Thursday, August 16, 2007

posted 8/16/2007 05:34:00 PM by Daniel   3 comments

"Feel Good" Gun Control Measures

[The Simi Valley City Council recently passed an ordinance requiring the reporting of Lost and Stolen Firearms. I objected unsuccessfully, by speaking at both Council meetings at which it was considered, and sending the following email to all the Council Members explaining why the arguments in favor of it made no sense.]

I would like to urge you to reconsider the Lost & Stolen Firearms ordinance when it comes up for its Second Reading. Logically, I believe this ordinance will have no positive effects and some negative effects. I’ve analyzed all of the possible cases below to demonstrate this result.

The main argument in favor of the ordinance, as expressed in the staff report and in newspaper reports, is that it would help discourage “straw purchases” and subsequent use of firearms in crimes. How can this be, when the ordinance deals only with the reporting of lost or stolen guns, and says nothing about illegally transferring guns?

As nearly as I can tell, the purported connection to illegal transfers and crime usage goes something like this: Guns may be used to commit crimes, or else they me be stolen or sold or given away to ineligible individuals who then use the guns to commit crimes. When the guns are traced back to the original owners, those owners often claim that they had nothing to do with the crimes because the guns had previously been lost or stolen (but never reported as such). By requiring a report, we take away that excuse/subterfuge.

But this is a non sequitur. Consider each of the following possible cases:

• Case 1. Gun is lost or stolen; never found nor recovered; never identified as being used in a crime; owner fails to report. In this case the owner has technically violated the ordinance, but nobody ever knows and no harm results, so the owner is never cited and the ordinance has no effect.

• Case 2. Gun is lost or stolen; owner reports it but doesn’t know serial number or other identifying details. If the gun is never found nor recovered, and never identified as being used in a crime, this is functionally equivalent to Case 1 above and the ordinance has no effect. If the gun is found or recovered or used in a crime but can’t be matched up with the owner due to the lack of identifying information, the ordinance has no effect.

• Case 3. Gun is lost or stolen; owner reports it and provides serial number or other identifying details. If the gun is never found nor recovered, and never identified as being used in a crime, this is functionally equivalent to Case 1 above and the ordinance has no effect. If the gun is found or recovered (either from the thief or from a criminal who used it to commit a crime) the owner may eventually get the gun back. That’s a good reason to VOLUNTARILY report a lost or stolen firearm with identifying details. But failure to report is its own punishment, since then the owner doesn’t get the gun back. Why is it a benefit to the gun owner to add a further punishment via this ordinance? This case represents more intrusive nanny-government: Requiring people to do things “for their own good” instead of allowing them to make their own decisions and bear the consequences of their un-coerced actions.

• Case 4. Gun is illegally sold or given away to an ineligible person, but gun is not subsequently discovered in the possession of that person or used in a crime. Since the gun was not lost or stolen, it did not have to be reported as such; hence this ordinance does not come into play at all.

• Case 5. Gun is illegally sold or given away to an ineligible person, and is either discovered in the possession of that person (in itself a crime) or is used in a crime.

• Sub-Case 5(a). Gun cannot be traced back to the original owner. Since the gun was not lost or stolen, it did not have to be reported as such; hence this ordinance does not come into play at all.

• Sub-Case 5(b). Gun is traced back to the original owner, but the owner does not claim that the gun was lost or stolen. Since the gun was not lost or stolen, it did not have to be reported as such; hence this ordinance does not come into play at all.

• Sub-Case 5(c). Gun is traced back to the original owner, and the owner tries to avoid blame by falsely claiming that the gun was lost or stolen within the past 3 days. Whether or not the owner is believed, this does not violate the ordinance, so the ordinance has no effect.

• Sub-Case 5(d). Gun is traced back to the original owner, and the owner tries to avoid blame by falsely claiming that the gun was lost or stolen more than 5 years before the ordinance was enacted. Whether or not the owner is believed, this does not violate the ordinance, so the ordinance has no effect.

• Sub-Case 5(e). Gun is traced back to the original owner, and the owner tries to avoid blame by falsely claiming that the gun was lost or stolen more than 3 days ago but less than 5 years before the ordinance was enacted. If the owner is believed, this would violate the ordinance and be punishable as a misdemeanor, but it would avoid the more severe penalties for either illegally transferring a firearm or being complicit in the criminal use of a firearm. If the owner is not believed, and is successfully prosecuted for illegally selling or giving away a gun to an ineligible person and possibly being complicit in its criminal use, then by definition the gun was not lost or stolen, and the owner cannot be prosecuted under this ordinance for failing to report it as lost or stolen. Either way the ordinance has no deterrent effect.

