A Railway to the Stars?

A few days ago, Randy McDonald at A Bit More Detail put me onto the revelation that Joss Whedon's short-lived but fan-favorite series Firefly has been named by the Exurban League as the #2 conservative television show of the last twenty-five years. After having thought about it, it's not that much of a surprise. The idea of personal freedom is generally of extreme importance in the conservative world of the mind, and one of the great themes running through Firefly was personal independence from the centralized government. The vast spread of space provides endless opportunities for a free and personal life - presuming that you have the resources and capacity to maintain a life in the final frontier.

Ideas of frontier independence, themselves influential throughout history, have been successfully married with space-based settings for a long time. Fifty years ago, Gene Roddenberry had begun drafting what would become Star Trek, which was pitched to the networks as "Wagon Train to the stars." Considering the historical preponderance of American creators in the Western science fiction field, it's understandable that attitudes about humanity's reach into space would be informed by the experience of the Old West. Popular culture especially has come to enshrine the pioneers' covered wagons as the quintessential symbol of Westward expansion. American settlement of the lands opened up by the Louisiana Purchase was in full swing by the mid-nineteenth century, spurred by the promise of open country or religious freedom.

In particular, the settlement of the American West can further parallel to pioneering flights into space in that there is no fixed route there. The settlers followed rough trails charted by fur traders or explorers; anyone who's ever played The Oregon Trail knows that the journey west was hard, with dysentery lurking around every corner. It wasn't until 1869 that the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed, and even in 1860 there were nearly four hundred thousand people living in California alone. In the United States, the settlers went first and the infrastructure followed them. Similarly, in the present-day reach into space, our pioneers have braved dangerous environments and been forced to build their havens with what limited resources they could bring with them.

The Canadian experience was rather different. Canada's transcontinental railway came later than that down south, completed at Craigellachie, British Columbia in 1885. Not only did the Canadian Pacific Railway tie Canada together from sea to sea, it played a great role in the settlement of the prairies. Before the railway, non-First Nations populations were rather thin on the ground north of the border. Calgary and Vancouver, large and prominent cities today, did not even exist when the American transcontinental railroad was completed. While in the United States the railroad followed the settlers, in Canada the settlers followed - and, for that matter, rode in - the railway.

For me, the Canadian experience parallels the promise of a space elevator. With a fixed and inexpensive link to orbital space - presuming, of course, that we can find something with sufficient tensile strength and a sufficiently low bulk manufacturing cost in order to build the damn thing - it would be possible for space development to expand beyond the constraints imposed by rocket launches from the bottom of the gravity well.

There's more than one way to space. People won't necessarily take a latter-day wagon train to get there.

PDP #230: Ten Minutes to Noon

This past weekend was marked, in addition to Anime North, by Doors Open Toronto, a two-day event where places normally restricted to public access throw their doors open - hence the name. Among the places I went was the Canada Life Building on University Avenue, recognizable for the weather beacon at it top. more specifically its usually-closed seventeenth-floor observation deck. From there I had an excellent view of the west side and parts of downtown - the parts that weren't blocked by taller buildings. Looking to the east, I got this shot of Old City Hall, reflected in the windows of the Cadillac Fairview Tower.

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Legislative Creep

On occasion I feel nostalgic for the days of the lawspeaker. This was a government office that existed in medieval Scandinavian states, and the man who held it was expected to memorize and speak aloud the law of the land when necessary. Admittedly, this would have been considerably easier a thousand years ago, when - it can be argued - laws were far more focused on issues relevant to the average person, thanks to the nature of governments and the absence of lobbyists. Now, of course, there's no way an average person could memorize the full extent of the law.

The reason why is simple - the function of a legislative body is to create law, and so that is what it does, whether or not it needs to. While medieval governments weren't responsive to the people to begin with, today corporations and multinationals and even other governments have far greater sway in the halls of government than the people it purportedly represents and legislates on behalf of. What this frequently results in is a legislature creating hundreds or thousands or millions of new criminals merely by the stroke of a pen.

