Here things stand, the three hundred and sixty-fifth post on this weblog since the beginning of January. I've gone through my archives looking for an image to represent the year that was, or the future as it appears to me from this point - what I found was what's below. On the face of it, it's just the Harbour Centre tower reflected in another building on Granville Street. Metaphorically, I see a shattered time and a shattered future, multiple things that don't quite overlap exactly, grittiness and darkness where I know there should be light.So that's 2011, and that's the future - the way it strikes me, at least. Perhaps 2012 will turn out to be not quite all that.
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You may have heard, a couple of months back, about how the Japanese government was going to give free airfare to ten thousand foreigners so that they could pump their money into the Japanese tourism sector, still reeling from the Tohoku earthquake in March. If you were looking forward to that, well, keep dreaming - the Japan Times reported yesterday that Japan's Finance Ministry has refused the Japan Tourism Agency's ¥1.18 billion request for 2012. Apparently - and I know this is hard to wrap one's head around, but work with me here - they "thought it would be difficult" to convince people that it was so important for their tax yen to go toward flying a bunch of gaijin over; besides, if newspaper travel sections are any indication, a lot of them may not have made it out of Tokyo anyway.Though, when you think about it, that billion-plus yen might not necessarily go as far as you think - I wondered, would it even work? With today's exchange rates, that works out to just under $15.6 million Canadian, and while it's easy to think of that amount as pocket change in a government's context, the Japanese government already has all of its change spoken for and then some. Dividing the amout by ten thousand gaijin leaves ¥118,000 or $1,552 to cover fare to and from Japan for each one of them. Ideally, some would have come from inexpensive places; while an Air Canada round-trip flight from Vancouver to Narita in October 2012 is a little more than $1000 before fees and taxes, the same flight on Japan Airlines is a staggering $8,125.14. It seems, however, that it's considerably cheaper to fly JAL from the States.It's a bit of a shame since I was hoping on being one of those ten thousand gaijin. In the end, though, this doesn't change anything; aside from a few Internet hopes and dreams being shattered, perhaps, everything is the same as it was yesterday. As far as my thoughts about this go, it comes down to the differences between the dedicated traveller and opportunistic tourist.
If JAL charges eight thousand dollars for an economy ticket to Vancouver, I shudder to think of how much one of those business-class seats in the front must cost. That's where you'd find a rich opportunistic tourist.
There are very few places where it's possible to take an overhead shot of a Canada Line train, considering that it's underground through Vancouver and elevated across much of Richmond. The only point at which the line is mostly surface-level is on Sea Island, near Vancouver International Airport - this photograph was taken from an overhead walkway leading to Sea Island Centre Station. The train honestly looks a bit strange to me, seen from this angle.
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I was browsing around for a copy of Ace Combat 6 the other day when some guy breezed into the store and asked if they had a Wii. They didn't, considering that Christmas was only a couple of days ago, and it's unlikely that more than a handful of stores in Metro Vancouver had any up for sale, whether new or used. I could hear him grousing about the kind of person that would give something used as a gift - and really, I think that's one of the twentieth-century problems we desperately need to address in the twenty-first.The twentieth century, it seems, had a mania for newness. On the face of it, it's not too suprising; it was the first century where the manufacturing sector had developed enough that anyone who wanted anything could get it fresh from the assembly line. Used goods, in that context, are castoffs - things that someone else has used until they can't use them anymore, or have gone beyond the need for them. I can understand why some people might see it as more like scavenging, or even picking trash up off the ground. But that doesn't mean it's right. The "used economy" has an important place today, and in the years to come I think it may become even more so - after all, you don't need to invest energy or resources in creating something that already exists.Besides that, there's one big advantage used has over new - many used things, depending on how long someone else has had their name to them, just aren't available in the stores any more no matter where you look. This is especially true when it comes to the vintage clothing market.
I mean, really - would I be able to get an authentic '70s shirt this hideous in a store today?
It's been more than twenty years now since I've been aboard a ship operated by BC Ferries, so I have no idea what they're like inside - particularly considering that twenty years ago, the Hot Cool Thing was that the ferries had ship-to-shore telephone capacity. What I do know is that some of them, like the relatively new S class ferries, are massive.I took this photo from Point Roberts, Washington, looking southwest across the Strait of Georgia; I'm not sure if those mountains are on Vancouver Island, Galiano Island, or some other island entirely. I can't tell which of the two S class ferries this one is; even at maximum zoom, it's too far away to clearly get the name.
