Imperfect Recall

I'll always look back fondly on the 1990 Total Recall movie, if for no other reason than it was originally something I shouldn't have had. I was just a lad of ten or so, and nevertheless my mom allowed me to watch the hand-labelled VHS tape of it we recorded off some station or another, and I did--again and again. It was one of my first tickets into the world of grown-ups, one of the first hints of what was beyond the everyday, and despite its technical errors--Mars is not in a vacuum, and real-time two-way communication between Earth and Mars is impossible, just to give two--it'll always hold a special place for me.

As for the 2012 Total Recall movie? Less so. I went and saw it last night, and to be honest it's the sort of thing that would prompt a visit to Rekall for some synthetic memories to replace it. Once again, in the new Total Recall we have a purportedly "science fiction" movie written by people who are not science fiction writers debasing the concept of science fiction on the silver screen.

If you haven't seen it yet, the plot hits all the same points as the 1990 movie, although not quite in the same order. The biggest difference is that Mars isn't in the picture; the setting is Earth, after global chemical warfare has rendered most of the planet uninhabitable, save for a chunk of Europe ruled by the United Federation of Britain as well as Australia, referred to in dialog exclusively as "the Colony" and in signs as "New Asia," for some reason. These two bastions of civilization are connected by the one of the most over-engineered transit systems I've ever encountered: the Fall, a gravity train that falls through a tunnel dug from one side of the world to the other.

Incidentally, this is where one of the 2012's films first errors appears. The British side of the Fall is established to be in the center of London. On the opposite side of the world, you'll find... the Pacific Ocean, a few hundred kilometers southeast of New Zealand. This took me thirty seconds to find and verify. I don't know what excuse the scriptwriters have. But it's hardly the most ridiculous aspect of building your movie around the idea of a tunnel through the world without it actually being about the tunnel through the world.

Mars: because you've got to get your ass somewhere.

The Fall, to me, is a good representative of just what's wrong with this movie. It's not so much a movie as it is a flurry of individual elements--elements like the Fall, the three-breasted woman, the skycar chases, the no-go zones left over from chemical warfare, and so on--and while some of those elements can be compelling on their own merits, when assembled they do not form a coherent whole. They do not make sense. For instance, why is the three-breasted woman even there? Outside the story, it's so they could have that connection to the original movie and have a callback to put into the trailer, but in-story? There's no reason. In the 1990 movie, it was simple enough--she'd been mutated by radiation that the cheap domes didn't stop. There's no reason given in the 2012 movie. She's just presented to us, and we're supposed to accept it.

It's the same deal with the Fall, and though the scriptwriters may not have realized it, the thing compromises the entire movie for me. Since there's no Mars here and no alien reactor, the motivation of our big bad Cohaagen has been changed to invading the Colony with his army of robots to provide living space to the overpopulated Federation, and the Fall is his troop transport. Think about it, though--this elevator just happens to connect what we are explicitly told are the only two centers of civilization left on Earth. How believable do you think it is that the war would bypass them? No, given the evidence presented to me in the movie itself, I have to conclude that the Fall was specifically built to link the UFB and the Colony.

Except that if that's the case, there's one big problem. This is a tunnel that is more than twelve thousand kilometers long, that goes through the center of Earth. Even a movie as ridiculous as The Core knew to add some technobabble explaining how its terranauts could survive the fantastic pressures down there. In Total Recall, there's nothing. Nothing except the scriptwriters' silent request that I actually suspend my disbelief over this shit. To put it simply, it's unbelievable. I cannot believe that a civilization with the technical know-how, resources, and manpower to build a gravity train would be troubled by overpopulation. Think of how expensive the maintenance alone would be for a setup like that. Sure, maybe for some reason they can't get rid of the lingering chemical contamination in the no-go zones--chemicals which can effectively be protected against with a simple face mask, even though actual chemical weapons like VX and sarin are absorbed through the skin--it would literally be cheaper to colonize Mars.

