Sunday, July 31, 2011

Photo: Breaking News!

One of the highlights of the old Citytv Building at Queen and John in Toronto was always, in my opinion, the news van frozen in crashing out of the eastern wall. When I was younger it was a Citytv van, later changed to a CP24 one, though in recent years I can't recall if the lights continued to flash and the wheels kept spinning.

It's been a while since I've been to Toronto and so I can't know for sure, but I presume that the van is no longer there thanks to Citytv's relocation to its Dundas Square studios in the former Olympic Spirit building - though, realistically, as this happened a year before I moved away from Toronto, I have little excuse to not know it. It doesn't seem like there's enough blank wall on that building for a news van to crash out of again.


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Saturday, July 30, 2011

Kerbal Space Program: Rocket (Explosion) Science!

When I was young, I thought the shuttle was the future. It was reusable, you see, and glided back to Earth after a successful mission - not like those blast-apart rockets they showed in old movies and TV shows, which weren't new and thus weren't as good. Today, we're on the cusp of another Rocket Age. With the Space Shuttles at rest after thirty years of flight, the business of boosting crap from Earth into space is once again purely the domain of the rocket. The towering stacks of boosters and fuel that flung men to the moon forty years ago are once again the kings of the spaceways. What better time than this to not only celebrate the new ascendancy of the rocket, but gain a more personal appreciation of what it means to get one of those beasts to lumber off the pad?

Or, alternatively, to find dark humor in how those beasts lumber off the pad, immediately start swooping and diving with all the majesty a drunken eagle while the hapless crew screams in terror and you fight to keep control, only for it to punch a new crater into the land seventeen seconds later?

Kerbal Space Program has that.

Under development by Squad Games of Mexico City, Kerbal Space Program is a free-to-download game centered around the establishment and management of an entire space program so that the small, green, cylinder-headed Kerbals can "fulfill their ultimate mission of conquering space." Right now the game is in a bare-bones alpha stage, and presently functions as a wide-open sandbox focused on the construction and launch of spacecraft out of a variety of parts - some included with the basic game, others created by members of the community and made available for download. There are no challenges yet except what you make for yourself; perhaps you start with building a rocket that doesn't immediately explode when the motors start running, and go up from there.

That's not to say it's necessarily easy, though. There is a steep learning curve here, and it's definitely not for everyone. Kerbal Space Program does not pull its punches as far as physics is concerned, to the extent that the center of mass for your rocket will change as its fuel is expended. It hasn't been described as a "Von Braun blooper reel" for nothing. My current bugbear is making it into orbit of Kearth, a rather salubrious world about an order of magnitude smaller than Earth and home of the Kerbals. Once you've got a fair grasp on how to build non-explosive rockets, it's fairly straightforward to build one capable of reaching orbit; actually reaching orbit is something else again. There's a very good reason that NASA uses computers. Even if you do make it into some kind of orbit, it's easy to be left with too little fuel to execute a deorbit burn and return to the surface - leaving those poor Kerbals stranded up there, until the seals on the command pod start to break.

Which is, incidentally, not that hard to imagine. Kerbal Space Program is based around the idea of a rickety, ramshackle space program on the cheap, where you build rockets out of parts found lying by the side of the road or built in a junkyard. It actually reminds me of The Wings of Honneamise in some respects - a shining representation of that belief that we can get anything we want if we want it badly enough.

Planet Kearth is blue, and there's nothing I can do...

Kerbal Space Program is one of those rare games that, just by playing it, you can't help but learn something. You learn about how rockets are staged, how solid-fuel rockets compare to liquid-fuel ones, what it means to enter into an orbit, how to steer a craft tumbling in three dimensions. I think it's got great promise as an educational game in its own right - twelve-year-olds would love it.

Aside from the fierce learning curve, which is more than understandable for a game that approaches rocketry in a rigorous way, I can't think of any complaints I have about Kerbal Space Program that aren't a result of the extremely early state the game is in. Sure, it's difficult to get into orbit when you have look up velocity and altitude tables to figure out whether or not it's a stable one, but I have confidence that some kind of trajectory indicator will be added in a future update. Considering that the game will eventually include missions, space stations, and voyages to other worlds, it's a bit out there to expect players to entirely eyeball their flights into orbit. The finished game will be a pay product, but this original sandbox version will be free forever - and hell, this is a game that I'm eager to buy.

By the way, once you make it into orbit, here's a tip: don't try landing on the night side of the planet. Something's bugged in the game's collision detection there. Your command module will explode upon landing regardless of whether or not you remembered to install and activate the parachute.

My recommendation? Sit back, put on "Space Oddity," "Rocketman," or "Yakety Sax," depending on the tenor of the mission, and help the Kerbals swim in the cosmic ocean. It can be downloaded from the main Kerbal Space Program website here, from its mirror here, or torrented here.

Get this game. GET IT!

Friday, July 29, 2011

Photo: The Roar of the Rotors

Vancouver Harbour is a busy place. Beyond all the cruise ships and container ships that come to unload tourists and load up exports, respectively, it's also a fairly significant water aerodrome, dominated by floatplanes that serve smaller communities along the British Columbia coast and on the islands. There's also a passenger heliport, from which the helicopter airline Helijet makes regular passenger runs between Vancouver and Victoria.

Yesterday, I caught C-GHJL, one of Helijet's five S-76A Spirits, just as it began to take off. The sound of the rotors seemed to be echoing off every wall that faced the water.

