Acts of Minor Treason

Photo: On the Off-Ramp

2012-01-30T08:31:00.000-08:00

It's not often that I'm in a position to take highway photographs. There's not much of a highway system here in British Columbia, and I don't drive anyway. In Ontario it's different; in the Greater Toronto Area, the highway network is one of the ways that the region keeps moving. GO Transit is another one of those means, and without it the whole area would grind and wheeze as two hundred thousand people looked for other ways to get where they need to be.

Here, a GO Transit bus turns off Highway 401 in what are yet farmlands just west of Mississauga.

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).

I Was A Preteen Star Trek Hat Kid

2012-01-29T11:33:00.000-08:00

You never forget your first - convention, that is. Back in the day, before the ubiquity of the internet linked fan communities from coast to coast and continent to continent, conventions were the prime mixers of fans and the places where fandoms were anchored. I didn't get the chance to attend Rustycon 29 in Seattle last week like I'd intended, thanks to western Washington being choked with snow, but on this grey and dismal New Westminster Sunday I thought I'd write a bit about my first convention, or at least the little of it that I can remember.

Today it's called Polaris, but twenty years ago it was known as Toronto Trek, being Toronto's preeminent Star Trek convention. In retrospect it's no surprise that this was my first intersection with the convention sphere; it was only because of my age and situation that the next time I crossed paths with that world wouldn't be until ten years later at Anime North. It was one of the many Star Trek conventions that had sprung up in the twenty years following the first such convention, back in 1972, when the syndication of the original series had allowed Star Trek fandom to retain its vitality. My mother took me there, and considering that we had shelves of Star Trek tie-in novels that constituted my first real look at the science fiction genre as well as the entire original run of Star Trek on those Columbia House VHS tapes, there's nothing surprising about that either.

let's see what this galaxy-class starship can do when it's in the middle of a hollywood warehouse

I don't recall very much about the convention itself. This would have been in the summer of 1993 or 1994, making me eleven years old at the most, and with both The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine fresh on the airwaves, it was energetic. I recall that it was busy, and there were a lot of cast and crew from the series in attendance. What I recall most strongly was a "stump-the-audience" event, because I won it.

The way it worked, to my recollection, was this - if you were in the audience, you could stand up and ask a trivia question related to Star Trek, and if nobody could answer it you won a prize. I'm not sure how much advance notice I had of the way it worked, but it was enough to formulate a plan: win by asking the most obscure question I could find. Fortunately, for that, I had the Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual. I'd read it again and again at home so I already had a fair idea of where to go, and I still remember the question I came up with when the event runners called on me.

"Where," I asked, "was the Starfleet Type 15 shuttlepod manufactured?" This was something that had never been stated on screen, ever, because really it's completely irrelevant, and in the days before on-the-fly smartphone access to Memory Alpha it would have had to come down to someone in the audience having memorized the section of the Technical Manual dealing with shuttlecraft and shuttlepods.

When the time ran out, no one had answered correctly - so I won! I had stumped the audience and I got to go up to the front to pick my prize. From what I remember and what was retold, there were two choices up there. The first was a complete soundtrack for the then-new Star Trek: Deep Space Nine on compact disc, and the second was a Deep Space Nine baseball hat.

So which one did I want, they asked?

"Umm... I don't think we have a CD player at home," I said. I certainly didn't, not at that point, but at that age I would have had only the vaguest notion of what a CD player even was - all the computer software I was familiar with at the time came on floppy disks, and when it came to music it was still the era of records and cassette tapes in my experience. "So I'll take the hat."

We did, of course, have a CD player at home. I was just totally unaware of that. I imagine that whoever ended up getting the CDs was thankful that I'd chosen the $10 hat instead. I don't know what happened to that hat - it disappeared sometime during the '90s, and I've never seen its like again.

Nevertheless, it was worth it. If nothing else, I suppose it was a significant learning experience for me - the first time, to my recollection, where I'd ever posed a question that a whole bunch of grownups couldn't answer. That's an incredibly empowering feeling for a kid, a big step on the road to independence and adulthood.

To answer the question: the Starbase 134 integration facility at Rigel VI.

Photo: Trolley on a Mission

2012-01-28T10:33:00.000-08:00

I never saw trolleybuses until I moved to Vancouver, and here they're all modern and top-of-the-line with digital displays and so on. San Francisco is one of the five other cities in North America that runs a trolleybus system, ant its aren't quite as new; buses such as this one on the 14 Mission route were delivered in the early 1990s and still mount the old-style signs, which I found to be a faintly strange juxtaposition in the modern day. It's just that in my experience, practically everything has gone digital by now.

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).

The Newt Jumped Over the Moon

2012-01-27T09:09:00.000-08:00

Nobody expected much from Newt Gingrich. His own name, so easy and so frequently mocked or just mistyped as "Gingrinch," is one of the strangest in modern American politics, and up until a week or so ago almost everyone was in agreement that he would soon drop out of the field of view as Mitt Romney relentlessly powered toward the Republican nomination. Gingrich's win in South Carolina changed all that, gave the Gingrinch that Stole Congress vast new potential - if not necessarily to win, then at least to be a serious competitor in the race. Personally, I find it preferable to Santorum getting spread around everywhere.

Mostly, though, Gingrich seems to have been running on the platform that he's not a super-capitalist, job-destroying corporate raider like Mitt Romney supposedly is. That may have got him enough traction in South Carolina to clinch the primary there, but it's not the sort of stuff that gets people talking. That had to wait until January 25, when in the Space Coast city of Cocoa, Florida he made a speech of the sort that I'd long since given up hope on hearing from a politician.

"By the end of my second term," Gingrich said with incredible optimism, "we will have the first permanent base on the Moon, and it will be American."

Not the sort of thing you usually hear coming from American political candidates, even in the context of fishing for Space Coast votes. It's the sort of bold, optimistic, triumphalist claim that feels completely out of place in the twenty-first century that we've stumbled into; it feels more like something out of the twenty-first century that we were looking forward to back in 1985 or so. A base on the moon!

Predictably enough, he's taking flak for it from all sides. The most common reaction I've found on Twitter, repeated again and again and again, is a variation of "will he be the first one to go there?" Jon Stewart took the plan to task, but since the video's on Hulu I can't find out what was actually said. However, it seems like the most common response is a mocking one, that the concept of a lunar base is in itself ridiculous or some kind of impossible dream. I'll admit that, yes, Gingrich's plan is possible.

Possible in that it does not contravene any currently-known physical laws, much like it's possible for me to quit my job tomorrow and walk to Halifax.

The way to the moon is a difficult one.

In particular, what I've noticed being picked up in the media is 13,000, Newt's magic number. The Huffington Post framed it as an integral part of his plan, that Newt is aiming to put not just a lunar base up there by the 2020s, but a colony thirteen thousand-strong. This is a bit of a misreading, I think. He does not actually state that he wants a base of that population to be done at that time; he's talking about a "Northwest Ordinance for Space" he apparently proposed early in his political career, about how when the American population of the moon passes 13,000 they would be able to petition Washington to form a new state.

That sort of population is another one of those things that is technically possible, but in the same way as me swimming the Atlantic from Halifax to Bordeaux and then walking from there to Vladivostok is technically possible. I was curious about it, so I ran the numbers using the SpaceX Dragon crew capsule, which will likely be the backbone of American spaceflight in the near future. The Dragon has a crew capacity of seven, so in order to have a 13,000-strong colony on Luna by January 19, 2021, the end of Gingrich's second term, there would need to be one thousand, eight hundred and fifty-eight launches.

Put another way, that's one launch a day every day for more than five years, starting in December 2015. Realistically, though, it would be considerably more than that, as that schedule of launches just leaves eighteen hundred capsules on the lunar surface and thirteen thousand people with no support systems whatsoever. The required cargo launches would vastly, vastly exceed the personnel launches, and in order to meet that schedule the first of thousands of Falcon 9 rockets would probably have to lumber off the pad next Tuesday. I don't think SpaceX has that kind of spare manufacturing capacity hanging around, though it would work wonders for economy-of-scale rocket production.

Even that ignores the political realities of a territorial claim on the moon. You can't do it, at least not under the current framework of space law. The Outer Space Treaty prohibits all national territorial claims to celestial bodies; presumably, one of the motivating forces of this was to throw up roadblocks to the crew of a successful Soviet moon mission establishing the Lunar Soviet Socialist Republic. I could understand ignorance from Romney or Ron Paul on this sort of thing, but I'd expect Gingrich would at least be aware of the Outer Space Treaty.

The biggest issue is, in the end, the fact that this is literally the worst time in history for the United States to seriously contemplate building a moonbase. At no time since the development of spaceflight has its economic and social situation been listing so severely. As alluring as the concept is, I have to admit that this is not the time for it. Here's hoping that as the years roll on, it won't just slip further out of reach.

Ultimately, though, my primal response to the news was this: god dammit, why did it have to be Newt?

Photo: Back to Front

2012-01-26T08:47:00.000-08:00

If you're aboard one of the white Mark II SkyTrains, no matter how busy it is there's one seat in each car that will usually be one of the last to be taken; the back-end seat, with an inspiring view of the other car. I'll admit, I can understand why people would think sitting there by choice is a bit off - you've got nothing to look at but the person in the next car.

Unless, of course, nobody's sitting in the equivalent seat in the next car. Which means you get to look at the interior of the next car. Inspiring, no?

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).

It's Just a Jump to the Left

2012-01-25T09:00:00.001-08:00

There must be something in the water at Toronto City Hall, or at least whatever Rob Ford and his steadily dwindling circle is drinking. Yesterday morning Hizzoner da Mayor of Greater Etobicoke went on AM640 talk radio, and I guess he may have been hungry from his new "rabbit diet" so he went and shoved his foot right in his mouth and chewed on it for a bit. By which I mean he made another statement that says "really? This man is actually the mayor of Toronto? This isn't just some extended joke like Vermin Supreme's presidential campaigns?"

So far I haven't encountered a recording or transcript of the broadcast, so I don't know the context in which Ford made his statement; though I'm hard-pressed to think of a context Rob Ford would be speaking in that would legitimize it. Nevertheless, here's what's got me all wound up today - his characterization of five of his particularly strident opponents in Toronto City Council as being "two steps left of Joe Stalin."

