Streetcars Per Kilometer

I'll make no bones about how I'm a streetcar supporter - but even then, I must admit that over the three and a half years I relied on Toronto's streetcars to get me where I was going from day to day, the word that best describes the system is "erratic." A lot of that description can go directly to the 501 Queen route, possibly the single largest route in the Western Hemisphere and accounting for nearly a third of the entire Toronto streetcar system's trackage by itself - and as it's arguably the flagship route of the streetcar system, problems with it rub off onto the rest of the system.

Some people today are barely joking when they claim that TTC really stands for "Take the Car." I remember well, before I switched to travelling downtown by the infinitely more reliable 504 King, arriving at a 501 Queen stop and having no idea if I'd have to wait thirty seconds or thirty minutes for the next car in the middle of the day; both ended up happening fairly regularly, with seemingly little regard to the actual schedule.

It wasn't always like this, though. Back in the day, streetcars were a Toronto fixture, and the TTC claim was that there was always a streetcar in sight, a claim made possible when Toronto became the beneficiary of so many other North American cities who abandoned their own streetcar systems and sold their used cars at firesale prices.

PCC #4549, one of two Presidents' Conference Committee streetcars presently retained by the TTC. In 1957, the TTC operated seven hundred and sixty-five such streetcars.

So I had to wonder - what could be behind such a shift? While Toronto did go through a streetcar abandonment phase from the 1950s to 1970s, the decline of its system was nowhere near as precipitous as other cities that retained their systems - take New Orleans, for example, which went from operating dozens of lines to only one. Could it be that there was too much system and not enough cars to service it? Even before the post-subway line abandonments, Toronto's system does not seem to have been magnitudes larger back then than it is now.

With that in mind, I decided I would determine the per capita nature of the streetcar system - not in terms of population, but in terms of the number of vehicles operated per kilometer of track. For perspective, I did the same determination in other cities in North America, Europe, and Asia. Here's what I found.

Hiroshima: 19 km of track, 271 vehicles = 14.2 vehicles per km
Kenosha: 3 km of track, 5 vehicles = 1.6 vehicles per km
Melbourne: 245 km of track, 500 vehicles = 2.04 vehicles per km
Portland: 6.3 km of track, 11 vehicles = 1.7 vehicles per km
San Francisco: 9.3 km of track, 26 vehicles = 2.79 vehicles per km*
Seattle: 2.1 km of track, 3 vehicles = 1.4 vehicles per km
Warsaw: 120 km of track, 863 vehicles = 7.19 vehicles per km

Toronto: 75 km of track, 248 vehicles = 3.3 vehicles per km

*San Francisco does possess additional PCC cars, including one painted in Toronto's colors, but they are not currently in service; the number given here is for streetcars listed by the SFMTA as being in service as of May 30, 2011. For this calculation I considered only the trackage of the F Market & Wharves line.

If the numbers I used are accurate, then, Toronto actually looks pretty good in terms of that assumption - better than anywhere else I looked at in North America, even. However, this won't last forever; as the existing CLRV and ALRVs are set to be replaced with two hundred and four new LRVs sometime after 2013, if there is no change in the length of the system once the fleet has been completely renewed, Toronto will be reduced to 2.72 vehicles per kilometer, just behind San Francisco.

Toronto's system isn't like a baggy pair of pants, then. There are enough streetcars to fill it - leaving us with the question of where the real problem lies. Traffic congestion? Poor route management? Poor route design? I'm not sure. But it's a question that should be asked if Toronto's streetcars are going to be responsive to the needs of the people who ride them, if they're going to be an integral part of Toronto's transit mix in years to come.

Photo: The Ruins at the Edge of the World

It's surprising, sometimes, how quickly the works of humans can fall into wreck and ruin. Such is the case with San Francisco's Sutro Baths - one hundred years ago, they were a proud complex of swimming pools. They burned down in 1966, and what's left today is crumbled stone next to the roaring, ceaseless Pacific waves. When I went down to them, I found them strongly reminiscent of the ruins of Pompeii; as if some very lost Romans found their way to the Golden Gate centuries before any other Europeans, and built themselves a city on the shore of an endless ocean.

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Contracting for Democracy

Recently, I've realized there's an implied social contract at the heart of every democracy, and it's this: the elected government of a state recognizes that it is duty-bound to listen to and protect all of its citizens, and in return, those citizens who did not vote for the elected government acknowledge the legitimacy of its authority. Simple as that, really... but history has shown us, time and again, what power does. Fortunately, it's also shown us what happen when the people get sick and tired of it - but it's not something you can really set a watch to.

It's a lesson that Stephen Harper's Conservative Party, having somehow been handed a majority government, would do well to keep in mind. 2011 is, after all, the last time a conservative party has won a majority since 1988, when Brian Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives kept the spirit of 1984 alive; you may also recall that once the dust settled in 1993, the PCs were left with exactly twice as much pull in the House of Commons as the Green Party has today. You'd think they'd recognize the importance of treading softly, particularly considering it took them three kicks at the can to get this far.

You'd think it would have taken more than a month after the election for things to get this far, but you would be wrong there as well.

For much of the spring, Quebec's Richelieu Valley has been dealing with severe floods. As early as May 4, the Richelieu River had broken records, hundreds of people had been evacuated, and thousands of homes had been flooded. Quebec has been doing what it can to beat nature to a draw, but standing firm against nature is always a risky business.

