Niagara of New Jersey

The city of Paterson, New Jersey, has had its ups and downs in the past 217 years.

The upward curve began in 1792, when Alexander Hamilton came upon a spectacular 77-foot-high waterfall in the middle of northern New Jersey and decided it would be the perfect place to create a water-powered factory town that could serve as the linchpin in his plan to build the economy of the United States around manufacturing and banking.

Hamilton founded Paterson, which became the first industrial city in the U.S. The heart, and engine, of early Paterson was its mighty waterfall.

Always known to locals simply as the Great Falls, this wonder of nature was created by a sharp bend in the Passaic River, a modest and meandering waterway that snakes its way through northern NJ and empties into Newark Bay. The bend is so sharp that it is easy to travel past the Great Falls at a close distance without even realizing it is there.

Unless, of course, it has been raining recently. Then you hear it, and it sounds like a combination of thunder and an express train. This is because the Great Falls is second only to Niagara Falls as the largest waterfall in the northeastern United States.

The man who created the U.S. Treasury designated Paterson as the nation's first big infrastructure project, enlisting Pierre Charles L'Enfant--who went on to become the master designer of Washington, DC -- to build a system of waterways to bring water from the Falls to factory sites.

Soon some large 19th-century manufacturers, including Rogers Locomotive Works and the Colt gun factory, set up shop in red-brick buildings near the Falls. It also was in the 1800s that a huge textile industry took root in Paterson, giving it the moniker ''Silk City'' as it became one of the largest producers of silk in the world.

But, beginning in the 1950s, Paterson began a descent from prosperity from which it still has not completely recovered. Like many other urban centers in America, the middle class fled, taking the tax base with them and leaving behind a broken infrastructure, a dearth of jobs, and poverty.

Paterson, once the proudest hub of northern New Jersey, was hit harder than most. It had the dubious distinction of being cited as one of the five poorest cities in America. The area around the Great Falls became a desolate landscape of crumbling red buildings and empty streets, its historic legacy hidden beneath layers of grime and neglect. The power plant that had been built beside the Falls sat silent and rusting.

In recent years, particularly under the leadership of Mayor Bill Pascrell, Paterson began to pull itself up by its bootstraps, aided by new attention and support from the state. We can report without hesitation that it is in much better shape today than it has been at any time in the past 40 years.

About 35 years ago, a movement began among civic leaders to revive the area around the Great Falls. The movement was kicked off by the first annual Great Falls Festival, a combination craft fair and circus. The high point of the Great Falls Festival, literally and figuratively, came when the legendary tightrope artist Karl Wallenda walked across the Falls at night.

Anyone who was there that night will never forget the sight of the 70-year-old Wallenda in a billowy white shirt and black pants standing precariously over the waterfall on a one-inch-wide steel cable without a net beneath him. As a 15-foot-long balancing pole clenched in his hands jittered seismically, Wallenda squinted into huge spotlights that were focused on him and carefully placed one slippered foot in front of the other as he moved across the wire, enveloped by mist and spray from the Great Falls.

As Wallenda took his final steps on the wire and stepped off onto the western cliff of the Falls, he fell into the arms of a relieved and jubilant crowd of Patersonians. People reached out to hug him and shake his hand and then stared at their hands and arms in amazement: Wallenda was soaking wet.Ê

Three years later, Wallenda was walking across a wire strung between two high-rise buildings in San Juan, Puerto Rico, when he was knocked over by a gust of wind and fell to his death.Ê

Paterson's civic leaders managed to get historic landmark status for many of the deteriorating factories of the Falls District, and a few years later began to spruce them up. But the Holy Grail of preservation -- designation of the Falls as a National Park --proved elusive.

For the past 10 years, PatersonÕs representatives in Congress have put forward bills every year to make the Falls a U.S. park, but none of these bills were brought to the floor for a vote -- until 2007, when one of the measures, sponsored by former Mayor Pascrell (now a Congressman), finally passed the House of Representatives. Last fall, it was passed by the U.S. Senate.Ê

On March 30, President Obama signed the bill into law and the Great Falls of the Passaic River became America's newest National Park.

So America's first industrial city, which for so many years teetered like the Great Wallenda on his wire, is now taking its rightful place in our national heritage. After 217 years, Paterson is still here, and now, Americans from all over the country will be coming to visit.

And the mighty Great Falls, which for an epoch has carved its spectacular crevice in the Passaic River singing a thunderous song of amazement and possibility, awaits them.