In some respects this both is and is not a surprise - it is because you would expect that basic standards of professional decency would dissuade you from openly likening your opponents to one of the worst dictators in history, yet it isn't because come on... this is Rob Ford we're talking about here. It seems like the man barely has a filter between his brain and his mouth. I would not be shocked if his thought process was something along the lines of "Stalin was a communist, communists are left-wing and bad, my opponents are left-wing, therefore my opponents are as bad as Stalin."

Though to be honest I cannot imagine Rob Ford ever using the word "therefore."

It's been too long since I brought this flag out, but at last its hour has come around again.

Some people - most likely the scattered remnants of Ford Nation - might be asking what the big problem is. It's certainly simple to find statements like that in newspaper comment threads. If you want to see the problem, just turn it around. Imagine that Adam Giambrone, say, was Mayor of Toronto today, and he referred to Rob Ford, Giorgio Mammoliti, and Denzil-Minnan Wong as being "two steps right of Adolf Hitler." He would have been burned to a crisp within hours, and rightly so. The front page of the Toronto Sun would not have been dominated by the "dead baby found in suitcase" story that it actually is today. I still remember the "Giam-boner" Sun covers after those emails came out a few years ago - in that sort of scenario, I have no doubt that the Sun's front cover would feature a picture of him with a toothbrush mustache photoshopped on.

The fact is that neither scenario is okay. Both dictators committed horrible crimes against their people and against humanity - for Stalin, look no further than the gulags or the Holodomor - and one of the only major differences is that we were never actively at war with the Soviet Union, so we're not accustomed to looking at Stalin through the "bad guy" lens. For Ford to attempt to tar his opponents with the brush of a dictator not only speaks volumes as to his evidently profound lack of historical awareness, but the content of his character as well.

Photo: Snowbirds in Motion

2012-01-24T09:52:00.000-08:00

Here's another one from the upper deck of New Westminster's downtown parkade, just after the big snowfall. The birds weren't all hanging out on the railing - in particular, the crows were poking around fresh litter and a discarded McDonald's bag looking for anything that could be classified as food. They probably had more luck with the litter. Of course, there are also the gulls; there are always the gulls.

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).

Taking Chances, Making Mistakes, Getting Messy

2012-01-23T11:56:00.000-08:00

A lot of people, it seems, have come to believe that the world is a fundamentally just place where good things happen to good people and if something bad happens to you, you must have done something to deserve it. It's called the Just World Fallacy and it's been with us for as long as can be remembered, because the alternative is living in a world where bad things can just happen to us no matter how much we've tried not to be an asshole. A great deal of people have would have difficulty living in this kind of world; nevertheless, one of the earliest lessons children learn is that life isn't fair.

So there are some mixed messages, of course. Not enough to keep plenty of people convinced of the notion that life is fundamentally fair, that if someone has an advantage it's because they earned it honestly, and if someone charges into a run of bad luck they obviously did something to justify it coming down on them.

This sort of thinking is particularly widespread in the United States, and at no time is it as visible as in the Presidential campaign season. I came to consider this earlier this weekend, when I encountered an article about the modern American political divide in the Toronto Star - specifically, the part hearkening back to a September debate, where Republican candidate Ron Paul was asked about the hypothetical situation of a healthy 30-year-old dude who elected not to hold medical insurance, only to suffer a serious accident that left him needing intensive care for six months.

"But congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?" Wolf Blitzer asks. The transcripts and videos I've found don't cover Ron Paul's response; for the purposes of this I'm not particularly interested in what he had to say. What I'm more focused on is the audience's response, members of the peanut gallery hooting and shouting yeah, that society should let that person die.

Because it was his own fault, you see. So the fallacy goes.

Do justice, and so on.

What concerns me is that it's a distinction that would be lost on a lot of people, or could be made to be lost by those in positions of authority who have an interest in making it lost. Right now in the United States, I imagine there are some people who could get health insurance but don't feel the need; I imagine there is a far, far greater number who could get health insurance, but feel that buying food and paying rent is more important. But because of the idea of the Just World, there are those in society that agree that those people should die because obviously they made the wrong choices, made too many mistakes, or otherwise they wouldn't be there.

Yet the world isn't just. Bad things happen to good people, and society is not on an even keel. There must be as many reasons why people believe otherwise as there are people who believe otherwise. Just a recognition of that, a rejection of the fallacy, by more people could do a lot to correct the sort of inequities the world faces today. Even if you think that society should allow a person to die for one simple mistake, that doesn't take into consideration the messes that come whether or not you want them to.

Photo: Mast in the Mist

2012-01-22T08:58:00.001-08:00

The banks of the Fraser River looked rather different after the snowstorm last weekend, and what looked like mist clung tenaciously to the Surrey and Annacis Island shores. There wasn't any ice afloat at that point, though, so navigation went on as normal - I caught the tug Harken No. 6 heading west. Is it just me, or does that boat have practically no freeboard?

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).

The Why of Climate

2012-01-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

I've never quite been able to wrap my head around what the deal is with particularly vociferous climate change skeptics, and why they think the way they do. Note that I'm not talking about the average person here, who most likely has only encountered very limited information and has drawn their conclusions based on their own observations and what they get from the media. The folks I'm thinking of here are more those who are, to put it bluntly, wild-eyed about it, ranging from furious notes in newspaper comment threads to sending death threats to climate scientists.

The idea that it's just about the money doesn't ring true to me. Sure, some opposition I've encountered is predicated on the notion that climate change was made up by scientists so that they could get more grant money - yes, I actually did encounter someone claiming that - or that it's just another tax grab. Personally, I'm curious as to how or whether these arguments will change once we start getting ice-free summers in the Arctic, but I don't think it's really explanatory of what's going on here. A lot of the talk seems to be particularly emotionally charged.

Whatever's going on, it's something I'd like to be able to understand, so that I can take it into account in my own thinking. Besides, if you have any hope at all of getting an argument of yours through to someone else, you need to know where they're coming from. What may be a slam-dunk argument for you could just be a rubber ball bouncing off a concrete wall when used on someone else. So it's something that I do think about, off and on - the question of the manner in which some people reach the conclusion that climate change is bunk.

My latest theory - for some people, at least, it may be based on a mix of weather and humility.

A snow-covered tree in downtown New Westminster - January 15, 2012.

I'd intended to be in Seattle right now, attending a convention and exploring the Emerald City during the rainiest time of the year. Instead, earlier this week four inches of snow fell on the city, and while that's essentially nothing for eastern cities that know well the cold touch of winter, here in the Pacific Northwest winter means rain and lots of it. Those four inches of snow represented a substantial chunk of Seattle's total yearly snowfall average, and it played merry hell with transportation around the city. In particular, Wednesday's afternoon Vancouver-Seattle run of the Amtrak Cascades was cancelled because of weather issues, leaving me high and dry in the Lower Mainland, and it wasn't until today that normal Cascades service started to resume along the length of the route.

It's not a shock that this happened, though, when you know why - the jet stream, a powerful air current that's one of the prime governors of Canadian weather, bent to the south and allowed a sustained blast of cold Arctic air to rush in over the Pacific Northwest, transforming the usual rain into freezing rain and snow. The jet stream was likewise the proximate cause of the unseasonably mild and dry December experienced across North America, because it stayed far to the north and kept the arctic air bottled up tight - this is why cities in Alaska have seen more than four meters of snow pile up so far this winter.

Seeing things such as this, then - weather patterns at the mercy of air currents, cities paralyzed by forces of nature - is it any wonder that some people have trouble accepting the notion that humanity is a prime influencer of the climate? Look at the English language, for example - "force of nature" is just another way of saying "something that cannot be stopped." We're accustomed to thinking of nature as something above us, beyond us, that we're powerless to control.

That may be so, but the failing here is just because we can't control something, that doesn't mean we're unable to influence it. One of the prime notions of climate change is that by adding heat, and thus energy, to the system of nature, we are potentially influencing it in a negative manner. Nature will still barrel on, wholly heedless of us, but the danger is that it will barrel on in a new direction, one in which we're not used to dealing with. That's what the big uncertainty is here - we have no idea precisely what dumping all this energy into the system will do. We've unintentionally begun a grand climate experiment with Earth as the laboratory... but it's not a scientifically rigorous experiment, unfortunately.

There's no control group, you see.

Photo: Victoria Street Sunset

2012-01-20T10:30:00.000-08:00

Say what you will about how the Pacific Northwest isn't equipped to deal with snow in winter, the fact of the matter is that once it's done and the skies have cleared, what's left generally looks a lot better than the usual dreary puddles. For me, a winter without snow isn't much of a winter at all, and more like early November but several months long. When snow's around, it makes things around it seem just a little bit brighter.

After the first series of snowfalls last weekend, I took this shot looking along Victoria Street in New Westminster. Looks a lot brighter than what we'd have got after a rain to me.

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).

The Trouble With TransCanada

2012-01-19T10:16:00.001-08:00

Think of it as the circulatory system of the Alberta tar sands. The Keystone Pipeline System, which presently connects the petroleum town of Hardisty, Alberta with refineries in Illinois, is one of the main ways by which all that synthetic crude oil is shipped out of Snow Texas. It's been in the news recently thanks to dickering over the Keystone XL. This extension of the pipeline, in the works for the last few years, would run south to the United States Gulf Coast, where the oil could be refined and loaded directly onto tankers - much like how the Canadian government wants to ram the Northern Gateway Pipeline through the British Columbia upcountry, to be loaded onto tankers in Kitimat for shipment to China. The difference between the two is that since Keystone XL passes through the United States, it's the United States government that decides whether or not to let it pass.

After what seemed like an eternity of back and forth, with people in town halls speaking out for it or against it, environmentalists trying to raise the word against and the oil industry attempting to stack the debate in its favor with things like the "ethical oil" claim, the State Department yesterday denied TransCanada the necessary Presidential Permit to build the Keystone XL. Among its opponents, cheers and celebration all around.

TransCanada, of course, was ready for this contingency, and didn't waste much time in shooting back - though in this case "shooting back" takes the form doing pretty much the same thing they already did, since they're just re-applying for the permit. What really got me about this is the memetic angle they're using in their pursuit of the Keystone - though, to be honest, it's not really surprising in light of the "ethical oil" angle. In fact, according to them the Keystone XL is the democratic choice, because otherwise American oil will come from "countries who do not share democratic values Canadians and Americans are privileged to have."

