On Lowais and Cylties

Writers of literary fiction, I would imagine, tend not to have to invent many words - in cases where they do, they'd likely be important to the plot. It's different in science fiction. Since it favors the exploration of times and worlds removed from modern Earth, almost by definition it creates its own vocabulary: both to describe concepts that do not yet exist, like Isaac Asimov's coining of the term "robotics" when the word "robot" was only a few years removed from Czech, and to demonstrate ways in which the setting of a story diverges from ours. In the end, it's part of that effort to scratch together whatever verisimilitude can possibly be assembled - otherwise it may have a taste of artificiality to it. Imagine, for a moment, a sf story written in the 1980s and set thirty years later, in which everyone speaks exclusively of "cellular telephones." Real people don't talk like that. As things become common, their names shift and become simpler - at the expense of being less transparent to someone looking in from the outside.

I encountered something like that while reading through the January 1993 issue of Analog on the SkyTrain yesterday.

"He'd gotten his first taste of that particular hell on the Soarliner that had carried him up from Earth to the orbiting cylty of Newtonia. The long trip from there to Adonis, the huge cylstation which was the Consortium's Venus operations base, had been spent in an at least bearable half-gee."
- from "Leap," by Steven L. Burns

I had to stop for a few seconds when I hit the reference to "cylty" to figure out what it meant. When I puzzled it out to be a slamming-together of "cylinder city" - that is, an O'Neill cylinder. I can't recall any more references to cylties or cylstations elsewhere in the story, and this was on the first page. Still, I found it a good way to help bring the reader into the story, and I also felt a small surge of triumph when I picked out the likely meaning.

Not everyone reads like I do, though.

You may also know them as "spacevilles."

In one of my stories that's gathered a deep pile of rejections around it, in early drafts I made two references to something called a "lowai," in connection with a small automated quadrotor. I'd meant this to be a shortening of something like "low-functioning artificial intelligence" - that is, an AI that's capable of learning and adjusting its own programming in a basic way, but which isn't self-aware or particularly complex. I also liked the connection that could be drawn to "laowai," because what's more foreign than an artificial intelligence? (Don't answer that.)

Unfortunately, I wasn't really able to extend all this from my brain into the world. When the story went out to beta readers, they universally complained about "lowai," how they couldn't figure out what it was supposed to mean. I hemmed and hawed for a while and changed the reference in the next draft to "lowAI," which is hopefully more transparent but nevertheless looks stranger to my eyes - more artificial, more like something a science fiction writer would come up with and not like something people might actually say.

Photo: Sunrise Skyline

Both my arrival at and departure from Fredericton last week took place in total darkness, but thanks to the end of Daylight Saving Time on Sunday, the sun was beginning to seriously make its presence felt during the plane's final approach over Toronto. I like how Lake Ontario looks almost purple, creating sort of a "reverse rainbow" effect.

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Traffic, On and Off the Rails

Last night was a rather interesting night to be commuting by SkyTrain from Vancouver to New Westminster. Just as my train pulled into Joyce-Collingwood Station, a voice from SkyTrain control - the first of several during the course of the journey - came over the loudspeakers to let us know about a stuck switch in the New Westminster area that was causing systemwide delays, how trains would be held for longer than normal and to expect "lengthy" delays. For me, "lengthy" was about twenty-five minutes; my train was one of those that short turned at New Westminster Station, and the crush of people on the platform there made the crowds from the track reconstruction a couple of weekends ago look like nothing by comparison - thick enough that the only possible route from the first car to the stairwell was along the yellow strip at the edge of the platform, and even then it was only wide enough for one person.

Sure, it was annoying - would've been even more annoying had I ended up pulling some overtime at work that evening - but for me, ultimately inconsequential. Nothing is one hundred percent foolproof, but in more than a year of five-days-a-week SkyTrain commuting, I can count the number of times I've been affected by delays like this on one hand. It compares favorably to one of my previous arrangements, the famously erratic - some might say "unreliable" - 501 Queen streetcar line in Toronto, where you might be waiting anywhere between thirty seconds and thirty minutes with no explanation at all. For many people, "TTC" stands not for "Toronto Transit Commission," but "Take the Car."

Not everyone's so tolerant of transit problems, though. In addition to the problems I encountered around 9:20 PM, apparently there was another one just slightly before rush hour; I'm not sure when the third happened. While searching through Twitter I came across a tweet from Bruce Claggett, who'd apparently had enough:

Three #SkyTrain service problems today. Will be taking car to work tomorrow. #noconfidence

But it got me on to thinking why.

Two Mark II SkyTrains delayed at 22nd Street Station by track reconstruction, October 15, 2011.