• Case 6. The owner commits a crime with a gun and tries to get rid of the gun. The gun is later found and linked to the owner, but he falsely claims it was lost or stolen (more than 3 days ago) but never reported as such. This is functionally equivalent to Sub-Case 5(e) above, and again the ordinance has no deterrent effect.

• Case 7. In anticipation of either committing a crime with a gun, or illegally selling or giving away a gun which might later be found in the possession of an ineligible person or used in a crime, the owner reports to the police that his firearm was either lost or stolen. This provides some modest level of deniability that the owner was complicit in a crime. As such, the ordinance provides a benefit to criminals and has a negative effect on public safety.

Case 7 is even more harmful than it appears at first glance. Suppose, for example, that a person of doubtful character who has had a few past brushes with the law was to walk into a police station today and report that his (legally-owned) gun had just been lost or stolen. Then a few weeks later that gun turned up during the investigation of a crime in which the owner was a suspect. The owner’s prior out-of-character police report might be viewed with considerable skepticism by a jury. But if an ordinance was enacted which REQUIRED such reports, his rationale for doing so would be a lot more persuasive.

I think I’ve covered all of the possible cases. In reviewing them, there is no instance in which this ordinance will have any positive benefit or deterrent effect with respect to public safety, and it does not even apply for many of the cases which have been touted as justification for its enactment. If anything, this ordinance will provide a slight benefit to criminals by giving them a reasonable-sounding excuse to report their guns as lost or stolen ahead of a crime.

Please vote against this measure.

[Streaming video of the July 23, 2007 City Council meeting which first passed the ordinance, and the August 13, 2007 meeting which passed it on the Second Reading, are available at the City of Simi Valley's website. Just scroll down and click on the video links for the meetings. For the July 23rd meeting, you can jump to Item 7B to see the public comments and Council deliberation and vote. For the August 13th meeting, the public comments came at Item 2A and the Council deliberation and vote were at Item 6B.]

Monday, June 11, 2007

posted 6/11/2007 06:31:00 PM by Daniel   3 comments

Global Warming Skepticism

I followed a link from Tim Blair to a "Denialism" blog which purports to debunk criticisms of Global Warming (mostly by labeling critics as "denialists" whose arguments therefore need not actually be refuted). The Denialism blog posting soon accumulated a couple of hundred very heated pro and con comments. So I decided to throw in my two cents worth, but inflation hit me hard. After my comment grew to over two thousand words, I decided to post it here as well:

After scanning through these many comments, it appears that there are at least a few intelligent and reasonable posters on both sides to leaven the numerous vitriolic attackers and counter-attackers. I’m therefore moved to lay out my own reasons for being a global warming skeptic. I’m certainly not an expert on climatology, but I’ve read a number of articles and I consider myself an educated layman (I’m an electronic engineer with a Bachelor’s degree from M.I.T. and a Master’s degree from U.S.C.). So here goes:

1. Extracting information from noisy data. Temperatures differ widely geographically and over short periods of time. Daily, weekly, and yearly variations dwarf the one or several degree changes which global warming models predict over a period of decades or a century. There are also much longer-term variations in the earth’s temperature, with periodicities of centuries or tens of thousands of years, as demonstrated by various proxy evidence and obvious macro events such as past ice ages.

It is difficult to extract information which proves the existence of recent anthropogenic temperature changes from all those short- and long-term variations, particularly when reasonably high-quality temperature measurements covering most of the globe have only become available in the last few decades. And it is only anthropogenic changes which matter in this discussion. If we were in the midst of a purely natural trend which would add perhaps 1 to 5 degrees to average global temperatures over the next century, my reaction would be “so what”? Life on this planet, and human life in particular, has survived such changes in the past, and we easily handle much greater variations on a scale of months and years, so we’ll deal with similar natural variations in the future.