TransCanada CEO Russ Girling put it bluntly, saying that "the U.S. will continue to import millions of barrels of conflict oil from the Middle East and Venezuela" without the pipeline - wait, WHAT? Did he seriously just utter the words "conflict oil" with what was presumably a straight face? I know exactly what he's trying to do here, draw a line connecting oil from the Mideast and Venezuela - in other words, current American rivals - with the conflict diamonds of Africa, mined in war zones and sold to finance wars or revolutions or insurgencies.

I found the sheer cheek in that statement to be despicable - how dare he? Sure, Saudi Arabia isn't exactly a hotbed of democracy and Hugo Chavez has spent the last thirteen years steering Venezuela onto a course that doesn't simply parallel the United States. Neither country is currently involved in a war or experiencing an armed insurrection. They just aren't assured providers, the way Canada is. Venezuela and Saudi Arabia can always take their balls and go home. Canada, thanks to the decisions of the last twenty-five years, lacks that option. Canada is trapped in an American orbit with insufficient delta-v to achieve escape velocity.

I wouldn't be as irritated about this, I suspect, if it wasn't so transparent on TransCanada's part. A society-wide push for "ethical products" would, if done correctly, do a lot of good for worker's conditions and the health of the North American economy; I mean, is it even possible anymore to buy something that wasn't made in some Pearl River Delta factory sweatshop, the sort of place where workers are threatening suicide over the conditions? For some things, like consumer electronics, it pretty much is impossible. Focusing just on "ethical oil" is a particularly narrow view, where "ethical" does not mean "the right thing to do" so much as it means "the right thing to do for those with an economic stake in the tar sands." The way I see it, an honest appraisal of ethical oil would include strong actions to minimize the use of it and switch over to other sources of fuel, because isn't it ethical to minimize the environmental impact we're going to leave our successors? Isn't it ethical to ensure that future generations have access to the same resource we did, so that they can get good things out of it as well?

Unfortunately, that kind of thinking is vastly out of step with the modern world, "ethics" and all.

Imagine A World Without Free Knowledge

2012-01-18T00:22:00.001-08:00

Quaff Review #19: Eel River Açaí Berry Wheat Ale

2012-01-17T09:43:00.000-08:00

It seems like all this açaí berry stuff came out of nowhere in the last five or so years; I certainly never heard of it while I was in university, but now it's got to the point where the net is full of scams pumping the supposed healing and energy-giving qualities of the berry, scams that give your decidedly non-açaí berry-related workplace telephone number as the cancellation line. They come from the South American açaí palm and are a key food source in the Amazon region, to the extent that açaí palm groves are starting to rebuild damaged portions of the rainforest.

So it should come as no surprise that someone's taken this Brazilian "wonder fruit" and mixed it into a beer. Specifically, it's the Eel River Brewing Company in Fortuna, California - well, technically Scotia, California, a nearby census-designated place - that's done it. Their Açaí Berry Wheat Ale is the first product of theirs I've seen on any shelves in British Columbia, but that's all right, since it's also the first beer I've encountered that contains açaí. I'm pretty sure that that, in itself, was a major component of the marketing for this particular beer - allowing it to sell itself through people doing a doubletake at the label. It's something you expect in health juice drinks that cost $10 per bottle and go on and on about how much of an antioxidant it is, not a $3.50 bottle of beer.

In fact, the label doesn't give much space to anything else. Aside from the government warning that comes standard on American beer labels, there's just the basic refund notes and beer information - 12 fl. oz., 4.0% alcohol by volume, and its organic certifications. That last one isn't exactly surprising, though - the bottlecap is given over to a USDA Organic logo, and it appears that every last beer in Eel River's lineup is organic. No notes about the beer itself, why they made it this way, and so on; their website isn't much more helpful, and spares only a sentence describing it as "a light-bodied wheat ale... a flavorful mix of pomegranate and berries" before launching into what foods it's best paired with and what awards it's won.

I didn't look up the website until I started writing this, and so when I drank it I was coming in with no preconceived notions to the extent that I couldn't even remember if I'd tasted açaí berries before. I picked it up to ring in 2012, and yet I didn't get around to drinking it until January was at least a week old.

The first thing I noticed was that for all of its ingredients, the scent of this beer is dominated by it being a wheat beer; I found the smell very similar to KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer and generally unlike most other beers. The wheat likewise dominated the taste at first though was quickly overwhelmed by the açaí which, to my tastebuds, seemed rather like blueberries. While strong, the fruit taste didn't take over the beer but merely supplemented the wheat.

In body, this was a smooth, non-viscous, somewhat watery beer, though no less flavorful because of that and by no means weak. Still, with 4% alcohol content it's not particularly strong either; call it welterweight. It's the sort of beer to be enjoyed rather than simply consumed - go with something cheap like Rainier or Lucky Lager if that's all you're looking for. It's a good beer to accompany a good relax.

And if you've been wondering, it's pronounced "ah-SIGH-ee." Portuguese, you see.

ANDREW'S RATING: 3.5/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

#18: Bah Humbug
#17: KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer
#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: This Bird's Got Places to Be

2012-01-16T08:10:00.000-08:00

There were three crows and a seagull chilling on the parkade railing after the snowfall, keeping a calm watch over the Fraser River and presumably looking for something to eat. I was setting up a shot of all of them when they started to take off, one after another, in a flurry of feathers and snowflakes. This crow here was the last to take flight, and I still can't believe I got to the button in time. Usually when I try to capture a crow in motion, I'll get a few tailfeathers at one end of the photo if I'm lucky.

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).

It's "Due to the Dead," Not "Do to the Dead"

2012-01-15T09:43:00.000-08:00

It's a simple truth of life that no matter how pure and good something is, you can easily find someone standing against it - a task that has become far, far simpler with the ubiquity of the net. The natural corollary is that there is nothing so coarse and vile that you won't be able to find someone cheerleading it. Case in point - the recent storm surrounding the video that made its way into the world, depicting United States Marines in Afghanistan pissing on the corpses of dead Taliban fighters. This is undoubtedly something that has happened times uncountable in the long and bloody history of humanity, but it's not often that the world gets a direct window on it - and just because it's been happened time and again, it doesn't make it any more excusable.

There's a little thing, after all, called having respect for the dead. After all, when the crew of RML 497 recovered the body of Obermachinist Pigorsch in the North Sea during the height of the Second World War, they didn't urinate on it - they buried it at sea in sight of Europe. War is a notoriously dehumanizing thing, and it's through even small courtesies like paying proper respect to the dead that people involved in it can keep from having the abyss swallow them.

History, however, has amply demonstrated that the abyss is plenty hungry in Afghanistan; take the First Anglo-Afghan War, for one example among many. What it hasn't had so much opportunity to show is people back home standing up and applauding barbaric actions - and yes, that's exactly what I think this is, a barbaric action. Pissing on the corpse of a dead fighter is something I'd expect from some grunting Visigoth tearing down the walls of Rome. I goddamn well expect better than that from a member of the United States Marine Corps. People today are supposed to stand above that sort of base revenge - sure, everyone stumbles from time to time, but this is more like throwing oneself off the edge.

Like I said, though, you can always find someone cheerleading for something, no matter how heinous. So it goes with this. Recently Dana Loesch, editor-in-chief of the CNN-contributing news blog Big Journalism, used her talk radio pulpit to argue in support of pissing on the dead. I found coverage of this on Little Green Footballs, a blog that incidentally has changed a vast, staggering amount since I was in university, along with the audio itself on YouTube. Listen to it. Since I don't listen to talk radio myself, particularly conservative American talk radio, I have no idea how "fringe" this is, or even if it is. Certainly the idea that "progressive" is a pejorative term has been spreading slowly but steadily through the American right wing since 2008.

"Can someone explain to me if there's supposed to be a scandal that someone pees on the corpse of a Taliban fighter? Someone who's part of an organization that murdered over three thousand Americans?" she asks, rather rhetorically. "I'd drop trou and do it too. That's me, though."

In situations like this I find it somewhat difficult to fully come to grips with the other person's thought process, mainly because we're hammering at the same situation from two vastly different perspectives. In her subsequent defense against "the usual mob of progressive haters," which I suppose applies to me now as well, she chooses to defend herself by saying, "In my Twitter timeline yesterday progressives called our military 'killers, kids, barbaric trash, murderers...'" and that because the same people didn't raise a stink over the Air Force dumping some cremated partial remains of dead soldiers into a landfill, their arguments are automatically invalid.

That last one is a horrid thing, disrespect for the dead - but disrespect of a different sort, one that should be dealt with a different way. Yet it's not material to the subject at hand. Loesch's defense is a scattershot attempt to discredit the people who disagree with her - which isn't really surprising; she evidently believes from what she's said and written that there was nothing wrong with Marines pissing on dead Taliban fighters, and so she doesn't see any reason to justify it. At least, that's what it seems like to me.

Still, it remains a bad thing, an intensely negative thing, something that's worth being called a scandal no matter how much people like Dana Loesch argue. To see why, simply turn it around - consider a situation where a bunch of Taliban fighters killed some US, or Canadian, or any ISAF troops, pissed on their corpses, and the video got out on YouTube. Would people like Loesch still be saying that this wasn't a scandal? Not likely. If the reverse happened the right-wing blogosphere would be on fire.

"I’ve seen more outrage towards our troops over this incident than I have ever seen towards the Taliban themselves who’ve beheaded soldiers (American and Afghan), raped and tortured women, sent out suicide bombers, and carried out horrific attacks," Leisch wrote. Allow me to be blunt in response.

We expect that sort of thing from the Taliban.

We expect our people to FUCKING BE BETTER THAN THAT.

Photo: The Sort of Snow I've Known Before

2012-01-14T09:31:00.000-08:00

Finally it's starting to look like a real winter; last night, the first snowflakes of 2012 fell on New Westminster and across the Lower Mainland. It kept up all through the night and is still coming down as I write this, though more softly than before. Nevertheless, the snow I've encountered since moving out west has just been a pittance next to what growing up in Central Ontario taught me was "normal." Take this photo, for example - taken on December 1, 2003, it's one of the oldest in my files, a view from the window of my old university apartment as the snow comes down around the intersection of Charlotte Street and Aylmer Street North in Peterborough, Ontario.

You don't see many GM New Look buses like that around anymore, either.

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).

