Saturday, December 31, 2011

Photo: The Last Photo of 2011

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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Friday, December 30, 2011

Dedicated to the Opportunities

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.

Before I start, let's break it down. A dedicated traveller would be someone who has it in their mind to go somewhere well in advance, who takes the time to learn the lay of the land and has a firm idea of why they're going over there in the first place. Opportunistic tourism would be, well, just like what the Simpsons did in the episode where they visit Japan - hanging out in the airport waiting for literal last-minute sales on unfilled seats. While that sort of tourism isn't really anything to sniff at within North America, it's a bit different when you cross the Pacific. For one, not everyone in Japan speaks English. The average opportunistic tourist from North America would not be particularly likely to speak Japanese - and that right there would seriously compromise how much an opportunistic tourist could really understand over there.

Yet, even if one was completely unable to communicate, understanding would still creep through. Hell, even that brief experience would be valuable if it shocked the complacent out of their comfort zones.

"I wish that a million of us would visit the USSR," wrote Robert Heinlein in 1960. "The dollars the Kremlin would reap would be more than offset by the profit to us in having so many free men see with their own eyes what Communism is." While there's thankfully no such adversarial spirit between North America and Japan today, the underlying theme remains true - there is always a profit to society when a critical mass of its members gain a true understanding of something else, a wider perspective. Nothing can be comprehended in isolation - whether it's your country, your language, or your society, you cannot truly understand it without something to compare it to. Despite a patina of superficial similarity, Japan and North America represent starkly different cultures, and understanding what they do and do not have in common will leave a person who is better equipped to understand and interact with the world as it is, and not just how they imagine it to be.

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Photo: A Bump in the Canada Line

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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Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Put the Used to Good Use

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?

The way I see it, there's nothing wrong with used - it has its own functional, low-energy niche. It has character, too, and can act as a reminder that there's more than just what's in the stores - that there's more to life than the present day. Right now, on my coffee table, there's a coaster from the 1962 World's Fair in Seattle that I picked up for ten bucks at a store in New Westminster's Antique Alley, and it's just got that sort of historic character that would be extremely difficult to find in a "new" store.

Plus, the thing is fifty years old and still in good shape - that speaks to how well it was made, even as a promotional item. Do you think the modern crap that gets shovelled out of Chinese factories today will last fifty years? A lot of it won't last five years - hell, some of it doesn't last five days without breaking or exposing some manufacturing fault.

Generally speaking, you don't find wrecked or broken things in a used market - you find things that people just don't have a use for anymore. There's plenty of utility left in them.

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Photo: A Ferry at Sea

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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Monday, December 26, 2011

Short SF Review #21: You Source of Tears

"You Source of Tears," by Andrew Barton
Appeared in On Spec, Fall 2011


Once 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.

Subsequent work didn't go quite as fast. Drafts went back and forth between me and brave beta readers willing to tear the thing apart, and it was not until November 2008 and the fourth draft that I thought I'd beaten it into publishable form. My first target was Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, out of Australia; their submissions method is one of the best I've encountered among SF markets, in that even when you're rejected you're likely to get valuable commentary back from the valiant slush readers who looked it over. Even then, the story wasn't rejected; instead, the editors at ASIM were unable to find a place for it in their pages within their standard story retention time. The positive feedback comments from the readers who'd given their thumbs-up buoyed my spirits, so I turned it around again: this time to Fantasy & Science Fiction.

They rejected it in six days. So I sent it to Asimov's. They rejected it in January. At the time, On Spec was open to submissions, so I sent it their way and didn't hear anything until May 2009, when it was rejected - with reservations. I've seen it said that editors, on finding something that is very nearly publishable, are known to give suggestions and advice with an eye toward getting the story over that bump, and those at On Spec did just that. The story went through two more drafts through the rest of May. When I returned home from a visit to Chicago on October 4, 2009, there was a thick envelope waiting for me. I still have it today.