Medium- and long-term natural temperature variations will always exist, so at most there might be an anthropogenic component which makes up some portion of future trends. Only if that anthropogenic component is significant and growing will it matter. In my profession I specifically deal with the problem of extracting meaningful data from noisy measurements, albeit on time-scales which are at least ten orders of magnitude faster than climate change. (For what it’s worth, I also deal with the obverse problem of creating better random noise. I have a patent, 6130755, which reduces the low-frequency components of pseudo random number generators so as to limit excursions from the ideal random behavior.) Based purely on past temperature variations and the relatively short span of high-quality measurements, it is not possible to prove that a significant anthropogenic component exists, at least up to the present time.

Of course Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theorists do not rely merely on extrapolating from past data. They postulate a physical mechanism, a greenhouse effect caused by elevated CO2 levels, which will result in significant future anthropogenic temperature increases. But the earth’s climate is an enormously complex, non-linear system with lots of feedback loops. Our climate models (and the computing power to run them) are still rather limited. The proof that elevated CO2 will indeed result in significant global warming involves specific predictions and verification derived from future data collected over the next several decades or centuries. It cannot come merely from the data collected to date.

Some AGW theorists may object that we can’t afford to wait that long. But that is a political objection, not a scientific objection. It may be unfortunate if irreversible ill effects occur before enough data can be collected to confirm the theory, but that doesn’t alter the fact that that amount of time is still necessary. Climate changes happen over relatively long time scales; that’s just reality.

2. Slow AGW isn’t a big danger. It’s not enough to prove that medium- or long-term temperature rises contain a significant anthropogenic component if the effect is limited to one or several degrees over a century. The big danger, if there really is one, would come from a runaway effect in which temperatures would suddenly and rapidly rise following some irreversible tipping point, leading to the destruction of civilization or even human life. This requires extrapolating an exponential temperature increase from past data even though we are currently below the knee of the curve. But the data is way too sparse and noisy to reliably do that; it could just as easily fit any number of other lines or curves.

Alternately one could argue that the physical mechanism is so well established and understood that (even absent past corroborating evidence) rising CO2 levels will produce an exponential increase with high probability. But that would be a very strong claim, and not one which I hear coming even from scientists who are strong advocates of AGW. They may sometimes speculate on that possibility, and worry about the consequences, but they do not formally assert it as part of their theories. Instead they confine themselves to the much milder temperature predictions emanating from their global warming models.

Without an imminent irreversible tipping point, the debate over AGW loses its urgency. We have time to make predictions, collect data, improve our models, and ponder the best corrective actions to take (if any).

Still, some AGW advocates resort to a form of Pascal’s Wager: Even if the chance of catastrophe is only one in (fill in the blank), isn’t it better to take action now rather than wait till it’s too late? Well, no, that depends very heavily on the (fill in the blank) value. Maybe, if the chance of thermal runaway is 1 in 10, it is necessary to take precautionary action now. Maybe not, if the chance is 1 in 1,000 or 1 in 1,000,000. After all, human resources are limited and there are all kinds of low-probability risks. We can’t protect against everything.

A good example is the threat of a civilization-destroying meteor strike. The generic odds of it occurring in any given year are perhaps one in ten million or less, based on what we now deduce about the history of our planet. So do we spend trillions of dollars on a crash project to construct meteor defenses? Failure to do so could lead to our destruction if we get really unlucky during the next few years. But we have to assess that risk and weight it against other dangers and opportunities in deciding how to prioritize and allocate resources. The same applies to the risk of runaway global warming.

3. Many AGW advocates try to tailor the evidence to fit a preconceived political agenda. The alarmist rhetoric coming from the Al Gore types and a lot of environmentalists appears fixated on enacting a specific policy prescription (reduction in CO2 levels through massive government controls and restrictions on economic activities) and then work backwards to justify that policy by agglomerating every possible argument they can think of no matter how nebulous. Perhaps that’s not your impression, but it certainly is my impression and the impression of many others. It makes me very suspicious of the conclusion when I see the extreme efforts being made to promote it.

Unfortunately, web sites such as the Denialism blog contribute to the perception, as they appear to be efforts to shut off open debate by applying derogatory labels to those who question the evidence and reasoning leading to the preconceived policy goal. Perhaps that’s not entirely fair to the authors of this site, or other respectable scientists who consider the evidence for AGW to be conclusive. But the science is being tarnished by the demagoguery of those who are using AGW to advance their own agendas.

My advice would be to stick to the evidence and stick to the science. Labeling doubters as “denialists” is not going to convince anyone of the validity of the theory, and will more likely have the perverse effect of raising additional doubts about the robustness of the theory when subjected to criticism.