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Thursday, July 28, 2011

Training the Evergreen Line

The thing about the SkyTrain is that if you're going west, once you're north of the Fraser River the separate lines practically don't exist. When Expo Line or Millennium Line trains are running on their own tracks, they're identified as such on the next-train screens - even though it seems a bit odd for the boards at Sapperton to specify the next train is a Millennium Line train to Waterfront via Columbia, because how the hell else could it get to Waterfront - but once they enter Columbia Station, they're only ever described as "TRAIN TO: WATERFRONT." Nevertheless, it's easy for me to tell now whether I've boarded an Expo train or a Millennium train to take me downtown; the Expo train is the one that's already standing room only at Columbia, and a strong demonstration of why there need to be additional rapid transit links between Vancouver and Surrey.

The Evergreen Line, assuming it actually gets built and all the talk about it has not just been one huge joke at our expense, won't necessarily solve those problems, but it will extend rapid transit service into a completely unserved section of Metro Vancouver. The Vancouver Sun ran a story earlier this month regarding the mayors' vote to fund its construction through a gas tax increase, but that's not I was focusing on; rather, it was the artist's rendition of an Evergreen Line train that accompanied the article. If that's accurate, it looks like TransLink is planning to run the Evergreen Line with new Mark II trains - the blue, grey, and black ones with the destination signs that started rolling back in 2009. They're modern, sleek, and pretty awesome; and aside from the Rotem trains on the Canada Line, they're the rarest in the system, with only forty-eight of them in the current fleet. By contrast, the SkyTrain also runs sixty of the older, white Mark IIs, and one hundred and fifty of the original ICTS Mark I cars that the system opened with in 1985.

Where this matters is in terms of their capacities - a four-car Mark I train can hold three hundred and twenty people, while a full-on train of new Mark IIs with two articulated two-cars can hold five hundred and eighty.

That isn't necessarily the train-deployment decision I would have made.

A Mark I SkyTrain soaks up the sun at Main Street-Science World Station.

Like I said, trains to and from Surrey are busy and well-used. Last night set a new record for me in that regard; when I boarded an Expo Line train at Granville around 9:20 it was already crushloaded, and when I alighted at Columbia it was still crushloaded! At nearly 10 o'clock at night! It's a particularly strong argument, I think, for greater transit service to the South Fraser. But part of that was due to equipment; the train in question was an ordinary four-car Mark I train, as they most frequently are.

But I frequently end up missing my train by ten seconds and chill on the Columbia platform while I wait for the next one to show up. It's fairly regular for a VCC-Clark-bound Millennium Line train to arrive on the far platform during that time; and it seems unusually common that those trains are the newer Mark IIs.

This does not make sense to me. Outside of rush hour and special events, I've never encountered heavy crowds on the Millennium Line. Wouldn't it make sense for TransLink to assign the most spacious cars to the line that needs them the most - that is, the Expo Line? Wouldn't it make sense for the Evergreen Line to, at first, run Mark I trains, with new-bought Mark IIs put into service on the Expo and Millennium Lines to cover their absence?

Granted, the best option would be an entirely new connection to Surrey, so that all trans-river traffic does not have to rely on the Expo Line bottleneck. But we've got what we've got, and it's up to us to make the best of it.

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Photo: What Might Have Been

These days, with the Brothers Ford busy asserting their dominance over the city of Toronto and their superiority over such pesky things as "facts," it's easy to forget that these dudes were voted into power. Yes, there was actually an election not too long ago, and they were far from the only candidates.

I know there are plenty of people regretting their victory now. They weren't the only choice. What about, say... Kevin Clarke, Toronto's perennial homeless candidate for mayor? In the end he came in 14th out of forty candidates, with 1,411 votes. On September 20, the day before I left the city for British Columbia, I encountered one of his election signs chalked into the sidewalk at Queen and Yonge. Its message is simple - "KEVIN CLARKE FOR MAYOR: POWER TO PEOPLE." It's the sort of attitude that's sorely lacking in Toronto today, I think.

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Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Life For Me Is A RiverBus Fantasy

People have always needed to get from point A to point B; in the future, this will be no different. Our particular future, however, has to confront issues that were too distant to notice or just overlooked by our predecessors; a future where petroleum will be substantially more expensive than it is now, and perhaps also a future where attitudes have shifted a bit away from private vehicular transit and more toward public transit. It's the sort of future that we need to be planning for now - because not only does the future have a tendency of sneaking up on you when you least expect it, it does take time to build things. While the Brothers Ford in Toronto are doing a great job at making sure that this planning for the future does not happen, over here in Metro Vancouver the people in charge are thankfully more willing to look over the next hill.

They'd better, because they have no choice. Metro Vancouver is going to be experiencing a hell of a lot of growth over the next few decades; current projections indicate that by 2040, Surrey will have more people than Vancouver, presaging a huge potential shift in the Lower Mainland's center of gravity. All those hundreds of thousands of people need to get around, right? It's too bad that in some respects, the current transit system in Metro Vancouver is better suited for 1991 than 2011.

Enter the Fraser RiverBus Society. I encountered a link to a story about them in the Vancouver Sun the other day - through their spokesman Jeff Malmgren, they're advocating a potential solution to Metro's future transit woes in the form of the RiverBus, a four-ship passenger ferry system that would ply the Fraser River between Maple Ridge and Richmond, with stops in Vancouver, Burnaby, New West, Coquitlam, and Langley along the way. The idea is primarily that of an "inter-suburban" line; rather than providing an alternate connection between Vancouver and the outlying cities, it's intended as more of a way to get from one outer city to the other without having to go through Vancouver.

