A picture

This is a locomotive leased by the Huron Central Railway, which operates the CPR's Sudbury-Sault Ste Marie line. The line was built when the Liberals were in power during the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The Liberals didn't want to spend the money for an all-Canadian route. The line was to go south of Lake Superior via Sault Ste Marie. When MacDonald's Conservatives came back, they scotched that idea, and the north of Superior route was built. It's still one of the most spectacular railway lines in the world, but only freight trains use it now. The line through Blind River is in very bad shape, several levels of government are supposed to spend money to fix it up so that coiled steel can be shipped by rail rather than truck. The Feds are dragging their heels, perhaps because this part of Ontario is definitely not Conservative country.

Book Review: Mice in the Beer (Ward)

Ward, Norman Mice in the Beer (1960; reprint 1986) Western Producer of Regina, publisher of a magazine for farmers, occasionally reprints or publishes books of miscellaneous interest. Ward, a professor of political science, lived most of his working life in Saskatchewan, which I suspect is one reason this collection of occasional pieces was reprinted. He has a sly wit, very much like Leacock: he's a master of the offhand remark that contains a bomb. He won the Leacock Medal for Humour, and on the evidence here deserved it. His humour is gentler than Leacock's (whose reputation as a gentle satirist rests on superficial reading.) Ward's persona often plays straight man to "Uncle Bob", a surprisingly good-humoured curmudgeon whose musings often lead logically into absurdities. Like Davies' Marchbanks, there are few one-liners. The humour depends on the slow and careful construction of context. Here's an example:

A friend of mine who, more or less as a hobby, runs in elections as the standard-bearer for one of our more obscure political parties, confided in me recently that he was working on a new way to build up his party's fortunes. I'm not quite sure what his opinion is worth, for judging from the number of votes he polls on election day the post he holds in his organization can't be much higher than rank of corporal. But the years of wandering beyond the wilderness have given his views a twist not found among conventional politicians.

"Look," he said, "at Social Credit and all the other small parties. From the beginning they've been loaded to the gunwales with clergymen, school teachers, and other taxpayers of oppressive respectability. Their spokesmen are moral to point of morbidity, and nobody can guess how low they could sink if they got in power. And look at my outfit! How," he demanded, "can we expect to get our party off the ground if all the drinkers are Liberals and Conservatives?"

All in all, a good read. **-1/2

Book Review: The Loch Ness Story (Mitchell)

Mitchell, Nicholas The Loch Ness Story (1974) A “revised” edition published by Penguin, this book contains a typically credulous account of the creatures supposed to live in Loch Ness. In the 60s and 70s several people used the best available underwater technology they could afford in order to find Nessie, and of course came up empty. There’s no question IMO in that Nessie is a compound of hoax, wishful thinking, and carefully ambiguous publicity aimed at tourists. Tourist pamphlets from before the first world war do not mention Nessie, which I think is evidence enough that she’s a very recent “discovery”.

Mitchell’s tone is that of a believer: any possible fact turns into reality within a sentence or two. He makes snide remarks about the skeptics and critics, often identified with a shadowy scientific establishment of some sort, who have closed their minds against this most momentous discovery. I read about halfway through the book, by which time Mitchell is referring to Nessie as a prehistoric animal, possibly a saurian, that has somehow survived for millions of years. Notions such a minimum sustainable population, of geological and climatic changes that would reduce the odds of survival, etc, appear to be beyond him. Grainy photos, out of focus blobs in the middle of out of focus snapshots, eye-witness accounts of things seen in the gloaming or against a background of sun-glistering water (there’s a photo of one of these sightings) – all these are for him irrefutable evidence, not only that Nessie is real, but that (s)he’s a reptile of some sort.

A wonderful, often amusing, but finally tedious read, like so many of these books, it will merely confirm both the believer and the skeptic in their opposing beliefs. The pictures are the usual ones, often reprinted, and to my skeptical eye are utterly unconvincing. The fact that they are badly printed doesn’t help. **

Update 2020-03-03: The most recent research has found a great deal of eel DNA in the Loch. No trace of saurians. This BBC link is one of many you'll find if you search on "eel DNA on Loch Ness." The BBC uses the standard (faked) photos of Nessie.
 