If the science is good, it will win out in the end. Evolution wins out over creationism because evolution works; its explanatory power informs all modern biological advancements. Similarly, the HIV virus theory works; it results in cocktails of anti-viral drugs which keep people alive. The same attitude should apply to AGW; if correct, it will result in accurate and testable predictions and explanations of climate changes. Why get bent out of shape over the doubters? Let them be wrong or remain ignorant. Who cares, unless of course the real objective is political policy rather than achieving scientific validity.

4. The policy proposals are at variance with the purported problem. If I was convinced that AGW was a serious problem, my normal reaction as an engineer would be to look for the most innovative and cost-effective geoengineering methods of solving the problem. Placing restrictions on the release of CO2 into the atmosphere would be way down on my list, since the sources of CO2 are so pervasive and diffuse and often result from processes which carry many other benefits. Possible solutions to global warming include seeding the oceans with iron dust to stimulate CO2-absorbing plankton; modifying surface albedo to reduce light absorption; putting parasols in orbit; adjusting the exhaust of jet airliners to leave dust or sulfur in the upper atmosphere to increase cloud formation, etc.

Perhaps none of these ideas will work, or else they might have drawbacks which make them unsuitable. The best solutions may still be waiting to be invented. But they all offer greater hope than the solution du jour of adopting the Kyoto treaty so as to ever-so-slightly reduce CO2 emissions (or just reduce the rate of growth of emissions). Anyone who is seriously concerned about AGW should be urgently searching for a technological solution. Anyone who is frightened about the prospect of a near-term thermal runaway effect should be desperately searching for a technological solution, since that would be the only realistic route to preventing it.

Carbon offsets are actually a good idea, despite the hypocrisy of some of the politicians who utilize them and despite the sleazy similarity to the selling of religious indulgences to expiate sins. Carbon offsets provide a competitive market mechanism whereby various approaches to ameliorating CO2 levels can be financed and tested. The comparative lack of interest in technological solutions compared to government controls on CO2 emissions reinforces my opinion that the issue is being driven by a political agenda rather than by science.

5. If AGW is a serious problem, economic growth and exponential technological advancement is the best solution. Not only do I doubt the urgency of the problem (see point # 2 above), if it even is a problem (see point # 1 above), but I doubt the need to find an immediate solution. Science and technology are advancing at exponential rates, as is most evident by the improvements in computer processing power but is also showing up in many other fields. If we are not facing an irreversible disaster within the next thirty years, why not just wait fifteen or twenty years to try to solve the problem? By that time computer power will have advanced a thousand-fold, and our engineering capabilities and resources will be vastly greater than they are at present. What today constitutes an enormous technological challenge or an impossibly expensive engineering task might be simple and relatively inexpensive two decades from now.

Our civilization will also be far wealthier then, making even expensive engineering tasks easier to bear, if economic growth is not artificially constricted by short-sighted limits on CO2 emissions and other regulatory restrictions.

Going back to the analogy of a civilization-destroying meteor strike, suppose we detected a sizable comet which was projected to directly impact the earth in five years and wipe out life on our planet. Surely it would be worth spending trillions of dollars in an emergency program to deflect the comet. We have the technology, albeit crude and incredibly expensive (especially on a highly-compressed schedule) to achieve that goal.

Now suppose we detected that same comet and projected that it would impact the earth in thirty years. Would it make sense to spend the same trillions of dollars on the same emergency compressed-schedule? Surely not. It would make much more sense to leisurely study the problem, use improved computer modeling over the next couple of decades to determine the simplest and most cost-effective method of perturbing the comet, and develop the space infrastructure and advanced propulsion technologies which would allow us to achieve the goal.

Putting it another way, advances in technology are already rounding the knee of the exponential growth curve, thereby far exceeding even the most pessimistic forecasts for exponential thermal runaway. For anyone who doubts that exponential advances in technology will continue, I recommend Ray Kurzweil’s book The Singularity Is Near. If we do nothing now, and Anthropogenic Global Warming turns out to be a real danger, we’ll still have the time and ability to fix it before it can manifest itself as a disaster.