Traffic jams have been the bane of motorized society for decades now, famously inescapable and seemingly always there when you need to go down the highway in a hurry. They're certainly familiar to drivers in Vancouver - while the 1960s freeway revolt stood in the way of superslabs punching through the West End and other neighborhoods, it meant that the city's capacity to absorb traffic is significantly less than other cities that didn't go Vancouver's way. Not that it might have made a difference - there's a reason downtown Toronto's main north-south freeway artery is popularly known as the Don Valley Parking Lot.

My point, though, is that thanks to both memetic reinforcement and the personal experiences of motorists, most people think of traffic jams and traffic slowdowns as fairly common, common enough that they only find traction outside the News 1130 traffic updates if they're really remarkable. Something to grouse at, sure, but nothing that would really come out of nowhere.

One of the big differences I noticed when first coming to Metro Vancouver is that the conversation - on Twitter, at least - about the SkyTrain and TransLink was vastly different from that in Toronto. Over there, back in 2010 searches under the #TTC hashtag tended to pull up complaint after complaint of overcrowded subways, delayed streetcars, absent buses, and so on. I haven't seen TransLink criticized nearly as much for service issues. Is it because of the SkyTrain's general reliability that events such as these hit so much harder? That riders are used to the SkyTrain not breaking down every day, and when it does it's that much more galling?

Or is it the control aspect? When you're in a car, if you're in a traffic jam at least you're there because out of all the routes you could have taken, you chose that one - for me, my only choice other than the SkyTrain to get between downtown Vancouver and New West is two buses with a transfer at Metrotown, which would probably take a good hour at least. If you're going from downtown Vancouver to someplace in Surrey, the lack of alternative choices is even more pronounced - and that's a big issue that I think TransLink really needs to work on in the years ahead, reducing the number of bottlenecks in the transit system.

Perhaps for some, they just need to put themselves back in control again for a while, and that's why they go back to the car. Reasons vary from person to person. For my part, though, a delay every once in a while is a small price to pay for not having to worry about the stress of traffic jams, gas prices, and everything else that comes with car ownership in this modern world.

Photo: Fly By Night

Forget what I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how Air Canada doesn't run a flight monopoly - in some cities, this actually is the case. Case in point: Fredericton International Airport in Fredericton, New Brunswick, where all regularly scheduled flights are run by Air Canada Express, connecting it to Toronto, Montreal, and Halifax. I was through there this weekend, arriving and departing in the deep darkness. Pictured here is C-FFJA, a CRJ200 regional jet that ran the 5:30 AM flight to Toronto Pearson, the airport's first flight of the day - and aside from a completely dark Dash 8 at the other end of the field, it was the sole and solitary aircraft there.

Been a while since I've boarded a plane without going by jetway.

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Tightening the Greenbelt

The land I grew up on was on the edge of the country, a long time ago; after the tornado clobbered that part of Barrie in 1985, the developers came in to lay down the first phase of what ended up being a near-continuous program of suburban expansion that pushed the city frontier kilometers to the south, deep into what had been unspoiled rural land within even my living memory. Barrie may have been one of the fastest-growing cities in Canada at the time, but its experience is hardly unique. In the Greater Toronto Area in particular, the land is under constant stress from consistent and continuous suburban encroachment, even as the factors that made our twentieth-century flight to the suburbs possible are changing rapidly.

In retrospect, I tended to play SimCity 4 this way; your simulated cities don't start to densify until you reach a necessary critical mass of population, and in order to reach that mass it's pretty much necessary to zone light residential over huge parcels of wilderness until enough people move in - and even then, it's tempting to just continue doing that until your city physically cannot expand anymore, since it's an easy way of bringing in tax revenue. In this respect, simulated cities have much in common with real ones.

This way of doing things particularly pronounced in the Greenbelt, a large area of protected land set aside by the Government of Ontario that's supposed to be off-limits to development, as it includes among other things the fragile and vital Oak Ridges Moraine. Despite this, it's being nibbled away in a dozen places, as are other undeveloped rural lands in the GTA - witness the example of the Regional Municipality of Durham, where recently Ajax was the only city to argue in favor of densifying the existing built-up areas rather than just laying down new suburbs - and it may only get worse, with the Toronto Star's recent coverage at how the Greenbelt may have truly been successful at pricing the housing market beyond the reach of most people, which - combined with the general lack of family orientation in Toronto's recent condo boom - has created an intense pent-up demand that's ready to erupt, bulldozing every farmer's field in its way.

The ones that have managed to hold out this long, that is.

Suburban sprawl in the Greater Toronto Area - probably some part of Mississauga, considering the descent path into Pearson.