In the United States, from what I understand, it's common for National Guard units to participate in this kind of disaster relief. As Canadian provinces have no National Guard equivalent, though, when the need for heavy lifting comes up they've got little choice but to request that the federal government make regular Canadian Forces elements available for relief efforts. It's not an unusual thing; it's been twelve and a half years, but people still mock Toronto after Mel Lastman called in the army to help the city dig out of a severe snowfall, and during the ice storm of 1998, the military was critical in immediate disaster response and relief.

So, with the floods proceeding, Quebec Premier Jean Charest requested military aid from the federal government, and what did he get? A letter from Ottawa - specifically from Vic Toews, Minister of Public Safety - that claimed that due to pressing "defence activities," the Canadian Forces would be unable to lend assistance in Quebec - also, because it would put them "in competition with the private sector."

Because, as we all know, the sole role of a government is to allow private business to reap the maximum profit possible in any given situation... and what is a disaster if not an unparalleled opportunity to profit off the affairs of the desperate?

Nice waterfront you've got there, Vancouver. You want it to stay dry? Sure, but it'll cost ya.

In the end, the federal government caved; two hundred and fifty more soldiers were dispatched to Quebec to assist with disaster relief efforts. But the fact that its reflexive reaction was an appeal to the invisible hand is telling.

Even the most out-there libertarians I've heard of tend to recognize a role for a state, even if they feel it shouldn't go beyond assuring the common defense. I would argue that the defense of the people from natural hazards, such as the Richelieu floods, qualify. Conservatives from Harper to Ford tend to couch their rhetoric in corporate terms, calling for governments run like businesses and preferring the term "taxpayer" to "person" - but how long would a business that took customers' money without providing a service in return stay in business?

The business of a government is to protect the people. Politicians can bluster and obfuscate all they want about what they think they're doing, but in the end it really does boil down to that. If a government cannot be counted on to even help protect its people, if its first answer is to tell them to call someone else... is that really the sort of government that should be representing us?

That deserves to represent us?

It may be that Stephen Harper, flush from a victory that even his own inner circle had given up on as hopeless mere days before the election, has forgotten the source of his power - aside from Alberta, that is, which I strongly suspect would vote a ficus plant or head of lettuce to Ottawa if it was run as a Conservative.

Hint: it's us.

Photo: One Against the Waves

Ever since we began, we've been in a struggle against the forces of nature, impersonal forces that don't care if we live or die. With time and sweat and gold and blood we've carved our cities and civilizations out of that uncaring world, and at times it's easy to forget that raw primordial power that moves outside our boulevards.

This photograph comes from San Francisco's Ocean Beach, the shore of the Pacific Ocean, and from here the next western landfall is Japan. I believe the person is there for fishing; in an earlier photo I saw him or her carrying what looked like a rod. I don't know how readily the fish would bite amid all that surf, though.

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Demolition Is Forever

Just as it is frequently difficult to give a hoot and not pollute, it can be hard to give a hoot about history. Humans are notoriously creatures of the immediate present, an attitude that's a psychological relic of our pretechnological, precivilized days - when the future meant nothing if there was no meat to be caught today. In that, too, the past could be reduced to secondary importance: a hunter who had observed animals yesterday could make some guesses about what they would do today, but if those observations were not borne out, what had already happened would be of little value.

Today, too often, the past seems to mean little to our leadership, outside from the fantasized neverneverland of bygone days so many of them seem to want to go back to. Historical preservation, unless the public is massively behind it, costs political capital; not all leaders are so secure in their positions that they can afford to spend it on what, really, amounts to a luxury in the eyes of many. It's a lot easier to just do nothing. If pieces of history have to get ground into the dirt so some developer can sink in the foundation for yet another condo to grow even richer... isn't that the price of progress?

Fort Point, a Civil War-era fortress in the Presidio of San Francisco, was saved from demolition when the Golden Gate Bridge incorporated a tall arched span above it. Toronto, of course, has nothing like this, because that would require a city that actually cared about the consequences of its actions.

It's what progress has traditionally cost in Toronto, at least. For a city that's more than two hundred years old there are precious few indications of its age; I've said in the past that Toronto has little choice but to be a city of the future, because it has already annihilated most of its past. Bits and pieces remain, of course, but that's all they are - scattered remnants of what the city once was. It's still important to preserve them, of course - dinosaurs have been extrapolated from only a few bones. But the more disconnected they become from the rest of the city, the less relevance they seem to have to the city as it stands, the easier it is to let them be ground down.

Now, even Casa Loma might be facing that. Toronto's own castle and site of an epic Scott Pilgrim beatdown, run by the Kiwanis Club since the 1930s, is now directly under the city's aegis after City Hall paid $1.45 million in what amounts to a bailout of the castle. It's supposed to be only temporary, a year or a year and a half until a new operator can be found, and I don't imagine Hizzoner Rob will balk at the opportunity to unload a city asset to a private operator.

What really got me, though, was Brett Popplewell's recent article in the Sunday Star: "Why are we trying to save Casa Loma when we could just tear it down?" I'd only just landed in San Francisco and my senses were still a bit dulled, and I read that article carefully for any indication that its tone was sarcastic or tongue-in-cheek. I didn't find any. More like angry resignation.

