Short SF Review #20: The Helix

"The Helix," by Gerard Rejskind
Appeared in Worlds of If, January-February 1971

"When a train takes a tunnel leading to the Helix, sensors pick up its presence, the computers make sure the route is clear for it and operate the circuitry to take it into the Helix and out the other side. Here, for instance--" he pointed to a trio of lights on the panel-- "we have a train approaching the Helix southbound on line six. These two trains--" he pointed again-- "are within the Helix. They're doing the seemingly impossible. They're crossing the same space without being aware of each other."

When you ride public transit, you sacrifice. You sacrifice the freedom, to a degree, to leave when you want and to choose what route you want to take to get there. You give up the option of going at your own pace and according to your own desires. You put yourself in the control of whoever's managing the vehicle you're on. For some people, like me, these sacrifices are easy to make when they mean I don't have to worry about the expense of a car, of licensing, of fuel and maintenance and parking and the responsibility of knowing that if I make a mistake, someone could die.*

When you ride public transit, you have to have some level of trust in the person running it all; that they know how to do their job and that you'll get where you're going without any big problems. This is an opportunity for storytelling - after all, what happens when they don't?

"Helix" is, according to the ISFDB, one of only two science fiction works by Gerard Rejskind ever published, and it likely represents one of the first appearances of the Montreal Metro in science fiction; the system was not even five years old when this story was published.

In "Helix" it's the late 1980s, and Montreal's traffic woes are being addressed with a revolutionary new technology, the Geoffroy Helix, a device buried beneath downtown Montreal which enables subway trains to pass each other in the same space without encountering each other by rotating them through a fourth and a fifth dimension. That's right, folks - a device is built that enables things to pass through each other, and the most prominent use it's put to is producing efficiencies in the Montreal Metro. You'd think they'd have installed in Toronto, with its older and larger system, but one aspect of this story's early-1970s nature is that it forecasts a Montreal that seems to remain resolutely Anglophone to the degree that the Metro is run by the Montreal Transportation Commission, rather than the more familiar Société de transport de Montréal - an interesting reminder of the things that sneak up on writers when they're building their worlds.

Of course, stories aren't interesting unless there's conflict, and in a device story the source of the conflict is obvious - that is, after four years of sterling service, the Helix doesn't only quit working, but does so while there's a train stuck inside it. The story then becomes about the struggle of the Helix's builder, Ed Fontaine, to figure out the problem and free the rush-hour-packed subway train from its interdimensional imprisonment; after all, if the hundreds of passengers aboard weren't inducement enough, he has every reason to believe his fiancée is one of them.

Now, ordinarily I strive not to unravel too many plot details in these reviews... but let's be fair, this story is forty years old, well beyond the statute of limitations for spoilers, I reckon, and a lot of my comments and gripes won't make any sense without a knowledge of where this story goes.

So here's the thing about the Helix - in the story's major twist, the characters discover that the Helix isn't exactly as advertised. Let me clarify, here, that the characters are Don Carruthers, a man from the New York Transit Authority to see if a Helix would be a good add to the land of the subway vigilante, and Ed Fontaine, the man who built the thing at the ancient age of twenty-five. Even the builder of this thing does not know what it really does.

Through the course of the story, he gets to discover what it is he's actually built. Likewise, we get to discover that the Helix was installed and used in an incredibly reckless way - despite four years of operation, despite having a miniature model of it in the control center, no one ever thought to test what would happen in an unusual situation until that unusual situation manifested itself; it's only the presence of Carruthers from New York, asking if they'd ever thought of that, that brings Our Hero to actually consider that angle. Even something as simple as turning the thing off and on again while a marble was inside the miniature Helix, just to find out what would happen, wasn't done. I mean, seriously - just who the hell signed off on this?

I recognize that this may be the author's intention - now that I really consider it, the protagonist isn't necessarily the "hero" at all - it's actually Carruthers who moves the story forward, and without him the Helix staff would have flailed around and if they stumbled onto a solution it would have been pure chance. It's Carruthers who suggests using the miniature Helix to test their theories, Carruthers who goes over the original mathematics and realizes that the correspondence between the mathematical and physics models for the Helix aren't exact, that it's in actuality a destructive teleporter - destroying subway trains as they enter it and reassembling them on the other end, and if the Helix is rebooted, the computers controlling it will forget how to reassemble the train and it, and its passengers, will be lost forever. To be honest, this is probably the most ambitious "trapped in the pattern buffer" story I've encountered; usually it's just a person stuck in the machinery.

In the end, though, the characters don't have to do anything. Almost as soon as they realize just what's really happening, the fault in the Helix goes away and the lost train pulls into Berri-de-Montigny station, then as now the core of the Metro... but it's not so easy, is it? Here, let me quote.

"Carruthers had been right. The Helix was no helix at all. It destroyed and reconstituted them from memory. But its memory was limited. It remembered by repeating the message, over and over, to itself..."

I don't know how accurate this was with respect to computers that you'd be able to find in 1971 - it doesn't really jive with what I know of them today, and I'd think that a computer with insufficient memory to store an entire metro train and all of its passengers would react rather differently, and what it spit out on the other end wouldn't live very long - fortunately. But no, the machines reassemble a train that actually works, and reassembles the passengers as purple, wrinkled, anteater-like beings with dripping snouts that don't immediately die, but survive at least long enough to get off the train and exit the station. I mean, for the result of a game of telephone played for way too long, that's a pretty good result; you'd expect them to look more like that alien pig lizard in Galaxy Quest after it got beamed up to the Protector.