Book Review: Remaking the World (Petroski)

Petroski, Henry Remaking the World (1999) Jon gave me this book for Christmas. Petroski wrote historical essays for American Scientist, a magazine that appears to carry on the original intent of Scientific American, which was much more focussed on technology (and even DIY) than the current version. His essays are very much like Gould’s, but the style is somewhat more neutral and pedestrian. I get little sense of Petroski’s personality, which is a pity, since his choice of subjects indicates a lively mind and wide range of interest.

His emphasis on the non-technical aspects of engineering is important. Most people lack scientific and technical insight (we need a word like “illiteracy” for this), which means that the context of engineering works is often incomplete. The yearning for quick fixes prompts politicians and their constituents to trust the technocrats too much (see the “heightening” of “security measures” at airports recently). On the other hand, nimbyism and paranoid Ludditism result in know-nothing rejection of economically viable and ecologically effective solutions (see the resistance to H1N1 vaccination.)

All in all, a good book, with useful nuggets of information here and there. For example, “bug” as a glitch or unexpected flaw in design predates computers. Petroski quotes a note in Edison’s diary, in which Edison refers to “Bugs – as such little faults and difficulties are called –”. I’ve suspected that the “insect in the electronic works” was a story a little too pat to be true, and am happy to have my suspicion confirmed. ***

Book Review: Pohlstars (Frederik Pohl)

Pohl, Frederik Pohlstars (1984) Most of these stories are Pohl's darker visions, more like Harry Harrison or Roald Dahl. Pohl, like Poul Anderson, usually writes about swaggering, libertarian, free-enterprise types, often crossing the line between legal and illegal (sometimes venturing into crime), in order to succeed. But in the end, they not only do well, but good.

Unlike Anderson, Pohl has a strong tragic streak in his makeup, sometimes tending to elegiac sentimentality. The first tale is a novella, I sampled it but did not read it. The short stories range from the mildly funny (a driving instructor is unaware that one of his pupils is setting up an invasion of Terran territory) to the horrific (a convicted murderer is purchased by aliens to conduct their business; when they decide they want to know what human sex is about, they make him reenact the crime for which he was condemned, and he kills his lover.) All have a more or less obvious theme; Pohl is one of the most tendentious SF writers ever. In A Day at the Lottery Fair he attacks the "pro-life" movement. A Day in the Life of Able Charlie tells how an artificial intelligence program is used for market research. Second Coming sends up the literalists who expect Jesus to return from the sky - he does, but decides he wants to go back to the zoo where the space people have kept him, it's a nicer place than Earth. The book will be added to my collection of Pohls, but not because it's his best work. **

Book Review: Three Bags Full (Leonie Swann)

 

Swann, Leonie Three Bags Fulls (2005; transl. Anthea Bell 2006) A flock of sheep solve a murder mystery. Turns out their shepherd offed himself. A nice, quirky idea, but it goes on too long. The sheep’s eye/mind view is nicely done, and Swann uses it for (mostly) gentle satire. She has degrees in philosophy and psychology. The book is not only entertaining, it prompts questions. One of the perennial questions in philosophy and psychology is what it would feel like to be someone else, or another animal. I don’t think we can answer that.

Some years ago, a TV show purported to show what the world looked like to dogs and cats. The makers manipulated the colours of the image, based on what’s known about cats' and dogs' eyes: they don’t have the same colour receptors as we have (more evidence that the eye evolved, BTW.) Trouble is, the colour chemistry of the eye’s receptors doesn’t tell us much about what the animal perceives. We can tell that colour-blind people can’t differentiate between certain colours, and this correlates with deficiencies in their retinal chemistry, but it doesn’t tell us what colours they actually see. The perception of the world is subjective. It seems reasonable to suppose that the world looks pretty much the same to humans, and largely the same to cats and dogs, but that supposition is based entirely on our observations of how other humans and animals respond to visual cues. They respond pretty much the same way I do, so I infer that they perceive pretty much what I perceive. But that inference is not provable.

A related question is whether we can imagine a truly alien mind. The answer IMO is no. Our imagination is limited by our experience and knowledge, which is wholly human. “Imagination” is based on remembering, which we don’t do very well. That is, “remembering” is reconstruction, not replaying of a record. To remember something is to imagine what happened.

However, by “imagination” most people mean “creating or inventing something new”. But what actually happens is extrapolation and recombination. That’s why a good imaginer can make loadsadough presenting us with things we individually cannot easily imagine. Such people can extrapolate further and recombine more wildly than most people can. The attraction of a well-written story or well-made movie is precisely that: these works present us with images we ourselves could not imagine, or could not imagine as well as their creators.

