Why Blocking Bunny Rides the SkyTrain

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

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.

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Approaching NDAA-game

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

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.

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Engineering Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt

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

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.

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They're Whipping Attawapiskat

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

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.

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Short SF Review #20: The Helix

"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:

• #19: "The Thirst Quenchers" (Rick Raphael)
  
• #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
  
• #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
  
• #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
  
• #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
  
• #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
  
• #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
  
• #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
  
• #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
  
• #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
  
• #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
  
• #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
  
• #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
  
• #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
  
• #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
  
• #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
  
• #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
  
• #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
  
• #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)

* 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

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.

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