Don't even get me started on the garden-variety plot holes. To me, the new Total Recall movie is a failure--spectacular, in that it's a hell of a thing to look at, but it fails as a story. As a movie, it's like the Calvin and Hobbes comic with tyrannosaurs in F-14s: "this is so cool!" versus "this is so stupid."

The End of the Honeymoon

I've always tried to improve my understanding of history, particularly recent history--not only does it echo more loudly than the ancient stuff, it's also more directly relevant to the things I deal with day-to-day, and it reveals patterns that have yet to fully establish themselves. Things like the North-South cultural divide of the United States, or the cultural divide between the United States and Canada, have deep historical roots and, therefore, a buttload of historical inertia. Though specific aspects can certainly be changed, in general Newton's First Law applies; a cultural phenomenon in motion will continue ahead unless acted on by something else, and when you've got a phenomenon that's had hundreds of years to build up steam, look out.

When it comes to recent history, the phenomena have just started to pick up speed, and even a small change made early enough can send it flying off in an entirely new direction. In that respect, I've started to look at the 1990s in a different way.

Imagine a guy who's stepped out on his own and is trying to make things good; trying to build a comfortable life for himself, trying to find a nice girl to settle down with. He hits and misses but keeps his apartment clean and stays in dating trim, and eventually he finds the woman for him. They tie the knot, they settle down, they live in wedded bliss--for a while, at least. But the guy knows he's in a comfortable spot now, and becomes less diligent. He doesn't exercise as much. He doesn't clean up after himself as much. He allows himself to lie back in a comfortable groove, but while he does so the qualities that allowed him to get there gradually slip away.

Sound familiar? It should, because it's supposed to be an analogy to the problems of today. The big difference is that where the dude settled down and let himself go, modern Western capitalism outlasted communism and... well, just look at some of the headlines.

Nag, nag, nag--give it a rest, I'll pick it up when I pick it up! Lay off!

In retrospect, it's easy to see that the 90s were practically a second run of the 1950s, but without some of the social problems that made the original 1950s so loathsome if you weren't one of the Elect. In 1989, Francis Fukuyama seriously suggested that liberal democracy marked the "end of history," that society and culture had evolved as far as they were going to and it was all down to the details. For much of the West, the 1990s were something of a "vacation from history" - the Cold War was over, the Soviet Union had fallen, the threat of nuclear annihilation was gone, and the major challenges that had faced the leaders of the world for decades were suddenly overcome.

An optimist might have thought it meant that the countries of the world would therefore be free to tackle other issues that had been shoved to the sidelines, like poverty and the environment and the plight of the Third World--and, to be fair, some progress was made on this sort of thing... but most people don't go on vacation to get things done. They do it to relax, and after the end of the Cold War the West hung a "Gone Fishin'" sign on the door and let it gather dust until 2001.

Today, though, the problems of 2001 almost seem like those of a completely different universe. Today the problems are money, power, and their abuse--problems like corporations siphoning more and more authority through schemes like the privatization of police forces, the denial of collective bargaining for unions, banks manipulating the markets and ruining the livelihoods of millions for petty profit, and the concentration of more and more political, economic, and social clout in fewer hands, all the way down to the modern trend of unpaid internships: exploitation of the proletariat, twenty-first century style.

Why? Although the wheels on this started moving decades ago, I believe things really got in gear thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union--a collapse which meant that since communism had been discredited, capitalism no longer had a motivation to be on its best behavior. In 2012, there doesn't seem to be any feasible alternative in existence or on the horizon. The modern world's marketplace of ideas has, essentially, become a captive market. Competition, they say, is a key factor of free market capitalism, but the lack of competition in the world of the mind means that it can get away with murder today.

It's not too late, of course. The inertia is still building, but there's still a chance to nudge things in a new direction. Otherwise, well... consider what happens if this goes on. I don't like what I see.