In fact, imagined experience for most of us can never have the vividness of actual experience. What we remember of an experience is not its sensory content so much as its emotive impact. What it felt like has a stronger effect than what it was. Hence people’s difficulty in describing a movie that impressed them. We get surprisingly vague and incomplete accounts of what the movie was about, but emphatic claims to its greatness, impact, coolness, etc.

All that being said, Swann has managed to give us a plausible and amusing story as seen and heard by the sheep. The sheep often misunderstand and misinterpret what humans say and do, but their mistakes are as illuminating as their insights. Mostly, we get a sense that what we humans think is important really isn’t. A good read, but longer than necessary for both the plot and the creation of the sheep’s world. Or maybe not -- YMMV ***

Update 2026-05-24:  The book has been made into a movie, "The Sheep Detectives".

Movie Review: Dune (1984)

Frank Herbert's book is singularly ill-served in this movie, made in 1984, with screenplay by David Lynch, big name special-effects people, and very competent if not exactly superstar actors. It should have been a good movie, but it's not. Boring, tedious, pointlessly repetitious, it looks like a patch job, cobbled together from a much longer movie, the gaps bridged by voice overs that do little to explain the long and complex story.

Dune is a huge book, a movie of it should be in at least three parts of about 2-1/2 hours each. The interpretation is crucial, and Lynch's concept of a fascistic, decaying imperium doesn't help. The story's backbone is simple enough: Arrakis, a desert planet, is the source of melange, a drug that not only combines the effects of pot, LSD, cocaine, and assorted other goodies, it enables spaceship pilots to fold space, and so bring any spaceship from one location to another in no time at all. Paul Atreides is the long-prophesied stranger from the sky who will set the Fremen of Arrakis free, a task at which he succeeds despite the opposition and machinations of the Emperor and House Harkonnen, the Atreides' traditional and evil enemy. He does so by taming sandworms, which he and his Fremen use as battle tanks.

The Bene Gesserit, an order of telepathic nuns, complicate the story because of their attempts to breed a superior human (female, of course) that will rule the known universe. Paul's mother, a Bene Gesserit, conceived him despite orders not to conceive a male child, because she loved Paul's father, who wanted a male heir. But she does later conceive a girl, and this girl becomes a crucial player in the last battle, when her psychic powers overcome those of the Bene Gesserit Mother Superior who is the Emperor's adviser, sometime concubine, and collaborator. For the girl, like Paul, is the superior human the Bene Gesserit have been working towards.

Frank Herbert hung a complex plot on this skimpy skeleton, with many subplots, a huge cast of characters, and that mix of myth, legend, and realism that almost guarantees a cult following. His gift was character and social ambiance, the plot creaks and groans under the weight of sheer narrative stuff that Herbert has piled into this book. He also wrote shorter pieces that fit more or less well into the universe of Dune, and left an enormous quantity of notes, which his son and collaborators have written up as still further parts of the saga. Turning all this into a movie is daunting at best. I don't know the history of the project, but it looks very much as if was conceived on a grand scale, a la Star Wars, but that money or energy or enthusiasm ran out. Maybe all three, but most likely money. I suspect that the producers realised too late what the project entailed, stopped the filming, and shot a few voice overs to stitch the footage together.

Not that we lost a masterpiece. As I said, concept is everything, and David Lynch (and whoever worked with him) conceived a fascistic imperium, but Herbert conceived a Byzantine one. The Fremen are nothing like what Herbert describes, the Harkonnens are merely nasty, not evil, the Emperor hasn't enough character to convince as a Machiavellian plotter, the Guild of pilots could as well have been played by cardboard cutouts, and the final battle scene goes on too long, with laughably unhurt Fremen, very peculiar psychically powered weapons, (which fire when the wielder grunts, and of course always hit their (evil) targets), and far too many repetitive shots of sandworms rearing up and opening their vast fangy throat. Someone wanted a Ran-like Goetterdaemmerung, but manages only a hokey shoot-em-up.

Well, I can now say I've seen it. I'm sorry I put Marie through it. Paul watched it too, but I don't think it was a high point in his movie life. They both found it hard to follow, and the characters weren't engaging enough to make us care for them. Pity, since one of Herbert's gifts is characterisation. Thumbs down.