Nevertheless - it was a good enough story, however the characters within it acted, that the ideas behind it stuck with me for a while afterward. I wouldn't necessarily have written it the same way myself - had it been up to me, I'd have just done something where the train returned empty or not at all - but it works even with the ending. It feeds into our concerns about the people watching over us, that the people who make sure that we get from place to place in safety are just ordinary, fallible people who make mistakes and build things wrong.

And the moral of the story, ladies and germs: for dang's sake, don't use destructive teleporters! They're murder on the complexion.

ANDREW'S RATING: 3.5/5

Previous Short SF Reviews:

• #19: "The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)
  
• #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
  
• #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
  
• #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
  
• #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
  
• #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
  
• #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
  
• #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
  
• #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
  
• #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
  
• #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
  
• #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
  
• #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
  
• #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
  
• #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
  
• #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
  
• #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
  
• #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
  
• #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)

* I know that people can also commute by bicycle or on foot, but come on - sometimes binary options are good for setting the mood.

Photo: V9715 the Red-Nosed Reindeer Bus

If I hadn't known Christmas was coming up from the music they've got playing in the stores or the fresh snowcaps on top of the mountains, I'd have realized by the bus. Every year TransLink dresses up one of its buses as a reindeer, and yesterday evening I caught it taking on passengers at Granville and Dunsmuir. It was running the 14 to UBC, so there's a pretty big swath of Vancouver it might show up in, drawing second glances and spreading awareness of just what time of the year it is.

The TTC never did anything like this, presumably because it could never afford to do so.

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Quaff Review #17: KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer

You always remember your first - beer, that is. For my part, that didn't come until I was in university and more interested in coming home from the United States with cases of fully-caffeinated Mountain Dew; after all, the Trent University campus is a twenty-minute bus ride from downtown Peterborough, and the LCBO on Sherbrooke is another five minutes away from the station. It wasn't until I actually started living in downtown Peterborough that I started taking advantage of the opportunities, and I began with something that was significantly easier to find in Peterborough than anywhere else back in 2002 and 2003 - KLB Rasperry Wheat Beer, produced by the then-independent Kawartha Lakes Brewing Co. KLB went bankrupt in mid-2003, but fortunately its product line was saved through acquisition by the Amsterdam Brewing Company of Toronto, thankfully another microbrewery and not one of the big nationals.

The can says that KLB Raspberry Wheat is "the beer that made Peterborough famous," and the design incorporates the endless farmlands of the sort that you will see when you motor north along Highway 115 to get to the Electric City. It describes the beer as a balance of Belgium wheat and German hops - though I think "Belgian" would have made more sense in context - and incorporates an unfortunate typo when it talks about how "pure raspberry essence gives this beer it's signature aroma and flavour."

Perhaps you should see about fixing that up on the next print run, Amsterdam. Regardless, though - onto the beer itself. This had been sitting in my refrigerator for two months, but it was worth the wait for me.

KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer is a fairly deep amber, lacks a particularly frothy head and should be drunk crisp and cold - appropriate, for a beer that is itself cold-filtered. As a result, it's thoroughly translucent, enough to easily read the text of wall-mounted posters through.

The aroma of this beer is, unsurprisingly, dominated by raspberry - so's if you don't like it, probably best to get out entirely. Beyond a sweetness on the tongue as it goes down, raspberry also dominates the taste of the beer itself, and that's one reason why I like it - it's one of what seems to be a small percentage of beers that stands out from the crowd, that has a taste that can be described beyond "beer." I know there are people who denigrate fruit beers, who see the use of fruit flavoring as some sort of weakness, but I like my variety. Beers such as this, in my experience, aren't incredibly common, and it's always good to have a field of options wide open.

Now, the downside: if you're not in Ontario, this beer may be extremely difficult to get outside of Ontario; the LCBO is the only place I know to stock it, and I've certainly never seen it in British Columbia - or anything else brewed by Amsterdam, for that matter. What makes it worse is that KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer comes in tallboys, rather than bottles: I discovered that this was a liability when I was unpacking. The can of beer used for this review was actually one of two I brought back from Ontario, both sealed in Ziploc bags for the trip - and yet when I unpacked, I found my freshly-laundered clothes smelling rather like a brewery. The second can was still sealed, but was nevertheless crumpled; the bag it was in was still zippered up, but only a small puddle of beer remained at the bottom. The only explanation I can think of was that the can had a slight manufacturing defect, enough so that once it was at 38,000 feet in the unpressurized cargo bay, the beer was forced out of it and out of the bag because of pressure differentials or something.

I'm not really sure. All I know is that from now on, when I carry liquids in my luggage they're going to be in bottles.

ANDREW'S RATING: 4/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #16: Mana Energy Potion
  
• #15: HE'BREW Messiah Bold
  
• #14: Mackinac Pale Ale
  
• #13: Ola Dubh Special Reserve 40
  
• #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

Photo: All the Colors of the Desert

What can you say about a city hall? Well, perhaps that its look is reflective of the city itself, with enough poking and prodding and special pleading; this might work in Toronto, where in the 1960s municipal government moved out of the ornate, traditional Old City Hall into the sweeping towers of New City Hall, a building that will never look zeerusty and yet still looks like it came from fifty years in the future. Vancouver's city hall is, apparently, built in such a way that much of it would collapse in a major earthquake, which is probably true for a disturbingly large chunk of the city as well. New Westminster's city hall is small, compact, and unassuming. So it goes.

Earlier this year I passed by the city hall of Phoenix, Arizona. It fits, I think - the gleaming sun over the doors is well representative of a sun that shines like it's northern summer in January, the building itself has all the colors of the desert, and there isn't a single pedestrian anywhere to be found.

