tend to shy away from proposing a straightforward system of national health insurance. Instead, they propose fairly complex compromise plans. Typically, such plans try to achieve universal coverage by requiring everyone to buy health insurance, the way everyone is forced to buy car insurance, and deal with those who can’t afford to purchase insurance through a system of subsidies

Amazing right? I didn’t see it coming but apparently it was easy to do so.

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Tonight is a good night to be outside
And to feel a cold lively new front
Blowing in across dark
Quiet bedded-down Seattle
And to hear dry leaves skitter
Down empty orange lit sidewalks
Under bare limbed trees.

The Matrix was on TV last night (AMC, believe it or not, though they showed trailers constantly for Space Cowboys which is also apparently an American movie classic) and I realized something that I really should have years ago. You can’t breed humans and use them for energy.

That won’t work.

You can’t get the same or more energy out of humans than you put in them. If the machines have an energy source that they use to grow food to feed the humans then why don’t they use that themselves? It’d be much more efficient. That’s basic thermodynamics.

Morpheus points it out himself in his monologue before they do all the kung fu — humanity has been reduced to a duracell battery (nice product placement). That’s true, you can’t use the duracells as a source of energy either, anymore than you can hydrogen. What’s wrong with just building some nuclear power plants? Machines are dumb I guess.

Also if, as Morpheus says, time is always against them, why did they take time out for a twenty minute techno orgy in the second movie? My time is also precious and that’s twenty minutes I can never get back. And did they ever explain why Neo was able to kill the robot outside the Matrix in that movie?

I still find all the shiny sunglass, leather, computer geek styling to be painful to watch. Maybe it wasn’t so bad ten years ago but why would they dress like that when they go into the Matrix? Aren’t they supposed to be avoiding notice?

Oh well, The Animatrix continues to be awesome.

It’s been gray and dismal. Here’s some random cell phone shots.

Work

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Pphh!
http://i.imgur.com/JmRmb.jpg (Avatar spoilers)

It took me a good long while to stop thinking about work and get to sleep last night and at one point I got up and put the battery back in my pager when I remembered that I had gone oncall. But eventually I put work out of my mind and slipped off to greener pastures. And I got a whole hour of sleep before I got paged.

And then it took me forever to stop thinking about work again.

Avatar that is. It was very thought provoking. And while the following is going to seem smart ass, it’s true; I’ve spent a lot of quality time thinking about what it was exactly that I didn’t like about it.

I was prepared not to like it. The critics seem to be singing in perfect harmony on this one, but I was surprised at how angry it made me, I wanted to walk out at a couple points, and I’m still not sure exactly how to express what it was that made me angry. What follows is the best I’ve been able to convince myself of since Sunday.

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