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"You Source of Tears," by Andrew Barton
Appeared in On Spec, Fall 2011Once he acknowledged and the radio cut out, there was only the sound of his breath, his heart, and the rumbling fans that kept Giordano Bruno from becoming his grave. If he'd truly comprehended what had really awaited him so far from home, he'd have never left in the first place. He was no gallant spaceman, just a simple raumfahrer.Before I start, there's one thing you need to know: this time, the title lies. This isn't a story review at all, for one very simple reason: I wrote the story in question. "You Source of Tears," which appears in the latest issue of On Spec Magazine, was my first sale to any market, and you should totally read it and On Spec in general, also. In the meantime, I thought I'd take this opportunity not to review the story, as such, but provide a little background as to my experience of the process from beginning to end; it's something I was always interested in when I was just an aspiring wordguy, and it's something I'm uniquely qualified to write on.The story itself is simple - it's about European astronauts who travel to a comet and what they find there. To get to that point, however, took some doing."You Source of Tears" was one of the first stories I wrote with an eye toward publication, and honestly it's the earliest one that's actually any good; even though I'd already been writing short stories for years at that point, and had already completed the first draft of a serially-posted novel that may, possibly, eventually see the light of day, changing gears from "writing for the Internet" to "writing for magazines that pay dollars for stories" was a big psychological leap for me, and in retrospect I did have to do a lot of scrabbling at first - not quite re-learning the craft, but looking at my process and product with a far more critical eye than I'd ever employed before. YSoT was the result of that.The idea came to me in the late summer of 2007, during a point in my life when I had just recently started working an overnight shift, waking up at 8:30 PM and going to sleep at one in the afternoon. At the time, the kernel of the story was a simple idea - what if the consciousnesses of nearly every human who'd ever lived had somehow been saved at the moment of death and uploaded to a computer? I think it may have been inspired by Mark Twain's comment about how he had come in with Halley's Comet, and expected to go out with it, to the degree that this story was originally set there; it wasn't until the fourth draft that it was changed to the wholly fictional Comet Veale, in honor of a fellow scrivener. This is also the source of the title - a quote from Eilmer of Malmesbury, back when comets were still seen as omens and portents.For the rest of the summer and into the winter, the story percolated while I took down notes and ideas, evaluated potential plots, and worked on other projects. Work on the first draft started on December 13, 2007, and it was completed on December 18 with a word count of 3,224.
These are my preliminary notes for "You Source of Tears," the earliest documentation for the story that I have in my files. Very few of them actually entered the story, but they were important for informing my own understanding of it.
There's really not much to say on a day such as today, so here is a picture of my tree. Thanks to everyone who's read and made non-spamming comments on this weblog over the past year. Best wishes for a good Birthday of the Unconquered Sun and 2012 to you and yinz.
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'Tis the season, I suppose - at this point it seems like everyone's rushing to the airports or the train stations or the ferry terminals or the highways while I stay here in New Westminster, thousands of kilometers away from the traditional family things. So for me, 'tis mostly the season to drink. Rum and egg nog will only go so far in this regard; not only is rum expensive (although that's entirely due to taxes - what costs $36 at the BCL cost $19 at San Francisco International Airport's duty-free shop), it goes a lot faster than you'd think. Yet it likewise deserves better than a six-pack of Rainier or Lucky Lager or whatever other kind of beer you buy for the sole and solitary reason that it is the cheapest one in the store.So: it's high time for a Christmas seasonal brew. For that I went over to the Central City Brewing Co. Liquor Store in north Surrey, only a short SkyTrain ride away, and returned with a bottle of Bah Humbug craft beer from the Wychwood Brewery in Oxfordshire, England. I waited until last night to try it out because, really, what's the point of having a specifically Christmastime seasonal brew in the early part of December? Bah Humbug is actually one of twelve seasonal craft brews Wychwood produces, one for every month of th eyear, and I think I'll keep an eye out for the other ones now.For now, though, on to the one right in front of me. To be honest, even though the label specifies "Christmas cheer," it didn't feel especially Christmas-y to me.