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Mars, Curiouser and Curiouser

Almost four hours ago the Mars Science Laboratory, including the car-sized Curiosity rover, successfully launched from Cape Canaveral and is now on its way to Mars. With the Russians still struggling to salvage the Phobos-Grunt mission, which has been trapped in Earth orbit for weeks now after its engines refused to fire, one can only hope that the hunger of the Great Galactic Ghoul has been sated for now and that MSL and Curiosity will make it to the Red Planet. If all goes according to plan, this time next year the largest Mars rover in history will be driving around Gale Crater and vaporizing rocks with its laser, because it's about damn time we sent out a rover with a laser. So it can blast annoying Martians and, through the wonders of spectroscopic examination, gain new awareness of their material composition. ("We are v-r-r-iends! Ouch!")

It's a welcome step forward for Mars research, particularly since there's now no longer any threat of the probe being cancelled because of economic factors. What I'm not looking forward to is the possibility that Curiosity will be more grist for the mill of the unmanned-boosters' peanut gallery. That is, the people who almost seem to be offended by the idea of human space exploration, or who think that calling spaceships "canned monkeys" is an endearing habit that totally makes people want to come over to their point of view.

The history of robotic Mars exploration has been incredible, all right. It's incredible that we've got as much out of robots as we have, and the ultimate cost of all their scientific insights would probably be incredible as well. There's one thing I'm curious about that, unfortunately, Curiosity won't be able to help me with; it's the question of whether all the science done by all the probes that have ever been landed on Mars over the last forty years could have been replicated by an astronaut actually on Mars in one week, or if it would be more like two weeks.

That rock had it coming. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

I'm not saying this to denigrate the people behind the actual Mars probes. Mars is a forbidding environment full of challenges alien to Earth, and it's hard enough to build a machine that works properly - let alone a machine that's rugged enough to keep on trucking in an environment that no human has any direct experience with. Yet, the limitations imposed upon past probes as a consequence of building them to endure the Martian environment had a definite effect on what they could actually do there. Remember Sojourner, the first successful Mars lander after the original Viking probes? It was a technical triumph - but that triumph wasn't free. Sojourner was not that much bigger than an Xbox 360, had a maximum speed of 0.036 kilometers per hour, and could operate as much as five hundred meters away from its lander. Over the eighty-three sols - that is, Martian solar days - it was in operation, Sojourner took five hundred and fifty photographs and analyzed sixteen locations.

It was a technical triumph, yes. But it also sounds like the sort of work that a lone astronaut, operating from a fixed base on Mars, could literally do in about an hour and get back to base in time for lunch. I expect that Curiosity will do good science, and will help pave the way for future human exploration, but it's inherently limited by the fact that it's a robotic rover at least partially dependent on a mission control which could be anywhere from three to twenty-two light-minutes away.

I'm not sure what the unmanneders - though there's got to be a better word for those people who support robotic missions and denigrate human ones - want me to take away from their arguments. What I usually end up taking from them is that they are willing to accept the return of a limited scientific payload in exchange for the expense of sending humans to do all this science themselves. Personally, though, I can't see myself coming around to that point of view - I can't yet accept the notion that, for a given amount of scientific returns, it would be cheaper to use robots than astronauts. Robots leave humans out of potentially dangerous situations, yes, but we pay through the nose for the privilege.

Nor do any of them, from my perspective at least, have the sort of psychological weight as the idea of boots on Mars.

Photo: Broken Reflection

I thought this one was interesting - I took it in December 2009 while on my way to work, the reflection of TTC streetcar #4137 in the windows of the Sun Life Centre at King West and University. Considering the news that's just started to come out of Toronto, I thought a broken reflection in particular was also appropriate. In 2012, there won't be quite so many opportunities to take this kind of photo as there are now - of course, the lion's share of the TTC service cutbacks, done in the name of Hizzoner da Mayor's demand that all city departments reduce their 2012 budget by 10%, are being extracted from the bus system, rather than the streetcars.

I guess buses that come reasonably often and have enough space to allow all the people aboard them to breathe is just gravy, though. With work soon to start on the Evergreen Line over here, it really throws the difference between the Toronto and Vancouver transit systems into starker and starker contrast; and Toronto isn't the one that comes out looking good.

"I will assure you that services will not be cut... guaranteed."
- Rob Ford, October 8, 2010

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Who's Condoning All These Condominiums?

One of the reasons I live in New Westminster, as opposed to Vancouver itself, is affordability - namely, while I can afford to live in New West with the lifestyle that I want, that being proximity to a SkyTrain station and services available within walking distance, I found it considerably more difficult to find such a place in Vancouver. Even with a recent rent increase, I still pay less than the Metro Vancouver average monthly rent of $864, as per Spacing Vancouver. According to the City of Vancouver, the average rent for a purpose-built one-bedroom apartment there was $1,041 a month in 2009; not necessarily unaffordable, but it doesn't exactly leave all that much leeway for things like food and transportation and entertainment and savings. Here in New Westminster I'm able to live fairly comfortably, and that's all I'm really looking for.

Even so, as a renter I can't help but look with jaundiced eyes at the nature of the residential projects I see sprouting up across Metro, and New West is no exception. While the transformed skyline created by the condo towers of Plaza 88 was already there when I moved here, similar projects are just starting to get off the ground. Earlier this week, the New Westminster News Leader reported on the presentation for a proposal to build a six-story, 118-unit condo structure on Royal Avenue, on the site of what is now rental apartments.

