This image was lost some time after publication.

"Don't slam the bridge on your way out," chortled this morning's San Francisco Chronicle above a photo of the departing Cosco Busan, which hit the Bay Bridge on its way out from Oakland in November and spilled 58,000 gallons of oily fuel into San Francisco Bay. But as a wannabe engineer, I'm fascinated by the cargo ships that come and go through the Golden Gate.

(Above: An animated, narrated video timeline of the Cosco Busan accident.)

They're floating marvels — 50 times more carbon-efficient than trucks, packed with information technology that tracks and controls everything, able to calmly navigate the stormy, misnamed Pacific Ocean and then glide smoothly beneath our bridges, sometimes with only a few carefully computed feet to spare. The accident that caused the Cosco Busan to hit the bridge was an astounding statistical anomaly, even accounting for human error. Journalists, who seem unable to count past three, have climbed over each other to portray the admittedly bad spill (the wildlife death toll is past 2,000 counted, with many more surely uncounted) into an oh-my-God catastrophe that proves Man's folly and Earth's fragility, by which they really mean big businesses suck, boo. Jeez, people, how do you think that 99-cent hipster hat you bought in the Mission got here?