Ask the guy who carved them

Easter Island sits in the southeastern Pacific Ocean. Known to its natives as Rapa Nui and governed by Chile, this tiny volcanic outcropping is famous for its enigmatic moai statues, monolithic human figures carved from rock.

Nobody knows who carved the huge stone figures, or why. There are 1000 of them, ranging from 6 feet to more than 30 feet in height. The biggest weighs about 270 tons. All have the same appearance: a long shaped head with an upper torso, a chin and long ears, with arms along the body or arms that rest on the stomach. Some of the statues contain eyes, made in white and red stone and coral. Some of them even sport stone hats that the natives call ''pukao.''

Archaeologists believe the first humans arrived on the island between the 4th and 7th century A.D., probably from Polynesia, and almost immediately began work on platforms for the famous statues. About 300 years later, the platforms were complete and they started building the big stone figures using rock from the inner core of the Rano Rarku volcano.

During the next 500 years, about two statues per year were completed and moved to their final resting place on the edge of the island. The natives apparently cut down all of the trees on the island to use the logs to move the statues. It must have taken longer to move them than to carve them, because almost 400 of the statues are still sitting in the volcanic quarry.

Suddenly, around 1680, the chiseling and moving stopped. Nobody knows why. Sociologists speculate that war or disease may have caused a catastrophic collapse of the island society (they do not believe the current inhabitants of Rapa Nui are descendants of the people who built the statues).

Perhaps the statue-builders ran out of chisels. Or maybe the movers unionized and demanded a higher wage for shlepping the big stone figures from the quarry. Or maybe the natives elected a new king who said ''Enough with the statues, already!'' and ordered them to use the last of the trees to build a big boat so they could all leave.

There is one other theory, however, and it is quite plausible. We'll get to that later.

Anyway, the spooky stone figures have stood on Easter Island -- so named by a Dutch explorer who ''discovered'' it on Easter Sunday in 1772 -- for the past 300 years without anybody bothering them. Until now.

The expanding reach of international tourism finally has enveloped the most remote and exotic locations on Earth. ''Eco-tourists,'' looking very much like the family from Dubuque in our favorite Far Side cartoons, have descended on the Galapagos Islands, where they are now threatening to trample Darwin's famous turtles into extinction. Tour boats are cruising up the heart of the Amazon.

On Easter Island, which officially is designated as a UNESCO world heritage site, the current residents are scrambling to accommodate a growing number of visitors who are creating a strain on the Rapa Nui infrastructure and its delicate environment. The Rapa Nuians need to build roads and hotels, but they don't want to disturb the big stone heads.

Enter Autodesk (the 3D modeling experts), METCO Services (provider of surveying and scanning services), and Leica Geosystems (maker of GPS and laser scanning instruments and something known as point-cloud processing software). For the past 18 months, high-tech engineers from the three companies have been mapping the big statues. They've also been training Rapa Nui officials to use the sophisticated technology and Autodesk digital modeling software, so local developers can evaluate the impact of their plans on the ancient statues and make sustainable development decisions.

''We are at a pivotal time in our history,'' says Pedro Pablo Edmunds Paoa, mayor of Rapa Nui. ''Sustainable development, protection of our historical artifacts and natural resources, and ongoing education about our resources are the key challenges we face today. Autodesk design technology and engineering expertise supports our need to make better, more informed decisions about the future of our Island. We appreciate our partners who are helping us modernize without destroying our rich cultural history.''

According to Lisa Campbell, vice president, Autodesk Geospatial Solutions, Autodesk design software is helping Rapa Nui officials digitally visualize and analyze how their development plans ''could impact roads, buildings and infrastructure, as well as historical artifacts throughout the island.''

''This unique opportunity to work directly with Rapa Nui officials and archeologists to bring state-of-the-art 3D prototyping technology and visual models to tackle their development challenges is especially rewarding for us,'' she adds.

Local developers and engineers on Rapa Nui are working their way up from existing AutoCAD software to advanced 3D modeling and visualization technologies from Autodesk, including AutoCAD Civil 3D, Autodesk MapGuide Enterprise, and Revit Architecture design software.

So 21st century technology is being deployed to enable sustainable development next to a bunch of stone figures that have been standing around for almost a millennium, hundreds of years after the people who carved them suddenly disappeared without a trace.

Maybe we've seen too many science fiction movies, but isn't this the part where the super-confident modern technoids, having awakened an ancient power far greater than their nifty gadgets, suddenly have to run for their lives?