I remember having an idea like this a little while ago, but in the context of relieving pressure on the Expo Line - it involved fast passenger ferries that would connect the Surrey waterfront, such as it is, with downtown Vancouver - but the distance involved made it seem a bit unlikely to me. By the same token, I'm not sure if the idea of a RiverBus is sound; it seems to me that it might be simpler, cheaper, and ultimately quicker to expand the infrastructure that already exists.

MV Peralta, an Alameda/Oakland passenger ferry, underway in San Francisco Bay.

Let's take a look at the details. According to my calculations, using Port Haney Station in Maple Ridge and Bridgeport Station in Richmond as the eastern and western termini of RiverBus service, the resulting route is roughly 41.5 kilometers long; however, this would be increased somewhat by the suggested stops in the five cities along the route, and use of the North Arm around Lulu Island is mandated by the prospective stops in Burnaby and Vancouver. What would really make or break the service are the RiverBuses themselves.

Ships, as you may know, don't tend to move as fast as land vehicles. Among other things, they have a lot more mass to move. The SeaBuses, the current backbone of TransLink's fleet, have a top speed of 11.5 knots - 21.3 kilometers per hour for landlubbers. The fastest vessels currently in use by BC Ferries appear to be the Cowichan class ferries, which are capable of 22 knots or 41 kilometers per hour. The PacifiCat Fast Ferries made 37 knots or 68 kilometers per hour, but I don't think the people of British Columbia want to see them any time soon.

There's room for comparison in San Francisco, where there's a large market for ferry services across San Francisco Bay - linking SF to places like Sausalito and Tiburon, and the cities of the East Bay to each other. Some ferries, like MV Peralta pictured above, can make 26 knots or 48 kilometers per hour. MV Golden Gate, one of the newest additions to Golden Gate Ferries' fleet, can pull 38 knots or 70 kilometers per hour. Barring stops along the way, Golden Gate could manage the route in a little more than half an hour.

That doesn't tell the whole story, though - ships like Golden Gate are fast because they use waterjet propulsion; the Fast Ferries did so as well, and part of the problem was that flotsam on the water kept getting sucked into the intakes and damaging the engines. If you've ever spent any time on the riverfront, you know that the Fraser is no stranger to flotsam. What's more, at many points the North Arm of the Fraser is only a couple of hundred meters wide; not necessarily the best place to be going all ahead flank. High-speed ships are far more suited for the open water, where there's no pesky land to dodge around.

Instead, let's look at a vessel more like Peralta; twice as fast as the SeaBus, but not necessarily based on such a vulnerable propulsion system. At 26 knots, an east-to-west transit would take just under an hour, and the stops along the way would add to that as well. By contrast, the West Coast Express takes an hour and thirteen minutes to go from Waterfront Station to Mission City at the western terminus of the line; between Waterfront and Port Haney, it's only fifty-six minutes.

In the end, what do I think? It's a compelling idea that doesn't necessarily hold up for me upon closer examination of the proposal. Personally, I still think a cheaper and more effective solution to Metro's transit issues would be through an expansion of West Coast Express service; not only more frequent service on the existing line, but the extension of new lines as well. Granted, in the future this might be worth looking into; at present, though, would the number of people travelling between, say, New Westminster and Langley really justify a service like this?

Monday, July 25, 2011

Photo: Frozen in Motion

What the camera's eye sees is not always what the Mark I eyeball sees. The brain filters, recombines, interprets information to forge a consistent and understandable view of the world; the camera just captures what's there with the sort of instant look that the brain just looks past. Case in point: the traffic on, I believe, West Pender Street at Burrard in Vancouver, back at some point during the Winter That Never Ended. The man crossing the street is unidentifiable, a blur of motion - except for his right leg, caught in mid-stride. It's that sort of active stillness the brain can't work fast enough to recognize.

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Sunday, July 24, 2011

On Stable Ground

A little while ago, a friend from Ontario landed in Vancouver for a spell, and one bright afternoon he came to visit in New Westminster. I took him through downtown and showed off the view from the Downtown Parkade across the Fraser, toward the SkyBridge and Surrey and the mountains. You know what he thought? That it was a bit "dilapidated." I'll be honest, this got me a bit, this strike against my new city's honor... but realistically, when you're looking at it from Front Street or the Parkade, it's kind of accurate. Downtown may shimmer along Columbia Street, but closer to the water things seem to get a bit ragged. I suppose it's partially because of the Parkade itself; there just isn't that much foot traffic down there when it's not being redressed as Brooklyn for a film shoot, and the parkade hides a lot of those buildings from view.

Last night, I stood on the deck of the parkade with quite a few other people to watch the Hyack FraserFest fireworks - and whenever someone moved nearby, I could feel the structure vibrate slightly. Now, I know the parkade's a fairly old structure, built back in the 1950s, and I have to wonder - how much attention did its designers pay to seismic stability? For that matter, how stable are any of the buildings on the south side of Columbia Street?

Sure, for some of them it may not be much of an issue; downtown New Westminster is built on rock rather than post-Ice Age silt, after all. But other buildings seem designed in such a way that they're practically daring an earthquake to do their worst. Case in point: the building at the intersection of Columbia and Fourth, at the easternmost entrance/exit from the parkade.

I'm not sure what street address this has... but just look at it.

Honestly, I would call this building dilapidated. But beyond that, it's built on supports - there's a rather significant difference in elevation between Columbia Street and Front Street, and while some of the buildings were built to take that into account, some are just on stilts. The Parkade, itself, could be described in such a way as well, I think. The Inn on the Quay, further down the waterfront, also goes for a similar support structure - though it, at least, doesn't look like it's one bad jolt from falling apart.