So it goes; it's nothing new. Most likely the biggest effect it will have on me will be through the noise of construction. At the same time, I can't help but feel vaguely threatened by the prospect.

Apartments along Royal Avenue in New Westminster, across the street from City Hall and on the site of the proposed new condo.

Renters occupy a particular place in North American society, where the general expectation is that everyone is striving to own their own home... a goal that has become much more difficult thanks to the fallout of the economic crisis, but culture takes longer to respond to stimuli than the money markets. Opinions vary from place to place; it's not unusual to be a university student or twentysomething renting your own pad, but there are those like teabagger Judson Phillips who last year suggested that renters should not be allowed to vote. Renters aren't second-class citizens - at the same time, though, governments don't exactly pay particularly fine attention to the situations renters can find themselves in.

For some, ownership just isn't an option. Before I made the decision to move out west, I was looking at the prospect of buying a condo in Toronto - a prospect that the state of my paystub kiboshed almost immediately; aside from a few units up in Crescent Town, the sort of sensible mortgage that I could get wouldn't have got me anything in the city, and even then I didn't much like the prospect of almost totally draining my savings to make the down payment. Here in Metro, of course, the price situation is even worse.

So it's no real surprise that developers are building condos; that's where the money is. With that focus on the money, though, renters are losing out. Sure, rental accommodations are being built, but it's just a fraction - fewer than one in five of all apartments built in Vancouver between 1990 and 2009 were rentals. I'm not sure what the numbers for New Westminster are, but I wouldn't be surprised if the ratio was broadly similar. Still, this focus on condos, if permitted to keep on chugging to its logical conclusion, portends a serious housing problem in Metro Vancouver - simply that there aren't enough housing spaces for people wanting to live there, and the housing spaces that are there are so expensive that the residents are perched on the rim of poverty.

The cities of Metro Vancouver want to build better futures for themselves - that's always the case, after all. Still, in the wake of this weekend's elections, it behooves them to take actions to ensure those better futures, to ensure that there's space for renters and not just homeowners within them.

Photo: The Road from Sausalito

It seems to me that the general expectation is that pedestrians will cross the Golden Gate Bridge from the San Francisco side; the sidewalks are long and it's easily accessible by foot, vehicle, and transit. The same is not necessarily true of the Marin County side. I took the ferry from San Francisco to Sausalito with the intention of returning by foot over the bridge, but getting to the bridge was a walk in itself. Once you're outside Sausalito the sidewalk disappears, and while there is a bike route that connects to the bridge, it was rather lonely-going for me as far as pedestrians went.

But it's a hell of a place, geographically speaking.

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Incidentally, today marks my five hundredth photo post on this weblog - score!

The Krokodil Hunters

I know it's saying a lot for a government to be proactive - I mean, there are so many pointless things it could be doing now to crush its opposition, because that's really what the voting public wanted. Still, outside of unusual issues like the laws against human cloning, governments seem to not really give much concern about the future. This is a problem in many respects, manifesting not only at the macro level - say, issues regarding the future of the world as a whole - but at the micro level as well, for concerns that are more relevant to the everyday.

It's as if governments have something against making stitches in time. But I'm confident that the government of Canada, in particular, will do absolutely nothing about anything important until it's almost or already too late. Recently I stumbled upon the latest thing that Ottawa will probably ignore until it's already become a serious problem: krokodil, the latest drug out of Russia for those looking for an inexpensive high. Apparently it's gaining popularity in Russian drug circles and has been pushing into Eastern and Central Europe, partially because it can be got for a twentieth of the price of heroin. You get what you pay for, though, and in the case of krokodil, you get scaly green skin around the injection site - that's where the name comes from, "crocodile" in Russian.

After that, of course, it eats your flesh; the skin around the injection site is damaged by the drug, thanks to its ingredient list including such wonderfully healthful things as red phosphorous, gasoline, and hydrochloric acid. Then gangrene will set in, and you better hope you didn't like your skin very much because you're not going to have nearly as much of it anymore.

I first heard about krokodil via an article io9 ran on it last week; check it out, but be advised that it is very not mind safe. I don't expect it to be the last time this drug gets into the news, especially not in Vancouver. The reason for that is simple - the key ingredient to make krokodil is codeine, and one of the reasons behind krokodil use in Russia is that codeine is easily available there, off the shelf in any pharmacy.

Just like it is in Canada.

I'm not sure if there's any in these tablets, though.

Codeine is used medically as a painkiller, and in Canada you'll find it in such things as Tylenol 1, 2, 3, and 4. It can also be used to manufacture desomorphine, which is the key ingredient in krokodil. It's apparently not that hard to make it, either - articles I've found describe it being cooked in kitchens, and with a high that doesn't last much longer than an hour, there's a lot of krokodil cooking going on. It's also difficult to get off once you're on it, with painful withdrawal symptoms lasting for a month.

Once you're on it, unless you're very lucky, you'll most likely be dead within three years.

Krokodil is still a very new drug - apparently it only emerged around 2002 in Siberia, but these things have a definite way of spreading. I would not be surprised to see accounts of krokodil usage coming out of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside in the near future, and once those accounts start coming out, the health aspect is going to be tremendous.

Now, I think, there's the possibility to short-circuit it before it starts; to regulate the availability of codeine in the pharmacies as in the United States, where it is a Schedule II drug under the Controlled Substances Act, alongside cocaine, opium, and morphine. Codeine isn't the only painkiller out there, and it's not as if it'd be unavailable in a climate of restriction.