The Krokodil Hunters

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

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

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

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

Just like it is in Canada.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fourth and the Future

Today is the Fourth of July. In previous years I've been able to mark it with a simple American flag post, but that seems a bit... utilitarian for how things are today. The path of the United States is the path of the world, and particularly over the last year, when I've looked south I've seen something that has become progressively more and more worrying - something that has greatly changed its appearance in the last twenty years.

It really is the last twenty years that have done it. Before 1991, the United States had the Soviet Union to keep it honest; to lean against. Personally, I doubt that the economy would have unravelled to the point that it has in the last few years if the USSR was still around - this sort of collapse would have been a propaganda goldmine for the Kremlin, the true crisis of capitalism. Without the threat of the Soviets getting the upper hand, though, there's been nothing to moderate the world's superpower. While it took people a while to realize this, realize it they have. Today, ideologues decry President Obama as a Marxist because... well, I suppose because he's a Democrat. Evidence? Who needs it?

The "peace dividend" following the end of the Cold War was wasted. With the utter implosion of its historic rival, the United States and its partners in the West had a chance to take a step back and reevaluate its course for the twenty-first century. Why, with all those billions that don't need to be spent on keeping the Soviets at bay, we could invest in new technologies, better the lot of the poor, maybe even go to Mars! That, of course, didn't happen - too much inertia had built up during forty-five years of brinksmanship. As someone born in the early 1980s and who really became aware of things in the 1990s, I grew up in a world where the Cold War was a fading nightmare. Where I didn't have to worry about nuclear war burning away everything I knew and loved. Where I could be sure that the people in charge were working toward a clean and prosperous future for the betterment of all.

Only a child could think that way. I know better now. I know that in the United States, the political discourse is degenerating further and further into emotional shrieks and extremism. The cracks in the system are being thrown into progressively starker relief. Look at California, where all potential tax/fee/levy/whatever increases require a supermajority in the State Legislature to pass... but if they want to decrease tax, they only need a simple majority. Now there's a framework that sure is built in a farsighted manner, eh? After all, does government really need money anyway?

In the past, it seems, there was at least the appearance of professional amity between the Democrats and the Republicans. You won't find that anymore. American politics, from my vantage point a scant thirty miles from the border, is descending into name-calling and knee-jerk opposition. It's practically sport - people have decided whether they're part of Team Democrat or Team Republican, and the goal has shifted from governing well to "winning" - whatever the winning condition might be in this world.

Do you want to know what I think? I think that if the future continues along the same trajectory as the present, this video may be a workable metaphor for the United States.


Have a good Fourth of July, Americans - and try to ensure there'll be more.

To the Stars, Through Simplicity

When I was young and unfamiliar with the ways the world worked but had stars in my eyes for science fiction anyway, I came up with a concept called the "impeller drive." This was meant to be a sublight drive for starships that worked through the amazing, incredible means of glowing. You know, just like the impulse engines on the Enterprise-D - they glow red and it goes forward, presumably because the red ones go faster. Though I wasn't aware of the name at the time - moreover, I wasn't aware of its violation of many of the laws of physics - I was pinning my hopes on a reactionless drive. It wasn't until fairly recently that I expunged the last bits of it from my brain, because really - not only is the reactionless drive such a compelling concept, it seems to dovetail with what we experience in our daily lives.

Fact is, the closest a lot of us will get to the vacuum of space in our daily lives is a Roomba. It requires knowledge, familiarity, and a curiosity-driven thirst to understand in order to really get a grip on how things work beyond the atmosphere. It's unfortunate that most of what passes for experience - popular entertainment in the mold of Star Trek, Star Wars or Battlestar Galactica - perpetuates the idea of stardrive prostitution; drives with no visible means of thrust.