Right now, the Conservative minority government of Stephen Harper - the best President that Canada has ever had, considering the degree to which he seems to get his marching orders from the United States - is struggling to push a somewhat modified, but still fundamentally made-in-USA copyright bill into law. While it's not quite as onerous in all respects as the version that was thankfully killed in 2008, and does not go nearly as deep into the crazy end of the pool as the United Kingdom's Digital Economy Act, it's still hardly ideal. It will still make it an offense punishable with five years and jail and up to $1-million in fines to circumvent any technological protection measures on information, the so-called "digital locks."

This isn't a law Canadians wanted. The copyright consultations held after the acrimonious failure of Bill C-61 made that clear, and none of it matters. This is a law that is going through because the United States - or, more appropriately, the multinational entertainment giants of the United States - prefer it to the current state of Canada's system. Personally, it sets us down a path we'd be better off not following.

Maybe the biggest issue is that the legislative bodies seem to be devoted so wholeheartedly to creating new law, to delineating the line between order and chaos to an ever-greater extent, and to making it so that every day the boundaries of the law are a bit more rigid than the day before. No surprise, really - we have dedicated chambers in our legislatures for the purpose of creating new law. But if the medieval lawspeaker forgot about one small portion of the law, and did not read it when the time came, was it really a law at all? Perhaps what we need is a new chamber, one dedicated to striking down laws that don't serve the people.

PDP #229: Would You Like A Jelly Baby?

This past weekend saw the running of Anime North 2010, one of the (if not the) largest anime-focued fan conventions in Canada. Though I didn't attend I was in the area on the weekend, and had the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the attendees - many of whom were cosplayers, though the costuming isn't limited to purely anime characters. While I was waiting for the 58 Malton bus I encountered a Fourth Doctor from Doctor Who. Honestly, I still think the Fourth Doctor is the iconic Doctor. I mean, look at that scarf!

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The Great, Competitive Outdoors

One of the great failures of imagination is to assume that the future will be like the present in every respect. While it's tempting for many people - familiarity is, after all, comfortable, and people crave anchors in strange places - it's fundamentally flawed. Change is one of the only constants in life, and if we want to be able to face the future on firm footing we can't loll back and assume everything's going to be like it was before. That is a recipe for being blindsided. What we need to do, as individuals, governments, and societies, is continue to probe the possible futures to ensure that we have the best chances of dealing with what the next years bring.

Recently I received an email inquiry from an interested voter about where I stand on certain positions, one of them being crime. In this case, my position is that we're on a good, smooth course. Toronto has a low crime rate for a city its size, and it's been decreasing steadily for more than ten years. Incidents like the subway robbery in April are plastered across the city media because that sort of thing rarely happens. Still, the future will evolve, and we can't assume that this state of affairs will inevitably continue. Things change; they already have changed.

Case in point - @sciencewisdom on Twitter recently posted this quote by science fiction author Isaac Asimov: "Night was a wonderful time in Brooklyn in the 1930s. Air conditioning was unknown except in movie houses, and so was television. There was nothing to keep one in the house. Furthermore, few people owned automobiles, so there was nothing to carry one away. That left the streets and the stoops. The very fullness served as an inhibition to crime."

What we're beginning to see today are the foundations of a world where leaving one's home is unnecessary in order to complete progressively more tasks, and if remote operation technology becomes more refined and accessible to the public in the years to come, that trend can easily accelerate. It could make the ideal of the "safe city" harder to realize than in the present day. Plenty of people, I imagine, would have no problem at all if they never had to leave their house again.

I believe that one of the things cities should be working on for the future is a program of outdoors development to coax people out of their houses and back into the commons. Toronto's Sherbourne Park, currently under construction and in a voting runoff to determine a final name, will hopefully be a fine example of this, as Chicago's Millennium Park may be - though I'm not sure how well-used it is by Chicagoans as opposed to tourists. As the old saying goes, a man's home is his castle - but one of the reasons castles were built in the first place was to protect from enemies outside. That's not really the sort of thing I'd like to happen again.