I think I’ve written enough for now. I originally intended this to be a fairly short comment. Somewhere along the line I totally lost control, and it exploded into a two thousand-plus word monster. I’ll be posting a version of it on my rarely-updated blog (http://wienerlog.blogspot.com) simply because I hate to waste all this writing.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

posted 2/25/2007 10:24:00 AM by Daniel   2 comments

[The Guatemala sinkhole and the Academy Awards hoopla over Al Gore's global warming "documentary" got me thinking again about disaster movies. Back in late 2005, after watching the first half of the made-for-CBS disaster flick "Category 7: The End of the World", I realized that there was obviously an unlimited market for this genre. If this kind of stuff can get on TV and even win Academy Awards, why shouldn't I claim a piece of the action? So I wrote up a treatment, and it's been gathering dust on my hard drive ever since. For lack of anything better to do, I'm posting it here. Surely there must be some agents and studios out there who will take the initiative to seek me out and offer me a six or seven figure deal...]

Sigalert 9: The Ultimate Traffic Jam

The setting is Southern California, where Marcia Prescott is the newly appointed director of CalTrans with responsibility for all the freeways in the state. Marcia is a divorcee with a seventeen-year-old daughter Mandy. Her former husband is Alexander Skeffington, Jr., heir to the Skeffington fortune and Skeffington Motors, the world’s largest auto manufacturing conglomerate which is run by his father Alex Skeffington, Sr.

However, unbeknownst to anyone but Marcia, Mandy’s real father was Jack Hathaway, Marcia’s lover in college. Jack is now a fully-tenured Professor of Environmentalism at the University of California’s Sedona campus, and the world’s foremost expert on mass transportation. Jack is also the principle author of an $83 billion bond measure that will be voted on at a special election the following day.

The bonds would finance a revolutionary high-speed monorail system down the centers of California’s freeways, which would ultimately make individual automobiles obsolete. The monorail cars would travel at speeds of up to 350 mph and use a computerized multiple-hub-and-spoke model to get people to their destinations in one-third of the time that congested freeways require. The monorails would be run by superconducting power lines from giant solar cell arrays out in the desert, and hence would be non-polluting and would help prevent global warming.

Unfortunately the bond measure appears headed for defeat, with public opinion surveys showing it down by 35 percentage points, because Alexander Skeffington has poured a quarter of a billion dollars into a vicious campaign against it and against Professor Hathaway. Skeffington rightly fears that this monorail system will become a model for the entire nation and will destroy his auto company and his fortune if it succeeds. Skeffington’s corporate goons have been roughing up idealistic students in order to break up their rallies in support of the bond measure.

Recently Professor Hathaway has been having an affair with Rosanne Conchita, a fiery and charismatic Chicano union organizer who is passionately fighting for mass transportation for her people. At the moment their relationship is extremely rocky because Hathaway is uncomfortable with her radical tactics to counter Skeffington and his thugs. Rosanne leads a splinter group of enraged students who are willing to do whatever it takes to make sure the monorail project succeeds.

When Professor Hathaway debates on behalf of the bond measure, he often uses the example of frogs who will jump out of a pot of boiling water but who will allow themselves to be cooked if the water temperature is slowly increased. He says that’s what’s happening with our transportation. Motorists don’t notice that traffic just keeps getting more congested and slower year after year, until in just a few more years we will reach total gridlock and nothing will move.

Rosanne has decided that the voters need to be tossed into the boiling water. Her clandestine group of activists intends to conduct a non-violent protest in which they will simultaneously shut down the entire freeway system as a demonstration of where California is headed if voters don’t approve the bond. They will do this by having nine teams choke off nine strategic freeway locations which will paralyze all traffic. Each team will consist of four to six drivers and cars. Each team will line up their cars next to each other across all the lanes of a freeway in one direction, and then slow their cars down in tandem until they bring traffic to a halt. Then they’ll get out of their cars and dump numerous buckets of nails onto the empty freeway in front of them, and run off to waiting getaway cars on side streets. It will take days to clean all the nails off the freeways and get vehicles moving again.

The day they have selected for action is one of the worst traffic days of the year. It is also the day that world leaders will be secretly converging on Los Angeles for a summit conference. A new treaty to end global warming has been hammered out behind the scenes for the last several months, but it must be finalized and it is still very fragile. Any advanced publicity is likely to scuttle it. So the leaders of every country are arriving incognito at Southern California’s five major airports, and they’ll be driving in darkened limousines to an undisclosed meeting location in downtown Los Angeles.