Nevertheless, it's understandable for the average person to hold these ideas, because really, the average person probably won't be presented with a situation where they become relevant. It's different for creators. When I had the notion of writing space-based stories, I started digging into research and came across wonderful things like brachistochrone equations. Understanding is, in all things, key. I'd expect to find it guiding the people who help to shape culture - people like Canada's queen of science fiction (although she vehemently denies being such), Margaret Atwood.

What sparks this? The other day I came across an article in the Technology section of The Province, another dip into the murky swamp of the "lunar hoax" - I don't think I'll ever comprehend why so many people are so willing to believe that one of humanity's greatest achievements was instead the work of a bunch of guys in a soundstage in Nevada. It makes reference to a 2009 interview wherein Atwood discussed questions about the moon "hoax," focusing around why "they haven't done it again if it was so easy."

All right, first off, if I could use any word to describe the Apollo program, "easy" would be in the same rough neighborhood as "putrescent." With a final cost of $25.4-billion as figured in 1973 - according to the Inflation Calculator, this works out to $121-billion in 2009 US dollars - reaching the moon was not easy, particularly when you consider that it involved the design and development of entirely new technologies, the construction of some of the most sophisticated machines ever assembled by human hands, and an environment vastly more dangerous than anything under the sky.

But why does Atwood suggest suspicion? Because of computers. Yes, the big question as per this interview is why no one has walked on the moon since Apollo 17 in 1972, when computers back then were massive and now they're not. Musings about dangers from the Van Allen Belt or "those strange shadows and why the flag rippled" are, in my mind, sideshows. The idea that lunar missions should be easy because we have microchips now is just staggering.

A key to Luna? I don't think so, me.

The biggest cost of spaceflight is climbing out of the deep, dark well we call Earth. More efficient computing hardware is chump change in the rocket equation - it doesn't change the fundamentals of how chemical rockets work. If you don't know how chemical rockets work, I urge you to research the matter in the way you feel best; but to summarize, they work because they throw stuff out the back, and the act of throwing pushes them in the opposite direction in accordance with the Newtonian principle of action and reaction.

What really worries me, though, is the cultural impact of casual ignorance like this. Studies have made clear that the public conception of spaceflight, NASA in particular, is far out of kilter with reality - a 1997 poll found that, on average, people believed that NASA took 20% of the federal budget, twenty or forty times greater than what it actually gets. How much of the opposition to space comes from this mistaken belief that space is easy to get to, and that NASA is just wasting taxpayers' money shooting robot rovers to Mars?

Misinformation is poison. It's our responsibility to correct it and struggle against it wherever we can. The challenges we face today are manifold and manifest, and without a clear view of our options and the possibilities ahead we may as well be fighting Lavos with a Wood Sword and Hide Tunic. The future would not be thankful, and it would refuse to change.

We Built This City on Rock, Roll, and Silt

I've been in Metro Vancouver for more than a week now and I'm still looking for a place to keep my stuff, but that's not for lack of options. Based on what I've talked about with others, though, I may be one of the few whose options are influenced by seismic hazard maps. Perhaps that's the nature of the transplant - someone who's lived in the Lower Mainland all their life may well be blasé about earthquake dangers, whereas one of the few things I still retain from high school geography class held on Ontario's stable land was the teacher telling us how Vancouver had a 70% risk of a major earthquake in the next 25 years... and this in the late 1990s, so I don't know if the odds have shortened or what.

Today, I'm not sure where he got that information; the most recent figure I saw was from Maclean's, giving a 10% chance of a major earthquake in the next fifty years, which is really not all that bad for a metropolis in an area vulnerable to megathrust earthquakes. Still, the chance remains that a quake will happen, and that's why I'm looking for places in New Westminster.

Or, more specifically, it's why I'm staying away from the city of Richmond entirely. You may or may not have heard of the place; for those Torontonian readers, it's roughly the North York of Vancouver - a formerly rural area that has, in the last few decades, been transformed by explosive suburban development. Today it has a population approaching 200,000, making it the fourth most populous municipality in British Columbia.