Before I get to the beer, I have to say that I do appreciate the purely artistic qualities of the bottle, with its sculpted countours and the circle of broomstick-riding witches around the midpoint, and the quality of the label, which reminds me of the detail that Dieu du Ciel goes into on its own brews. It's something that the mainstream beer industry lacks entirely - the big brewers put out uniformly uniform bottles with lifeless labels that may well have been designed by a committee of computers. That's one reason I prefer the output of microbreweries - there's more character to them. The bottle itself is deceptively large, and I thought it was holding a lot more beer than I ended up getting out of it.Now then - the drink. The back label states that Bah Humbug is a strong beer, and I found no reason to disagree; it seemed just a bit more viscous than lighter kinds when I poured it, and at 5.0% alc./vol. there was that subtle tang of alcohol in the background of the taste, but unlike abominations like Earthquake High Gravity Lager it did not overwhelm it. That's part of the problem, though - I couldn't detect much to overwhelm in this. According to the Wychwood website, the taste is "spicy fruit" and the smell is of bananas, cloves, and fruit, but I couldn't detect any of this. It seemed to be... well, rather neutral, really. Certainly no flavors that I would associate with December or the holidays.It may well be that it's just a personal problem and something is messed up with my taste buds. By no means is this a bad beer; it actually had a refreshing absence of bitterness. It just didn't seem to have much "Christmas cheer" to me.ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5Previous Quaff Reviews
With the recent explosion in Vietnamese restaurants across the country, I've been keeping my eyes open for one named "Pho Q" - the closest, however, appear to be in Seattle and San Mateo if Google can be trusted. When I passed by the storefront of Wang On Blinds Mfg. Ltd. at Main and Kingsway last winter I took a picture, because, y'know, wang - juvenile and sophomoric, I know, and so am I. It wasn't until just this morning, going through my archives, that I realized Wang On Blinds is right next door to the Fox Cinema, which according to the Georgia Straight is the last remaining pornographic theatre in the city of Vancouver.
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No matter what happens to the food supply, there'll always be algae - vast groupings of unicellular plants that are most familiar as simple seaweed. Sure, that's the case now, but once the Grim Meathook Future inevitably arrives, what we today dismiss blithely as "seaweed" will be the foundation of civilization! Wars will be fought over access to seaweed supplies! Everyone will have their seaweed cereal and seaweed burgers and seaweed steaks and work to carve life out of a world gone mad!Until then, it's strictly an ancillary food item, but why not acquire a taste for it? Today, known as roasted seaweed or nori, it's most commonly used to wrap sushi and onigiri. If you're in the Vancouver area you can get it on top of some Japadog hot dogs, and if you have your own supply they go well with burgers, sandwiches, or whatever you fancy, really. I've heard the taste of nori sheets described as salty, but really there's nothing in standard North American cuisine that really matches up.It's getting your own supply that can be the tricky thing, assuming you're not in East Asia. Roasted seaweed has only been available in North America for fifty years, and it's always been closely associated with Japanese cuisine over here. I don't recall ever coming across it in Ontario grocery stores, but when I found that Donald's Market was selling ten packs of nori for under five bucks, you'd better believe I snapped that up. I mean, it's imported Korean seaweed that comes in packages covered with writing that I can't even begin to understand. What's not to love?I wouldn't be surprised if part of that lack of availability comes down to the associations that come with the word "seaweed" in European Canadian culture. It's a negatively loaded word, and a lot of people just aren't that interested in challenging themselves. I can imagine that if you're white, there's at least a fair chance that the idea of eating seaweed hits you as being rather grody. Yet it's just one of the casual assumptions that European-origin cultures have carried with them over the centuries. The same algae that's used to make nori in East Asia exists in Europe as well, after all. It just comes down to different cultural priorities that it was domesticated in one place but not the other.Nevertheless - to the food! It didn't take me long to discover that nori makes a perfectly good snack all on its own; with individual sheets being practically two-dimensional while remaining taste sensations, they're rather easy on any diet plan you may be on as well. So I thought I'd depart from my usual subjects a bit to write about the seaweed sandwich - undoubtedly a staple food of the grim, dark future! It doesn't really appear to be a thing yet; my Google searches generally turn up combinations like tofu and seaweed sandwiches, but even those are buried below video game and SpongeBob SquarePants references.Here's what you'll need:- 2 slices of bread
- 4 or 5 sheets of roasted seaweed
- Butter or margarine
Preparation is extremely simple. First you take the bread and, very lightly, add butter or margarine as if you're adding Vegemite - you only need a small bit, otherwise the flavor of the seaweed will be overpowered. Once that's done, add the nori sheets, close, and eat. Preparation time: about twenty seconds. If you can make toast, you can make a seaweed sandwich.