Popping the Hood, Checking the Bucks

2012-01-13T09:51:00.001-08:00

Vancouver transit riders have been able to breathe easy for a while when it comes to fare hikes - after all, there haven't been any since 2010. It's a much preferable situation to the one which prevails in Toronto, where fares have gone up twice in the last two years, most recently from $3 to $3.10, because fare increases aren't irritating enough on their own without throwing dimes into the mix. Still, even though the fares have held pat, the costs of living and operating haven't, and so earlier this week TransLink applied to raise transit fares in Metro Vancouver in 2013, subject to approval. If approved, a one-zone fare will go from $2.50 to $2.75, while two- and three-zones would be increased to $4.25 and $5.50, respectively.

2013 is a ways away yet, but there's already grumbling in the comment threads. I noticed one person for whom this increase was the last straw, that thanks to TransLink they'd be putting their car back on the road and nuts to them. It's not an unexpected result. One thing Toronto papers repeat time and again as TTC fare increases loom is that each increase will drive a certain percentage of riders back to their cars. Fair enough; everyone has their breaking point, and some people only merely tolerate transit. I know that my view of it certainly isn't universal. Encountering comments like that, though, of people fulminating against a few more quarters every day, made me wonder about the economics of getting around with four wheels instead of on the train - whether a car would make economic sense for me, so that I can have a better understanding of the people who do use them.

For this hypothetical, my assumption is that one day I wake up and have decided to reinvent my life. The first priority is, of course, to buy a car since I currently have none. For this I consulted Craigslist, and found someone selling a 1997 Honda Accord for $2,700 - it's within what I would imagine to be my price range, so I'm using it here. For the purposes of figuring out the cost, I'll assume that it's bought outright.

One advantage of purely hypothetical car purchases off Craigslist is that you don't have to worry about ornery sellers or unwelcome surprises under the hood.

According to the US Department of Energy's Fuel Economy website, the '97 Accord gets 22 miles per gallon, which works out to 9.35 kilometers per liter. Not the greatest mileage, but not the worst either. From my apartment in New Westminster, it's about twenty kilometers to my workplace in downtown Vancouver by Google Maps - which interestingly enough quotes a travel time of thirty-three minutes, actually slightly longer than my SkyTrain commute; must be all that traffic on the Kingsway. Thus, my travels to each work shift would consume 4.27 liters of gasoline, which resolves to 21.35 liters per week and 85.4 liters per month. The '97 Accord has a 64.45 liter tank, so with that consumption pattern I would need to refuel once in the first month.

When I entered the job market back in 2000 I started out as a gas monkey, pumping fuel at a full service station along Highway 400 in south Barrie. Prices then, even for the premium fuel, were far lower than they are today, which may be another one of the reasons why so many people of my generation are re-evaluating the value of car ownership. According to VancouverGasPrices.com today's average gasoline price is $1.29/liter trending upwards. At this price, my fuel cost to get to and from work per day would be $5.50 - the cost of a one-way three-zone ticket in 2013 if TransLink's request goes through. This resolves to a monthly cost of $110.16, which is effectively equal to my $110 two-zone FareCard.

Looking at those numbers, some people might say that the car makes economic sense - I wouldn't have to cram myself into a train packed full of Canucks fans heading back to Surrey, for example - but that would be disingenuous. Fuel isn't the whole story here, no matter how much some people are tempted to read it as that. My car would have to exist somewhere while I was at work, after all - so I consulted three EasyPark lots in the downtown core. The cheapest, Lot 3 at 535 Richards, would cost me $15 per day with my shift, and the one under the Pacific Centre would be most expensive at $29 per day. Going with the least expensive option of these takes my effective daily transit cost to $20.50 - at that rate, I'd spend the cost of my FareCard in six days. Plus, at home there's costs to consider - my building charges $10/month, I believe, for the use of one of its spaces.

Then there's insurance. I can't put down an honest dollar figure here, as I have never held my own car insurance policy. I'll just have to leave that as a significant but undefined number. The same with maintenance - a fifteen-year-old car could just as easily purr like a kitten or need a $2000 cough suppressant.

With those numbers, then, my transit cost to work comes to $410/month - a significant portion of my pay; it would in fact work out to be my second-largest monthly expenditure after rent, though since the charges would come in ones and twos scattered throughout rather than in one lump sum, it would probably be easier to look past. Yet that's not the whole story, either. For the purposes of this hypothetical I replaced my commute only, trading my regular SkyTrain use for car use. I regularly use the SkyTrain and bus system on weekends or vacation days to get places around Metro Vancouver; I imagine it would be the same if I had a car, and that would just send the dollar amount ticking upward again.

So, for me at least, would a car make economic sense? It appears that the numbers reflect the conclusion I've held for along time, which is hell no!

Photo: Bike Lanes Make Me Hornby

2012-01-12T09:18:00.000-08:00

I recall, a year or so ago, that it was a rather big thing in the media when the City of Vancouver installed separated bike lanes along Hornby Street; in particular I recall business owners along Hornby claiming that the lane would put them out of business because of the loss of parking spots that had to be removed to make room for it. Similar arguments are being raised now in New Westminster regarding the bike lane along Columbia Street. From where I've been standing, it doesn't look like the openness to bicyclists and pedestrians has been that damaging.

This is them, the Hornby bike lanes, looking south from the foot of the street. I can't take credit for the title - I saw it on a line of T-shirts that Vision Vancouver had around the time the lane was completed.

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).

Another Flag for Free Cascadia

2012-01-11T10:08:00.001-08:00

For a movement that has essentially no real-world political presence, there's a surprising variety of iconography available on the internet for the purely theoretical Republic of Cascadia. After having been west of the Rockies for this long, I have to admit that the idea of a union between British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon has become an increasingly appealing prospect. Even a year ago I thought it was real low-probability stuff, but the more I read about the political and economic situation in the Western world in general and the United States in particular, the more I can hear those distant, tortured groans as the world buckles under the weight we've piled upon it. The more I doubt that the map of North America several decades hence will closely resemble the maps you'll find today.

Granted, it's still low-probability; it just seems less so than before. Even in the salad days of the early 2000s and 1990s, there were those who explored the notion of Cascadia independent. One of the touchstones of that has always been a flag - after all, what's a country without a flag? The flag is a symbol to bind peoples together, to represent a country's situation or struggles on a piece of fabric waving in the wind - it's something to rally around.

It's just that some of the Cascadian flags out there are really... meh, in my opinion. Not bad, not with so many actual country, province, state and city flags that are manifestly horrid - for example, the flags of Pocatello, Idaho and Provo, Utah, which resemble nothing so much as the box art of personal productivity software. Right now, the effectively official Cascadian flag - as "official" as something like this can get, anyway - is the Douglas fir flag, which consists of a Douglas fir tree charged on a horizontal blue, white, and green tricolor.

I've never liked it, really - there was always something about it. Having thought about it more recently, it's because of the tree itself; it just looks too complicated to me. One of the core necessities of a good flag, as related by the North American Vexillogical Association, is to keep it simple. While the idea of the tricolor is simple, the tree isn't - it's got a realistic appearance, with branches and void space here and there, and thus brings what I feel is an unnecessary complexity to the flag. Granted, that alone hasn't kept flags down in the past; the alternately straight and wavy sunrays on the flag of British Columbia have a level of complexity to them as well, though not to the same degree.

There are other flags, of course; perform an image search for "flag of Cascadia" and you'll run across plenty. The only thing they tend to have in common is the blue-white-green color scheme; specific references to nature are common but not universal. I rejected those flags. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... one that I made myself.

Here, my intention was simplicity first and foremost; this flag of Cascadia is made entirely of geometric shapes while retaining the straightforwardness of the standard Cascadian tricolor. Here, the green symbolizes the forested land, open fields and environmental awareness of Cascadia, the white for the mountains that give it its name, the three joined peaks to represent the unity of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon within Cascadia, and the blue both for the sky and the Pacific. My original concept for the flag had it rotated ninety degrees counterclockwise, to represent Cascadia's north-south geography, but I couldn't get it to look quite right.

I'll admit that I'm not much of a flag guy; this is only the third one I've designed and the first that's entirely from scratch, not reusing any elements from other flags in order to connote a connection. Still, this is what I made. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't - personally, I like it fine.

Here's hoping I haven't just recreated some flag I've never encountered before.

Photo: Millennium in Motion

2012-01-10T08:37:00.000-08:00

Some photos are purely opportunistic, based on an instant's realization that something could look interesting. That's the kind of thought I had while I was waiting on the Lougheed Town Centre platform the other night, and since Lougheed will be a Millennium Line-only station until 2016, I had a fair bit of time to wait. Here, a train bound for VCC-Clark accelerates past the far platform, reflected in the platform barriers that, I suppose, keep people from climbing up to the track from the ground and electrocuting themselves on the third rail.

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).

The Park(ade) of the Covenant

2012-01-09T10:06:00.000-08:00

For much of the twentieth century it was there, balanced on those dozens of bare metal supports drilled into the ground, standing between the city and its waterfront. The New Westminster Waterfront Parkade appears to be the single largest assembly of parking spaces in the downtown area, with seven hundred and forty-nine spots available, but at the cost of completely overshadowing Front Street and acting as a physical and psychological barrier - not to the same degree as something like the Gardiner Expressway in Toronto, but a barrier nonetheless. The approaching completion of Westminster Pier Park may change this, but for now the parkade is, for all its potential utility, a definite eyesore that means downtown perpetually has one foot in the 1950s.

What's worse is that it's not even heavily utilized. Back in 2008, the city government found that demand for the parkade's spots was such that there was only a 38.3% usage rate; I visit the parkade fairly regularly on the weekends, as its top deck provides an excellent vantage point for photographs of the bridges, the mountains, the river, and the Surrey waterfront, and in my experience it's never seemed as if even a third of the spaces were being used. Meanwhile, down underneath the business of Front Street soldier on in obscurity, with handmade signs placed at strategic Columbia Street intersections to let people know that, yes, there are actual things underneath that hulking assembly of green-painted steel. Only to a degree, though; Front Street is a wasteland between McKenzie and Begbie, and I can think of only a single business that actually operates there between the shuttered doors and newspapered windows.