Let me answer his question. Why preserve Casa Loma? Because there's always a place that the line must be drawn, where we will say we go this far and no farther. Because demolition is a final thing. Sure, we could always build a replica of some lost historic site - but if we couldn't muster the gumption to preserve the original when we still had the chance, how likely is it that we'd want to build it again from the ground up?

A city shorn of its past is shorn of its context. Bit by bit, piece by piece, brick by brick. Without that, we can't really understand.

Photo: The Real Big Pointy Building

I recall an episode of Sliders in which the gang landed on a parallel Earth where the American West was all part of the independent Republic of Texas. Though they arrived in what turned out to be a reproduction of a typical Wild West town, Rembrandt was confident they were still in San Francisco because he could see the Transamerica Pyramid in the skyline.

So there you have it - the Transamerica Pyramid, perhaps San Francisco's most well-known non-bridge structure, was not built, but made - sculpted into its present form over the long aeons by wind and water, just like Alcatraz and the Golden Gate. As a result, every parallel San Francisco will have one, except for those ones where dinosaurs still rule parts of the Earth.

I understand that when the observation deck was still open, there was a parachute up there - but only one, mind.

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Transparency for Breakfast

These days a lot of people want to be careful about what they eat. Plenty of folks out there want to be sure they're getting the vitamins and minerals and whatever else they need to keep their bodies from breaking down like the slowly decaying organic husks they are, so that they can live longer and healthier lives and, if American, perhaps stress less over what the state of health care will mean for those first two things.

But these are also busy, just-in-time, go-go-go days. How many people have the time, energy, or inclination to prepare proper meals for themselves before or after work, when it's so much easier and more convenient to stop at a fast food place and let them do all the work for you in a jiffy? Personally, I buy microwaveable vegetable burgers in an attempt to do an end-run around at least part of that, but it's common. Nor is it necessarily conducive to a long and healthy life. It's just one component in the massive increase in obesity that's been happening in North America since the middle of the twentieth century - because people can't really know what they're eating.

Technically, that's not true. I know that in Ontario at least - not being a conoisseur of British Columbian fast food fare - you can go into a Burger King or McDonald's or what have you and find a nutritional information sheet posted on the wall somewhere; but it's out of the way and the font size is small, and if you had time to kill squinting at a column full of riboflavin percentages, you wouldn't be in a fast food place, right? Really, though, it's the sort of thing people don't tend to notice, and as a result it can't affect their habits.

It doesn't have to be this way, though. Soon after I landed in San Francisco, I stopped for lunch at the In 'n Out Burger at Fisherman's Wharf, and noticed that the menu board listed the calorie counts of all their items. What a sterling example of 21st century corporate citizenship! I thought. Then I noticed them in Burger King. And Starbucks. And Jack in the Box. And Taco Bell. And so on.

Obviously something was going on. There hadn't been anything like this in Phoenix this January - maybe it was just San Francisco. But what?!?

Presented for your consideration, four hundred and seventy calories in food form - specifically, a Carl's Jr. chicken teriyaki burger.

Back in 2008, California passed a law that, bluntly, required all restaurants that had twenty or more locations within the state to post calorie counts on their inside menu boards by January 1, 2011 - New York apparently pushed something similar through back in 2009, and the same sort of law is on the table in dozens of other American states. This is the exactly the sort of corporate transparency that I think needs to come to Canada, now if not sooner.

This is one of those things where, try as I might, I cannot twist my brain enough to come up with any valid reason to oppose it - if you can, please let me know, so I can contemplate it. There have been similar counts on potato chip bags, on pop cans, on chocolate bars and so on for as long as I can remember, and that sort of information is an invaluable guide - if you're really jonesing for chocolate but don't want to kick yourself over the standard calorie threshold for the day, it's really good to know which one has two hundred calories and which one has six hundred.

There's nothing about a "nanny state" in all of this - I say that because I imagine any potential opposition might come from that direction. No one is saying you can't order that thousand-calorie breakfast burrito. If you like it enough, and you acknowledge it in your fooding-up budget for the day, or just want that burrito, then by all means buy it and eat it. For me, though, it gives me the opportunity to look at the board and think that's a thousand goddamn calories? Like hell am I scarfing that.

It's all about choice, and the ability to make informed decisions about the things that affect us. That's what we should continue striving toward.

Photo: Market Street's Railway

Even though the LRVs of the Muni Metro and BART's long white torpedo trains zoom north and south beneath the pavement, on the surface San Francisco's Market Street is well-served by rail as well - specifically, by the heritage streetcars of the F Market & Wharves line. More geared to tourists than any of Toronto's streetcar lines or any of Muni's other lines, the F cars link Fisherman's Wharf with the Castro, using primarily Peter Witt cars purchased from Milan and good old PCCs - many of them painted in the old liveries of Chicago, Birmingham, Kansas City, and other cities which once ran them. There's even a Toronto one, but it's out of service right now. Toronto could have had something like this with the 509 Harbourfront line; hell, it even ran PCCs in the beginning. But I'm pretty sure His Fordness would have fulminate and roar about something that progressive.

Pictured here is Muni's PCC #1076, representing a Washington D.C. streetcar. I'm not sure what cross street this is at.