As for myself, though, I'd rather see it a bit harder to get something with codeine in it than see residents of the Downtown Eastside with muscle and bone where their skin used to be.

Photo: Calgary From Above

I've never been to Calgary - not been to Alberta much at all, in fact - but on the my last flight from Vancouver to Toronto, the city of Stephen Harper was spread out right below, with the towers of downtown plainly visible. I hear a lot of tell that Calgary's a distributed, rather sprawling city, cut into sectors by highways and difficult to get from place to place, but with this aerial view it seems considerably more centered than some American cities I could name.

I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

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Defiance in Davis

Even though it's only just now started getting cold and snowy, it's already shaping up to be a harsh winter. Let's start afield: today, in Cairo's Tahrir Square, where popular protests and demonstrations brought down the Mubarak regime and ignited the brightest lights of the Arab Spring earlier this year, the Egyptian police and military is attacking the demonstrators, burning tents and lobbing rubber bullets and tear gas into the crowds. Mind you, these aren't Occupy protesters over there - their goals are rather more concrete, in that they want the military to specify when it's going to hand over control to a civilian government.

Nothing that would happen here in North America, right? Well, maybe they're just building up to it.

Closer to home, the Occupy movement has been in flux for a while. Part of that, I think, was an unavoidable aspect of the movement itself; as it spread beyond New York and more and more people took up its banner, the focus of some individual demonstrations drifted - I've heard that Occupy Vancouver, for instance, is now about homelessness. Police responses are likewise radically different from city to city - take the heavy-handed park eviction undertaken by the New York Police Department, for instance, and compare it to what are effectively battles between the police and demonstrators in Oakland, California, or the generally hands-off attitude that has dominated in places like Toronto or Vancouver.

And then there's Davis. Never heard of it? It's a university town outside Sacramento and the site of the University of California, Davis, physically the largest campus in the University of California system and with one of the highest enrollments. With an on-campus resident population of thousands of students, it's no surprise that UC Davis hosted its own Occupy demonstration. Some students started a camp-out demonstration in the university's quad on Thursday, but this wasn't going to fly with the university administration - word came down that the tents were to be removed by 3 PM on Friday, and many of them were.

Let's go to the Sacramento Bee's coverage of the event to see what happened next, shall we?

Shortly before 4 p.m., about 35 officers from UC Davis and other UC campuses as well as the city of Davis responded to the protest, said Annette Spicuzza, UC Davis police chief. They were wearing protective gear and some held batons.

The protest initially involved about 50 students, Spicuzza said, but swelled to about 200 as the confrontation with police escalated.

She said officers were forced to use pepper spray when students surrounded them. They used a sweeping motion on the group, per procedure, to avoid injury, she said.

The students were informed repeatedly ahead of time that if they didn't move, force would be used, she said.

Wait, I forgot, that's just news reporting - and biased reporting at that. Fortunately, we live in a world that includes YouTube, and where every last university student carries a video camera. So let's actually see what happened. The video is eight and a half minutes long, but you should watch the whole thing.

"I want to be very clear in calling upon the Egyptian authorities to refrain from any violence against peaceful protesters. The people of Egypt have rights that are universal. That includes the right to peaceful assembly and association, the right to free speech, and the ability to determine their own destiny. These are human rights. And the United States will stand up for them everywhere."
- Barack Obama

Look at that. Look at that. What the fuck is that? How does that have any resemblance to what the Bee claimed took place? Sure, they used pepper spray - on motionless students, seated on the ground, with arms linked, in non-violent protest! How can a row of seated students surround the police? How can a row of seated students with linked arms injure police aside from somehow making the cops trip over them? And yet, there goes UC Davis Police Lieutenant John Pike spraying them down like it ain't no thang, so casually that his face shield is raised, looking for all the world like a gardener spraying down the flowers.

By what fucking moon-man logic are they operating? What possible course of events could justify pepper-spraying motionless, unarmed demonstrators on the ground? Does this look like police that are surrounded, that are worried, that are trying to control the situation - or does this look like police who want to control the situation, who are using pepper spray to say "don't fuck with us, or you're next?" What would you think if you saw something like this on the news coming from a well-known beacon of democracy like China, say, or Iran? The fact that this is happening in the United States makes it even worse - the United States is supposed to be better than that.

The media, of course, is already in spin mode. Take that Sacramento Bee article, and look at the photo caption: "Students claimed police used pepper spray on people sitting on the ground. Police said officers had to use the spray when students surrounded them." Students claimed, police said. Think for a moment about the truth values generally associated with those words. Reading between the lines, to me it says, "this was what happened according to the students, but we're sure the police are really telling the truth."

It's been evident for a while that those in power dearly want the Occupy movement to go away, that one thing it has been doing has been helping to raise awareness about the malfeasance and criminality practiced by the sociopaths and scoundrels at the highest levels of society. Given enough time it may just have naturally dissipated on its own, but things like the events in Davis can have a galvanizing effect. They certainly galvanized me. If those in power want the Occupy movement to go away, I can't think of any better reason for it to stay and to grow. Obedience is not a virtue, and there are rewards in defiance.

Chad Inglis got to the core of it, I think, in a response to the original video post on my Facebook wall: "The best part about the Occupy movement is that it's making very plain the type of world we all live in. our governments are benevolent and kind, nothing like those bad ones overseas, right up until we start challenging them."

A government that can't withstand a challenge from its people is a government that doesn't deserve to be.

Photo: Snow!

On Thursday night, the first snow of the season fell in New Westminster. With the days as short as they are now, the sky giving the impression of the middle of the night at 5:30 PM, a bit of the white stuff is welcome - it makes things brighter. Still, with the Winter Solstice more than a month away, the days won't stop getting shorter any time soon.