[skip to middle of movie]

Mandy’s boyfriend is one of the freeway shutdown conspirators, and he has accidentally let slip hints of the plot. Mandy logs into his computer while he’s going to the bathroom and finds complete plans. She barely escapes discovery, and then tries desperately to call her mother who is unable to answer her cell phone because of the crisis. Then Mandy goes to the police, but they are too busy with other things and refuse to listen to a teenager with a nutty story. Finally Mandy steals her boyfriend’s motorcycle and takes off on a harrowing high speed ride to reach her mother, weaving around the stalled traffic and leaping obstacles as she goes.

Marcia Prescott is in the CalTrans emergency command center staring at the 30-foot-high traffic map display, which is turning red all over along with numerous warning triangles. Every once in a while, amidst the frantic hubbub, someone will shout something like “We’ve just lost the Hollywood Freeway” or “We’re up to six Sigalerts! We’ve never had this many Sigalerts at one time. We don’t have the resources to handle it. Violence could break out at any second.” The President calls Marcia to demand that she do whatever it takes to get the world’s leaders to the summit meeting by 6 pm; the fate of the entire planet hangs in the balance.

Interspersed are scenes of angry horn-tooting motorists who are stopped dead on the freeways. Some are locking their cars and walking away. All the cell phone lines are jammed. Fistfights break out, and rocks are thrown through windshields. Dozens of traffic-reporting helicopters circle overhead above every blockage. Two of them collide because the famous arrogant pilot of one has been drinking, but the other helicopter pilot, Ace Hogan, is miraculously able to land safely with nobody injured even though his helicopter’s entire tail assembly has been shattered.

Meanwhile we’re also following the personal travails of Susie Prescott, Marcia’s younger sister, who has gone into premature labor and is trying to rush to a hospital but is caught in the mammoth traffic jam.

[skip to climax of movie]

Max Goldberg is an eccentric Professor of Advanced Physics at UC Sedona, and is Jack Hathaway’s best friend. Max has been developing a “focused magnetic beam device” which can selectively attract specific metal objects. Max’s goal is to be able to target metal guns of all types. Giant versions of his device could then be placed in orbit around the earth and used to extract all the world’s firearms, thus leading to universal disarmament and peace in our time.

Naturally the U.S. military thinks this is a terrible idea and has refused to fund Max’s research. His lab has repeatedly been broken into and his equipment smashed. But he has nevertheless constructed a dozen working prototypes that he has managed to target at steel-jacketed bullets. It’s a relatively trivial matter to reconfigure his device to target the millions of nails which have been splashed across the freeways.

When the Air Force refuses to cooperate in using Max’s device, Jack Hathaway and Marcia Prescott decide to bypass official channels and rush the prototypes to the fleet of radio and TV traffic-reporting helicopters, which then are able to clear the nails from each roadblock in a matter of minutes. Motorists join together to lift up the blocking cars and carry them to the side of the road, and traffic begins to flow again. One by one the red indicator lights on the 30-foot freeway traffic map display begin turning green. The limousines carrying the world’s leaders are finally able to get to the summit meeting just minutes before the 6 pm deadline and sign the agreement to save the world. They then issue a unanimous statement endorsing mass transit as an essential component of reversing global warming, and urge the voters of California to approve the monorail bonds.

On election night the bond measure is a squeaker which finally passes by a single vote – the absentee ballot that Susie inserted into the mailbox in front of the hospital before letting herself be taken to the emergency room. Of course Susie's newborn daughter survived and is healthy. The Governor severely scolds Rosanne and her band of idealistic students for causing a colossal 9-Sigalert traffic jam, but then issues pardons to them all because he understands that they were just doing what they though was right and that in the end it all worked out for the best.

Alexander Skeffington, Jr. is arrested based on the video tape recording that Ace Hogan made (before his crash-landing) of Alexander shouting at his goons to attack the student activists. Jack Hathaway and Marcia Prescott get back together, and Jack learns that Mandy is his daughter and he resolves to try to make up for all the lost years.

The fading shot is of the freeways returning to normal, as seen from Ace Hogan’s circling traffic helicopter (with the tail assembly duct-taped back into place). The view then pulls back higher and higher until it’s the whole world as observed from outer space. The scene holds steady for a few seconds, as first one and then more and more satellites start whizzing by underneath until we’re left with a giant traffic jam in orbit.

The End