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In the Common Interest

If anything, it was a pleasant encounter when I saw the flag of the United Nations was flying high over United Nations Plaza, the blue of its threads only a little brighter than that of the open San Francisco sky beyond. Taking into account this city's general reputation, it's the one American city other than New York where I would not be surprised to find the UN flag given equal prominence to the Stars and Stripes. It was there, surrounded by the vendors and customers of the Heart of the City Farmers' Market, that I really got a sense of the optimistic idealism that informed the organization at the start, back when the world was still smoldering.

Pity that we let it get away from us. It's hardly the most popular thing in some parts of the world these days - that is, when people think about it at all.

The United Nations and United States flags fly equally, but from their own flagpoles, in San Francisco's United Nations Plaza.

Plenty of people dislike or distrust the UN. I won't pretend there aren't perfectly valid reasons to do so, but it almost seems as if the loudest opponents aren't basing their opposition on things like its problems with peacekeeping or corruption in Turtle Bay, but on black helicopters and the New World Order. This is, realistically, bunk - the UN has less teeth than a pitcher plant. The only "military" it has is those peacekeeping forces that have been seconded to it. We could've gone another way, of course - speculatively speaking, after the Second World War, the United States could've turned its nuclear arsenal over to the new organization as a guarantee that no country would be allowed to start the Third World War.

Whether it would have been considered politically feasible was another matter entirely; aside from Robert A. Heinlein suggesting it in one of the essays he included in Expanded Universe, I've never encountered it having ever been advanced as a serious policy. But then, there were only four years in which it was even an option; once the Soviet Union exploded Joe-1 in 1949 the jig was up, as Stalin would never have handed his bombs over to a tool of the Western capitalist oppressors.

Now, though - if it was unfeasible in 1945, it would be purely impossible in 2011. Twenty years after the Cold War, everyone would rather we all forget about those thousands of warheads that are still kicking around and good riddance to them. It's true, the threat of nuclear annihilation did end up guaranteeing the general peace, but it was pretty damn dicey for a while there. A world where the United Nations maintained a nuclear monopoly would be a world that didn't have to worry about nuclear war. Granted, though, such a situation easily leads in to a world where the United Nations becomes a world government - because he who has the nukes, makes the rules. could be an interesting story setting. Regardless--

You can also read the Preamble to the United Nations Charter at United Nations Plaza, and there's one part of it that really struck me as I walked along: its intention "to ensure, by the acceptance of principles and the institution of methods, that armed force shall not be used, save in the common interest" - that is, the United Nations comes along and tells its members that they can't go around declaring war for the lulz anymore.

Fighting is an intrinsic part of human nature. Hell, it may well go back to the time before there were humans; groups of chimpanzees have been observed to go to war with each other over territory. Sure, every once in a while there were attempts by some group or another to try and keep Europe from being ground into dust for a generation or two, but they generally did not produce lasting results. The United Nations, on the other hand, came from the crucible of the most destructive conflict in all of human history; it meant to stick.

Stick around, at least - one might argue that the UN ideally functions as the world's conscience, something which the right people can ignore. The United States certainly wasn't listening to the United Nations when it invaded Iraq back in 2003, just as the most recent example I can think of. The UN's presence in the Korean War was possible only because the Soviet Union was boycotting proceedings at the time and thus not around to veto Resolution 84.

I'd like to think this is baseless speculation, that the real reasons have more to do with things like perceptions of a more powerful UN overriding national sovereignty, and whether its dedication to the interests of the people of the world is questionable; because otherwise, I really worry it might come down to, somewhere in the reptile brain, "Who the fuck do they think they are to tell us we can't kill the bastards?"

Photo: It's Golden, and There's a Gate Involved

Fortunately, I tend to get very few hits from the San Francisco Bay Area, so at least there's a possibility you're not already absolutely sick to death of it. Yes, this is the Golden Gate Bridge, photographed just before 9 PM on a cool May evening as the sun gutters behind the Marin Headlands. I came from the north, walking across from Sausalito; I believe that's the tight cluster of lights you can see a bit to the right of the bridge. Between them is Fort Baker, which is - as we all know - the future site of Starfleet Command.

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Quaff Review #13: Ola Dubh Special Reserve 40

Beer has perhaps picked up something of a bad rap in history, something that North American culture seems to have only recently turned against. It was the layman's drink, the low-class drink, simple and utterly without sophistication - and that's when it wasn't just the devil's brew. Today the situation's a lot better; we have experimental microbrews, independent craft breweries that aren't bound by the crippling inertia that finds fertile ground in the big international brewing concerns, and a population of beer drinkers who are always looking for something new.

Sometimes, though, the new thing isn't new - sometimes it can be rather old indeed; old like Harviestoun Brewery's Ola Dubh Special Reserve 40, a numbered ale made in cooperation with Scotland's Highland Park Distillery. It's simple, the way they do it - they take a very small batch, as the label specifies, of their Old Engine Oil dark beer and age it in oak casks previously used to age Highland Park's 40 Year Old Single Malt Scotch Whisky. At first I thought the beer had itself been aged for forty years, but unless its makers have a pretty sweet DeLorean, that's impossible - the Harviestoun Brewery's only been around since 1985.

The bottle I bought is easily the most expensive single bottle of beer I've ever picked up - $19 at the LCBO, plus tax. That bottle of Ola Dubh came from an LCBO in Toronto, and it came with me across the country to Vancouver, sitting in my refrigerator while I waited for the stars to align and for opening it to be worthwhile. I mean, you don't just drink a beer like this with no occasion at all. I don't, at least, and didn't. If Rob Ford had lost the November 2010 Toronto mayoral election, I would have drank it then.