Furthermore, for those of you in British Columbia, go vote today! Help decide how your city's run.

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Getting the Details Right

It's easy for me to end up putting a stop to a story project before it's even, officially, begun - because I get bogged down in details. Not just figuring out the details of the setting, the plot, and so on, but trying to find something, anything, to shut up that part of my brain that thinks the antagonists must be omniscient barring sufficient explanation. I like to think that I've come up with progress on that front more recently, but in the past, the way I tended to deal with that was to think more and more about the background in that specific lens, looking for justifications for why the bad guys didn't have the drop on the heroes from second one.

That sort of process breeds a lot of details - some relevant, some not particularly so. One indicator of an author's experience is how well they're able to submerge details of the world beneath the story, iceberg-like; to convey the impression of a world that's much grander, much more complex, than solely that which appears on the page. Getting them correct and consistent in the context of the story can support the suspension of disbelief greatly.

I feel it's even more important in the visual media. There, creators define what the audience sees, and don't always have the luxury of drawing things with broad brushstrokes so that the viewer can fill in the gaps. The fact of the matter is, television and film productions frequently go to great lengths to get the background details correct. This is something that comes up fairly frequently in Vancouver, considering how much stuff is filmed here. Just last night, in fact, Granville Station was partially remade into one of the six 50th Street Stations on the New York City Subway - at least, the signage seemed to be correct. I'm not sure how much a 1980s-era SkyTrain station looks like anything on the New York City Subway today, unless it's set in the future or something.

This being Vancouver, that wasn't even the first film set I'd wandered into this week. A few days ago, Granville Street was shut down between Dunsmuir and Pender for another shoot - this one for the TV series Fairly Legal, in which a part of the street was transformed into San Francisco... a shocking departure from what Vancouver's done in the past, I know. It was small, but done well; it seemed like it could pass for Market Street, with California-plated cars and a big San Francisco advertising pillar, though I don't know if San Francisco gets hit with autumn to the same extent that Vancouver does. It was all pretty cool.

It wasn't until I was reviewing the photos at full size that I noticed a bit where they seemed to have slipped up. Part of the set dressing included the installation of two newspaper boxes - one for the fictional San Francisco Bulletin, and the other for the decidedly non-fictional San Francisco Chronicle. I can't see what's in the Bulletin box, but the Chronicle box has a pretty obvious copy of... USA Today.

Check it out yourself.

It seems like a rather odd choice to make. I mean, they've gone to all the trouble of getting accurate cars, accurate signage, accurate newspaper boxes and advertisements and so on, but this one newspaper is left in there to break the illusion. Twenty years ago it'd have been irrelevant, of course, but with modern high-definition televisions, something like this would be noticed by someone if it appeared on screen.

I suppose I just wonder why they would go to what seems to be great lengths, otherwise, only to leave that USA Today in there.

Photo: A Stillness in the Bush

My grandparents' house in New Brunswick is in the countryside, in the midst of land that seems like it hasn't changed all that much in centuries, and walking a couple of minutes back into the bush will isolate you from all the evidence of civilization. Here, amid this stand of partially submerged treees, a family of beavers built a dam - you can see it in the center of the photo, though somewhat obscured by the trees - and it's because of their dikes that the area is flooded to the extent that it is. Not only the calmness and clarity of the water, but the fact that there's no refuse there - no abandoned tires, no chocolate bar wrappers, no discarded Tim Horton's cups - make it almost feel like not part of the world.

Which really goes to show what the situation is, when something doesn't feel normal because there isn't litter around.


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Brother, Could You Spare a Cite

If there's one question that people have been struggling to answer conclusively ever since it was asked for the very first time, it's this: "how should we live?" Through the ages, thousands of religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines have been tested to destruction as we've searched for an answer. Personally I think it's a question that will never be answered, at least not to the satisfaction of everyone; life is too big, too unique, to complex to be boiled down into a simple answer. The best we can do is find an answer that works for ourselves while at the same time fitting into society. That's the crux of it, really - the question would be better posed as "how should we live with each other?" Or possibly "without killing each other?"

Yesterday, the Brisbane Times - of Australia, for all you geography majors - reported on the latest noises issuing from the Liberal National Party of Queensland, a state-level party that is described by Wikipedia as being a party that combines "conservative liberal" and "liberal conservative" ideologies, somehow. They seem to be backing the continued prominence of religious instruction in government schools as a means for ethical education of students, in exclusion to secular ethics classes of the sort that started being rolled out in New South Wales' education system recently so that non-religious students could have an option aside from opting out and "studying" in the library.

Why? Because the party, according to its education spokesman Bruce Flegg, "believe[s] that the overwhelming majority of Queenslanders want their children brought up with a Judeo-Christian grounding in religious education. In many cases this applies to people who themselves may not be particularly religious. I am sure this also applies to the increasing number of Queenslanders who identify themselves as Islamic."

There isn't a [CITATION NEEDED] big enough.

The stained glass window represents religion.

Those are pretty big concepts - "believes," "I am sure," and likely more that aren't quoted in that snippet from the Times - and full of truthiness. There's no evidence brought up to support the case for why the LNP has reason to believe this, there are no studies or surveys or quotes; there's just what the party claims to know from the gut. It's the sort of intellectual viewpoint I'd expect from the Conservatives up here, or the Republicans in the States... more and more, it seems like right-wing parties across the Anglosphere are working out of the same playbook.