Which brings us back to that other theory about why the original Rapa Nui natives disappeared. Here it is:

Even though many of the stone figures on the island are standing next to the ocean, all of them are facing inward, staring up at the crest of the volcano that rises above the island.

The first natives created the big figures to protect themselves against the evil volcano spirit. The statues are "guarding" the volcano. Unfortunately for the natives, the volcano spirit was not impressed, and eventually let them know it with a huge belch of fire. The stone figures are still here, but the natives are gone.

In the last scene in our movie, a handful of ash-covered Autodesk engineers and Mayor Paoa are paddling a handmade boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, trying to find the nearest island with the only GPS device that survived the wrath of Rano Rarku.









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A fire on the moon

Forty years ago this week, three men were strapped into a metal capsule perched atop a 36-story marvel of engineering that had three million parts, enough liquid hydrogen to blow up a small city, and five titanic rocket engines, but less computing power than you can find today on your desktop PC.

On July 16, 1969, the fuse was lit and the three-stage Saturn V, the most powerful machine ever built, lifted majestically off the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The Saturn V did not exist eight years earlier, when President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States would send a man to the moon before the end of the decade.

Human beings had never escaped the gravitational pull of the Earth, and even our best scientists were not certain of what it would take to get to the moon, or if it was even possible to land on its surface. The technology, manpower and expertise had to be organized and created from scratch in the most complex enterprise ever undertaken.

The race to the moon was filled with breathtaking episodes of triumph and touched by tragedy.

Alan Shepard's flawless 15-minute flight in a tiny Mercury capsule, the first American in space, was followed by Gus Grissom's adventure. As a nervous Gus sat in his bobbing capsule waiting for an aircraft carrier to pick him up after he parachuted back to Earth, he prematurely blew the hatch, sending the capsule to the bottom of the ocean.

Gus was plucked out of the water by a Navy helicopter, but he and two other astronauts met a tragic end five years later when a spark in their Apollo capsule -- which had been filled with pure oxygen during a test run on the launch pad -- caught fire, incinerating the crew in a matter of seconds.

The two-man Gemini program, which followed the solo Mercury flights, featured a series of astonishing firsts: the first space walk by an astronaut, the first rendezvous and docking by two space vehicles, the first weeklong space mission.

The debut of the Lunar Module (LEM), the strange, spider-shaped craft designed for the moon landing, was not inspiring. Neil Armstrong, already a space veteran in the Gemini program, took the LEM out for its first test flight on Earth and promptly crashed in a parking lot.

Apollo 8 provided an unforgettable and welcome respite to the unrelenting bad news of 1968 when it circled the moon and, on Christmas Eve, sent back the first incredible view of Earth rising over a lunar landscape as astronaut Frank Borman read the words of Genesis from the Bible.

On July 20, 1969, Armstrong, a soft-spoken pilot from Wapakoneta, Ohio, and Buzz Aldrin, a hyperactive space engineer from Montclair, New Jersey, descended to a barren, crater-filled field on the moon's Sea of Tranquility in a LEM they called Eagle.

Armstrong manipulated the small thrusters on the LEM and gently coaxed the craft over boulders and craters, looking for a smooth spot to set it down. With less than 30 seconds of fuel left -- and a decision to abort the landing on the lips of frazzled mission controllers in Houston -- Armstrong calmly counted off the last few feet on the altimeter and noted that the LEM was ''kicking up some dust.''

For a few agonizing seconds, an entire planet about 250,000 miles away in the airless black void of space held its collective breath. Then:

''Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.''

A few hours later, after patiently listening to Buzz Aldrin's numerous requests to let him go first, Neil Armstrong gingerly stepped down the Eagle's ladder in his bulky white spacesuit. He paused at the last step, perhaps contemplating the theories of some skeptics at NASA who had postulated that the surface of the moon could not support the weight of a man. The first man who stepped on the moon would simply sink and never be heard from again, they said.

Armstrong jumped off the ladder, and said ''ThatÕs one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.''

Forty years later, human beings on Earth are still grappling with age-old problems of war, poverty and disease, and some modern human-created nightmares like global warming and nuclear proliferation. From time to time, we wonder if the inexorable march of progress has faltered, if perhaps we are sliding backwards.

We wonder if we still have the right stuff.

But high above us in the nighttime summer sky, the moon beckons, carrying Neil Armstrong's footprint and waiting for us to take another giant leap.

They said it couldnÕt be done. We did it.