Demand should not be the final arbiter. To be blunt, the continued existence of the Greenbelt, as a protected buffer zone of wilderness and country lands of the sort that used to be dominant in southern Ontario only decades ago, is more important than the popular desire to have a house with a white picket fence. No one is entitled to home ownership, not the same way we're entitled to things like free expression, and we'll be dealing with the consequences of that meme dominating our society for decades down the road. Still, the real problem here is that the government seems to have fumbled the ball so horribly that there are almost no alternatives to a house if 1) you want to own, not rent and 2) you are a family. With the forest of condominums in downtown Toronto thickening every day, and more and more new stands appearing elsewhere in the GTA, there's no excuse for this kind of residential myopia. Thanks to years and decades of poor decisions, Ontario may be on the edge of a housing crisis.

This would be something very instructive for the Lower Mainland to learn from, because damn if it's not a lesson that doesn't need to be applied to Vancouver itself. One of the reasons I live in New Westminster is because even rental prices in Vancouver itself were pretty much uniformly out of what I considered to be my league; as for owning a home in Vancouver, unless you want to be in hock to the bank for fifty years, forget it!

Yet Metro Vancouver particularly still has the advantage of time on its side - the pressures haven't been as great, it seems, and they didn't start as far back as they did around Toronto. There are still spots of open countryside that are reachable in under an hour by bicycle from New Westminster. The Lower Mainland doesn't have any equivalent to the Greenbelt as far as I know - if it does, please correct me - and if that's to continue being the case, I'd very much like it to be because the right decisions were made and the demand for leapfrogging subdivisions into the countryside just doesn't exist.

Besides, even if there is, it's not necessarily a good idea. I wouldn't want to buy a house on Lulu Island, considering what's going to happen to that land when the Big One comes.

Personal Concerns

Due to personal issues, there will be no update today - presuming anyone cares. The regular posting schedule will resume tomorrow.

Photo: The Horse-Drawn Beer Wagon

Seven years ago my travels took me east to the Maritimes, specifically New Brunswick, and one of the places I ended up while there was a country fair in Gagetown - the sort, I imagine, you can find across rural North America. I know that beer isn't delivered by horse-drawn carriage anymore outside of special occasions, but really, how often would you see something like this in the Greater Toronto Area or the Lower Mainland? Aside from riots or demonstrations that bring out the mounted police, how often do you see horses in cities, period?

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Beware of Greeks Gifting Bears

Just when I was beginning to hold out hope that the worst was behind us, that things might finally be on the road to recovery, that my appearing-eventually-in-On Spec story wouldn't be horribly dated by the time it comes out because it supposes the continued existence of the euro and the European Union in the late 21st century, this happens. This, in this case, is Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou's snap referendum call - you remember that agreement the Greek government hashed out with the other eurozone leaders a few days ago to keep old Hellas from collapsing into austerity and default and so on? Unless something changes, the birthplace of democracy will decide its future democratically, with the Greek people voting on whether or not they will remain in the eurozone and thereby accept the heavily austere conditions attached to the next EU rescue package... but without it, Greece will literally not have the money to pay its bills in the next few months.

What a way to start off November.

The changing of the guard in Syntagma Square, Athens - March 2000, before there was such a physical thing as a euro and before everything went pear-shaped.

Referenda aren't all that uncommon, granted, but for a situation such as this - they're extraordinary. Generally, in my experience, referenda surround relatively simple questions; the Quebec independence referendum, for a sufficiently broad definition of "simple" when you consider how the question was worded, or British Columbia's keep-the-HST referendum, which went down in flames because people thought it would be a fun time to punish the government without regard to the consequences. It's that, in particular, that concerns me about the idea of the referendum. Public opinion is prone to emotionalism, and all too often public opinion doesn't care about consequences.

This referendum plan the single most monumental example of governmental ass-covering I can think of. From the Prime Minister's perspective, it must be gravy; if the people vote in favor of the austerity - just like how British Columbians voted in a landslide to keep the HST, har har - then the government can abdicate all responsibility for creating this situation to begin with and just dump it in the people's collective lap. If it doesn't, well... to be honest, I'm not entirely certain what would happen then. I don't imagine Athens would ignore the will of the people after going out of its way to ask them, but despite the loathsome nature of the austerity demands themselves - such as the whole "sell your continually profitable assets to pay your creditors now and, incidentally, enrich some banks and corporations" thing - I've never seen any alternatives to this austerity offered in the media.

If it was just Greece, it wouldn't be an earthshaking problem. But it isn't just Greece; this is the reason why globalization was not all that good of an idea. What Greece does will echo across Earth, and do you really think that the rest of the world is just going to stand by while the Greek government aims its torpedoes at recovery because it doesn't want to own up to how much it and its predecessors fucked up? Governments have been forcibly toppled for less.