In the end, I waited until the evening of May 1st. At the time, with the death of Osama Bin Laden everywhere in the news and the New Democratic Party's surge in the polls making it seem like we were really on the cusp of tomorrow, I poured it into my grandfather's old Conners Brewery mug and drank to the future. The immediate future didn't exactly unfold as I'd have preferred; nevertheless, it was still a worthy occasion.


This is not the first bottle of beer I've bought that came in its own box; it's the second, after a limited-edition 2010 ale that I never ended up reviewing. Not only that, but after I pulled off the frilled foil top that covered the bottlecap, it revealed an icon or something about the size of a dime hanging from the string with Harviestoun Brewery symbols on both sides.

When I popped the bottlecap, I was struck by the smell: like the inside of a distillery, heavy with wood - presumably traces of the oak casks - and sweetness. It's easily the strongest smelling beer I've tried so far, enough so that I could almost taste it while holding the mug level with my chest. It produced barely any head when I poured it.

The beer itself is thick and viscous, rather reminiscent of motor oil - no surprise, considering it's made from Old Engine Oil beer, and the name "Ola Dubh" itself means "black oil" in Gaelic. I'm not a scotch or whisky drinker - really, I don't think I've *ever* had scotch or whisky - so I can't go into detail about the degree to which their spirits are mixed in, but to me it had a taste strangely like black licorice. It went down smoothly and coated my throat as it went down, though it left a bit of a bitter taste behind it.

This is a rather bitter beer, but not nearly the most bitter I've ever tried - that would have to go to a honey beer that was so bitter I just couldn't take more than a few sips. It seemed like the sort of beer that gets really harsh, really fast as it gets warm; maybe you like that, but personally, I don't.

If you're interested in this beer, your biggest problem will be finding it. If you've got a bottle still kicking around in your refrigerator or elsewhere, or you come across one, be thankful - it's been discontinued. Harviestoun's website only lists twelve-year, sixteen-year, and thirty-year varieties of Ola Dubh as currently available. Still, it also says that Ola Dubh is only available in the United States, which isn't entirely accurate; as of the evening of May 20, LCBO.com tells me that there are fifty-two bottles of Ola Dubh Special Reserve 12 in stock in various stores across Ontario - twelve in Toronto alone! BC Liquor Stores doesn't seem to have any in stock, though. For the record, mine was bottle #43005, bottled in January 2009 - 9.0% alc./vol, and 330 mL. But then, that's the standard for this sort of beer.

If you can find it, drink it. You will not be disappointed.

ANDREW'S RATING: 4.75/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #12: Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale
  
• #11: La Loubécoise
  
• #10: Summer Honey Seasonal Ale
  
• #9: Earthquake High Gravity Lager
  
• #8: Route des épices
  
• #7: Sparks Plus
  
• #6: Hurricane High Gravity Lager
  
• #5: L'Indépendante
  
• #4: Antigravity Light Ale
  
• #3: Nektar
  
• #2: Innis & Gunn Original
  
• #1: Abbey Belgian Spiced Ale

wait a minute... Doc Brown built the DeLorean in 1985! Great Scott!

Photo: Wings Above the Water

While at Canada Place the other day, I caught this Harbour Air DHC-3 Otter descending into Vancouver Harbour Water Airport - its floats hit the waves about a second or so after this picture was taken. I didn't realize until I was preparing this to go live that the zoom is so good, and the plane so close already, that you can actually make out the wristwatch that the pilot is wearing. Unless that's just one of those really annoying bands of shadow.

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Theseus in Nova Scotia

You'll know it if you've ever looked at a Canadian dime: the Bluenose, the schooner that became a symbol of Nova Scotia and Canada eighty years ago. It's been sixty-five years since she sank in the Caribbean, but her legacy lives on with the Bluenose II, a replica of the original based in Lunenberg, originally built as a marketing stunt for a beer company - in other words, deeply Canadian.

As a replica, Bluenose II was built out of wood - and the thing about wood is that it tends to degrade over time. So, since last summer Bluenose II has been in drydock undergoing a heavy rebuild to extend its life - but at the cost of putting much of the ship's original materials through a wood chipper, with practically the entire hull being rebuilt and only the masts, sails, and another one-fifth of the original materials remaining.

The Globe and Mail ran a story about this yesterday. Its thrust is simple, and boots criticisms and complaints that seem to have been circulating in Nova Scotia for a while now; given the profundity of this refit, when all is said and done will that ship in Lunenberg still be the Blunose II, or just some new ship that happens to incorporate pieces of the Bluenose II?

Of all the things I expected to encounter in the mainstream media, a real life example of the Ship of Theseus problem is not it.

I can't find any photos of an actual sailing ship to illustrate this article, so this one of the side of a West Vancouver Transit bus will have to do. It's full of... ship-ly goodness.

The Ship of Theseus problem, if you've never heard of it, is a long-standing philosophical issue that boils down to this: if you take an object and replace everything material about that object, is it still the same object or is it something new? This is one of those things that will never be satisfactorily answered until there's only one being left who cares about it, and only then because there would be no one around to disagree - that kind of identity is extrinsic, assigned by the observers around what's being identified, and not an intrinsic part of the wood itself. The planks don't care whether or not they're part of the Bluenose II.

