I'm a really big fan of the TV Show Heroes. In the April 30th, 2007 episode, Hiro traveled forward in time to a future that was created due to a huge nuclear explosion in New York.

For those of you who do not watch the show, this show centers about the lives of a few individuals with supernatural powers. Some of the characters have the ability to be invisible, others can heal themselves from just about any injury, and obviously, there are some characters that can make themselves nuclear at a moments notice.

This episode was an interesting one. It showed a world that was so afraid of what they didn't understand that it mimicked the times of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, where all Japanese-Americans were forced to register with the government, and some where placed in concentration camps. This event in American history showed the ignorance of those individuals who were in charge of running the country at that time. The saying says; we fear what we do not understand.

In this same fashion, I have just learned of this Senior in the Fort Bend Independent School District who created a map for the computer game Counter Strike, a game where you play a Navy Seal, and attempt to rescue hostages from terrorists.

In the hacker world, failure is actually a success. When you get something to fail, this is how you learn a way around it by analyzing the actual failure process. This mentality however is not only useful when dealing with computers or electronic equipment, but in other aspects of life as well.

Case in point; recently, a tanker hauling 8600lbs of fuel (almost $40,000 in gas by today’s prices, the bastards) was speeding through the Highways 80 & 580 interchange. Unable to negotiate the turn, he clipped the side of the roadway and flipped over. This ruptured the tank itself, but not in such a way that it allowed all the gas to escape, rather, it just created a hole where enough gas was able to escape and create, for all intents and purposes, a giant flame thrower.

This in itself is not the actual failure, and is not what I am writing this article about. The failure I’d like to concentrate on is the failure of the structure above this turned over tanker, the overpass that connected the Bay Bridge to Highway 580 Eastbound.