Now, I'll admit that Flegg's stance isn't totally out to lunch - there are people who send their kids to religious schools without being really religious themselves in order to get what they perceive to be a moral grounding. I know because I went to high school with one such dude, who had gone through Ontario's Catholic elementary school system for that reason... though I do only know one such dude. Ultimately, it's a choice that should come down to the family, and not to the government.

But it should also be a choice. The availability of secular ethics courses does not diminish religious ethics courses; only in the minds of people who can only be secure when they have an ideological monopoly is that so. To claim that secular instruction is unnecessary because you believe without evidence that people are sufficiently satisfied with it to not need an alternative is not only doing a disservice as a political party - it's intellectually dishonest.

After all, religion is not the only way to ethics, not the only possible path to answering that age-old question. I know because you won't find my footprints on that road.

Photo: Mother Russia's Missiles

It was a week ago today that I ate my lunch cold because of the Russians, since I couldn't just let my lunch half-hour go by without figuring out where all the uniformed Russian Navy officers in the Pacific Centre were coming from. As it happened, the Russian missile cruiser Varyag had arrived at Canada Place earlier that day, coming off of exercises near Vancouver Island. While I wasn't able to make it on board, I took as many shots as I could manage from the Canada Place walkway during the days she was here.

Here's the bridge and some of the starboard missile tubes of Varyag - in all, it mounts sixteen P-500 Bazalt/SS-N-12 Sandbox anti-ship missiles. While I was in the lineup trying to get aboard, some guys behind me were debating how much of Vancouver the ship could destroy if it came down to it; they eventually settled on downtown, but I don't know if you can use anti-ship missiles against ground targets. Even then, those missiles can only carry a 950-kilogram high explosive warhead - while sixteen would carve ragged chunks out of downtown, I don't know about total destruction. Besides, they were pointed at North Van, anyway.

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Herman Cain and the Apple of Knowledge

No matter where you are or what situation you're in, it's incredibly difficult to be an effective leader if you don't have effective information to go with it. Sure, charisma is an important quality for a leader, as is the ability to make good decisions - but good decisions necessarily require good information backing them up, or they become bad decisions. Something that seems like a good idea may only seem so because of critically flawed or missing information. With that said, I feel it should also be the duty of leaders to have good knowledge - if not in their own heads, than in the heads of their staff. There's nothing wrong with falling back on someone else for some answers; the brain can't hold everything.

Sometimes it can't even hold enough to convince people that presenting themselves as anti-intellectuals with tunnel vision is a good idea.

Case in point: Herman Cain, one of the challengers for the Republican nomination in the United States, and who the elevator at the office tells me was tied in the polls with Rick Perry last week. While Perry's recent problems have had more to do with tongue-twists and mind-slips, Cain's views on the duty of leaders don't seem to have had that much traction in the media; after all, they've got sexual harrassment stories to go after instead.

It's still important to consider, though. During an October interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network, Cain explained how he would react to "gotcha" questions - that is, questions meant to trip up a politician - thusly:

“When they ask me who's the president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan, I'm going to say, ‘You know, I don't know. Do you know?' And then I'm going to say, ‘How's that going to create one job?' ... Knowing who is the head of some of these small, insignificant states around the world, I don't think that is something that's critical to focusing on national security and getting this economy going."

Not exactly the most diplomatic tack, no... but it also tells us something about the man himself, if only we're willing to pay attention.

You know, I don't know why that sculpture hasn't been cleaned recently. Do you know? That might create one job!

Tunnel vision is not something to aspire to; tunnel vision is dangerous. Relentless focus on one issue to the exclusion of all others invites problems by the score - since you're so focused on your pet issue, you won't see the others creep up on you until it's too late to do anything about them. Being focused on one or two things is not sufficient justification to abandon your attention on all other things.

Really, though, what this suggests to me about Cain is that he lacks appreciation of the value of knowledge. If this quote is a valid representation of the way he thinks, then it seems to me he thinks that knowledge is only worthwhile when it is of direct application to the problem right in front of you, and outside of that circumstance it is valueless. It's not just whether or not you know who the president of Uzbekistan is - leading the United States is a fantastically difficult and complicated job if you're trying to do it right, and all that knowledge and information needs to be at the President's fingertips so that the best decision can be arrived at.

Seems to me he may have been trying to prove his "chops," that he wouldn't be willing to use kid gloves with the media - but the fact that he chose to say what he did, rather than something like "I don't know off the top of my head, that's why I've assembled the best people in the country, so I can have this information at hand while I focus on national security and getting this economy going." That seems more leader-like to me - someone who knows he doesn't know everything, knows what his priorities are going to be, but doesn't dismiss something because it's outside those priorities.

There's not going to be one simple road out of the situation the United States is in; it's going to be long, winding, obscured, and take multiple routes with long detours. There's a place for focus on a problem, yes, but focusing when it comes to solutions is dangerous.

And by the by, Islam Karimov is the President of Uzbekistan.

Photo: Granville, Between Darkness and Light

Apparently it rained pretty heavily for a short time in downtown Vancouver on Friday afternoon. However heavy it was, I missed it entirely; during my entire SkyTrain ride in, I didn't encounter so much as a drop. Now that we're back on Standard Time - perhaps something of a misnomer now, since it only covers five months of the year - it's going to take some time to adjust to how early the sun sinks out of the sky. This photo was taken only a little after 3 o'clock in the afternoon, but I like the way the light and the rain-soaked street complement each other.

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What Is Your Major Malfunction, SkyTrain?