Of course, there's no assurances things will go even that far. PM Papandreou's government is holding on to power with a razor-thin majority, one that has been steadily weakened by a constant stream of defections. I'm writing this on Wednesday, so by the time it goes live on Thursday morning the situation may well have changed dramatically. That's how these things happen.

There are times when the threat of democracy can make things move... and there are times when the duty of a government is to take responsibility for its own actions. On the latter, Greece is failing rather stupendously.

Photo: A Long Look Down Lake Shore

When I still lived in Toronto, I didn't get down to Lake Shore Boulevard very often; even though I lived nearby, it was still a fairly long streetcar ride out to Mimico and New Toronto and Long Branch, the former lakeside communities that still retain a markedly different character than Etobicoke proper. Plenty of people do head down that way, though - and through proper use of the zoom lens, that sense of activity in New Toronto is only amplified.

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Racing Gadgets to the Future

Here's some disclosure: I own, and fairly regularly use, a VCR. Well, to be fair, it's a combination DVD player and VCR, but even those are difficult to find these days - I've only ever seen the same brand over and over. You may wonder why I still stick with that "ancient" technology - but have you seen how cheap VHS tapes go for these days? Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade for a dollar is a deal you'd be hard-pressed to find in DVD. Still, the world of personal technology has changed a great deal since we were earnestly exhorted to be kind and rewind - changed for most of us, that is. With my stack of videotapes and my lack of a mobile phone, except for my always-on broadband internet I really don't live much differently than I did in 2000.

Yet there are always those who want to push ahead - people who want the newest, latest gadget, like those who camped out for the latest iPhone, and people who wnat to make sure that people keep buying these gadgets, again and again and again, shelling out dollars upon dollars for incremental improvements. I'm told, for example, that the new iPhone has improved cameras and a new voice-recognition system that allows you to talk at it and tell it what to do, like closing the pod bay doors. I don't know if that, along with the additional new programs and gizmos on the new iPhone, is enough to warrant an upgrade. A lot of people believe it is, though; in its first weekend of availability, more than four million of them were sold.

Plenty of people seem to have reason to believe that this sort of trajectory will only get steeper into the future. More and more folks will get more and more sophisticated smartphones, so the story goes, and that steadily increasing sophistication will effectively eject devices from the marketplace as phones incorporate their functions - this is the thesis behind an article that ran in the Globe and Mail a couple of weeks ago, "Gadgets that won't be around in 2020" - or, at least, which will be as common then as VCRs are now.

What gadgets? Things like self-contained GPS systems, ebook readers, point-and-shoot cameras, and CDs and DVDs as storage media. They're fairly tame predictions, in their way, though I am as always greatly suspicious of the movement away from physical to digitial distribution models, as the latter has the potential to place a hell of a lot more power in the vendor, and the recent back-and-forth about bandwidth caps in Canada demonstrate that for now, that digital distribution future is still very unevenly distributed.

There are two things that concern me about this trajectory. Consolidation, and choice. Sure, it'd be convenient to have all of your devices in one, wouldn't it? You wouldn't have to fumble through pockets for one or the other if your phone was also your camera, your map, and your on-the-go computer, wouldn't it? Great, great... but what happens when it breaks?

Such as, say, my old digital camera, which had a rather unfortunate encounter from elevation with a hard concrete floor in Los Angeles? I know I've used this photo before, but the truth is I just don't have that many broken cameras.

For me, it was a fairly straightforward solution - a trip out to a West Hollywood Best Buy to obtain a replacement, because I'll be damned if I'm going to be out and about in a city I've never been without a camera to swing around. What if it hadn't just been my camera, though, but essentially everything I'd been relying on? Granted, since I've never owned a mobile phone I have no experience with how difficult it is to replace things, but with what I've seen about the prices and contracts and fine print, it doesn't strike me as being quite as easy as poking through the big box store's camera department, when replacement is necessary on short notice.

Consolidation amplifies convenience, certainly, but it also amplifies risk - and with payment functions starting to migrate to smartphones as in the case of Google Wallet, more and more people seem to be making them more and more central in their lives. Which isn't bad, as long as everything works fine. But things never work fine all the time.

Yet this stampede also cuts against choice. The more people who have decent point-and-shoot cameras embedded in their phones, the smaller a market there is for stand-alones, and the harder it gets for people who want them to get them. Sure, it's still possible to get a VCR/DVD player like I've got, but it costs twice as much as a pure DVD player, and I've only ever seen the one model by Toshiba for sale anywhere. How long is it going to be before people are forced into that model of consolidation, simply because they can't afford the alternative?

I know that technology always advances, at least in our current frame of development. It's just I have this thing about people constantly crowing about the future of technology without really stopping to think about what's implied.