Recently, though, downtown New West has begun to experience a renaissance. Much of the preparation for this was made before I arrived, but even in the last year I've seen the development of downtown with the opening of River Market and the transit-oriented construction around New Westminster Station and the work on the Pier Park and the Multi-Use Civic Facility. Downtown New West may be leaping into the twenty-first century, but... there's still the issue of the parkade; there's a small but growing divide between those who want to maintain it and those who want to tear some of it down.

It's the business owners of downtown New West, by and large, that want the thing to stay up. Last week the New Westminster News Leader covered some of the issues surrounding the parkade; Bill Shannon of the Downtown Business Improvement Area led off the article with concerns about how a lack of parking could increase uncertainty for businesses, particularly with so many new people coming to downtown in line with the new developments. I can understand where the BIA's concerns come from, but I can't help but feel they're rooted in a view that is becoming increasingly out of step with the modern world.

The upper deck of the western end of the downtown parkade, photographed on Sunday, January 8 at 2:30 PM. This is the section currently being considered for removal by the city.

The BIA's concern is that a more people coming to downtown New West to live or to visit will create a parking crunch; based on what I see, I can't take that view. The civic facility will include a small parkade of its own when it's finished, and there's already significant on-street and in-lot parking in downtown for visitors to the pier park. What I take issue with in this is what seems to be an unconscious twentieth-century bias; all people are assumed, as a matter of course, to be reaching downtown by car.

My own view is that private vehicles will bear an increasingly small percentage of the modal share for transportation to downtown as time goes on. It's easy to get to downtown by transit; it's bracketed by two SkyTrain stations, an advantage that many cities in the Lower Mainland lack. Beyond that, I don't see how an increase in downtown's population will be the salvation of the parkade; it seems to me that people who live downtown would patronize downtown businesses as pedestrians, not drivers.

My own view is that the city should remove the underused, western portion of the parkade. It would open up an entire block of Front Street to the sky and to the riverfront. If additional parking does become necessary somewhere down the line, I'd rather see the city investing in a new structure that's far more integrated with its surroundings, and which doesn't look like it'll come down like a bunch of Jenga blocks in an earthquake.

I'd like to see downtown really move into the twenty-first century. Re-evaluating the parkade would, I think, be a good place to start.

Photo: Breaking Down, Building Up

2012-01-08T11:43:00.000-08:00

When I moved to New Westminster in 2010, there wasn't much to distinguish Alexander Street. It was just one of multiple small, mid-block roads where you could find a few small businesses, a Money Mart, a corner grocery store, and so on. That's all gone now, because it's the site of New Westminster's new Multi-Use Civic Facility, still unnamed and with completion not expected until late 2013. Right now the site is still being readied in preparation for construction. I'm interested in seeing what this thing looks like once it's finally done; also, what they decide to name it. Names are important, after all.

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).

A Den of VIPRs

2012-01-07T10:58:00.000-08:00

At this point, it's unlikely that we'd be able to go back to the way things were twelve years ago; too many variables have changed, too many vested interests have entrenched themselves. It's difficult to project a near-term future where the security theatre that's become increasingly dominant in the West in general and the United States in particular will take a step back - instead, what's easiest to see is a future where that security theatre keeps moving forward, grimly and relentlessly, and in the name of security it may stamp freedom into the dust.

On the face of it, Canada and the United States responded to the September 11 attacks in similar ways; where the US set up the TSA under the Department of Homeland Security to take over airport security, which up until then had been overseen by one of the airlines using that airport, Canada established CATSA. The airport experience in both countries is broadly similar; airports on both sides of the border have pornoscanners, though you won't necessarily have to go through them, and while they didn't made me take my shoes off in the screening lines at Vancouver or Fredericton, that's been the case in Toronto and Los Angeles. The liquid restriction rule, intended to prevent binary explosives like in Die Hard With a Vengeance being brought on board, is universal, which for me just makes Amtrak that much more attractive for cross-border travel.

There is, however, one key difference; it's right in the names. CATSA is the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority; it's specifically responsible for security in airports, and nowhere else. The TSA is the Transportation Security Administration, and while many people consider it to be just the agency that deals with airport security, its actual bailiwick is "[to protect] the Nation's transportation systems to ensure freedom of movement for people and commerce."

That's right, the TSA's authority isn't just limited to airports, but extends to all transportation systems within the United States... which is rather a large point of responsibility, don't you think? It's also a rather unsettling one when you take into account issues of the sort that were raised in the Orange County Register's editorial of December 28th, which shines a light on the TSA's moves after ten years to expand their presence outside the airports. Right now there are twenty-five Visible Intermodal Prevention and Response, or VIPR, teams active in the United States.

What are they doing, you might ask? Well, according to NewsChannel5 of Nashville, back in October some of them were in Tennessee, establishing security checkpoints at two bus stations and five Interstate weigh stations in the state - giving Tennessee the somewhat dubious honor of becoming the "first state to fight terrorism statewide," as the headline rather bombastically puts it.

I'm sorry, sir or madam, but federal regulations dictate that no person may travel outside their homes with unscreened liquid in excess of 100 mL in a clear plastic bag. Please exit your car for secondary screening.

This is how it starts - not with a bang, but with a whimper. This is how control is extended. This is where police states begin. Sobriety checkpoints are one thing, but these are something else again; if anyone had suggested establishing security checkpoints on the highways to combat terrorism twenty years ago they would have been dismissed as a lunatic, and from 1992 to 2012 we get the entrenchment of lunacy as policy. How far can this go? Will security checkpoints along the highways, in metro stations and train stations, and on the streets be facts of life? Will there be something that, although it would never be called as such, acts like the internal passports of the Soviet Union - something to justify the warnings of "your papers, please?"

I'm thankful that, for now at least, Canada's version is specifically limited to airport security. There have also been pushbacks in the United States; in 2011, Amtrak ordered VIPR teams off its property for a time in response to some of these searches. Freedom of movement is an integral right in a free and open state, and while these random security checkpoints on previously open routes are justified by the spectre of terrorism, the real threat is what this sort of thing normalizes. Ten, twenty years from now - who knows?

Plus, that's if there isn't another major attack. If terrorists strike the United States again in a big way, all bets are off.

Photo: The Rails of Arbutus

2012-01-06T09:16:00.000-08:00

I'd been living here for a while before I came across the old Canadian Pacific track along the Arbutus Corridor in Vancouver. The rails were abandoned about ten years ago, and have since been the subject of court battles over development disputes - CP wanted to sell it off to be developed, while the city wanted to retain it for use as a future transportation corridor. As I understand it was one of the potential alignments considered for what became the Canada Line, but due to a lot of back and forth it's been mostly dormant - because, you know, the locals are "the creme de la creme in Vancouver." Today, toward the northern end of the line near Granville Island, the right-of-way has been mostly given over to community gardens.

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).

The Developing Country and the Heavenly Palace

2012-01-05T09:27:00.000-08:00

Some people spend their whole lives looking for the right excuse; a few simple words that give them a free pass to do whatever they want to do. It's equally true of countries looking to justify their own policies, and I can't think of any state that falls back on this kind of "excuse politics" more than the People's Republic of China. It's simple as excuses go, but it keeps appearing again and again: China is a developing nation. Therefore, China can do whatever the hell it wants and feels free to ignore any kind of environmental regulations, because it is a developing nation and is still building its economy.

I most recently encountered China falling back on this excuse in the context of the European Union's new carbon fees for airlines flying to European airports, a project that has also drawn vociferous opposition from airlines like Delta and Qantas because, boo-hoo, won't someone think of the airlines' profit margins? The Guardian reports that China's position is that "it is unreasonable for Europe to apply its policies to developing nations, which are still at the stage of rapid expansion of their airline industries and so find it difficult to cut overall emissions."

Most developing countries don't have four national airlines flying to Europe, and ultimately, the decision on what airlines fly to Europe is Europe's, not China's - and if Air China, China Eastern, China Southern, or Hainan Airlines don't want to pay the EU's carbon fees, I'm sure that other Asian ones like Cathay Pacific or Singapore Airlines will. Nevertheless, this is just the latest appearance of China's favorite excuse, and the latest reminder that the Chinese leadership apparently considers itself to have absolutely no responsibility at all for its current and future pollution path.

How dare you suggest this airline should pay for the externalities that its operations create! Why, next you'll want mining companies to finance the remediation of exhausted lands themselves, too!

Facts change quickly, though. Twenty years ago, maybe even ten years ago, China was unarguably a developing nation, but its breakneck development pace threatens to undercut its arguments. You may recall that back in September, China launched Tiangong 1 into orbit to serve as a testbed and demonstrator for its planned space station, and last week it reiterated its plan to undertake a crewed moon landing in the 2020s.

You'd think a developing country would have more important things to do with its money, like ensuring its major cities aren't drowning in choking clouds of smog that make 1970s Los Angeles look like a day at the park - but no. While its goal of lifting the Chinese population out of poverty is one that should be pursued, its method of pursuing it works at cross-purposes; with every day that passes, the strain on China's own environment becomes greater. It seems to me that a country in China's situation should have more important things to focus on than whether its airlines are making as much money as they can possibly make, or how much prestige it can earn in the international arena by putting boots on the moon.

That's just it, though. I seriously doubt that the Chinese government actually cares about the Chinese people in anything but an abstract sense; rather, I imagine that its priority is squarely the strengthening of China, with millions of people reduced to little counters in the game the Politburo plays. China's cooperation is essential for any developmental trajectory that would see the end of the twenty-first century better off than the beginning of it, but that cooperation will likely be hard to come by as long as it keeps beating its "developing" drum.

Photo: Between Shadows and Centuries

2012-01-04T10:02:00.000-08:00

It's easy to tell that Chicago has been an important city for a long time from the sheer amount of nineteenth-century buildings that still stand there. The Loop is full of structures that were already well-used by 1900, and while some newer buildings blend into that there are outliers; outliers like the Trump Tower, that shining silver structure up ahead, originally planned to be the tallest building in the world but eventually its builders settled on it being the second-tallest building in Chicago. This photo was taken at some point along N Wabash Avenue looking north in the autumn of 2009.

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).

Plotting Out Your Motivation

2012-01-03T09:57:00.000-08:00

Not all narratives have to have a plot. While it's very highly recommended it's not one hundred percent mandatory, and this is how the literary canon gets things like Finnegans Wake, where things like "characters" and "story" emerge not from an ordinary reading, but from decades of analysis and argument by English professors, from swerve of shore and bend of bay and so on. Still, very few of us are of the caliber of James Joyce, able to produce something that is regarded as one of those weird classics of literature and which is nevertheless absolutely opaque. Beyond that, there are successful slice-of-life works, which don't necessarily have a plot so much as a series of events. No plot in real life, after all.