I know New Westminster is doing a lot to improve the waterfront; once the Pier Park opens later this year, the area will be transformed. Still, it's only a stage - and I wouldn't much like to see downtown further transformed by these older buildings crumbling if the ground should shake.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Photo: A Bit of a Hill

One of the things San Francisco is known for is its hills; long and steep hills that seem to mock anyone who tries to climb them, hills that were the reason why the cable car was invented. But it doesn't have a monopoly on them, and point in fact, White Rock, British Columbia could easily fill in for San Francisco in that respect.

Oxford Street is easily the match of any hill I encountered in San Francisco - if only I hadn't been dumb enough to actually climb it, while pushing a bicycle at the end of a 30+ kilometer ride through Surrey. This street is so steep that the sidewalks have stepping stones built into them - and by the way, the hill is a kilometer long. I would be surprised if it's not one of the single steepest streets in the Lower Mainland. It would be a great hill for a cable car.

To illustrate how steep Oxford Street is, here's a tilted picture, arranged so that the street appears level.

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Friday, July 22, 2011

Jossed by Science

I've noticed that, over the last couple of years, a few terms from TVTropes have started to creep into my vocabulary - the most prominent of these, with in my opinion the most utility, is the word "jossed." I know I've used it a few times on this weblog, and it's what happens when the elaborate theories a creator builds around something in a canon franchise - as this is frequently an issue of fan speculation - are rendered obsolete by new revalations from the canon. Joss Whedon tended to negate a lot of between-season fan speculation with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so that's why his name gets attached.

Nevertheless, jossing isn't just something that fans of entertainment products have to worry about. It's an issue of the real world as well - particularly something that science fiction writers have grappled with for decades. Think back to the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, the solar system as developed by Leigh Brackett, or the jungle-like Venus which appeared again and again in the literature until the 1960s. When Mariner 4 made the first successful flyby of Mars in 1965, it revealed a red, dead world with no canals, no Martian princesses, no crumbling empires, and effectively jossed almost every fictional thing that had been written about Mars up to that point. It was due in large part to this and subsequent jossing, made possible by the robotic exploration of the solar system in the latter half of the 20th century, that sf writers began packing up in earnest and moving out into the greater galaxy.

For a while, that was perfectly fine. You could build your planetary system around Tau Ceti or Alpha Centauri or wherever else, and you could be fairly confident that you wouldn't experience another "Mars correction," right? Hell, even today you could argue that holds true, but the way I see it, the situation is analogous to the time when Mariner 4 was still in flight - it hasn't revealed anything yet, but you know it's going to do so before too much longer.

An artist's impression of some of the planets known to orbit the star 55 Cancri A. This image from NASA is in the public domain.

The current breed of astronomers are something else - for the first time in history, they've been pinpointing planets orbiting other stars. Over the last fifteen years, hundreds of exoplanets have been detected, and the degree of detail that we can determine about these worlds across the light-years is astonishing when you consider how limited the detection methods really are; sometimes they're measuring minute diminutions in brightness from the transit of an exoplanet across its star, sometimes they're measuring the "wobble" produced as an orbiting planet tugs its star just slightly this way and then the other, and sometimes they use even more exotic methods.

This new knowledge provides a fertile field for speculation. Allen Steele was one of the first authors to get into this in a major way, with his series of books and short stories about Coyote, the fictional habitable moon of the very real 47 Ursae Majoris b, a gas giant that was one of the earliest exoplanets to be discovered. For my part, the temptation to work in a similar manner is almost unavoidable - the desire to base my work on known and measured reality to the greatest possible extent is a strong one.

For a while, the 55 Cancri system looked to be a good bet. One of its larger planets, of a size that it could easily be a small gas giant, was known to orbit in its star's habitable zone - which could make life as we know it possible on a moon of this planet. I've been running with that for the past little while, sketching out background details and information for Esperanza, such a theoretical habitable moon.

But then - gnashing of teeth! A few days ago, Phil Plait linked to a new scientific paper dealing with 55 Cancri f, and according to the latest measurements, while it does orbit within the star's habitable zone... it doesn't do so for all of its orbit. f has something of an elliptical orbit, and so actually leaves the habitable zone for about a third of its orbit. The expected temperatures for a planet in that orbit don't leave me much room that I can feel I can work with.

So... back to the drawing board. I find myself wondering if I should just invent a star system, get it over with and build it precisely to my specifications; that would, however, defeat the purpose of building it on reality.

Thursday, July 21, 2011

Photo: Explorer at the End

Six years ago, at Kennedy Space Center, I saw the space shuttle Explorer. Except it wasn't really a space shuttle at all; it was a mockup on the grounds, something that looked like a shuttle but was even less functional than the testbed orbiter Enterprise. Now, though... Atlantis landed early this morning, and a program that's been running for longer than I've been alive has come to an end. Now those last three orbiters, the ones that flew in space over the decades and returned to Earth nevertheless, will be mockups of a sort themselves - symbols of what we get when we prize discovery over destruction, investigation over the perpetuation of inequality. No one ever had to ride a shuttle, or even see one launched, to be uplifted by their spirit.

It may be many, many years before we see their like again.

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Wednesday, July 20, 2011

Take A Look, It's In a Book

The library has always figured prominently in my life. When I was a kid, the Milton Public Library ran a book-reading competition of sorts that encouraged youngsters to read. When I rode my bike straight into a rusty Ontario Hydro mailbox, it was because I was on my way to the Barrie Public Library and my usual route was closed due to construction. When I needed to get my high school essay just so, I'd head to the Toronto Reference Library to get that source I just couldn't find up north. One of the first things I did after signing my lease here in BC was to get a New Westminster Public Library card.