After that it was just a matter of waiting for the story to be committed to print, and worrying whether events in Europe would mean that my references to euros and the European Union would already be dated before the story was released. The version printed in On Spec does differ in some very minor ways from the seventh draft manuscript I have of the story, as there were a few tweaks made on the production side that I still need to integrate into my files. Being that it's already found a home for now, though, that's strictly a low-priority endeavor.

So that's how this particular story went from loosely drifting concept to something you can now find between covers. My recommendation - buy On Spec and read it, and also buy subsequent copies when they come out - help support the Canadian cultural sector, even if it does include things like stories about European astronauts who travel to a comet and what they find there.

ANDREW'S RATING: ERROR ERROR CONFLICT OF INTEREST DETECTED/5

Previous Short SF Reviews:

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Photo: A Very Merry

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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Saturday, December 24, 2011

Quaff Review #18: Bah Humbug

'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: 3/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

Friday, December 23, 2011

Photo: A Neighborly Synchronicity

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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Thursday, December 22, 2011

Fooding Up: The Seaweed Sandwich

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.

On its own, it's just a snack - nori is light enough that it doesn't come close to being a meal, any more than two slices of bread would be a meal. But it's a good snack, full of greens and sea vegetable power, and healthy to boot - 3.5 grams of nori, so about maybe six sheets, contains ten calories, zero fat, zero cholesterol, and fifteen percent of your daily recommended Vitamin C intake. Plus, it's good, with that special seaweed tang. So if you come across packages of roasted seaweed in the grocery store, pick it up and try it!

Now, though, it's time to eat. That sandwich you see up there? That's my breakfast.

Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Photo: The Shortest Day, the Longest Night

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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Tuesday, December 20, 2011

North Korea: Doomed For All Time?

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.

North Korea talks a big game, but its industrial plant seems to be mostly left over from the 1970s and isn't getting any less rusty. Perhaps the only really modern industrial area in the entire country is the Kaesong Industrial Region, a parcel of land just north of the Demilitarized Zone where South Korean manufacturers have been able to set up shop, and where the North Korean workers are paid a fraction of what their counterparts in South Korea would earn and significantly less than workers in China, even.

This, I think, is the most lileky future of North Korea once the Kim dynasty crumbles or becomes irrelevant. Not unification with South Korea but a precarious existence as the World's Sweatshop, as Randy McDonald predicted to me back in 2008. In decades to come, "MADE IN NORTH KOREA" labels may be as ubiquitous as "MADE IN CHINA" ones are today - and really, that may be the only way for North Korea to lift itself out of the hole it's been dug into. No one is going to invest the trillions of dollars necessary to bring North Korea into the modern world just for the sake of it. It's a harsh future, true, but at a certain point, the situation reaches a certain point in its trajectory that nothing can meaningfully change it.

That's the legacy of the Kims - grinding their country to a powder so fine that one day there'll be no choice but to build it anew.

Monday, December 19, 2011

Photo: Industry, Nature and the Setting Sun

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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Sunday, December 18, 2011

A Longing for the Shorts

"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.

Now that I'm a regular reader of them, my lack of access to them earlier in life is something I regret, in the sense of "what could have been." What things would have been like if my horizons could have been broadened so early, to know that there were things beyond Star Trek and Star Wars and whatever novels I had at the time. The big problem was, and is, availability. My high school library didn't carry them; the Barrie Public Library, to my knowledge, didn't carry them; back in the 1990s, there might not have been anyone selling in them in a place as podunk as Barrie - and when no one sells something, in the pre-web age it was easy to not realize such things existed at all.

So it goes back to people like the cashier, who could find these magazines interesting but honestly have no idea they are around. It's hardly a surprise - the only places I know in Metro Vancouver to find them are Chapters stores and that one magazine store on West 4th in Kits. It's a shame, because I feel there's still a vital niche that short stories can occupy, particularly with the recent rise of e-readers. With the recent successes of the electronic magazines Lightspeed and Redstone, among many others, the medium is far from dead yet. What it still needs, most of all, is to be recognized by its potential audience.