On the whole, though, plots are important when you're creating a story no matter what mechanism you're using it to create it - words, art, music, and so on. What's equally important is the motivation for the characters to move through the plot. Sure, on occasion it's understandable and believable for a character to be caught up in events, but a whole story of that is unsatisfying. The key to a good story is allowing a disentangled character to follow the plot for her own reasons. The necessity for choice is a fundamental part of a good plot, as it puts control of the situation into the hands of the character you're following; particularly when you're talking about a protagonist, you want to be in control of the situation. What you don't want to be is a puppet of outside events.

It's a lot easier to encounter this problem in the modern generation of video games, many of which are essentially interactive stories. It's still a new medium, only a few decades old, and so it's understandable that creators are still coming to grips with the opportunities and pitfalls inherent in it. While this doesn't apply universally, when it comes to games that are story-driven and advertise themselves as specifically role-playing games, I think the issue of motivation should be a key one to consider.

Take, for example, Fallout 3. Released in 2008, it was the long-awaited follow-up to the two original games of the late 1990s about survival, discovery, and justice in post-apocalyptic California. Ten years of technical refinement makes it stand apart substantially from its predecessors; while the original games used an isometric, overhead view with a turn-based battle system in which the echoes of rolling dice were never far away, Fallout 3 thrusts the player into the game with a default first-person perspective and a limited third-person viewpoint that owes far more to first-person shooters than to its RPG heritage. Granted, this is a popular mechanism today, and using that kind of viewpoint does not diminish the quality of a game's story - what it does do, for me at least, is increase my investment in the story. Ordering around the Vault Dweller or the Chosen One from somewhere high in the sky is one thing, but when you're looking through the Lone Wanderer's eyes, her story gains that immediacy as well.

If only the creators of the game had actually made a story worth that feeling.

This is actually the Arizona desert, but the Capital Wasteland looks pretty much exactly like this.

The biggest problem that I saw in Fallout 3's plot was that most of the world that Bethesda created for it was wasted. When you boil it down not only is it simple, but it's extremely easy to end up on a treadmill straight to the ending without even realizing you're on it. The game's plot begins with you looking for your father and ends with you saving the Wasteland, and while there's a wealth of additional content scattered across the ruins of D.C. there is very little reason, in terms of plot and motivation, why your character would ever find it. The whole "find your father" plot is actually very straightforward - in the first town there's a guy who tells you he went somewhere else, and when you arrive there there's a guy who tells you he went to another place, and once you arrive at that place you get sent to where your father is. There's no misdirection, no uncertainty, no discovery - the only difficult bits are ensuring you have enough money or a sufficiently silver tongue to get the people with the proper knowledge to give it to you.

Where's the in-story reason to wander around the Wasteland? It's not like you have to assemble the fragments of a puzzle leading to where your dad is. There isn't one. It's a game of connect the dots, but following up on the non-plot content is basically your character saying "all right, I know where to go to find my dad so that things will be comfortable and familiar and the way they were before," and instead deciding to traipse around the blasted Wasteland with two hundred pounds of weapons and armor, getting poisoned by radscorpions and shot at by super mutants, because... because.

The first time I played through Fallout 3, I obediently followed the story because I figured "hey, Bethesda went to the trouble of building this huge-ass open world, it's not like they're going to waste ninety percent of it." Then I realized I was on the last mission of the main campaign. I'm thankful I bought the Game of the Year addition, which includes the extra downloadable content that was released after the original game, because I would have been pissed as hell if the game had ended the way it did originally.

I know that not everyone will see things the way I do - but role-playing video games are a new mode of storytelling, with a great capacity to tell stories. I don't like it when that capacity isn't used to its utmost.

Photo: Written in Chalk

2012-01-02T09:08:00.000-08:00

While the wooden boards that were used to cover up the Bay's broken windows may have become one of the more prominent symbols of popular response to last year's Stanley Cup riot, those boards weren't the only place that people were leaving their mark. The small plaza at Granville and Georgia, immediately outside Vancouver City Centre Station, gathered some of its own messages in chalk. Even in summer they didn't last long, but long enough that I was able to capture some of them. As 2012 unfolds, everyone in Metro Vancouver would do well to keep the experiences of the last year in mind.

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).

I Don't Know Why They #RIDE-in' So High

2012-01-01T10:35:00.001-08:00

Happy New Year! If you're reading this, it means that you weren't struck and killed by a drunk driver last night; good for you! New Year's Eve is one of those dates that draws drunks to steering wheels like moths to a flame, and though it doesn't appear that anyone in the Lower Mainland is dead thanks to a drunk driver, the lead story on CBC British Columbia deals with a suspected drunk that totalled an RCMP cruiser. Hell of a way to start 2012, right?

The fact is, even if that's the case, there were people out and about yesterday doing what they could to help people drive drunk.

I'm not sure if it's done in British Columbia, but for the last thirty-five years Ontario's RIDE program - initially just in the city of Etobicoke, but province-wide for as long as I can remember - which is essentially a series of checkpoints on the roads where police officers might pull you over to find out whether or not you blow high on the breathalyzer. The program is active all year and news articles about drunks arrested at RIDE checkpoints aren't unheard of no matter what month it is, but the only time you're actually likely to encounter a checkpoint is around a long weekend, Christmas, or New Year's Eve, for the simple reason that more people tend to drink and drive at those times. As I've never been stopped at a RIDE checkpoint, nor do I know of anyone who has been, I can't really give any more details than that. A similar program is, I understand, run in Alberta under the Checkstop name.

So, for decades, this is how it's been. If someone was idiotic enough to drink and get behind the wheel, they ran the risk of being found out by the police - and then the mobile internet started its little revolution. This past Christmas Eve, a number of people got it in their heads to broadcast the locations of RIDE and Checkstop locations over Twitter. After the initial shock and outrage among a wide section of the tweeting population, people struck back on New Year's Eve by appending the #RIDE and #Checkstop hashtags to irrelevant messages - the goal being to bury the messages that actually contained checkpoint information. What followed was something of a hashtag arms race, with the checkpoint-busters switching to new hashtags and using anonymous accounts to spread information by direct messages invisible to everyone but the sender and recipient. In a Twitter war like this it's nigh-impossible to tell with any certainty which side "won," but I suppose the real winners are people who didn't get killed by a drunk driver last night.

Still, why would anyone tweet the checkpoint locations to begin with? Well, it's complicated.

The Christmas lights are there to make drunks doubt their perceptions. Well, not really - but wouldn't that be something?

For some people it comes down to liberty - and as much as it makes me gnash my teeth, I can understand that. Ten American states have outlawed sobriety checkpoints for exactly that reason. For some people, the idea of the police being able to stop people at random with the "reasonable suspicion" being "a lot of people try to drive drunk around now." So, yeah, I can see where they're coming from - but the issue here is there is a world of difference between taking issue with what they see as overly intrusive police, and actively working to subvert the system.

"RIDE was the beginning of the end of civil liberty in Canada," argued one of the checkpoint tweeters, who hid behind an anonymous account but appears to be from the Calgary area. "Once the precedent is established that police can stop you, question you, order you out of your vehicle, demand identification, etc, etc when they have absolutely no reasonable grounds to believe you have or are committing a crime it is all over for our freedoms. In a few decades we have gone from RIDE to cops issuing summary judgements at the side of the road to the G20 outrage. Where will a few more decades take us?"

The slippery slope is an attractive idea when you're standing up against what you feel is dreadfully wrong, a clear and present danger to society as you see it. Arguing that sobriety checkpoints represent the creeping advancement of government controls, however, feels overly simplistic to me; a transition from a free and democratic state to a police state is something that happens on multiple fronts, and the growth of increasingly militarized police forces - witness, say, Occupy Oakland, and the manner in which the Oakland Police Department conducted itself - is far more threatening to liberty than a limited network of flying checkpoints. Washington is one of the ten states that outlaws the checkpoints, and yet it had the Battle of Seattle in 1999.

"Absolutely," our anonymous Albertan said when asked if he or she really believed tweeting the locations of sobriety checkpoints was the right thing to do. "If your government wanted to curb drinking and driving, they'd make alcohol illegal."

It really is amazing what people can justify to themselves. I mean, have people already forgotten about Prohibition? Have people forgotten that the "moral crusade" was a horrific flop that took an honest industry, pushed it underground, gave organized crime an incredible opportunity to grow, and resulted in what may have been the drunkest decades of the twentieth century?

Really, you think that random spot-checks on the roads to catch people who are operating heavy, potentially deadly machinery while drunk is a blow against liberty and a step toward the police state, but banning something as ubiquitous and culturally important as alcohol isn't? What planet did this person come from?

Yes, both the United States Constitution and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms enshrine freedom of movement. In a real police state, it wouldn't matter what mode of transportation you're using should you come across a checkpoint, if you're driving or walking or sitting in a little red wagon being pulled by a pony. You'd still need your papers, please. Sobriety checkpoints are targetted specifically at people who are driving - people who do not appreciate the damage that can be easily done with a car at speed. That appreciation is one of the reasons why I gave up my driver's license.

Sure, it's a new year... but people will keep using the same old eyes.

Photo: The Last Photo of 2011

2011-12-31T09:43:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

Dedicated to the Opportunities

2011-12-30T09:13:00.000-08:00

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.

Photo: A Bump in the Canada Line

2011-12-29T08:49:00.001-08:00

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.

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).

Put the Used to Good Use

2011-12-28T09:17:00.000-08:00

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.

Photo: A Ferry at Sea

2011-12-27T09:02:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

Short SF Review #21: You Source of Tears

2011-12-26T09:24:00.000-08:00

"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:

Photo: A Very Merry

2011-12-25T08:49:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

Quaff Review #18: Bah Humbug

2011-12-24T10:20:00.000-08:00

'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

#17: KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer
#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: A Neighborly Synchronicity

2011-12-23T08:50:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

Fooding Up: The Seaweed Sandwich

2011-12-22T09:36:00.000-08:00

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.

Photo: The Shortest Day, the Longest Night

2011-12-21T09:16:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

North Korea: Doomed For All Time?

