In case of flood, don’t forget your shovel

Free bags and sand available from the city
Bonnie Durrance

According to the National Weather Service, a succession of storms starting Thursday will bring at least two inches of rain and as much as ten inches, leading to possible flooding. The City of Sonoma has announced that if a flood alert is posted for Sonoma Creek, those needing sand bags may come by City Hall during normal business hours, as long as supplies last. Bags may be filled any time from the sand pile at Depot Park, 270 First Street West. No charge, but bring your own shovel.
Empty bags and sand are also available at Friedman Bros. Hardware, located at 1360 Broadway, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (8 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Sunday).
To report flooding or possible flooding, call City Hall (938-3681) from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday-Friday. After hours, or on weekends, call 911 to report a flood location. City Public Works personnel will respond as quickly as available.

Data & Errata
Daedalus Howell

I’ve been researching what I like to refer to as the “Frankenstein Factor,” which is one of the defining features of science fiction – essentially “play god and be smited” as per the fate of Dr. Frankenstein who gave a creature life which lead to his death. Anyway, my research eventually brought me to various observations of artificial intelligence (the Digital Age form of the Frankenstein monster), including this chestnut from the “Lord of Rings” archives. Apparently, Massive, the special effects program designed to facilitate the cast-of-thousands battle scenes in the trilogy really put the “special” in special effects. As science and culture writer Clive Thompson recounted on his blog “the program worked by creating each orc as an independent agent, driven by a few simple goals: Kill enemies, while trying to stay alive and avoiding overly-congested areas of the battlefield. When you combine thousands of these agents together, they create a highly realistic sense of the army being ‘alive’ – teeming with ripples of emergent behavior that could never be predicted or hand-coded.”
According to Thompson’s report, Richard Taylor, the films’ special effects head, explained to the Montreal Gazette that a particular behavior arose that his team hadn’t expected. Initially, instead of fighting, the orcs ran away.
“For the first two years, the biggest problem we had was soldiers fleeing the field of battle,” Taylor said. “We could not make their computers stupid enough to not run away.”
Call it cowardice, but I think given the odds of surviving on the “Lord of the Rings” battlefield, the digital orc’s intelligence may be more than merely artificial.