Also, cut it diagonally. It looks classier that way.
Today - right now, actually, if my calculations are correct - is the Winter Solstice in the northern hemisphere, the shortest day of the year, technically when winter starts but really it already feels like it's at its deepest. There are still months yet to go before the sun starts setting at a time more reasonable than just after 4 o'clock in the afternoon. It's sort of a hard concept to illustrate with a photo - so here's the sun descending in vague alignment with the Vancouver street grid, as pedestrians cross Howe along Robson.
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With Kim Jong-il finally, finally dead, and his son Kim Jong-un set to take charge of what is quickly shaping up to be the world's first and only communist monarchy, two questions are heavy on many people's minds: now who's going to control the weather with his mind, and does this mean things might start to improve on the far side of the 38th parallel?It's tempting for people to think that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is on the cusp of change. This is not the case. It doesn't matter that Kim Jong-un was educated in the West or that it's the twenty-first century and Pyongyang's Soviet sugar daddy is long since gone, or that power will likely end up residing with the generals anyway. Over the last sixty years, the North Korean leadership has dug the country into a rut so wide and so deep it may never pull out of it.Well, I'll admit that "never" is a pretty big word. Nevertheless, despite overly optimistic people who seem to think that this could mark a new beginning for the people of the north, I can't help but think that even if North Korea was to become a free, open, truly democratic state tomorrow, it might take a hundred years to repair the damage that successive generations of Kims have done through neglect and pursuit of their mad cult of personality. Overseas a lot of people seem to take it for granted that the natural result is for the two Koreas to reunify, yet from what I understand this prospect is particularly unpopular in South Korea itself.It's not hard to see why. South Korea struggled for sixty years to get where it is today, and spent much of that time groaning under a military dictatorship that the United States stood behind because it was a stable bulwark against the Communists up north. During the Cold War, North Korea was actually better off in some respects than South Korea, thanks mainly to Soviet patronage. Today, two decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, North Korea is the biggest old-school communist state left, a pure relic of the Cold War. Its economy is a tattered basket case. Some people cite the example of West and East Germany - forgetting that outside East Berlin, East Germany at least possessed a functioning infrastructure.
It's easy to figure out where North Korea is from space. Just look for the spot where there isn't anything. Photo courtesy NASA.
Befitting its nature as an aggregate of silt, Lulu Island is a rather level place. Pretty much anywhere in its eastern half, its horizon is dominated by the main tower at the Lafarge cement plant in the southeast. It's visible equally well from parts of Delta and New Westminster. This photo was taken at maximum zoom from the intersection of Eighth Street and Queens Avenue in New Westminster, the absence of any other buildings notwithstanding, and I like the contrast between industry and nature here.
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"Oh, neat," the Chapters cashier said when I set down the latest issues of Analog and Asimov's. "I didn't even know we carried these." It's slightly paraphrased, since it's been a couple of months, but it's also a slight problem. Short story magazines were once the crucibles of writing in general, and science fiction in particular was first launched from the prewar pulps. Short stories were how many new writers entered the community. It wasn't until the 1970s that the balance started to tip in favor of using one's first novel to break down the clubhouse door.I can't help but wonder if a lot of that is due to what's happened to the short story magazines themselves. Sure, old stalwarts like the Big Three are still chugging along, but with a fraction of the regular subscribers they had only thirty years ago - according to the PS Form 3256 in the January/February 2012 issue of Analog, its average paid circulation per month over the last year was 29,105, down from 83,000 in 1990 and 104,000 in 1980. Clearly, something is happening. My own theory goes back to that Chapters cashier - that a big part of it is a simple lack of awareness, that a lot of people just don't realize these things even exist.I mean, for the longest time I didn't. When I was twelve, the Golden Age of science fiction, the only magazine I read was Nintendo Power. In retrospect, now that I've started adding issues from that time period to my collection, my twelve-year-old self wouldn't have had any trouble grasping the content. As it is, the earliest possible date I've been able to establish for encountering a science fiction magazine was the January 2001 issue of Asimov's - and even then I only realized it when the opening chapters of Allen Steele's Coyote had a niggling familiarity to them. It wasn't until 2003 that I found a place that I actually knew to sell them - the Trent University Bookstore. Even then it wasn't until around 2006 that I really started getting into them.
