Transitions

 

Circle Game

And the seasons, they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We're captive on the carousel of time
We can't return, we can only look
Behind, from where we came
And go round and round and round, in the circle game.

After more years that I care to admit,  I have circled back to the beginning.

When I was a child at St Paul’s School, I was fascinated by the story of God’s casting of Lucifer out of heaven, so much so that I chose the name Michael, after the archangel Michael, as my confirmation name (which might not mean something unless you are Catholic, but this was a big deal to me!)  In high school I was enthralled by the Isaac Asimov’s idea of psychohistory as promoted by Hari Seldon in his Foundation novels.  ( And Apple TV+. A fancy Rubic’s cube for psychohistory?!  Is that the best that you could do?).  However I was born poor and decided that I would have to study it as an engineer.  In my hubris I applied to MIT. My application was rejected and I had to attend my safe school Brown.

(I am grateful to MIT.  I also applied for graduate school at MIT and while I was accepted at UPenn, I kept stalling them because I was waiting to hear from MIT, which eventually rejected me.  But while I was stalling,  UPenn kept increasing their financial offer, and MIT's delay paid off  in a dividend to me in the long run).  But back to Brown.  While at Brown, the closest thing that I could find to psychohistory was Jay Forrester’s (of MIT!) model and land use models. )

Land use modeling was not funded but transportation modeling, which used land use modeling,was, and that determined my course of study. I took a transportation modeling course in my senior year at Brown that was taught by Dr. Stella Dafermos, which I did not know at the time was the one of the developers of the User Equilibrium, UE, assignment  that would be a large part of my career.  My mother was a clerk in the department where her student Anna Nagurney showed that the best impedance function in UE, among the ones she tested, was a fourth power function, That was the basis for the use of  the Bureau of Public Roads, BPR, curve which had a fourth power component, as the standard impedance/Volume Delay Function, VDF.

The Atlanta Regional Commission adopted VDF curves that varied by Time of Day.  The reaction of my colleagues was that was nonsense because the VDF curve should be based on the physical behavior of vehicle and that should NOT vary by Time of Day, but instead should only be a form of thr BPR curve.  When I had the chance to investigate travel reliability measured as time, I found that reliability DID vary by Time of Day, because the drivers in different time periods had different expectations of reliability.  I speculated that the VDF curve was based on the combination of the behavior  of vehicles AND the driver’s of those vehicles.  In trying to include reliability in the VDF, I was forced to propose a new speed-volume curve, which had a transition from laminar, orderly, flow, to turbulent, chaotic, flow when the volume approached capacity, just like the behavior of fluids in pipes.  Since I have found an underwhelming response to this curve, I was forced to seek other metaphors.  One is that as you approach an absolute, i.e. capacity, you may transition from an orderly domain to a domain governed by chaos/entropy. 

Which leads me to propose that Lucifer was NOT cast out of heaven by God.  He cast himself out of heaven by trying to be too much like/approach God.  Which completes my circle.