PDP #228: If You Have A Problem...

The A-Team was one of the landmarks of 1980s television. Do not deny it; in your heart, you know it to be true. From Hannibal's disguises and love of when the plan comes together to Mr. T and the once-an-episode assembly of armored fighting vehicles from backroom scrap, it may have been cheesy but it was still also awesome. I'm not sure whether or not the upcoming major motion picture will turn out like so many other 80s TV show reboots, but I'll be seeing it anyway.

I encountered this van while going home on Saturday via the Carlton streetcar. It's turning onto College Street from Manning, and the only thing it's missing from the true A-Team van is the spoiler at the back. But I won't quibble. Deep down, many people want to be able to hire the A-Team.

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The Wikipedian Candidate

If the Toronto municipal election thus far has taught me anything, it's the degree to which people feel as if they're qualified to talk about anything under the sun for the simple reason that they're going to have their name on the ballot. There are most likely a boatload of municipal issues that I lack a deep understanding of - but for me, to talk and act as if I know them as thoroughly as an expert on the matter would be disingenuous at best.

This strain of political action is particularly visible in terms of transit. It's probably the single most important issue in this election, and everyone has their take on it. What gets me about this is that it all sounds like a bunch of posturing and the drawing of lines on maps. I may be the only car-free candidate for Mayor, and I'll be the first to admit that I only have a hobbyist's familiarity with the TTC system. What would surprise me is if the other candidates know as much about the system as they purport to.

Case in point: "Furious" George Smitherman released his new transit plan on Friday. He is - get this, because this will shock and awe you - promising new subways. The Sun's coverage was eminently predictable. I first heard about it via transit guru Steve Munro's careful, detailed, point-by-point criticism of it. Here's the meat of what he'd do as Mayor, if you're unfamiliar:

- Extend the Sheppard Line west from Sheppard-Yonge to Downsview.
- Replace the Scarborough RT with an extension of the Bloor-Danforth Line from Kennedy to Scarborough Centre.
- Extend the Bloor-Danforth Line from its western terminus at Kipling to Sherway Gardens, a stone's throw from the Toronto-Mississauga border.
- Extend the Eglinton LRT tunnel to Weston Road.
- Extend the Sheppard East LRT to U of T's Scarborough campus, in preparation for the 2015 Pan Am Games.

He also includes the Spadina subway extension, the Finch West LRT to Humber College, and the Waterfront LRT in his plan as well - though this is disingenuous at best, I think, since those projects are either already under construction or well on the way to being realized.

While on the bus to and from furthest Etobicoke today, I had plenty of time to reflect on this plan - and something hit me. It seemed disturbingly familiar. It didn't take long for me to realize why: his subway plans are taken directly from Wikipedia. Check the revision for the Bloor-Danforth article from May 21, and that of the Sheppard Line from May 13. The westward extension of the Sheppard line is a particularly common meme, it seems, in the Toronto subway community. Granted, it would make that line a lot more pleasant, and it would slightly increase the crosstown utility of the Sheppard Line, but to champion these things of all things suggests to me that Smitherman is looking for solutions that "make sense" or are potentially popular, regardless of whether or not they will be worthwhile additions to the transit network.

Smitherman's plan is particularly teeth-grinding to me because it makes no mention at all of the Downtown Relief Line. The fact of the matter is that the subway network is dealing with serious capacity issues, and I'm surprised it's not hemmorhaging riders because of the sardine-like experience that is the subway downtown at rush hour. To talk about extending the lines further into the outer city while excess capacity is needed now in the downtown core - to my mind, transit-oriented it ain't.

The Downtown Relief Line is, I believe, an absolutely necessary component of Toronto's transit network. While I have no problem with the idea of extending the Sheppard subway west, or taking Bloor-Danforth further out into Scarborough and Etobicoke, these should not be priority projects. The proper time to start building the DRL was 1985. If we need any subway, it is that subway.