I have since worked to remedy that.
It's interesting what the camera can see when you change the default settings at the right time of day. For this picture, looking east along Cordova Street at around 4:30 in the afternoon, I had set my camera to a 0.6 second exposure time to compensate for the generally lessened light so close to sunset. I like the six-pointed star effect that it creates around all the headlights, traffic lights, and light standards, but that's ordinary - what I really like is the way the people in the crosswalk are rendered as blurry clouds of smoke, or in some cases shoes and boots with smoke curling out.
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One of the most precious things in the world a person can have is a sense of perspective - the capability to understand the degree to which something is important in the grand scheme of things. It's precious specifically because the vast majority of people either don't have such a sense, or sorely need to calibrate it. It's easy to make a mountain out of an anthill when you don't really understand mountains, and it's very easy to freak out about nuclear power when you only have a limited grasp of how nuclear power actually works.In his editorial for the January/February 2012 issue of Analog, Stan Schmidt called for perspective and understanding in the wake of the Fukushima disaster - covering, incidentally, similar ground as I did at the same time - but one thing he wrote struck me in particular. "I live near a nuclear power plant," he wrote, "and I often marvel that a routine plumbing repair there is front-page news; I can't think of any other industry in which such treatment would even be considered."It only took a couple of days for the Canadian media to prove the accuracy of that. On Wednesday, it was reported in the Globe and Mail - not on the front page, thankfully, but high up in the science/environment section - that the presently inactive Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station, New Brunswick's only nuclear power station, experienced a spill of four to six liters of radioactive heavy water while the plant's moderator was being filled. Note that this was specifically in the reactor building, and it was cleaned up by staff and it's no longer an issue.Still, for some people, uttering the word "radioactive" in the context of a nuclear plant is like Pavlov ringing one of his little bells. Also on Wednesday, the Globe ran a follow-up article - about the spill of four to six liters of radioactive water inside a nuclear power plant, just so we're clear - about how the Conservation Council of New Brunswick is seeking more information about what happened, because "there are too many unanswered questions."I've got an unanswered question, right here - do you have any idea how nuclear power generation really works, really?
Presented for your consideration, six liters' worth of containers. I didn't want to waste any water, so just pretend that they're full.
Construction on the new Port Mann Bridge, providing a more effective link between Surrey and Coquitlam, is proceeding apace and it's looking more and more like the SkyBridge every day. Particularly when you consider the degree to which the old Port Mann Bridge resembles the Patullo Bridge, it's practically as if the planners over there said "yeah, New Westminster is awesome, so let's just copy their style."
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I'm not particularly proud to be Canadian right now. It didn't take very long after Dear Leader Harper's mouthpiece announced, mere hours after returning from the Durban conference, that Canada would become the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol for the finger-pointing to start. Much of it is coming from the European Union, China, and India - understandably so, when you consider that by its actions, the government of Canada obviously doesn't care about what other countries think of it. Sure, Harper has since reared up on his hind legs and jawed about how he wants to work to create a solid framework that includes everyone and doesn't give China and India a free pass. It seems to me that he's chosen the most ass-backwards way of going about it. Why should China or India get on board with anything Canada wants now? Canada has demonstrated that it's a delinquent quitter.Fingers are also being pointed from within the country, too, and one such point particularly infuriated me - from the Globe and Mail, Stephen Gordon's short but stunning "Don’t blame the politicians, Canadians killed Kyoto."You hear that, Canadians? It's your fault. Yours alone. Your fault that back in 1997, Canada took on emissions reductions targets it had little hope of reaching... because of course that's the platform Chrétien ran on, wasn't it? Your fault that Stephen Harper is a relentless skeptic of Kyoto - I wouldn't be surprised if he was a full-on climate change skeptic, if only because so many people on that side of the spectrum have built this insane conspiratorial structure that betrays either their lack of understanding of the science involved, or their willingness to gamble with the future of the world. Your fault and not the government's. I mean, the people elected the government, so obviously, the people are responsible for what the government does, right?What a world that would be to live in. Doesn't bear much resemblance to this one, though.
Who cares about the future, anyway? Industry is where it's at.
A lot of people took the opportunity to board the Russian missile cruiser Varyag when it was in town for a port visit last month. It's easy to see that some of the most interesting photos would come from the bow, and so it was unsurprisingly packed with people when I came by and failed to get on. With the flagship of the Russian Navy's Pacific Fleet tied up in Vancouver with a SeaBus sailing practically right under her guns, it's interesting to see the degree things have changed over the last twenty years... in some respects, at least.