Maybe it's the wintry weather that's doing it. Whatever the cause, it hasn't even been a week since the last major SkyTrain delay that I'm aware of; this morning, as I write this, the entire Expo Line from Waterfront to King George is totally non-functional, with service maintained only through bus bridges and transfers along the Millennium Line. Until things get fixed, those rails aren't exactly where I'd want to be - visiting SkyTrain stations during system delays just reinforces how important the system is to Metro Vancouver, through the sheer number of people that get marooned on the platforms. It's a good thing this didn't happen on a weekday, or the chaos would be total - the system just doesn't have that much flex in it.

Information on what the problem actually is is spotty - News1130's tweet just speaks of "major delays," and while TransLink has announced through its Twitter feed that they're working on fixing it, they don't have any estimated time of repair for... whatever it is. And that's just it - the nature of the problem is purely a matter for speculation. I don't know, and TransLink doesn't really tell. I mean, at least earlier in the week they mentioned that the problem had to do with a busted switch, presumably one of the ones governing the junctions around Columbia Station - yet that only delayed service until SkyTrain Control organized the short turns at New Westminster.

What kind of problem could be bad enough to shut down the entire line?

A Mark I SkyTrain after crossing the SkyBridge, on a day when the Expo Line was actually running.

Information is power, and that applies equally to transit riders as it does to transit operators. Knowing where you're going is important, yes - but knowing why things break has relevance too. It irks me when I hear SkyTrain Control come on the loudspeakers about system delays or timed-out trains or whatever, but when the situation's all resolved, we hear no more about it. That's missing the most important points: namely, why did the delay occur to begin with, and what is TransLink doing to ensure, to the best of its abilities, that it doesn't happen again?

I mean, if you were a motorist and your car suddenly started making loud grinding noises with smoke rising from underneath the hood, you'd want to take it to a mechanic pretty quick, wouldn't you? And once everything was fixed, would you be satisfied with the mechanic only telling you just that - that everything was fixed? Isn't it even more important to know what the problem is, so that it can be avoided in the future?

Things are a bit different for SkyTrain passengers, yes - maintenance of the trackage and the rolling stock is not our responsibility. Nevertheless, the SkyTrain is how hundreds of thousands of people get around every day. Personally, I want for TransLink to publicly acknowledge and take stock of its problems, and demonstrate what it's doing to fix them. That's the mark of a good transit operator - otherwise, there's the risk of falling into a situation like the Toronto Transit Commission, where massive and unexplained delays are a simple fact of life.

Photo: Remembering Lessons of the Past

Visit any Canadian community that already existed in 1914, and you're practically assured to find a war memorial there - carved with names upon names of the fallen, no matter how few people called that place home when the soldiers went Over There. Photographed below is a representative sample: the war memorial in Minto, New Brunswick. They help, I think, teach us respect, and demonstrate that slowly but surely, we might be getting a lesson through our thick heads after all. Consider what would have been going on a hundred years ago - would there have been protests in the streets over invading Iraq in 1903, of shoring up rebels against an unpalatable dictator in 1911, or spending ten years in Afghanistan from 1901?

They didn't have the experience back then - that was when war was still "glorious." There is such a thing as progress... now we know better. Somewhat.

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On Lowais and Cylties

Writers of literary fiction, I would imagine, tend not to have to invent many words - in cases where they do, they'd likely be important to the plot. It's different in science fiction. Since it favors the exploration of times and worlds removed from modern Earth, almost by definition it creates its own vocabulary: both to describe concepts that do not yet exist, like Isaac Asimov's coining of the term "robotics" when the word "robot" was only a few years removed from Czech, and to demonstrate ways in which the setting of a story diverges from ours. In the end, it's part of that effort to scratch together whatever verisimilitude can possibly be assembled - otherwise it may have a taste of artificiality to it. Imagine, for a moment, a sf story written in the 1980s and set thirty years later, in which everyone speaks exclusively of "cellular telephones." Real people don't talk like that. As things become common, their names shift and become simpler - at the expense of being less transparent to someone looking in from the outside.

I encountered something like that while reading through the January 1993 issue of Analog on the SkyTrain yesterday.

"He'd gotten his first taste of that particular hell on the Soarliner that had carried him up from Earth to the orbiting cylty of Newtonia. The long trip from there to Adonis, the huge cylstation which was the Consortium's Venus operations base, had been spent in an at least bearable half-gee."
- from "Leap," by Steven L. Burns

I had to stop for a few seconds when I hit the reference to "cylty" to figure out what it meant. When I puzzled it out to be a slamming-together of "cylinder city" - that is, an O'Neill cylinder. I can't recall any more references to cylties or cylstations elsewhere in the story, and this was on the first page. Still, I found it a good way to help bring the reader into the story, and I also felt a small surge of triumph when I picked out the likely meaning.

Not everyone reads like I do, though.

You may also know them as "spacevilles."

In one of my stories that's gathered a deep pile of rejections around it, in early drafts I made two references to something called a "lowai," in connection with a small automated quadrotor. I'd meant this to be a shortening of something like "low-functioning artificial intelligence" - that is, an AI that's capable of learning and adjusting its own programming in a basic way, but which isn't self-aware or particularly complex. I also liked the connection that could be drawn to "laowai," because what's more foreign than an artificial intelligence? (Don't answer that.)

Unfortunately, I wasn't really able to extend all this from my brain into the world. When the story went out to beta readers, they universally complained about "lowai," how they couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean. I hemmed and hawed for a while and changed the reference in the next draft to "lowAI," which is hopefully more transparent but nevertheless looks stranger to my eyes - more artificial, more like something a science fiction writer would come up with and not like something people might actually say.