2011-12-20T09:26:00.000-08:00

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.

Photo: Industry, Nature and the Setting Sun

2011-12-19T08:46:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

A Longing for the Shorts

2011-12-18T10:27:00.000-08:00

"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.

Photo: Smoke People of Cordova Street

2011-12-17T10:23:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

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

2011-12-16T09:09:00.000-08:00

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.

Photo: Bridging Again the Waters

2011-12-15T08:53:00.000-08:00

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."

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).

Failing Kyoto After Failing Canadians

2011-12-14T09:08:00.000-08:00

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.

Photo: Under Her Guns

2011-12-13T09:42:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

A Key to Entertaining Education

2011-12-12T08:47:00.001-08:00

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.

Photo: Full Moon Over the Inlet

2011-12-11T08:48:00.001-08:00

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.

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).

Unsafe at Any Hypersonic Speed?

2011-12-10T10:35:00.000-08:00

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.

Photo: A Columbia Street Rose

2011-12-09T08:15:00.000-08:00

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).

Why Blocking Bunny Rides the SkyTrain

2011-12-08T09:23:00.000-08:00

I don't have much cause to complain about the SkyTrain. That was one of the biggest things I had to get used to on moving here from Toronto, where complaining about the failings of public transit is something akin to a sport. For more than a year now, the SkyTrain has got me where I needed to go and back again with only a couple of hiccups along the way.

Nevertheless, it's not perfect. I noticed one aspect of this immediately upon moving here - specifically, the way people waiting on the platform deal with the doors. There is a strange but consistent tendency among Vancouver transit riders to crowd around the doors of a train before they even open, as if they don't expect anyone already riding to alight at that station. Sometimes it feels like a contest of wills; the doors clunk open and people on the platform have already started closing in, and there's nothing to it but for you to move forward and make them make a space for you to pass through by force of presence. It's something that doesn't happen nearly as often on the Toronto subway; there, in my experience, people on the platform will allow passengers to alight before boarding themselves.

Recently TransLink ran the Transit Pet Peeve Battle, a voting contest to determine which of a number of options was the biggest breach of transit etiquette. Ultimately the voting came down to two - Funky Ferret, "known for wearing one splash of perfume or cologne too many or exuding excessive body odour (especially during the summer months)," and Blocking Bunny, who "likes to stand as close to the SkyTrain doors as possible while standing on the platform." Ultimately Funky Ferret won, but Blocking Bunny isn't going to go away very soon either.

I've been trying to figure this out for a while, and I've come to the conclusion that there's about twenty-five years worth of reasons why.

Not the biggest doors in the world on a Mark I train, for starters.

Not many cities run transit systems like Vancouver does. The SkyTrain uses what was originally called ICTS or Intermediate Capacity Transit System, something that should be blindingly obvious to anyone attempting to board an Expo Line train at Stadium-Chinatown after a game. Vancouver was effectively the launch customer for this technology - the Scarborough RT in Toronto, which uses the same equipment, is so short that it's basically a proof-of-concept shuttle between the subway and a mall - but it didn't spread much beyond that; the only other city that uses ICTS, as contrasted to the updated Advanced Rapid Transit available now, is Detroit.

Since the SkyTrain is an intermediate capacity system, some tradeoffs were necessary. Compared to the subway trains of Montreal, Toronto, or Los Angeles, the cars themselves aren't very big. This is a particular issue on the Mark I cars, the boxy rolling stock that came with the SkyTrain back in 1985. There just isn't all that much room on them... particularly not when you're standing rather than sitting. The new Mark II trains are a lot better in this regard; they're roomier in general, and the articulated points in the middle of the cars are great places for standers to hang out with minimal impact to passenger flow. It's too bad that sometimes Mark II trains seem to be rarer than hen's teeth.

Here's how it goes, the way I see it - the SkyTrain starts up in 1985 with the original Mark I trains. It doesn't take long for people to figure out the best places to stand in these trains: the doors. You can brace yourself against one of the dividers and have a smooth ride. When I find myself on a Mark I with room to maneuver this is generally my tactic, switching between sets of doors as the train passes from center-platform to side-platform stations - of course, not everyone does this. For seventeen years, this was all there was; the first Mark II trains didn't arrive until the opening of the Millennium Line in 2002. What this long dominance of the system resulted in, I think, was the inculcation of the idea that just because someone is standing next to the doors, it doesn't mean they're getting off at the next station. In Toronto, this isn't really an issue; the doors are big enough that people can be leaning against both dividers and still leave enough room for alighting and boarding.

Blocking Bunny's actions can also be explained by the nature of the system as a whole - namely, the fact that it's automated. Stations are simple matters for SkyTrains; they arrive, hold their doors open for thirty seconds, then close them and depart, so long as no one tries to hold closing doors open for too long. They stay open for thirty seconds regardless of whether the platform is empty or busier than a Beatles concert in 1964. This can be a definite problem sometimes - on one particularly packed Expo Line train heading east after a game had just let out, the doors started trying to close before people had finished alighting, let alone boarding. Toronto trains don't have this trouble - the crew of each includes a guard, who sits in the middle car and manually opens and closes the doors. I've heard of Toronto trains taking upwards of two minutes to load and unload in busy stations at busy times.

So that, I think, is why Blocking Bunny rides the SkyTrain; because the nature of the system itself magnifies the perceived need for some riders to exhibit those traits. We may not like it, but we're stuck with it for the indefinite future.

Photo: Tugging the Load

2011-12-07T09:09:00.000-08:00

Almost every day I see a tugboat pulling a mess of some material or another along the Fraser River, ultimately bound for who-knows-where. That's about all you can see from the shore. If you can arrange to get an overhead view you can see considerably more, such as the bulldozer thing they've got along for the ride. As it happened, one of those tugboats passed under the Pattullo Bridge while I was crossing it over the weekend, heading west along the river.

I gotta wonder what that grey stuff is, and how much of it ends up getting washed back into the water.

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).

Approaching NDAA-game

2011-12-06T09:05:00.000-08:00

You may have seen it whipping around the Internet recently in yet another example of near-powerless fury: the United States' National Defense Authorization Act for the 2012 fiscal year, or just NDAA. It's a bill that has been passed and revised and passed again every year since the 1960s to codify how the Department of Defense can spend all those hundreds of billions of dollars that get shoveled its way. What's got people riled up this time is an innocuous passage buried deep within its six hundred and sixty-six pages; a passage that would allow the United States military to arrest and imprison civilians anywhere in the world without charge or trial. It's telling that a lot of the opposition to this is specifically focused on the idea that it could be American civilians arrested and imprisoned; presumably, it's A-OK for Eagleland to throw as many foreigners as it wants into a deep, dark hole and never let them out.

The problem, though, is that it's not honest. I've read the bill, and it doesn't have the balls to come out and say exactly that. No, it's all couched in legalese that appears designed to be as impenetrable and ordinary-seeming as possible - impenetrable enough that even though the bill is dated June 22, its potential implications have only been realized fairly recently. The big issues are with Section 1036 - but don't take my word for it; read it yourself.

SEC. 1036. PROCEDURES FOR STATUS DETERMINATION OF UNPRIVILEGED ENEMY BELLIGERENTS.

(a) In General- Not later than 90 days after the date of the enactment of this Act, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report setting forth the procedures for determining the status of persons captured in the course of hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40) for purposes of section 1031.

(b) Elements of Procedures- The procedures required by this section shall provide for the following in the case of any unprivileged enemy belligerent who will be held in long-term detention under the law of war pursuant to the Authorization for Use of Military Force:

(1) A military judge shall preside at proceedings for the determination of status of an unprivileged enemy belligerent.

(2) An unprivileged enemy belligerent may, at the election of the belligerent, be represented by military counsel at proceedings for the determination of status of the belligerent.

(c) Report on Modification of Procedures- The Secretary of Defense shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report on any modification of the procedures submitted under this section. The report on any such modification shall be so submitted not later than 60 days before the date on which such modification goes into effect.

(d) Appropriate Committees of Congress Defined- In this section, the term 'appropriate committees of Congress' means--

(1) the Committee on Armed Services and the Select Committee on Intelligence of the Senate; and

(2) the Committee on Armed Services and the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence of the House of Representatives.

And now I've gone all crosseyed.

So, yeah, it doesn't come out and say "this bill will let us arrest and indefinitely detain civilians, including American civilians." You've got to do some detective work to figure that out, back to the Authorization for Use of Military Force - one of the US government's first responses to September 11, enacted exactly one week later and thus not exactly the result of sober second thought. The factor at issue is, as I understand it, here:

Section 2 - Authorization For Use of United States Armed Forces

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

This isn't a case of "the US government is going to start herding civilians into internment camps" - things are rarely that black and white. No, this is just a door creaking open, a door that many people hoped had been bolted so securely it'd stay shut forever. When you take these two chunks of legal vomit together, what you get is a legal process for anyone to be tried and held in long-term detention by a military court so long as the President determines that they "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the September 11 attacks. Now, if that had the force of law to it, if it had to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt that the detainee was involved in such a way, it'd be one thing.

But it isn't. As it's written, that determination lies with the President of the United States. Maybe you think Obama's a nice guy, he'd never do that... maybe you're right. But Obama's not going to be President forever. Come 2013 or 2017 there's going to be someone else behind the Resolute desk, someone with their own set of goals and priorities. Someone who might find it particularly advantageous to determine that a person or persons - say, maybe the leaders or media faces of some protest movement, or a gadfly journalist - is, through their actions, aiding the September 11 attacks; helping the terrorists win even years later.

Perhaps you think I'm off base; maybe you think that this sort of thing would never happen. It could be that you're right - I'd like to live in that sort of world. Nevertheless, the government likes to run by the letter of the law, and the letter of the law is on track to giving the President more power to detain than any President should rightfully have.

Photo: Cascading Along

2011-12-05T08:24:00.000-08:00

The Amtrak Cascades is one of two trains that still runs into Vancouver's Pacific Central Station, the end of the transcontinental railway. It runs north-south from here to Eugene, Oregon via Portland and Seattle, tying Cascadia together. In order to get to Vancouver it needs to cross the Fraser River by way of the Westminster Bridge. I parked myself on the Pattullo Bridge yesterday to watch the Mt. Adams trainset pass by, the first northbound trip of the day. It's a fairly long train - considerably longer than any Via Rail trains I would see back in Toronto, and as time passes it will likely collect an ever-greater share of the traffic between Vancouver and Seattle.