PDP #227: Putting It Into Isometric Perspective

One of the most important inventions in the field of graphic arts was perspective: the ability for artists to render three dimensions on a two-dimensional field. Attempts to create the illusion of depth began in earnest in ancient Greece, but true perspective was often eschewed in ancient and medieval art for stylistic reasons.

Isometric projection is one of the simpler ways to create the appearance of three dimensions. Here, I'll show you; although, the limitations of ASCII pose additional challenges.


I recall the isometric perspective fondly for one major reason: it was in my video games. Civilization II relied on isometric, as did X-COM: UFO Defense and SimCity 2000 - just a few of many. It's not used quite as often anymore, since graphical rendering capabilities have increased to a point where other mechanisms for creating the appearance of three dimensions are feasible.

This three-quarters photograph of the TD Canada Trust Tower, part of Brookfield Place in downtown Toronto, is as close to isometric as I can reasonbly get to. For complete accuracy, I'd need to have a flying camera - isometric games generally went with the bird's-eye perspective.

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If Rigs Drill Down--

I'm holding out a bit of hope that the recent ecological catastrophe - "oil spill" just doesn't work as a description when you're talking about tens of thousands of barrels of crude spewing out every day for more than a month - in the Gulf of Mexico will thoroughly discredit the idea of offshore drilling. Then I remind myself that I have to be realistic. There is money to be made in slurping up dinosaur stew that happens to be underwater, and as such we've got to get ready quickly for a constant struggle against politicians who place short-term enrichment - particularly, the favors that oil industry lobbyists and representatives give out to grease the wheels - over the long-term interests of those they ostensibly represent.

It's easy enough to see where the battle lines will be drawn next: the Arctic Ocean. At the rate we're going, in the next few years we will lose the northern icecap through the summer months, and all that open ocean with all its inferred oil resources - an estimated 90 billion barrels - is singing a sweet, sweet song in the ears of petroleum executives the world over. Shell Oil was even granted exploration licenses in the Beaufort Sea last year, but thankfully the issue has been tied up in the courts - as far as I know, there are no operating rigs up there yet.

That can't change. In my mind, we can't afford to allow these resources to be exploited. Notwithstanding the environmental impact of burning an additional ninety billion barrels of oil, or the degree to which access to such a bonanza would only encourage the continuation of our current situation, we cannot run the risk of a similarly devastating oil catastrophe in the Arctic Ocean.

Personally, if it was up to me - if I was World Archon, or whatever, because I like "archon" as a title - I would shut the rigs down to as great a degree as possible. We can't afford an oil spill anywhere, whether it's the Gulf of Mexico or the Pacific or the Indian Ocean. Devastation is devastation, no matter whose shores the oil washes up on. The problem here is inertia - existing offshore drilling operations have bit down pretty hard, and they're not going to be coming up easily.

Ultimately, though, this does not come down to the corporations alone. Sure, corporations may be doing all they can to get authorization to drill in the Arctic, but while they have the money they do not have all the power necessary to do it on their own. The final word rests with governments. As far as I am concerned, any government that allows offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean - taking into account the recent disaster, as well as the need to radically transform the way our civilization is fueled if we're to make it through the twenty-first century in hale and hearty shape - would demonstrate that it is more concerned with the prospect of immediate enrichment than with the long-term interests of its people and of the world as a whole. And as such, in my mind, any government acting in such a manner would lose the moral authority to govern.

We give power to governments so that they can coordinate the things individuals can't, so that they can help ensure we live in peace and plenty. What we needs is a firmer awareness of the concept of the Mandate of Heaven. A short-sighted leap toward the paradigm of the twentieth century is something we can afford only slightly more than another ecological catastrophe.

PDP #226: The Night Car

A few nights ago the lights were on at Allan Lamport Stadium, significantly brighter than they usually are at that time of night - on the opposite side of the street, still bright enough to read or take photographs by. I was surprised how long I had to wait for the streetcar to enter the frame, though - at the time it was taken, 501 Queen streetcars were diverting onto King, but just tell that to the service frequency gods.

I'm so happy to have a camera that actually takes decent night shots.

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