I was originally planning to write something about the forty-second anniversary of Apollo 11's lunar landing and the thirty-fifth anniversary of Viking 1's landing on Mars, but no matter how important space exploration is to me, this is something even dearer to my heart. But there's still a tie there anyway - libraries are the foundation of curiosity and exploration, those attitudes that led us to go to the moon and to Mars. Libraries are the foundation of a literate, knowledgeable, inquisitive, intellectual society. Libraries are gateways to other worlds, other modes of thinking - and especially in times like this, when the economy is approximately as stable as a matchstick skyscraper, they're vital to the poor - whether you're a kid or an adult, even if all your money is going toward food and rent and the necessities of life, the library will always let you in.

Now, though, it seems that Toronto's mayor Rob Ford and its other mayor Doug Ford have confused the smell of books with that of gravy, and they are paddling their gravy boat straight toward the Toronto Public Library system.

The Toronto Reference Library circa October 2009 - there are 1.6 million items in the catalog here.

Over the past few weeks, Hizzoner Rob has been gnashing his teeth so loudly at his inexplicable inability to find the oceans of gravy he knew flooded the basement of Toronto City Hall that I've been hearing it here in New Westminster. I mean, it's got to be there, doesn't it? After all, he promised the taxpayers that it was there, and he would get rid of it, because obviously their taxes were being wasted! However, I guess the last thing David Miller did in office was engage the emergency override that crash-dumped the city's gravy reserves into enormous bunkers fifty kilometers below the surface, so he and his brother Doug have had to look extra-hard for this gravy, lest the people of Toronto start dismissing it as a myth.

As I doubt that the Fords had the same experience with libraries as I did growing up - hell, I'd be honestly shocked if either of them had even been inside a library of their own free will in the last ten years - I didn't react with surprise to this look into their policy toward the TPL. It was more of an anger thing. This is an excerpt from CFRB 1010 that gives a disturbingly clear look into the situation: audio, and more details, are available here.

CFRB 1010: Doug also has a problem with the number of libraries we have in the city of Toronto.

DOUG FORD: We have more libraries per person than any other city in the world. I’ve got more libraries in my area than I have Tim Horton’s.

Notice: Ford pronounces "library" as "li-bary," and presumably pronounces "tomorrow" as "tomorrey," much like Homer Simpson - except I think I'd much rather have Homer Simpson as Mayor of Toronto.

It's an insightful look into Doug's psyche, and his priorities. The implication here is clear - there are more libraries in his area than Tim Horton's outlets, and that's a bad thing; that the availability of cheap-ass, bitter coffee is more important than the combined intellectual history and development of thousands of years of civilization. Toronto operates the largest and busiest city public library system in the entire world, so OBVIOUSLY the solution is not to take pride in the fact that Toronto is able and willing to serve its citizens in such a comprehensive way - no! It means there's GRAVY. Because god knows that the role of a city is to do the bare minimum possible in every respect.

I'm pretty sure I know what the Fords would really like to do to Toronto's public library system; they'd like to privatize them. Too bad we already have those - they're called bookstores. The ENTIRE PURPOSE of a public library system is to be PUBLIC; to be OPEN and AVAILABLE to the PEOPLE. Through actions like this, through their denigration of city services intended for the COMMON WEALTH, meant to ENRICH the lives of the people, they show their true colors to me - the colors of toadying ideologicals who don't care what kind of damage they do, so long as the Exalted Taxpayer has more money in their wallet.

Sometimes you have to be blunt. In that respect...

IT'S BEEN EIGHT MONTHS, ROB. WHERE THE FUCK IS THE FUCKING GRAVY?

Tuesday, July 19, 2011

Photo: Duck, Duck, Goose?

Disclosure: I have no idea what sort of bird these birds are. This was taken in the Phoenix Zoo this past January, and while the Phoenix metro area is within the range of the mallard duck, I suspect these are in fact Canada Geese - they look the part, and Arizona is in their wintering band.

They're flying critters - that's enough, right?

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Monday, July 18, 2011

You Don't Know Me

Some people may be surprised, but it's true - we live in a world with masked superheroes in it, though these "superheroes" don't necessarily match what you might expect to see in a comic book. They're ordinary people trying to make a difference in different ways, whether it be the street patrols and interventions of Seattle's Phoenix Jones, or Thanatos passing out supplies and calling 911 when necessary in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Sometimes, though, it's easy to look past what they do and just focus in on the mask.

I know that outside of Halloween, masks have a bad rap, and understandably so; they're specifically designed to conceal the wearer's identity. Events such as the recent Vancouver riot forcefully demonstrated the necessity for people to be recognizeable - and if they're not, the Criminal Code of Canada makes it clear that "every one who, with intent to commit an indictable offence, has his face masked or coloured or is otherwise disguised is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding ten years."

In other words, not much room up here for the sort of masked vigilantism that was traditionally the bread and butter of comics. Which, honestly, is all for the better: vigilantism has no place in modern society, masked or otherwise. It's more the masks that get me. I've heard people express misgivings about the mere act of mask-wearing, even for characters like Thanatos - who limits himself to distributing food and reporting crimes in the DTES. Personally, I have difficulty getting behind a distrust of masks for distrust's sake... mostly because of my concerns about where this might lead us, ten or twenty or thirty years in the future.

what is this I don't even

Today, it's a rare person on the street who doesn't have a camera on them, usually in the form of a cameraphone - but when you stop to consider it, this is a staggeringly vast change that came about in less than ten years. Back in 2001, I don't know if I knew anyone who had a cell phone; hell, the fact that someone in my staircase at university owned a laptop was unusual. Even with the world teetering on the brink of financial collapse, I don't expect this pattern of change to alter much in the coming years. Augmented reality, which literally lets you see the world a different way, is speeding up and gaining traction.