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).

Engineering Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

2011-12-04T09:26:00.001-08:00

Leave it to environmentalists to be beacons of "progress."

With another round of UN climate conferencing underway in Durban, South Africa, when the environment news isn't talking about how Harper and his cronies are trying to sabotage efforts to replace the soon-to-expire Kyoto Accord, issues such as geoengineering are bubbling to the surface. It's something I've written about before - the use of technological means to modify the planetary environment, specifically in a manner that mitigates or negates the effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Among my series of predictions for this decade that I posted on December 31, 2009 was that "at least one major geoengineering project will be active by 2019," and I still stand by that... although I did also predict that the Conservatives would lose power and that the Greens wouldn't pick up a House of Commons seat.

Still, there's a lot of talk about geoengineering, and I really believe it's something vital we need to pursue - whether it be by brightening clouds or painting roofs white to increase the planetary albedo, thereby reflecting more sunlight and decreasing the degree to which the planet is heated, injecting sulfur dioxide into the upper atmosphere to mimic the effects of a volcanic eruption (and, incidentally, increase the incidence of acid rain), or something else entirely. On Friday, the Toronto Star covered a report made to the Durban conference that, theoretically, increasing the planet's albedo "would have an immediate and dramatic effect" and that in a matter of years, "global temperatures would return to levels of 250 years ago."

Are you kidding? This sort of research needs to be supported immediately - it's the sort of thing every government should be able to get behind, from the ones who want action because sea level rises would wipe them from the map to the ones that don't want action because it would cut into Alberta's short-term oil profits. Sure, rising temperatures don't represent the only threatening aspect for climate change - ocean acidification will continue as long as we keep emitting huge quantities of carbon dioxide - but it gives us breathing room, more of a chance to figure out how to solve these problems.

But where problems are complicated, so are the solutions. Earth is a complex, chaotic system, and we don't understand nearly enough about it as we think we do. I recognize it's highly possible that a major geoengineering campaign could have side effects that, right now, we can't predict. For me, I'd take that as reason to start off small with pilot projects, and to invest in geoengineering methods that can easily be turned off if need be. I'll be the first to admit that managing planetary environments is difficult work - I learned that back in the 1990s, with SimEarth on the Super Nintendo.

Industrial civilization getting you down? Carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere up to 10%? With just a few adjustments here and there, you can freeze the planet over or make the oceans boil away! SimEarth for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System is ©1990/1992 Maxis & Will Wright and ©1992 FCI Inc.

Yet here come the environmentalists. Specifically the Star quotes Silvia Ribeiro of the ETC Group, an organization which describes itself as "dedicated to the conservation and sustainable advancement of cultural and ecological diversity and human rights," as stating that geoengineering is as bad as nuclear weapons. If you're keeping to the Ford embargo of the Star, here's the quote in all its cockeyed glory.

"Solar radiation management technologies are high-risk and extremely dangerous and they should be treated under international law like nuclear weapons — except, unlike nuclear weapons, we have an opportunity to ban their testing and their proliferation before the technology is fully developed, rather than trying to prevent their proliferation after the fact," she said.

Yes, how excellent! How forward-thinking! Rather than consider the possibility that certain flavors of geoengineering, if managed carefully, could mitigate the effects of climate change, we should just ban it all right now and close that door forever! Banning geoengineering won't put it in a box any more than the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty put nukes in a box - it certainly didn't keep India, Israel, North Korea, or Pakistan from getting their nukes. Honestly, in a future where geoengineering was banned, I would expect it to be far more likely for environment modification to be used as a weapon, because if it's banned, why else is anyone going to be investigating it?

What people tend to forget is that we are already geoengineering - or, if you'd rather, call it de-terraforming like Randy McDonald does. Those hundreds of billions of tons of carbon dioxide we pump into the atmosphere every year don't just zilch out into nothingness. They're up there and they're having an effect, and to dismiss an entire spectrum of possibilities with which to deal with it because you're scared of what might happen is pure irresponsibility.

We need at least to do the research on geoengineering, to figure out what options are open to us. At this point, unless you expect Stephen Harper and all his pro-emitting buddies to be visited by the Ghosts of Environment Past, Present, and Future, it's probably one of our best hopes. Sure, it's difficult work, but it's difficult work we may need to do.

Photo: No Jaywalking on Granville

2011-12-03T09:41:00.001-08:00

For a time after the completion of the Canada Line, most of Granville Street in downtown Vancouver was entirely a pedestrian mall; that's the way I found it when I came in June 2010. By the time I returned this had fallen somewhat by the wayside, with its reopening to buses - not that there's anything wrong with a transit mall, but being able to walk all over the street was nice while it lasted. Still, I suppose in order to fix the changed situation in the minds of pedestrians, for a while in late 2010 and early 2011 the city installed eye-catching strips along the curb warning against jaywalking. Not that they worked, of course - many times I saw people walk right over them in order to jaywalk.

They're gone now - but, really, the horn of a very heavy trolleybus is a far more effective discouragement to jaywalking than a painted strip along the sidewalk.

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).

They're Whipping Attawapiskat

2011-12-02T07:13:00.000-08:00

So, Attawapiskat.

Maybe you've never heard of it. It's a First Nations community on the shore of James Bay. A couple of weeks ago, hardly anyone outside of northern Ontario would have heard of it, but now it's rampaging across national news. I myself heard about it a bit earlier than when it broke into the headlines, from a post on Boing Boing talking about the dire straits the community was in - with winter approaching and its shelter inadequate when you consider just how cold it gets in northern Ontario in December, the town declared a state of emergency and for days the Feds did nothing. Which I'm sure is totally in keeping with how the Constitution gives the federal government "exclusive legislative authority" over First Nations and their lands, just like the census and the military and Canada Post. I was hesitant about making a post on the matter, because to be perfectly honest I'm not really up to speed on this subject and was unwilling to stumble into making an ass of myself.

Now, though, things have changed. Earlier this week, the federal government announced that it was taking direct control of Attawapiskat's funding and organizing an audit to figure out how the $90 million invested in it - since 2006, mind you; the government has been particularly careful to avoid noting the timescale involved, but the Attawapiskat First Nation's audited schedule of funding from the year ended March 31, 2011 is pretty clear in that the total amount of federal funding received for that year was $17.6 million - considerably less than an F-35, in other words.

For me, it's not surprising that the government's first reaction seems to have been "seize control" - Harper acting dictatorial is, honestly, nothing new. It's not surprising but it is extremely regrettable; in my mind, seizing control of finances in situations like this should require the presentation of a great deal of evidence justifying it, whereas from what I've seen in the media, the government's takeover of Attawapiskat's finances has been more along the lines of "we think you're misappropriating funds, so we're just going to take over right now."

Not just for that reason, though. Also because it feeds into the extremely negative historical precedent that seems to have been established with regard to the federal government versus the First Nations. What I get from the government's actions is the sense that, yet again, it's telling us that "those Indians just can't look after themselves."

sigh

The history of Canada's treatment of its First Nations population is a sad and sorry one, a centuries-long litany of theft and abuse with the ultimate goal being for the First Nations, as a distinct group, to cease to exist. I'm not editorializing here - this was stated explicitly in 1931 by Duncan Campbell Scott, at the time Canada's Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. Here's a relevant quote from his The Administration of Indian Affairs in Canada:

"It is the opinion of the writer... that by policies and activities such as have been outlined, the Government will in time reach the end of its responsibility as the Indians progress into civilization and finally disappear as a separate and distinct people, not by race extinction but by gradual assimilation with their fellow citizens."

Incidentally, the idea of a government official in 1931 referring to Natives as "fellow citizens" is something of a laugh in its own right - "second-class citizens" would be more appropriate; after all, it was not until 1960 that First Nations people were allowed to vote in federal elections while retaining their treaty status. 1960! This isn't deep-past stuff; this is within Prime Minister Harper's own lifetime! That doesn't sound much like equal citizenship to me - and if it's not equal, what the hell kind of citizenship is it anyway?

My point is that I feel the government has a particular responsibility to the First Nations, considering the role the Canadian government has had in, bluntly, fucking the First Nations for practically as long as there has been a Canadian government. The fact that it's not the current government that did those things is immaterial - it is still the Government of Canada, and by dint of being Canada's government, still bears the responsibility to set things right.

This should have been a time for the government to walk carefully - but I'm forgetting myself. This is Stephen Harper's Majority! The government doesn't have to give a fuck about anything aside staying in power, because what are you going to do about it, huh? Four years is an awfully long time.

Photo: By the Bay

2011-12-01T08:48:00.000-08:00

San Francisco, on the whole, usually isn't one of those cities that you envision with a forest of skyscrapers; people who aren't from there probably think of the Golden Gate Bridge and the cable cars and that row of houses from the intro to Full House and leave the skyscrapers to New York and Chicago and so on. But they're there, and while the 260-meter Transamerica Pyramid is still the tallest in the city, it's got rivals - rivals like One Rincon Hill's South Tower, something of a misnomer as there is not and may never be a North Tower, one hundred and ninety-five meters and fifty-four stories tall. Not the tallest in the city, but brother, where it is it towers - it's not marking the gradual expansion of the skyscraper frontier, it's in a whole new area.

It's evident in this shot I took of the San Francisco skyline from Dolores Park - that's One Rincon Hill in the middle, next to the towers of the Bay Bridge. Given the way it dwarfs everything around it, I can understand why its construction was controversial.

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).

Short SF Review #20: The Helix

2011-11-30T09:37:00.000-08:00

"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:

* 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

2011-11-29T08:59:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

Quaff Review #17: KLB Raspberry Wheat Beer

2011-11-28T09:54:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-27T10:12:00.001-08:00

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.

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).

Mars, Curiouser and Curiouser

2011-11-26T10:50:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-25T08:32:00.000-08:00

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

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).

Who's Condoning All These Condominiums?

2011-11-24T09:33:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-23T08:56:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

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

The Krokodil Hunters

2011-11-22T09:42:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-21T09:39:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

Defiance in Davis

2011-11-20T10:20:00.001-08:00

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!

2011-11-19T09:05:00.000-08:00

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.

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).

Getting the Details Right

2011-11-18T10:02:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

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.

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).