The little rovers that kept going and going

Two movies I wanted to see were scheduled in actual theaters this weekend. I saw both. The first was Private Desert, Brazil’s nomination for International Film in last spring’s Oscars. I saw it at the Detroit Film Theater. Daniel is wearing a cast on his right wrist because something went drastically wrong during his job as a policeman and he was forced out. He is taking care of his senile father, though his sister thinks Dad should be in a nursing home. Dani keeps himself somewhat together through an online relationship with Sara – the kind of relationship where he can send nude selfies. But Sara begins ghosting him. So he hits the road (abandoning Dad to his sister) to see her in person. I was amused that during this road trip is when the opening credits were shown, a half hour into the film. When he gets to her town he can’t find her. He shows a photo of her but nobody recognizes her. That’s because she’s transgender and the town knows her by her male persona. She ghosted him because she saw the online video of that police incident and knows he can be violent – and transgender women are quite fearful of violent men who discover they’re transgender. Much of the second part of the story shows Sara trying to stay in the closet in this conservative area of Brazil. I enjoyed this one. The second was Good Night Oppy. It’s in theaters now (and the one close to me only this weekend) then goes to a streaming service I don’t subscribe to. It is a documentary of the Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity. They arrived on Mars in 2004 and were designed to last 90 days. Spirit lasted 7 years and Opportunity lasted almost 15 years. While they lasted they did an incredible amount of observation towards whether there was water and perhaps life on Mars. The ancient existence of water was confirmed. As in most documentaries the filmmakers show interviews with some of the major players plus archive images. This one also featured recreations of the rovers doing their thing on Mars – there certainly wasn’t a camera standing a few feet off or hovering over the scene. These scenes, credited to Industrial Light and Magic, are quite good and quite detailed of both the rover and the Martian terrain. Alas, I was soon tired of images of the stalk mounted camera doing its thing. There was a lot of talk of anthropomorphizing the rovers and this camera mechanism could be considered the head. The story includes the highlights of the two year struggle to design and build the rovers to meet a launch window that comes up every 26 months. Then there is a six month trip during which the rovers are hit with a solar flare and their software needs to be rebooted. That’s followed by the six minutes of terror (for the earthbound crew) where the lander has to do more than 80 steps successfully without instruction from earth, because communication takes 10 minutes. Once on Mars there are such difficulties as Spirit getting stuck in the sand. The team on earth recreates the situation with another full size rover to figure out how to unstick it. I read the summary of several reviews on Metacritic before seeing the film. One reviewer, who gave it a decent but not great score, said the film was emotional because it spent so much time on the emotional moments of the mission – the relief when the six minutes of terror ended and the rover signaled it was fine and the sadness when the crew could not wake up a rover and had to declare its mission complete. While watching those scenes I certainly got caught up in the relief and the mourning. Is that better than the dry moments of the day to day rover management over 15 years? NASA has a tradition of playing wake-up songs each morning. JPL and the rover team mostly kept that tradition to “wake up” these robots, though they are more for the mood of the earth crew. Some of those songs are included in this movie and many are quite appropriate. For instance, when a rover is shut down because of a dust storm it is awakened with Here Comes the Sun. I enjoyed this one. It was good to see a summary of the lives of these two rovers. I grew up during the race to the Moon (and I enjoy science fiction) so I’ve always been interested in the space missions (though not enough to go watch a rocket launch or apply to work at NASA or JPL). This is now the second time I’ve watched a movie on the big screen and had the auditorium to myself. That might be why this multiplex is showing this film only this weekend. The first time was back in 2007 when I stopped at a theater in Nashville on my way home from doing Katrina rebuilding work and the Metropolitan Opera was simulcasting a new opera (yes, I had planned it all ahead of time). I finished the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs. It was published in 1961 and the copy I have is from my friend and debate partner. It took a while to read because it was the book I kept in my car and there was a lot of time I didn’t travel much. It was the book I read while traveling a couple weeks ago. It was time to finish it. Jacobs discusses the vitality of cities, not suburbs, towns, and rural areas which work differently. The central idea of the book is that city planners were stuck on ideas from about 60 years before. These were ideas that sounded wonderful, but did not fit reality. So she explains the reality. She called the unworkable ideas the Radiant Garden – that city residents wanted well manicured land around their high rise building. No, she replied, what they want is a vital street life. That vital life meant that someone