It's also built on land that's full of glacial silt brought down by the Fraser River, mostly deposited within the last twelve thousand years. The problem with this is the danger of liquefaction - that is, when exposed to seismic shocks, "solid" ground with a sufficiently high water saturation would turn into a sludge. This is exactly the sort of thing that happened in Christchurch, New Zealand during the recent earthquake there. Considering the strength of earthquakes that the Lower Mainland is vulnerable to - the last megathrust quake, back in 1700, has been estimated at magnitude 8.7 to 9.2 and is thus well inside the top 10 of most powerful earthquakes in recorded history - it's unlikely that a disaster would be particularly kind to Lulu Island.

This might seem stable, but that ain't necessarily so.

What gets me is that this danger has been known since at least 1997, and I only say that because that's the year a National Research Council Canada study detailing the Fraser delta's vulnerability to liquefaction was published - additional studies go back decades. So the question becomes, why in the hell would Metro Vancouver not dial back the intensity of settlement on, and development of, land that is known to be a geological hazard under conditions that for all we know may be triggered tomorrow? I can understand why the City of Richmond itself would be inclined to brush the threat under the rug - after all, no people moving to Richmond means no expansion of tax revenue - but this seriously strikes me as a failure of government. Hell, in the early 1990s, the GVRD increased Richmond's population cap from 157,526 to 185,000 - and considering patterns of population growth, we'll probably see calls from Richmond to have that cap lifted if it hasn't been already - because, you know, they're not only building suburbs on rich agricultural land ideally placed to provide locally-sourced food to Metro Vancouver, but that land isn't solid either.

Does the city of Richmond tell its residents that they're living on land that may well turn to sludge in an earthquake? I don't imagine consulting seismic hazard maps is a common practice among homeseekers. That's just a weirdness mostly of me.

Reality: Augmented, Redefined

One of the fringe benefits of being a future-oriented dude is that I get the opportunity to denigrate subcultures which do not yet, technically, exist. Thinking about it now, the feeling I get is that one of the big subcultures of the future may well pivot around the use of augmented reality - a setup that can take the world and paint virtual information on it, like bringing up reviews of a restaurant when you point your phone at it. The beginnings of it are already available today, and it's the sort of thing that's not going to go away. It will likely change the world and twist existing cultural norms to an even greater degree than the ubiquitous cell phone has.

The sheer transformative potential of augmented reality is such that it should be approached very carefully... but we all know that's never going to happen. I mean, why bother sussing out the potential negative implications of an advancement and coming up with ways to mitigate them when this is such a cool thing? It's another headlong run toward the frontier and screw the consequences; just like how cell phone ubiquity leads to the assumption of 24/7 availability and encourages seat-of-the-pants activities over prior planning, or how ebooks are fundamentally far more vulnerable than physical books. Still, for many people, it doesn't matter: they'll put on their augemented reality shades because they just want to forget how much reality bites.

YEEEEEEEEAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

Not everyone thinks about it the same way I do. What really got me on this line of thought was a comment I found on a forum the other day, one that I think really gets to the core of the problem.

It's re-definitional to what it means to be a human.

My phone, if I take a picture of some french text it will translate it. If I wore that all the time, and it did it in real time. I can read french.

That is just one example, but it is a massive shift. We already see it. My car has a device that will overlay arrows on images of roads (a GPS) and I can never get lost.

The line what a person knows and what humanity knows blurs.

I think the big problem here is also the one that gives the idea of the Singularity so much of its heft: the notion that, in the very near future, technology will advance to the point where it will save us from ourselves. Religions have been preaching about humanity's need for a savior for millennia, and today there are people who believe that we're about to build electronic saviors for ourselves. One of the things that worries me is the prospect of the opinion quoted above becoming mainstream.