What I worry about is a world where it's impossible to slide beneath notice on the street - not from the police, mind you, but from the people around you. Facial recognition programs exist today, and they're only getting better. What I worry about is the phone of, say, twenty years down the road; maybe it's linked into your glasses so that you can see the augmented reality layers clear as day, and to do that, it's got a camera that's seeing everything that you see. Every face that you see. How hard would it be for a facial recognition program to look at every face passing by, scour the internet, and have that face's name hovering above like a character in a computer game?

At that point, the game would be different. At that point, I would consider myself obligated to wear a mask, or at least something like really big sunglasses that obscure a huge swath of my face, day-to-day - because while I know I don't have any expectation of privacy in a public space, other people don't have the right to know who I am because there's an app for recognizing faces. It's one thing for the panopticon to be a prison, but to build it ourselves is something else again.

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Photo: That Old Look Looks Familiar

Last Sunday, Columbia Street in downtown New Westminster was shut down for the Royal City Show and Shine, an outdoor car show that attracts exhibitors from across the Lower Mainland. Aside from the array of classic cars like the '57 Chevrolet Bel-Air with no seatbelts whatsoever, the Transit Museum Society - operators of Vancouver's Downtown Historic Railway - exhibited the Centennial Bus, a 1957 GMC Old Look bus which has been converted into something of a rolling transit museum.

When I first noticed it in the distance, I thought someone had invested a hell of a lot of effort in converting a PCC streetcar for road operation. But no, this is what they actually look like; these are the buses that replaced streetcar systems in city after city across North America. I'm not sure if the heavily PCC-inspired styling was meant to create a smooth link between the old streetcar-based systems and the new bus-based systems, or a cynical attempt to convince people that buses would be just as good as streetcars because, hell, they looked the same.

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Saturday, July 16, 2011

Quaff Review #14: Mackinac Pale Ale

We've all done things we aren't particularly proud of. Sometimes things that seem perfectly normal and justifiable at the time can, with the weight of years piled atop, grumble and groan and be revealed for how pathetic they really are. For myself, I can think of few things I've done more pathetic than this - wandering the aisles of a Kroger grocery store in Swartz Creek, Michigan, shuffling from one battery of strange and wondrous and foreign American brands to the next, waiting for the clock to click past 7 AM so that they could sell me beer.

Not one of my better moments, but it couldn't be avoided. When my dad and I started our trip west from Toronto to Vancouver last year, we crossed the Ontario-Michigan border at something like four in the morning. By the time we reached Swartz Creek, a small town off I-69 just west of Flint, the sky was beginning to lighten and I was coming up on twenty-four hours straight of wakefulness. By then, I'd already formulated my idea - pick up some beer from every state we travelled through on the way to British Columbia. It didn't work out as well as I'd hoped. Still, in that Swartz Creek Kroger I started things off with a six-pack of bottles of Mackinac Pale Ale, produced by the Michigan Brewing Company.


Mackinac Pale Ale - presumably named after the Mackinac Bridge, which connects Michigan's Upper Peninsula to the Lower Peninsula and is featured on the label - is one of two pale ales produced by MBC. It's definitely a mellow sort of pale ale, which has become more important to me recently; as a beer gets hoppier and more bitter, my ability to take it just keeps going down. While Mackinac has the somewhat watery aroma I've come to associate with pale ales, its bite is modest and it's got a smooth taste. While the somewhat bitter tang is present, it's not overwhelming, which is all I ask - I've run into occasions where I've had to pour beer down the drain because it was just too bitter to finish.

Its label is succinct; to be honest, I don't think I can recall another label with this little information on it. Aside from its size - 12 fl. oz./355 mL - There's the Surgeon General's warning, the note about bottle redemption, a Michigan Brewers Guild logo, MBC's address, the bar code, the machine-printed date 01/13/11 - which I really hope wasn't a best before date - and that's it. I had to look it up on Beeradvocate.com to find out that it's 5% alc./vol. I'm not sure if it's that understatement that led me to buy it; honestly, knowing me it was probably the picture of the bridge.

The six bottles were priced at $8.49 at that Kroger, which is still a pretty good deal when I look around at the prices here in British Columbia. It's doubtful I'll find this particular kind any time soon, though - from my reading of the MBC website, it's only distributed within Michigan. While I know the state of Michigan is one of the modern world's tourist utopias, this beer isn't good enough to justify going there on its own. It's a beer; it's enough for itself.

ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

Friday, July 15, 2011

Photo: There's No Gridlock on the Rails

What the impending Carmageddon in Los Angeles has really underscored to me is the necessity for major cities to seriously invest in their public transit infrastructures - and what it's demonstrated to me is that Los Angeles wasted a lot of time before it started getting around to that necessity. I know that all the cool cities were tearing up their streetcar networks in the years after the war, but subways were also cool in the 1950s. Hell, Cleveland of all places built a subway in the 1950s. I have to wonder if LA would be in this situation today if it had been building up a subway network over the last sixty years.

Still, at least it has one now... it's a start. In this photo from 2009, a few riders wait to board a train at Union Station.