The problem also has bearing in terms of human uploading, and whether or not a person's consciousness uploaded into a computer is a continuity of the consciousness as it was in the body, or just a sophisticated computer that has been given all the memories of a person and carefully taught to think exactly as they had. In fact, I think that questions such as this may well become significantly more important in coming years; even if mind-to-machine uploading isn't possible for a while if ever, I can certainly see some people electing to become total cyborgs - that is, installing their brains in robot bodies. I'm sure there are no shortage of folks who would love to use that as an opportunity to officially define total cyborgs as being "less than human." That's just one of the wonderful things we may look forward to in years yet to come!

As for the Bluenose II - well, it comes down to physical continuity versus spiritual continuity. When I've thought about consciousness uploading, no matter how much I believe that the uploaded consciousness would be another being with another viewpoint that just happens to have memory of everything that happened before the upload, the fact of the matter is that nobody else can tell the difference. Ideally, that is. The same can be true for ships. The materials may be new, but they were placed into the pre-existing template that we call Bluenose II, and even if everything that once made up the ship is gone, the idea of the ship remains. It's not really that hard to imagine - we look at cities the same way. Today, for example, there are only a few scattered bits and pieces of the New Westminster of 1871 standing, but you don't have people claiming that New Westminster of 1871 and New Westminster of 2011 are entirely different cities.

In the end, it's all about the ideas. Everything else is just hydrogen.

Photo: One Wrecked Beach

The other day we descended from UBC along the Trail 4 staircase, through the rainforest to Wreck Beach - well, Tower Beach, really - and the Pacific shore. It was totally deserted, which wasn't much of a surprise as it had been raining all day. But still, I'd expected to find at least a beach. Aside from a small bit of open land immediately around the bottom of the stairs, it was all fallen logs jammed against each other. Something I didn't expect to see; very Pacific Northwest.

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Prisoners of Gravity

One of the biggest questions regarding the existence of advanced extraterrestrial life can be boiled down to three simple words, the Fermi paradox: where are they? The universe has existed for billions of years, with more than enough time to permit the evolution and development of life and civilizations capable of being noticed even across interstellar distances - theoretically, at least. We won't know for sure until we actually start finding them. But the question of why has been grappled with constantly for decades, with everyone approaching it from a different angle.

Larry Niven once suggested an interesting possibility that I hadn't seen before - that, whether by fluke or environmental pressures or whatever else, perhaps the intelligent beings of the universe were almost all aquatic. It's perfectly possible to be intelligent and live in the water - dolphins and cephalopods could be all of the way there, and it's just taken us this long to realize it. But aquatic beings are held back by the nature of their environment: you can't really build a technological civilization when you live in the water.

The other day, I had an idea along these lines that I don't recall seeing anywhere besides the works of Hal Clement - what if extraterrestrial intelligences are kept where they are by gravity? I'm not thinking about something extreme like Mesklin, with 3 g at the equator and at least 275 g at its poles, but rather something we've already observed: Gliese 581 d, a potentially terrestrial, potentially habitable world twenty light-years away.

There's only one niggle, if the information we've gathered about it is accurate: the planet's a bit clingy. Specifically, it's estimated to be twice the size of Earth, and have seven times its mass. By no means does this preclude life; it just means it wouldn't be exactly like home. Owing to my lack of mathematical skill, I wasn't able to calculate the surface gravity for a potential planet with this size and mass - so let's be charitable and assume a planet with 2.83 g, just to be charitable, to see what we've got with nearly three times Earth's gravity pulling you down. Call it Earthissimo, like my astronomy lecturer did back in university.

For one, falling would not be a pleasant experience.

Local life forms would be short and bulky - in that kind of gravity, there's nothing to be gained by going up. Without the high mountains that lower gravity makes possible, land would tend to be lower and more eroded - conceivably, there could be high-gravity archipelago worlds. If you're interested, Extraterrestrials: A Field Guide for Earthlings by Terence Dickinson and Adolf Schaller goes into a bit more detail.

That's just biology - I'm more interested in technology. There's nothing about a high-gravity planet that fundamentally prevents an intelligent civilization from arising there, but one that did would face far greater challenges in some respects than we do. Culturally, it could theoretically have the deck stacked against it from the beginning. On a high-g planet, very few things fly and falls are exceedingly dangerous even from what we'd think of as trivial heights. That sort of environment could easily breed what would be, by human standards, an intensely conservative mindset - something like that, introduced early enough and reinforced enough by the environment, could put serious brakes on any kind of serious technological development, or perhaps just leave the people there in a long Bronze Age.

But let's look at Earthissimo. The people there have struggled against the chains of gravity enough to build a technological civilization that we might recognize in the broad strokes - details, of course, would differ immensely. The important issue, however, is access to space - without that, there's no chance of aliens coming to us. It's with access to space that the real challenges lie.

While it's certainly difficult to get to Earth orbit or beyond, it's certainly doable - a big part of the problem is that there aren't yet any economies of scale in the space industries, but even then you've still got to deal with accelerating to 9.4 kilometers per second even to reach the 300-kilometer altitude of the International Space Station. If you're leaving Earth entirely, escape velocity is 11.2 kilometers per second.