Look - let's say you have a universal translator linked to your phone, or your shades, or your optical implant or whatever, and that it was capable of real-time translation of a language. That does not mean that you can read that language. You are just as ignorant as you were before, and you're relying on a machine to do your work for you. What happens when it spits out a bad translation that lands you in immediate trouble? Sure, you could always flag it as "bad" after the fact, but that's little consolation if it got a few of your teeth knocked out. The idea that having a GPS means you'll "never get lost" is likewise laughable - how many times have people followed GPS instructions so slavishly that they drive right into ditches?

Sure, I know that GPS is a boon to many people. Personally I prefer the traditional way: following lines on a printed map, one that never runs out of power or needs a critical software update to continue working. Do we really want to encourage a society where people just go where their machine tells them to go, rather than learning how to translate those maps on paper into maps in their heads? Why do some people seem so eager to augment reality by discounting the one right in front of their faces?

That's not even getting into the risks of making so much of our society dependent on our information infrastructure. Events like the solar storm of 1859 aren't one-of-a-kind, and delegating things you should know yourself only makes you more vulnerable, in the end.

Enhancing Character Awareness

One of the biggest problems a writer will face is convincing the characters to do what the writer knows is necessary. The fact is, characters aren't robots - whether or not they're empowered with a will of their own on the page, the fact remains is that their words and actions establish their perspectives, motives, and desires, and forcing characters to arrive at decisions through pure authorial fiat cheapens a work immensely. Good writers can manipulate the characters, make them believe that they're doing things for their own reason, seeing things with their own eyes.

Still, sometimes the temptation to use authorial intervention to solve an intractable or just difficult problem is too much. I notice it frequently in works of fantasy, where it almost seems to be a staple of the genre - prophetic visions or clairvoyant revelations that give the characters insight into the future, and also serve as easily-installed motives. Say that you've got this sorcerer in a far-off land who you plan to be the Big Bad of the series, but your characters have no reason to even be aware of him, let alone willing to challenge him. Sure, you could weave a complex plot together where the protagonist and the antagonist gradually come into each other's lives through ordinary circumstances and invent their own reasons to stand in opposition - or, you could just have some convenient soothsayer grant a character a vision of what this sorcerer will do when he achieves the power he seeks, and motivate the protagonist to prevent that vision from ever coming to pass.

Personally, I feel that pulling that particular trick out of the writer's toolbox cheapens the work. I believe that a protagonist should travel through the narrative and emerge victorious on their own merits, rather than because of some ineffable gift of second sight.

It's when this same line of thinking shows up in science fiction and other, more reality-rooted genres that I really start to get irritated. Fantasy gets a pass for a lot of things specifically because it is fantasy; the whole genre is practically a paean of longing for things we can't have because the universe is a meanie. To be perfectly blunt, I expect better from things that claim to be science fiction. I speak, specifically, of the Enhance Button.

Zoom in on A4 and rotate the bitmap around the Z axis all you want - the only thing that matters is that pixels gotta come from somewhere.

It's a staple both in modern science fiction and police procedural/mystery shows for the magical computer to take a small, grainy, poorly-resolved image and transform it into something of perfect sharpness - generally it's a key clue or deciding piece of evidence for the main characters, and without it they would be flailing about like a fish on the dock.

This is nothing more than an expression of the same motives that lie behind fantasy's prophetic visions - and, hell, science fiction frequently incorporates prophecy like it's no big thing. Look at Minority Report - without precognition, the story would fall completely apart. More recently, you can find it in StarCraft II's reeling, staggering narrative with the Ihan crystal missions.

What crystallized this for me was a two-part episode of the mystery series Castle, which I can watch thanks to CTV streaming it on their website. In the second-season episode "Boom!," the NYPD is on the trail of a crazy killer who has sent a video of himself with a captive to taunt them. Fortunately, the characters have a magical computer at their disposal. Not only are they able to zoom-enhance a light-drowned corner of a window into a recognizeable image of a New York City bridge, they're also able to completely strip out parts of the audio track with a few keystrokes, thereby isolating the sound of a passing elevated subway train. They then use the sound and the angle of the bridge view to establish precisely where the killer was holed up - and all this in barely more than sixty seconds.