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Thursday, July 14, 2011

Ten Miles to Midnight

Two days from now, Los Angeles will be burning! There will be no escape for the millions trapped in the City of Angels as chaos and despair descends upon the Southland, turning the air yellow with smog and the surface streets into blood-and-gold rivers of headlights and brake lights! It will be madness, I tell you! Disastrous! It's Carmageddon!

At least, that's the impression I've been getting from the media. To put it in more prosaic terms, a sixteen-kilometer segment of the 405 freeway between the 101 and the 10, a route that carries hundreds of thousands of vehicles every day and one of the busiest stretches of highway in the United States, will be shutting down Friday night and not reopening until Monday morning for a lane widening project associated with the partial demolition of the Mulholland Bridge. For Torontonians, if you think of it as two and a half Don Valley Parkways, I don't think you would be far wrong. But I remember times when there was no movement on the DVP and it didn't break the city - we called it "rush hour." ZING!

In all seriousness, this is a hell of a thing to watch. Not being an Angeleno, in fact barely knowing anyone from Los Angeles, and having about a week's worth of experience with it, I know that I can't understand Carmageddon the way someone living there understands it. From what I'm seeing online, this seems utterly earthshaking, in the metaphorical sense. The Los Angeles Times has an entire section devoted to Carmageddon stories. The LAPD solicited the assistance of celebrity tweeters like Ashton Kutcher, Lady Gaga, and Tom Hanks to spread the word of the closure. People are being urged to shop as locally as possible and stay close to home. Metro is going zero-fare for the entire weekend, which would be pretty nice if you like tooling around on the subway. Though, I do note that as of this writing, #Carmageddon isn't a trending Twitter topic in Los Angeles.

They say that it's in times of trial that a person's true colors emerge. I suspect the same may be true of cities, too. If that's the case, and if the news and reports I'm getting are credible, the general reaction to impending Carmageddon can tell an interested observer a great deal about Los Angeles... though a lot of it is nothing that wasn't already taken for granted.

Eastbound traffic crawls in a stereotypically Los Angeles manner along the 101 at Vermont Avenue in December 2009.

None of the cities in which I've lived have been particularly dependent on highway systems. Neither New Westminster or Vancouver have any, and Toronto's is just a fraction of what had been planned back in the glory days of the automobile. In the event of a closure in Toronto, people would be irritated but people would be able to deal. Los Angeles, on the other hand...

Los Angeles practically defines highway dependence. It is a city addicted to the automobile, married to the idea that freedom comes with a patch of asphalt and your own set of wheels. The reaction of Los Angeles to the 405's closure is almost sad, in its way - I can't help but imagine an alcoholic who wakes up on Saturday morning to find the booze chest empty and all the liquor stores closed for the weekend.

It's got to the point where I really think the time has come for Los Angeles to admit that it has a problem, one that goes beyond the simple closure of the highway. Its real problem, the real thing people should be angry about, is the series of choices that led to it being put in this situation. In previous posts, I've written about the importance of the network effect in public transit - that chopping routes damages the network to a greater degree than one would expect, because with more options comes more choices. The same is true for roads and highways. A city should not be so utterly dependent on its highway system that the closure of one sixteen-kilometer segment of it paralyzes the whole. Is Los Angeles really that fragile, that vulnerable?

When taken together with the pressures of rising gas costs, a growing environmental awareness, and the problems that come with an atomized society linked only the superslabs, I wonder if it's possible that this whole Carmageddon thing might catalyze some thinking in the Southland; be a reason for people to change the region's course. Certainly, Los Angeles County's current public transit expansion work is probably the single largest program in the United States - but there's a lot to do, and not just in Los Angeles. We've got to catch up after resting on our laurels for half a century.

It's time to admit that we have problems - everywhere, not just in Los Angeles - and it's time to get busy.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

Photo: A Distant Peace

When I took my bike down to White Rock this past weekend, my original objective was the Peace Arch at the Surrey/Blaine border crossing; the only problem was that my maps were insufficient for the task at hand. Unlike the Point Roberts border crossing, which is extremely easy to get to via regular roads, it seems that access to the Peace Arch crossing is intended to go mostly by highway; King George Boulevard just ends at 8 Avenue. I did find detours on Google Maps after returning home, but that didn't do me much good.

I didn't make it to the Peace Arch, but I was still able to see it. I got this shot of it on the far side of Semiahmoo Bay from the White Rock waterfront. It's funny, in its way; the border looms so large over everything, but in a photo like this, if you didn't know it was there you might never suspect it was there.


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Tuesday, July 12, 2011

I Would Have Made a Better Mayor than Rob Ford

Sometimes, it's best to lead off with utter arrogance. Maybe I'm way off base; I know that being Mayor of Toronto is an extremely trying position with heaps of responsibility and is, in a lot of respects, utterly thankless. I know that, as a 27-year-old unknown, my chances of victory were less than the chance of Boehner's Republicans agreeing to tax increases to keep the American economy from imploding. Nevertheless, after having observed the situation in Toronto from my perch in New Westminster for the last nine months, I can't help but think that I would have been a better mayor than Rob Ford.

For a while, it was something of a joke. But recently I've started wondering if it shouldn't be serious. Now that the Gravy Train is emerging from that long, dark tunnel, letting us see just what that chuffing engine Hizzoner da Mayor warned us about is pulling, we're in a better position to appraise Rob than we ever were before.