was always watching the street (because there was something worth watching on the street) and all those eyes meant the street was safe. A vital street needed a mix of businesses (not just all restaurants) that prompted people to come and go throughout the day. Wall Street in New York had a terrible street scene because all these financial companies brought in thousands of workers – who were on the street at morning and evening rush hour and at lunch. If a restaurant, or any business, couldn’t survive on the lunch crowd they couldn’t survive. There was also nothing to draw people in the evening. Jacobs decries the way slums are cleared and the vacated areas rebuilt. Amazingly, she talked little about racism being behind slum clearance. The problem isn’t just the displaced people. Slum clearance also destroys the community and interconnectedness the residents had built. She decries cataclysmic money that makes slum clearance possible. Slums appear when banks decide a region is heading towards becoming a slum and refuse to make loans to the people living there. It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. But there is money, usually a great deal of money, to knock everything down and rebuild. What should happen instead is to give the residents a reason to stay (they usually can come up with this on their own) and support them as they improve where they are. A neighborhood so supported can unslum. Jacobs decries the way poor people are supported in housing. In 1960 (and I doubt anything has changed since) if a family is able to increase their income above the subsidized threshold they had to move. A better way is to reduce, then remove the subsidy and let the residents stay. Assuming the family, which has probably created ties to the community, would want to move to move to something better is paternalistic and a reason why so many neighborhoods of our cities are segregated by income. Jacobs says the city isn’t a conflict between automobiles and pedestrians. The two can coexist – if there were a lot fewer automobiles. There are just too many cars. She discusses ways to reduce the numbers of cars in certain areas, though beyond robust public transport they seem to move the problem rather than fix the problem. And that problem is simple to state: Cars need space to move and to park and the more space that is devoted to cars the more vitality is sucked from a neighborhood – there is little street life along a parking lot. Too many big city governments are just big versions of small city governments. That doesn’t work – there is no one (or even one department) in city hall that can understand the whole city. One can’t fight city hall because city hall doesn’t function. There need to be district governments that can respond to the needs of the district while coordinating with other districts and working under the government of the whole city. Jacobs does a very good job of explaining all this. Her word usage is precise and she calls out a bad idea as silly or frivolous. I admire her ideas and the thoroughness through which she works them out. Then she surprised me with the last chapter, taking it up another level. Why do city planners get it so wrong? In answering that question the discusses the way reasoning has evolved over the last 300 years. There are simple relationships – change thing A and study how thing B changes. This is the first big step in scientific discovery. Make one billiard ball hit another and we can describe what happens to the second. There is disorganized complexity – we can use probability and statistics to describe how lots (as in thousands) of things interact. Put a thousand billiard balls on a table and whack one into them. We can’t describe what happens to all the balls, but with statistics we can describe how likely a ball is to fall into a pocket. Over the years city planners tried to fit cities into these two descriptions. They tried to describe cities as two things, residents and jobs. They tried to use statistics – if we do this thing what percentage of people will move out? But cities are organized complexity. They have a large number of interacting parts that create a whole and changing one affects the others. One must study how the parts interact. An example is a park. Is it used throughout the day and night or is it a dead zone that residents avoid? That depends on such things as: How lively is the neighborhood? How big is the park? Is there a street scene on the perimeter of the park and does it extend into the park? Is the park well designed for the way residents use or want to use it? The park can be described, but not in terms of a simple problem or in terms of statistics. Trying to force a park – or a whole city – into those two methods of thinking isn’t going to work. I think Jacobs’ ideas are so refreshing, understandable, and so counter to the ways city governments do things even today I want to make sure city leaders read it. Alas, I live in suburbia and many of her ideas don’t apply and where one must have a car to do almost everything. As for nearby Detroit, these ideas would have limited use. Detroit was built by the auto industry and its unions. It is the city with the highest percentage of single family homes because that’s what a union job could get a family. It also covers a huge area. So I think large parts of Detroit act like suburbs. There are areas – Downtown and Midtown – where these ideas might apply. And over the last couple decades these areas have become more vital with an actual street life. Alas, that probably came through gentrification, driving out the poor.