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Photo: Smoke People of Cordova Street

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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Friday, December 16, 2011

Waiter, Waiter, There's An Atom in My Water

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.

The website of the CCNB describes nuclear power as "not green, not cheap, and not needed" - which, when you consider that "Cutting Greenhouse Gases in NB" is in the same section of the website, tells you the degree to which this organization seems to be rooted in the real world, just like how it claims that Canada reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% below 1990 levels in 2020 is achievable... I suppose technically that's true, in the sense that it doesn't really violate any physical laws, like how I could just lie down in front of the SkyTrain when I go to work. Just because it isn't impossible it doesn't mean it's going to happen.

Too, there's the separate Nuclear Free NB website, which is exactly what you'd expect - the main logo is all red clouds, and the second post is selling bumper stickers carrying the message "FUKUSHIMA: Don't Let It Happen Here!" Because, you know, Fukushima Daiichi didn't experience catastrophe because it was hit by one of the most powerful earthquakes in the last ten thousand years and one of the most powerful tsunamis in the last thousand, and because it had been incompetently managed. People seriously advocating this should first be able to explain a mechanism for how a nuclear plant situated near the coast of the Bay of Fundy, shielded by Nova Scotia from the open Atlantic, far from any active fault lines, could "happen" the way Fukushima did.

Here, they're making perfect the enemy of good. Personally, I consider anti-nuclear organizations like this to be unwitting stooges of the true enemy, the big fossil fuel lobbies. If Point Lepreau was to be decomissioned, what do you think would make up the generating gap? Would it be renewables, or would New Brunswick just follow Germany's sterling example and replace its non-polluting, zero-carbon nuclear infrastructure with dirty, polluting, carbon-heavy coal? Coal's no stranger to New Brunswick - my great-grandfather was a New Brunswick coal miner.

But in the end, these things get traction because too many people have no understanding of how nuclear power plants work. It's not like in Blowups Happen, where constant monitoring and intervention was necessary to keep the plant from going up. Nuclear power is, on the whole, the safest form of power generation we have. Keep in mind that, even almost a year later, no one is known to have died as a result of the Fukushima disaster. Estimates range wildly for the toll of Chernobyl, from 30,000 to 985,000 premature cancer deaths... but compare this to the main alternative, coal power. Earlier this year, a report by the American Lung Association estimated that in the United States alone, thirteen thousand people are killed every year by power plant pollution. At this point, even by Greenpeace's estimate of 200,000 early cancer deaths, American coal plants have killed far more people than did Chernobyl.

We face grave challenges in the years to come, and if we want to have a hope of coming out the other end with any kind of strength, we cannot afford to discard zero-pollution, zero-carbon power generation because it gives some people the willies. The answer to that is education and proper oversight. It would be a dark future indeed that didn't have nuclear power in it.

Thursday, December 15, 2011

Photo: Bridging Again the Waters

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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Wednesday, December 14, 2011

Failing Kyoto After Failing Canadians

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.

The fact is, it is at the government's feet that this responsibility should be placed, both because of what it has done since 2006 and as the successor of previous governments. Canadian governments have rarely done anything that was of wide-scale, environmental value, or ever really considered the long-term consequences of their decisions. In fact, it was the government - under the aegis of the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation - that helped start the suburban explosion in Canada. It was the government that planned and built Ontario's highway systems, which through the magic of induced demand created a vast demand for use which had not been there before. It was the government that let the passenger rail system wither on the vine. It was the government - specifically, the Ontario government, but reflective of government actions nonetheless - that cancelled Toronto's Eglinton West subway project in 1995.

Sure, Canadians have "chosen" to live a lifestyle based on high per-capita carbon dioxide emissions. Really, though, how much of a choice was it for many people? Myself I count as lucky - I don't own a car, I rely exclusively on public transportation for getting around, and according to my latest bill from the City of New Westminster, over the last two months my apartment has consumed 191 kilowatt-hours of electricity - contrast this to the average consumption in the Lower Mainland, roughly 1,483 kilowatt-hours per two months. Granted, my laundry use isn't reflected in those figures, but somehow I doubt that thirty-four minutes of washing machine time and an hour of dryer time would significantly alter those numbers.