This is a man who made the Gravy Train the centerpiece of his campaign. This is a man whose proposed cycling infrastructure seemed specifically designed to be as inconvenient to use and serve as few people as possible. Fundamentally, this is a man who appears to be led by ideology: a man who does not judge the utility of a concept on its own terms, but only by the manner in which it fits into his existing political worldview. Cycling infrastructure? It takes space away from cars so it's bad. Surface-running LRT? It takes space away from cars so it's bad, despite the fact that surface-running LRT has taken hold in such car-centric sprawltopias as Phoenix and Los Angeles - but I don't expect Rob to know anything about that. Subway? It's underground and fast and people like subways and it doesn't get in the way of cars, so it's good. Who cares if it's a white elephant addendum to a white elephant project that should never have been built the way it is in the first place?

I wouldn't have cancelled Transit City - I liked Transit City. I wouldn't have cancelled the vehicle registration tax, either - in my view, tax decreases are things that should come when things are on an even keel, not when the storms of deficit and debt are tossing ships of state and city around the world. I would have worked to build Toronto to be a better place than I found it, to as much as I could have managed.

I guarantee that I am not crazy, just arrogant as hell.

I can't help but feel that's part of the problem. Rob does not strike me as a builder or improver. He's a business manager, looking for efficiencies and not really too concerned with the effects of finding them. He's proven the maxim that it's easier to destroy to create - after all, from Transit City to the Fort York pedestrian bridge, it seems as if he's focused disproportionate energy on preventing things from being created.

Creation is a fundamental part of the city. Hopefully Toronto will learn this well in time for 2014. But meanwhile, it's going to be a long three years in Hogtown... and if the city wakes up one fine October morning to find Tim Who-Dat in Queen's Park, it's probably going to seem like forever.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Photo: A Long Train in White Rock

White Rock, British Columbia is an interesting sort of city. Squeezed in between Surrey and Semiahmoo Bay, between the beach and the towering bluffs, it reminded me a lot of California - and I'm not the only one, as I later found that the producers of Psych use it to stand in for Santa Barbara. Its waterfront is long but narrow, and is separated from the rest of the city by a rail line. Not just any rail line, either - it's the main BNSF line leading into the United States, and the only railway that crosses the border between Vancouver and Abbotsford. As there aren't any sirens that start going when trains approach - though the trains do sound their horns in daylight hours - it's a good idea to be aware of your surroundings whenever you're going to the White Rock waterfront. Fortunately, they're not moving too fast at this stage; the people in the photo got across with no problems.

Also, the effect of the heat distortion around the engine reminds me of an Impressionist painting.


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Sunday, July 10, 2011

Evergreen, Ever Needing Green

I've been following the details of the Evergreen Line since before I moved to British Columbia; in my understanding, it's been somewhat like a more well-known version of Toronto's proposed Downtown Relief Line, in that people have been talking about building it for a long time but nothing ever gets done about it. In the meantime the cities of Coquitlam and Port Coquitlam, which have been developing for years along the planned route of the Evergreen Line, continue to wait. If it hadn't been for the Olympics, they might have had it done by now - but if that was the case, it would probably be the Richmond-Airport-Vancouver line that everyone would be talking about now.

The big issue has been where the money to build the line is going to come from. A little while ago, the council of mayors on TransLink rejected a property tax increase to pay for it; a few days ago, they came out in favor of a two-cent gasoline tax increase with which to finance the construction. This has, predictably, not played particularly well in large parts of Metro Vancouver's motorist class, with the tax on a liter of gas already standing at forty-five cents.

While I'm glad that the mayors have finally agreed on something to move the Evergreen's construction forward - despite the fact that I would rarely if ever use it, being in New Westminster and very rarely having a reason to visit the Tri-Cities - I can't help but feel that this gas tax is based on short-term thinking. Sure, taxing gasoline is a reliable source of government income right now, because gas is, regrettably, an absolutely necessary component of society as it currently stands. It also fuels people who like to fulminate about how transit should completely pay its own way, who think drivers shouldn't have to pay one red cent for transit improvements, without any consideration of the nature of the society we live in.

It's purely wishful thinking to believe that this state of affairs will endure forever. It might come in the form of inexpensive and easy-charging electric vehicles. A change could be fueled a steadily decreasing supply of oil matched with ever-increasing demand, particularly among the new motorist classes of China and India. There has to be another way.

A Millennium Line train makes its way through New Westminster.

I've banged this particular pot before, but not for a while - not since I was in Toronto, and the Toronto Transit Commission's state of penury was very relevant to my day-to-day life. It's something that, I think, should be discussed here in Metro Vancouver as well - in fact, it's probably more easily applicable to Metro Vancouver than Toronto. It's stolen from Los Angeles, where it has been demonstrated to actually work. It's Measure R.

What is Measure R? It's simple - approved by a two-thirds majority of voters back in November 2008, it is a half-cent sales tax levied throughout Los Angeles County, with the proceeds funneled solely and explicitly to transportation improvements. Not just transit, mind you - as Los Angeles County is a patchwork of independent cities, some of them have little transit to fund, and so in many cases the Measure R funds go to work on roads or highways. As TransLink is responsible for roads as well as the public transit system, this could make things far more equitable for motorists as well as transit riders.

It's Measure R that backstops Los Angeles' 30/10 Initiative - a project to get thirty years of transit expansion done in ten, the centerpiece of which is the planned extension of the Purple Line subway from central Los Angeles to the Westside Cities and, eventually, Santa Monica. It may be that Los Angeles' history as a car-choked land of smog and sprawl has primed the people there for this, made them get behind the prospect of something better. I don't know many Angelenos, so I'm not sure if this is actually the case.

No matter what happens with gas in the near future, people will always be buying things. I believe something like Measure R would not only be a windfall for TransLink; it would be a windfall for all of us who want to get around Metro Vancouver easily and smoothly.