What makes this even more hilarious is that, from the way the rest of the episode unfolds, the killer had expected the police to discover exactly this.

I know from experience that one of the hardest parts of writing is making a worthwhile villain, because they don't have the decency to make some elementary, stupid mistake that the protagonist sees through in an instant. But to create a villain that does cover his bases and have the protagonist make her way to him because of revelations from a magical computer or a prophetic vision doesn't do a work justice.

I Shot An Error Into the Air

One of the more sinister inventions in the world of finance, in my opinion, is the idea of compound interest: when interest itself earns additional interest. It's a pretty sweet deal if you're the one to whom the money is flowing, but in most cases it's flowing to a loan shark or a credit card company, and someone can easily be driven into the depths of financial despair by compound interest if they're not careful.

Vaguely similar to that, and extremely damaging in its own right, is the concept of compound mistakes. Here, one poor choice has the potential to snowball, closing avenues that could have led to better choices and taking the subject of the decision further away from what might have been considered the ideal. Whether you're talking about a building or a plan of action the foundation needs to be solid, and if whoever's in charge makes an ill-advised decision early in the process, that decision will echo and, depending on the nature of the project, make it difficult to alter course.

Living in Toronto, I get a lot of opportunities to witness the phenomenon of compound mistakes first-hand. I imagine there are plenty of people who would agree that the plan for Toronto's hosting of the upcoming G20 summit, to take an example that's prominent in the news, was a decision monumental in its maliciousness or stupidity. Every day I run into news that compounds the poor nature of that decision: a tab in excess of $1-billion for security, the virtual shutdown of downtown Toronto in the time leading up to the summit, the economic damage that will result in enclosing the heart of Canada's financial center behind a ten-foot-tall fence. The only saving grace, I think, is the summit's temporary nature - by July 1 the world leaders will be gone, and hopefully so will the fence and the plethora of new CCTV cameras. By, say, 2015, the bruises will probably have faded.

A better example for the danger of compound mistakes is, I think, found in the TTC. Sometimes, when I really think about it, the Toronto subway and streetcar systems strike me as impossible machines: knowing what I know about the back-end stuff, the revenue and lack of support, I have difficulty understanding how they can work at all. Certainly I don't know first-hand any other transit systems that have to work as hard as the TTC does just to stay in the same place.

Although the more immediate cause of the TTC's woes is simple - the provincial and federal governments are completely unwilling to assist it - ultimately, I think, it traces back to decisions made in the 1970s. Fundamentally, the Toronto subway in particular still is a 1970s transit system. Since 1982, the only substantial additions to the system have been the Scarborough RT, the Sheppard Line, and Downsview station - in that same span of time, both Los Angeles and Vancouver built their current rail transit infrastructures from nothing - and while Toronto is having to beg and scrape at the feet of the provincial government for a drastically pared-down Transit Village, Los Angeles is building a new light-rail line and planning a subway extension clear to the Pacific Ocean while Vancouver is set to start building its new Evergreen Line.

Things could have been different. There were plans, even in the 1970s, to ensure the system's smooth expansion into the future. We could have built the Downtown Relief Line starting in the late 1980s, before the system became overloaded to its current extent, but the transformation of what was unused railway land in 1985 to towering condominium towers in 2010 complicates that project significantly. We could have dispensed with the Sheppard stubway and the transfer to the Sheppard East LRT by building light-rail straight through along Sheppard, but we didn't. Instead we're getting an extension of the subway into Vaughan, of all places, and not because it's actually necessary but because of political interest and political interest alone.

You can try to build a mighty tower, but if you're building it on top of a bed of gelatin, it's only going to be able to stand so high before it comes all crashing down. I can only hope the next Mayor is a fan of Tetris, because there's going to be a lot of puzzles for he or she to solve.