As I said, though, I'm lucky, because I had the freedom to choose to live in an area that met my requirements in this regard. A lot of people aren't. Perhaps they live in places that don't have good access to public transit and thus require them to drive, no matter what the person may want. Perhaps they did have a good thing going once, but their job relocated from downtown Vancouver to Langley or Surrey. Perhaps they're just trapped where they are and don't have the financial resources to do anything else.

The government, and past governments, could have made it easier for Canadians to choose to live lifestyles based on low carbon emissions. They didn't. The ultimate responsibility lies with the government, and to say otherwise is to give it a free pass from its misdeeds. The government is supposed to look beyond the everyday that the ordinary people are focused on; it's supposed to look ahead and work for the future.

It failed.

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Photo: Under Her Guns

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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Monday, December 12, 2011

A Key to Entertaining Education

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.

It's easy for us to make grand leaps of logic out of ignorance. To think that anything we don't understand is hard only because we don't understand it, and for someone who knows what they're doing it's child's play. The hard fact is, just because you know how to do a difficult thing doesn't make it stop being difficult, it just makes it stop being practically impossible.

That's a worthwhile education on its own, an idea of what it's really like up there - an appreciation for how difficult some things really are. I'm guilty of that, even just in the context of Kerbal Space Program; I really believed there was a chance that with the smallest fuel tank in the game only one-quarter full, I could not only establish a stable lunar parking orbit but execute the burn to get the crew home. What actually happened was that the fuel was exhausted barely after ascent had begun, and shortly thereafter the Mun gained a new crater. Brutal, unforgiving physics demonstrated how deep in error I was.

So I tried again, with a bigger fuel tank for the descent module. Wouldn't you know it, not only did I manage to land it safely, but took off again and brought the crew all the way home with just a sliver of fuel, despite the Mun swinging around to screw up my trajectory. That single mission taught me more about how spaceflight really works than an entire childhood spent reading starcharts and science books. There is a certain viscerality when you're actually doing these things, or as close to actuality as you can get through a computer screen.

This is what edutainment should be. Not just games where you shoot enemies by solving mathematical equations at them - things that are fun on their own, but demand comprehension of the underlying subject in order to succeed. That's how new things are learned and lessons are retained. A greater understanding of things like this means a people that's equipped to comprehend the way the world works, and that's just what we need in this sort of century.

Sunday, December 11, 2011

Photo: Full Moon Over the Inlet

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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Saturday, December 10, 2011

Unsafe at Any Hypersonic Speed?

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.

Sure, to a degree the United States already has this ability; but that's only to a degree. While its bombers can reach anywhere on Earth, a significant chunk of the modern American bomber force is subsonic. Aside from that, there are psychological factors at play: bombers are known, bombers are familiar - and bombers can be shot down. Even stealth aircraft can be shot down, as the Serbs proved back in 1999 when they shot down an F-117 during the NATO bombing campaign. That the United States has the capacity to send a bomber anywhere and drop some bunker-busters if it feels that it needs to doesn't really generate friction on its own.

Hypersonic missiles are a different story. Basically, unless you already operate a ballistic missile defense system, you're not stopping a hypermissile. Sure, you might be able to see it coming, you might be able to get out of its way, but nothing more than that.

Granted, I don't believe - at this point, at least - that the United States really would start using hypermissiles hither and yon outside of extremely unusual circumstances. The point, however, is not what it would do; the point is what it could do, and how that it is perceived by its rivals. It's easy to imagine how states that aren't on the best terms with Washington might see a hypermissile force as an existential threat. The way the reactions to such perceived threats manifest may greatly influence the geopolitical landscape as the century drags on.

Friday, December 9, 2011

Photo: A Columbia Street Rose

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.


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