A View From The Brink ... the beach is backwards

Brown enlarges his role in California's foundering bullet train project

With the $100-billion project at a critical juncture, the governor puts his people in key positions.

 

Roelof van Ark is stepping down as head of the California High Speed Rail Authority. (Bryan Patrick / Sacramento Bee)

 

Ralph Vartabedian and Dan Weikel of the Los Angeles Times newspaper reported that a surprise shake-up of senior leaders at California's bullet-train agency this week was partly Gov. Jerry Brown's response to a growing crisis of confidence and credibility in recent months that has threatened the political viability of the project.

As criticism of the project has intensified, Brown has moved to exert more direct control, installing two representatives on the board of the California High Speed Rail Authority and, on Thursday, playing at least a peripheral role in replacing the authority's chief executive, Roelof van Ark. Several state government sources said Van Ark, an engineering manager and high-speed rail expert, had become personally frustrated and lost the confidence of some key legislators.

Brown is under pressure from unions, engineering firms, big-city mayors and the Obama administration to stabilize and press ahead on a nearly $100-billion project that would be the biggest in California's lofty history of extraordinary public works gambles. With so much at stake, Brown is putting his own people in charge, although their ability to quickly reverse the damage of a wave of negative outside reviews of the project remains unclear.

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Imagining Star Wars in the pages of Dr. Seuss

Seattle-based cartoonist Adam Watson started his Dr. Suess Does Star Wars series as a napkin-doodling project—a literal throwaway gig. However, after getting a little encouragement from a friend, he expanded the series.

Beca Grimm of Pastemagazine.com gives us the Awesome of the Day scoop, because the force is strong with green eggs and ham, Skywalker I am.

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Internet Turns 40 Today: First Message Crashed System

Ker Than of the National Geographic News reports that the Internet turns 40 today and was born in California with a failure, more or less. The message that started it all consisted of two letters "lo." 

'On October 29, 1969, that message became the first ever to travel between two computers connected via the ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet,' Than writes. 'The truncated transmission traveled about 400 miles (643 kilometers) between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute.'

The electronic dispatch was supposed to be the word "login,' according to Than, but only the first two letters were successfully sent before the system crashed. Still, the humble greeting marked the start of a phenomenon that has become such an important part of modern life that many experts argue access to it should be a right rather than a privilege. In fact, earlier this month Finland became the first country in the world to declare broadband Internet access a legal right for all of its 5.2 million citizens. 

"I don't think it's quite on the level of food and water yet, but it's pretty close," said Jeffrey Cole, director of the Annenberg School for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California. 

For the last decade a team led by Cole has been tracking the effect of the Internet on societies around the world. 

"When we started in 1999, it was already clear that the Internet was gong to transform communications," Cole said. "What we could never have imagined is that it would transform virtually every element of business and social activity."

Go here for the full National Geographic News article --->>>