East wind

Later this year, a global summit meeting will be convened in Copenhagen in which world leaders will try to craft a successor agreement to the Kyoto treaty, the last worldwide effort to establish a meaningful target for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.

The scientific experts on climate change have warned that any agreement in Copenhagen must go much further than the Kyoto accord if the world is going to avoid the catastrophic effects of global warming. Basically, we have been told, this is our last chance to prevent climate change from becoming irreversible.

In the run-up to Copenhagen, President Obama has changed the position of the United States -- which was one of only a handful of nations which refused to ratify the Kyoto treaty -- from foot-dragging to frontrunning. He persuaded his colleagues at the recent G8 summit of leading industrial nations in Italy to endorse a 50-percent reduction in current carbon emissions by 2050.

However, the two growth leaders of the developing world -- China and India -- thus far have refused to join the party, claiming that their growth will be stymied if they accept the same carbon-reduction standard as the fully industrialized powers.

China, in particular, has in recent years tied its emergence as a global economic power to fossil fuels. The world's most populous nation has fueled its astounding 10-percent annual growth rates by firing up a new coal-burning power plant every two weeks. By the end of this year, China is expected to surpass the United States as the country that spews the largest volume of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

So it might be logical to conclude that the U.S., which is now embracing a green agenda, and China, which has an expanding appetite for the world's dirtiest fuel, are moving in opposite directions.

Not so.

According to a report in The New York Times, China aggressively is positioning itself to become the world's most dominant producer of renewable energy. Its strategy involves building up an alternative energy manufacturing base by shutting out foreign competition for huge domestic projects while at the same time using this expanded manufacturing sector to flood overseas markets with exports.

The Chinese are rapidly applying several variations of this strategy to solar and wind power, and they are laying the groundwork to become a world power in electric cars as well.

The Asian giant is building not one, but six of the world's largest wind farms on its territory, each with a capacity of between 10,000 to 20,000 megawatts. By comparison, the largest wind power project in the U.S. -- a 4,000-megawatt wind farm in Texas proposed by oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens -- still sits on the drawing board. Pickens recently announced he is putting the project on hold, primarily because he does not expect transmission lines needed to support it to be built during the current economic downturn.

According to the Times, the bidding process for the huge Chinese wind power projects was skewed by the Chinese government to award manufacturing contracts to domestic companies. The 25 largest contracts for the PRC's wind initiative all were awarded to Chinese firms earlier this year. As soon as these domestic projects are completed, analysts expect China to unleash a wave of wind-power component exports.

To corner the solar power market, the Chinese used this formula in reverse. They created the world's largest solar panel manufacturing industry by exporting 95 percent of their output to Europe and the U.S. But when China authorized its first solar power plant this spring, it required that 80 percent of the panels be made in China.

While we're not privy to the diplomatic dialogue between the great powers that is going on behind the scenes, we suspect the U.S. and Europe are doing most of the talking in the current conversation with China on the subject of global warming.

The Western powers are urging China to adopt their timetable for carbon-emission reductions, and they undoubtedly are threatening to file a complaint with the WTO over China's protectionist stance regarding its emerging alternative energy industry.

We suspect the Chinese aren't saying anything. They are waiting for it to occur to U.S. and European leaders that China already has established its global warming ''negotiating position'' through its actions.

From where we sit, it seems that China's position is as clear as a pollution-free sky:

''There can be no solution to global warming without us, and we intend to dominate the market for green technologies and alternative energy. If you want one, you have to accept the other.''

The Chinese are waiting, and they are smiling. Eventually the Americans and the Europeans will understand they are caught between a bituminous rock and a hard place.

And if we in the West don't have this epiphany soon, well, our friends in Beijing know they can speed things up by suggesting they may want to convert the $2-trillion worth of U.S. dollars they are holding into another currency.

They wouldn't do that, would they?

Rat Pack

We caught up with Fred, our favorite talking mouse, in Vegas this week. We found him sunning himself by the pool at the Bellagio, wearing some oversized Ray-Ban sunglasses.

What's with the shades?

''Too much neon. It's messing up my Circadian rhythm,'' he said.

''Besides, I've got to keep a low profile. CIA may want me to take over for their chief Congressional briefer. The last piece of limburger they sent over there to testify had more holes in his story than a wheel of Swiss.''

When we last left Fred, the loquacious rodent was tucked away at a secret government lab in Wisconsin. As you may recall, Fred granted his first exclusive interview to us after he was successfully implanted with the human gene that governs language and speaking skills.