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Most people of my generation has at least some experience with edutainment games. Primarily at school, but sometime at home as well depending on what our folks wanted to learn, we'd be set in front of the keyboard and given leave to play a "game" that was teaching us something at the same time... the problem is that a lot of the time edutainment games just weren't very good, sacrificing the entertainment aspect for the education aspect. In fairness, though, it's rather difficult to build a non-transparent edutainment game, something that's fun in spite of being educational.One way to get around this is to build a game that is not itself educational, but which requires learning specific skills in order to succeed. Kerbal Space Program, an awesome spaceflight simulator game I've written about before, is one of these. As your rockets become more and more sophisticated and your flights become more and more ambitious, you can't help but learn about things like orbital mechanics, the way thrust works in a vacuum, and how difficult some things really are to pull off successfully. Like, say, moon landings. So far we've had six successful moon landings, and when you have even a bit of experience with a game like Kerbal Space Program, you know that it's a testament to the skill of everyone from Neil Armstrong to Gene Cernan that not a single moon landing ended with twisted debris strewn across the surface. The most successful of my first six moon landings were qualified by "included the fewest number of explosions." A powered descent on an airless world takes nerves of steel; Neil Armstrong's heart was doing 156 beats per minute during the final descent of Apollo 11. This is not simple stuff.That, in itself, is an important lesson - building up one's understanding that even if someone knows how to do something, that does not make it easy.
Making a successful Mun landing: hard. Making sure you have enough propellant left to get home: also hard. Going by the crew portraits, I think Jeb is the only one who truly grasps this. Kerbal Space Program is © Squad.
On Friday evening I watched the full moon rise over the North Shore Mountains. I'd never seen that before, and I'd certainly never been able to see the moon actually moving, but move it did. By the time I got down to the water, it was already high in the sky and shining bright with reflected sunlight. When the Burrard Pacific Breeze came by on its way to the Waterfront Station SeaBus dock, I knew that was all I needed. Vancouver in December can be an enrapturing place, just as long as it isn't raining.
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War never changes; it just gets more sophisticated. Last month, while the media was doing its utmost to marginalize and pigeonhole the Occupy movement, the United States military conducted a test launch of a new weapon platform: a hypersonic missile, capable of flight at five times the speed of sound, or six thousand kilometers per hour, and faster. This missile, fired from Hawaii, didn't even need half an hour to reach a target 3,700 kilometers away. It's all part of a project intended to give the United States the capacity to strike any target anywhere in the world within an hour and with ten-meter accuracy.The BBC's reporting on it is rather dry and slim, saying little more than "this happened. Here is a brief explanation of what it is and some of the basic reasons why it happened." What isn't really spoken about is what it means, and that's the truly important thing to consider. For one, it distinctly reminded me of George Friedman's The Next 100 Years, in which he forecasts the Third World War to start in 2050 with attacks by unmanned hypersonic aircraft against the United States, Poland, and the rest of its coalition. The way I see it, hypersonic missiles are poised to reinvent the idea of warfare similar to the way intercontinental ballistic missiles did in the mid-20th century, and destabilize the 21st century political environment.What really concerns me is how the United States will act when it has a hypersonic monopoly. It would have the ability to strike anyone, anywhere, with practically no warning at all, and whether or not an ability is used has little bearing on how that will be perceived elsewhere. I would imagine that once the United States starts building a hypersonic arsenal, everyone who is not already a staunch US ally will feel more threatened, and be justified in doing so. Missiles that fast can't be intercepted by aircraft, and it would take an extremely lucky shot for anti-aircraft defenses to knock one down. In many, many circumstances, hypersonic missiles would give the United States to strike anywhere it wants with utter impunity.
The Phalanx Close-In Weapon System aboard HMCS Algonquin. With an effective range of two kilometers, it'd have approximately one and one-quarter seconds to shoot down a hypersonic missile moving at Mach 5 before impact.
I don't know what the story behind this was. All I know is that a couple of weekends ago, someone left a rose on top of the electrical box at Columbia and Church in New Westminster. Perhaps it was a token of some sort; no way to know. It looked nice, though, and it was gone later. That's all I really know.
I'm not even sure if it's actually a rose.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
