Subways without people (link)

Eerie subway photos. Take a look here: Nick Frank's Subway Photos Nicely done. Show how digital has changed photography completely. ****

Kid uses trash electronics to make stuff (link)

Here's a link to an article on the MAKE blog about a kid who impressed MIT engineers. Kelvin Doe at MIT

The Illusion of Progress

That's the title of an article in a recent New Scientist. Thesis: that we have lost more technologies than we currently have. Good point, and illustrated in a variety of ways. For example, the ballpoint pen has nearly eliminated the fountain pen. But what if a crash of some kind eliminated the factories that make pens? We know, in a fuzzy historical-fiction kind of way, that goose quills and other feathers were used for writing. I don't think we'd have much trouble reinventing that technology. But what about the ink? Who knows how to use oak galls to make ink? Or soot and, well, what exactly?. Could one use other dark, brownish liquids, such as coffee? I've occasionally tried tinting paper with tea or coffee, and believe me, they don't work every well.

The rule is: new technologies displace old ones. Our cumulative knowledge doesn't include obsolete technologies. At any rate, most of us don't. Specialists in certain histories may have the book knowledge, but very, very few have any kind of hands-on skills. Curiously, archaeologists are the most likely to have such skills. They've learned them in order to understand the tools they find, and sort them from bits of naturally fractured rock that aren't tools.

Turn on the Heat (Book review)

A. A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner) Turn on the Heat Another Bertha Cool - Donald Lam tale. In mood a noirish version of the Thin Man stories plus a mild satire on the Nero Wolfe-Archie Goodwin genre. Pure pulp fiction. Lam tells the story, and does most of the legwork. Unlike Wolfe, agency head Bertha Cool doesn’t solve the case. As in the Wolfe novels, the plot is incredibly convoluted; but Fair plays fair with the clues, if you want to keep score. Unlike the Wolfe novels, the solution hides a good deal of the truth from the police. A pleasant enough entertainment, if you don’t read too critically. One oddity: the cover shows an electric typewriter, but the story is set ca. 1940, when it was written. **

There's No History Here (Poem)

There’s No History Here

This country has no history,
they say.

Then what’s that breathing there?

There are no stories told
more than a generation old.

Musty papers in old libraries,
read by odd fellows who believe they can rebuild the past.
Frail quilts stored on high dusty shelves,
brought out into bright air
and fingered by old women,
as they tell who pieced the patchwork,
ran the needle through the batt,
made arcs and whorls that held
the coverlet together; these tales made up
of memories, misremembered names
and half remembered facts
don’t make a history.

Nor do those fragments
of a myth the elders tell.

Oral history’s not history,
they say.
Each teller adds his notions
of what was truly done.
Each teller makes a tale
of what she knows must,
not might, have been.

And if these tales are true enough
(for truth in history’s a guess,
a fiction built on facts),
if then these tales are true as any history may be,
that doesn’t signify –
a generation or two back’s as far as memory
and memory of memories reach.

The land seems empty,
the sound of the truck
working up the hill remote and muted
by the space enfolding it.
The ghosts of those who came before us
don’t speak in the wind,
their language doesn’t
echo in the water filled canyons,
their songs have long since faded
into silent distances.

And yet –
        and yet.

Something moves behind me,
touches my neck,
something like a word,
half heard,
catches my ears.

I stop and listen.

The heat seems loud as a shout,
the pines’ sweetness hangs
in the sun-stilled air –

There is history here.

There was history here.

What’s left of it –
a few flakes struck from stone
the rusty stain of blood
bleached
by indifferent rain and sun.

Copyright 2012 W Kirchmeir

The Ferryman Will Be There (Book review)

Rosemary Aubert The Ferryman Will Be There (2001) “An Ellis Portal Mystery”. This is the third in the series. Portal was a judge, but alcohol and adultery led to homelessness. For a while, he lived in a cave in the Don Valley. He has succeeded in climbing out of the valley, literally and figuratively.
    Now Det. Sgt. Matt West  enlists his help in finding a girl whose father was murdered while stepping out of a limousine on his way to a film festival bash. The girl has gone back onto the streets. Portal’s curiosity and orneriness entangle him in the murder investigation, too. His  journey takes him through derelict buildings, fancy offices, and of course the streets and valleys of Toronto. Like any hero of a quest, he has companions on the way, but here they travel mostly in the background; half the time Portal doesn’t even know they’re there. The monsters he must defeat are drug dealers, traffickers in women, and his own memories. Several inconclusive plot-lines from the earlier books move a few steps towards resolution.
     The mystery, such as it is, resolves plausibly enough, but Aubert’s focus is on street life, the homeless, and Portal’s haphazard approach to redemption. Though the book isn’t a page-turner, it sticks with you. I want to know the details of the back story, told in the first two books, so I’ll look out for them. Above average entertainment. I can see it as a moody, bleak TV series, set in the ramshackle and grungy buildings and streets where the homeless scrabble for a living, contrasting with elegant, expensive spaces in which the mysteries of finance are performed. **-½

King Street at night

We were walking back to the hotel after a pretty good meal of Indian food at the Aroma (recommended) when I took this photo. I like Toronto at night, the mix of coloured lights, the reflections in the windows, the people on the sidewalks, the traffic, and of course the streetcars. Anything that runs on rails is worth watching. I know the photo is blurred, but I like the effect anyhow.