This time, Fred was not alone. He was accompanied by six other mice, who like Fred were hidden behind Ray-Bans and reclining on miniature lounge chairs.

''I like to think of them as my grad students, but one of the Vegas papers is already calling them the Rat Pack. The one with the crooked tail over there is Dino. The clueless one is Joey, and the guy spreading clotted cream on his cracker is Lawford.''

The three other members of Fred's crew suddenly produced top hats and canes and began tapping their way around the pool, humming what sounded like a cross between Motown and Alvin and the Chipmunks.

''They've got an audition at the Mirage. Calling themselves The Three Blind Mice. The showstopper is a Four Tops medley.''

Fred shrugged his little shoulders and sighed. ''Yeah, I know, it's pretty cheesy. They can sing, but they can't count. Maybe they'll get eaten by Seigfried's cat.''

We asked Fred what he was doing in Vegas. Without missing a beat, he replied: ''Economic stimulus.''

We told Fred we had a hard time believing he could write off a trip to Sin City as part of the federal recovery effort.

''Are you kidding? Those bozos are falling all over themselves trying to figure out how to spend it fast enough. I had six federal agencies begging me to come up with a project.''

We asked Fred what he came up with. He took a sip from his frosty drink, pausing to flip the lever on a poolside poker slot machine with his tail.

''Small-Scale Urban Infrastructure Survey for HUD. Assessment of Climate-Change Variables in a Dry Desert Environment for DOE and NASA. Swine Flu Casual Contact Vector Threat Level for DHS and NIH.''

We must have raised our eyebrows, because Fred got exasperated.''You don't believe me? Go ahead, ask me how many germs you can pick up at a blackjack table. It's 3.4 trillion per shoe, wiseguy.''

As in our first interview with Fred, this interlude was interrupted by the ringing of his iPhone. We assumed it was Fred's lawyer, so we asked him for a progress report on his legal battle with the Disney people.

''Nah, we dropped that. Statute of limitations expired,'' Fred said. ''Besides, we got bigger fish to fry.''

Bigger than the Magic Kingdom?

''The Big Cheese himself. Thought he was being cute fessing up to smoking in the White House. When my ambulance chaser finishes calculating the impact of second-hand smoke in mouse years, we'll be rolling in cheddar.''

Talk to the hand

The fiscal calamity in California moved closer to the brink of total collapse this week, as the state -- which has yet to pass a budget for the fiscal year that began July 1 -- printed up nearly $600-million worth of IOUs.

Unless Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger manages to miraculously find a way to close a mammoth $24-billion budget gap during the holiday weekend, the first wave of 30,000 promissory notes will start flowing out to recipients, including residents awaiting their income tax rebates from the state. The IOUs will require California to repay the owed amounts, along with substantial interest.

The Governator thought he had a deal with the state legislature to approve a budget and stop the fiscal bleeding, cobbled together after months of arm-wrestling, but this package fell apart when voters decisively rejected a referendum authorizing new taxes. Without a budget deal, state officials have confirmed that California will run out of money by the end of this month.

The Golden State was among several states, mainly in the West and Southeast, that were clobbered by the collapse of the real estate market. Unemployment in California currently stands at close to 12 percent. In the desperate scramble to avoid a default by the nation's largest state, which could further drag down the struggling U.S. economy, Arnold has proposed everything from selling the L.A. Coliseum to releasing thousands of prisoners from state penitentiaries.

As far as we know, the Golden Gate Bridge is not on the auction block yet, but there are some unconfirmed reports that several Terminator costumes and a Mr. Universe belt have turned up on Ebay.

Of the 46 U.S. states that have fiscal years ending on June 30, Illinois and Pennsylvania also have failed to pass balanced budgets while Arizona has passed a partial budget. Connecticut, North Carolina and Ohio have measures in place to keep their governments running until they pass full budgets.

So as California residents prepare to celebrate the Fourth of July -- which marks, among other things, a declaration that taxation without representation is not acceptable in America -- they may find an IOU in their mailbox instead of a tax refund. We're guessing these notices feature a picture of Arnold over the caption, ''Refund? Talk to the hand. I'll get back to you.''

Which raises some interesting questions:

If the citizens of California had simply written ''IOU'' on their state income tax returns when they sent them in, would Arnold still be proposing to reduce the state's prison population?

Or would the Governator be rounding up all the delinquent taxpayers and building more jails?

Have a glorious Fourth, taxpayers.