How envious the space freaks of Earthissimo would be of us. With all that extra mass pulling things down, it's not easy to get to orbit - Earthissimo's to-orbit velocity would be 44.91 kilometers per second, and if you want to escape entirely, you'll need to have a ship that can accelerate to 63.5 kilometers per second. The problem is that chemical rockets, such as the ones we used as we began to claw our way into the heavens, are insufficiently beefy. Rocket launches from Earthissimo would be incredibly complex and incredibly expensive - enough so that it's easy to imagine that the people there just wouldn't bother with it at all. Hell, we're having enough trouble getting it off the ground here!

So maybe that's another explanation. There may be worlds upon worlds of people out there who can look up at the stars, at the blackness of space, and know that because of the dirt beneath their feet-equivalents they'll never be able to touch them.

Photo: Hungry Crow

Here is a picture of a crow on the upper level of the Vancouver Law Courts, eating what I believe to be a peanut. Its lack of manipulating appendages other than a beak isn't hampering its dedication to get that peanut down its gullet one bit. Just look at that determination. It's almost a shame that crow's eyes appear to be entirely black and thus incapable of expressing anything except a glassy stare.

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For Health and Money

It's been something on the order of ten years since I watched television regularly. I still don't have cable, but with a pair of rabbit ears and a clear view to the south, I can at least pick up KVOS-TV out of Bellingham. I mainly use it to watch House. Good show, sure, but I can't help but think I would have liked it even more a few years ago, back when I didn't know as much. Now, watching it from my Canadian perspective, I can't help but try to fill in the blanks with what I know about the nature of American health care; about what happens after.

Really, look at an average episode of House - the patient of the week comes in with some incredibly exotic or unusual disease that frequently takes three-quarters of the episode just to pin down, and that's after investigations and multiple treatments for what House's team thought the most likely candidate was. I know enough to understand that things MRI and CT time, angiograms, biopsies, and the like are expensive: according to the Florida Institute for Advanced Diagnostic Imaging, a standard angiogram costs $7,000 USD. Beyond that there's the cost of the drugs, the doctor's time, and whatever the hospital charges you for just being in the bed.

Sure, there are plenty of House episodes with happy endings, where the patient's brought back from the brink of death when the true cause of their sickness is finally determined. So far, though, I haven't seen anything that looks at that after, of this patient now on the hook for tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of medical procedures. There's a reason that medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States. Beyond that, American hospitals seem to position themselves practically as businesses in their own right; in the second episode that KVOS aired last night, the hospital's new Chairman of the Board criticized House's Department of Diagnostic Medicine as a "financial black hole."

Here is a photograph of St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver for illustration.

Perhaps it's partially because I'm Canadian, but I find that kind of viewpoint abhorrent - but it's one that's become all too common in our society. It's easy to find outside the medical world as well, with people like hizzoner Rob Ford in Toronto jawing about how he wants the city to run like a business. The way I see it, there are things that should be run like businesses, sure - profit-making businesses! Not organizations that have what I would call a higher responsibility to the people.

The point of a government isn't to make money, it's to ensure the security and well-being of its citizens. The first priority of a hospital shouldn't be to turn a profit, but to deliver the best care that it can. Introducing the profit motive into situations like this is, in my mind, a catalyst for abuse; a person should not have to trade their future for their life, but in many cases, that ends up happening when they get slammed with medical bills that they cannot afford to pay. The inflated cost of medical insurance in the United States, to feed the maws of the insurance companies, feeds into this too - while I, as a British Columbia resident, pay something on the order of $60 per month for the government-administered Medical Services Plan premiums, in the United States the average health insurance premium for a single person in 2009 was $4,824, or $402 per month.

Why so high? Because the British Columbia government isn't setting out to make money through medical insurance; it has taxes and the BCL for that. But it also means that someone in British Columbia who came down with the sort of disease that House would salivate over wouldn't have to worry about mortgaging their kidneys once it was cured and done.

Photo: Wild LENS FLARE Appeared!

Today's photo comes from downtown Vancouver, next door to the Marine Building. The lens flare was not planned - I'd just wanted to take advantage of the tower partially occluding the sun - but it did give unexpected results. Like those multicolored spots of light transposed on top of the Marine Building: refraction artifacts, or autonomous alien probes invisible to ordinary human eyesight?

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Not to Seek Power

There still remain a couple of weeks before the new 41st Parliament begins to sit, and since wild speculation about what Harper may or may not do with his precious majority would reduce the media to little more than a dog chasing its own tail, they've had to knock over other political rocks to sniff under. From what I've seen in the Globe and Mail and the Star, at least, a lot of mileage seems to be coming from the New Democratic Party's cohort of Quebec MPs, fifty-seven of whom are new to Parliament.

The media's magnifying glass has focused on a few of them in particular - Ruth-Ellen Brousseau, the new MP for Berthier—Maskinongé, has taken a lot of heat over the past few weeks for her Vegas vacation and lack of preexisting connection with her new riding - but in the end, I think this new crop of representatives is one aspect of the Orange Revolution that I actually like. For what may be the first time in modern Canadian history, a significant chunk of the House of Commons will be occupied by people who did not set out to be politicians at all. I recall reading that Brousseau agreed to put her name on the ballot as a favor to a friend; these people certainly didn't expect to be the beneficiaries of a voter revolt against the Bloc. Yet they have.