Tough Politicians (2)

Mr Harper’s government has taken on the fishes and the water birds and the frogs. His omnibus budget bill includes a change to the Navigable Waters Act. This change removes a large number of navigable waters from federal protection. Oddly enough, a large batch of these no longer protected waters are in Northern Ontario, in NDP ridings, while all the ones in the Parry Sound - Muskoka area continue to be protected. That’s the riding of Mr Clement, the Minister for the Federal Economic Development Initiative for Northern Ontario and President of the Treasury Board.

Removing navigable waters from the protection of the Act will make it easier and cheaper for resource extraction companies to acquire permits for mining, lumbering, quarrying, and so on. It will also make it cheaper and easier for paper mills and ore refining enterprises to acquire permits for dumping wastes into rivers and lakes. No doubt they will share thier increased profits with the communities affected by poisoned waters.

I feel sorry for Mr Harper and his friends in cabinet. It must have been very difficult for them to agree to these changes. It’s not easy to contemplate poisoning fish and water birds and frogs. It’s not easy to contemplate the effect of poisoned water on humans. But these are tough times, and politicians must be tough. It's good to know Mr Harper is up to the challenge.

Sandy (2)

Looking at the photos and videos of the destruction done by Sandy, it’s clear that it will take months to fix the physical damage, and years to fix the psychological damage. The stories of rescues and help are moving; the expressions of hope for the future in the face of such massive disaster are touching. The sadness I feel when reading of the deaths, so impersonally random, is hard to express.

Sandy, losses, and GDP

From a story in the New York Times, 31 October 2012:
“Even as businesses struggled on Monday to gauge and contain the damage from Hurricane Sandy’s slow move up the East Coast, economists played down the likely long-term effects. The recovery after the storm, they said, could actually pump up growth temporarily in a few sectors, like construction and retail sales, when cleanup begins in earnest in a few days.”

The last sentence of the story:
“It’s a problematic aspect of how we account for economic output,” said Mr. Carroll. “Of course, it’s terrible when something is destroyed. That doesn’t show up in the calculation of gross domestic product. However, the rebuilt house does.”

The above illustrates the craziness of economic “theory” these days. There’s no reason that the loss of the house should not be included in the GDP calculation: just include the cost of rebuilding it as a debit. This would show the loss of the house as net decrease in GDP, which it surely is. That is if we want to think of GDP as a measure of wealth-creation, as most people seem to do.

In fact, as shown by the above comments, GDP is the aggregate value of money transactions. It tells us nothing about the net increase in wealth. The $20 billion or more in storm damage will be shown as a $20 billion increase in GDP, but I don’t think wealth will increase by 20 billion dollars. Most people I think would see those losses as exactly what they are: a reduction wealth. We can reasonably expect to replace those losses. If we are cunning, politically savvy, and lucky, we may be able to replace those losses with more wealth at the same or even less cost: technology does offer that possibility.

Some transactions obviously increase wealth, such as building a house or educating a child. Others just as obviously decrease wealth, such as tearing down a block of derelict buildings, or shutting down a research project. If the buildings are replaced, there may be a net increase in wealth, but that doesn’t always happen. Some transactions are iffy: does a loan to a business build wealth, or not? Depends on how well the business does, I suppose. Some do both: a fighter plane is a waste of resources, thus a reduction in wealth; but the people who build it spend their wages on wealth that other people produce. There may or may not be a net increase in wealth.
           
In short, many transactions that the GDP calculation shows as increasing the GDP ought to show as debits. In general, it’s obvious what the debits are. When it’s not obvious, more careful analysis is needed, beginning with a clear definition of wealth. Too many people think of money as wealth. It’s not. What you get in exchange for money is wealth. But not everything you can buy is wealth: cigarettes destroy your health, so they are a debit.

All that being said, there’s a lot more to wealth-creation and sharing than is captured by GDP. Last night, one of the CBC reporters in Atlantic City told how they had helped rescue a few people, because their SUV had high enough ground clearance to get through the flood at that time. This will not show in the costs of the storm. But that CBC crew may have saved those people’s lives. Great wealth, given in exchange for nothing at all