Kalihi Street, which cuts through a slice of urban Honolulu like a knife, transforms suddenly into a meandering rural road as drivers head into the valley. Drivers suddenly encounter the S-curve in the upper reaches.

The state wants to put $1 million into the kitty to pay for widening the road, as long as there’s a city match. The city, meanwhile, disagrees on the nature of the problem — as well as on the project’s cost — and wants to install new reflective markers and see if that corrects the drift into a wrong lane. But city-state discord shouldn’t be surprising, in the midst of the War of the Rail, should it?

THAAD missile intercept a triumph of math

Indeed, there’s very much at stake here, with the escalating threat from North Korea over ICBMs, nuclear warheads and unhinged leadership. So it’s certainly good news that Tuesday’s defense test involving the THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) system was successful, with an intercepting THAAD missile from Alaska hitting its target missile launched from an in-flight military cargo plane. Better than missing, to be sure.

But take a pause to marvel at the engineering feat alone. Projectiles starting at least 1,864 miles apart; the detection, tracking then blasting of the moving target. Think of the complex parabolic equations at work here, taking into account factors such as velocity, range, mass and gravitational force. For many among us who barely survived trigonometry, the successful math itself is worth applause.