What I like about this is simple - I have always agreed with the notion that the best person to give power is the one who did not want it and did not seek it. Considering that a lot of these new-minted MPs not only didn't campaign in their ridings but in several cases had never even visited them, it's safe to say that they definitely didn't seek this kind of responsibility. A lot of these new MPs are not so much politicians as they are average people who stumbled into the House of Commons.

Ten years ago, during my first year of university, my Politics 100 professor said that Parliament should look like a streetcar, in that its membership would ideally be more reflective of the population of Canada and not dominated by rich old white dudes. Sure, we've made strides since 2001, but there's still a way to go. Now we have MPs who were in elementary school when I was hearing this; we have 19-year-old Pierre-Luc Dusseault, not only the youngest MP in Canadian history but possibly one of the youngest MPs in parliamentary history. There are at least seven NDP MPs now who are younger than I am, and who of necessity come to the House with a set of cultural baggage that's entirely different from what likely predominates on the other side of the aisle.

It's a shame that this didn't end up as another Conservative minority government; the NDP would have had an unparalleled opportunity to test its strength in a situation where the Conservatives could not just ignore them. But if Ottawa is broken, as the NDP circulars tend to say, we're not going to fix it by electing the same old breed of professional politician again and again and again.

Someone should really patch that up.

Photo: Wonder of the Waves

So there I was, in Gastown at noon, when a loud, long horn sequence pierced the air. I didn't need long to figure out it was coming from the cruise ship terminal at Canada Place, but when I went outside I didn't expect to see the silhouette of Mickey Mouse on the funnels.

It was the second Vancouver visit of the Disney Wonder, one of three cruise ships currently operated by the Disney Cruise Line, and you can find it there every Tuesday from 7 to 5 between now and September while it runs Alaska cruises. It's only the third cruise ship I've spotted so far in Burrard Inlet - but then, I wasn't looking very hard over the summer. Just the scale of it, though; that SeaBus in the distance is practically a raft next to it.

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They Built their Farms Upon the Sand

Where there's a city today, in years gone by there was more than likely one of two things: forest or farmland. The first is more common in the built-up areas of Metro Vancouver, where Stanley Park stands as a testament to what the downtown core would have looked like a hundred and fifty years ago, whereas back in Ontario and throughout North America, the second is practically ubiquitous. Major cities tend to become that because they sit at favorable locations for trade and transportation, and there's little that's more favorable to trade and transport than food. The problem, of course, is that as cities expanded and suburbs sprawled, that fine farmland was plowed under concrete - something that is very common in Ontario.

I've never thought that building over farmland, particularly considering the world's populations issues, was a particularly good idea. You'll find effectively none in Toronto these days; while places like Scarborough and North York were pretty much village-dotted farmland sixty years ago, today the tide of development has long since swept through them.

Things are different in Metro Vancouver. From my apartment in New Westminster, it's about a thirty-minute bicycle ride to Richmond - and aside from the developments just across Boundary Road from Queensborough, a good chunk of Westminster Highway in the City of Richmond doesn't seem to be passing through "city" at all. In fact, much of central Lulu Island seems to me that it can't have changed much in sixty years - aside from dottings of houses and wineries and a big concrete factory, the middle of the island is pretty much farm to the water.

A view of the farmland in central Lulu Island at Westminster Highway and No. 7 Road, looking toward the city beyond the river.

Thankfully, I'm not the only one who seems to like this state of affairs. A few days ago, the Burnaby NewsLeader released the results of a poll regarding agricultural land in Metro Vancouver - a poll which found ninety-three percent agreeing that the protection of the remaining agricultural lands is important, for a variety of reasons. Aside from the environmental issues which apparently dominated in New Westminster, there's the issue of food security, containment of sprawl, and the maintenance of local agricultural jobs. Beyond that, there's something relaxing about riding through the countryside on a bright, warm day - and it's a countryside we can practically reach by SkyTrain.

Beyond that, there's also the issue of proper land use. To be blunt, if it was up to me, Richmond wouldn't be a city at all but a collection of villages between farmland - not because of any specific dislike of development, but purely geological concerns. It may be the case that Richmond is one of the worst places in the Lower Mainland to have built a city. Recall that Lulu Island is made of sediment transported by the Fraser River - while this may be what made it so good to farm in the first place, it is an extreme liability when it comes to earthquake preparation.

It's all down to liquefaction. If a sufficiently powerful earthquake strikes, the ground beneath Richmond will act more like a liquid. The same is true for pretty much all of Delta save western Tsawwassen, a chunk of west-central Surrey, parts of Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam, Pitt Meadows, and land further along the Fraser. It will happen, one of these days.

So it comes down to proper land use. I support the defense of Metro Vancouver's existing agricultural land, because every acre of farmland in an area with high seismic risk - and, to my eyes, most of the farmland appears to be in exactly those areas - is an acre that isn't converted to cities that may collapse and kill their occupants in the next earthquake. The advantages of an agricultural economy so close at hand is a pleasant bonus.

Photo: Vancouver Beyond the Water

I still haven't seen very much of North Vancouver - mostly I've stuck around Lonsdale Quay on those rare times I've been up there at all. The last time I was there, I found a park a bit to the west of the quay (truly an earth-shattering discovery, that) where you can find some good views of the Vancouver skyline. Like this one, perhaps.

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