Child Prodigy Inspiration

You know the kind. The kid who built a nuclear power plant in his parents' garage. The seventeen year old wunderkind who is flying an airplane she built herself across the continent. The teenager who is not yet old enough to vote, but who has successfully lobbied for a change in foreign policy and raised $300,000 to help enslaved kids in the third world. They used to make me kind of depressed and irritated that I had so much lower an accomplishment to lifespan ratio. But recently I started to look at them in a new way.

If a kid has accomplished so much in ten years, the first few of which he or she was mainly focused on learning to talk and control bodily elimination functions, then any of us can take the next ten years and do whatever we want without having a lifetime of that behind us. Whatever we know about the subject is going to be greater than what the kid started with. All the kid has on us is that he or she didn't know it couldn't be done.

I haven't decided what to do with my newfound inspiration, except maybe use it as a procrastination excuse, but I thought I'd share it.

Calgary Sights & Heights

In an account that has drifted loose from the day in which it actually occurred, I will now describe a half day free of duty in Calgary. I e-mailed everyone who responded to my Lunch invitation and whose e-mail comes up when I search on "Calgary" or "YYC," to see if anyone is up for a short notice visit. If I didn't e-mail you, and you wish I had, send me an e-mail with the name and airport identifiers that I might be putting in if I were in your neck of the woods, and you never know. I might have a free day there sometime. I search everything with the label Lunch in my gmail account, looking for the name of the town or airport, so put more than one in if you like, and avoid mentioning places you're not in the same e-mail.

No one is available for the afternoon, so I go solo to investigate the things on the hill behind the hotel. They're ski lifts and ski jumps, leftovers from the 1988 Winter Olympic Games. There's not enough snow left to ski--it's summer, after all--but there was enough to climb up a big pile of snow underneath the chairlifts and pretend I'm summitting Everest. Forgot my flag, though. I do climb up the whole hill. It's a little disorienting to find when I get to the top that the hill is really just an escarpment, and that there's a boring subdivision at the top, almost level with the top of the ski hill.

Along the ridge at the top of the ski hill there is a path that goes to the bases of a number of towers. They are the tops of ski jumps. You know when you see ski jumpingon TV and the person goes off the jump and sails through the air, bent forward over their skis into a human aerofoil? That sort of ski jump. The biggest two have elevators going to the top, but the others have stairs, and there's no gate nor "keep out" sign and it's all part of a public park. I walk on up. And up. And up. Maybe they just figured sightseeers wouldn't go up all those stairs. At the top there's a platform with that same potscrubber plastic stuff you get at the loading and unloading area of ski-lifts. There's a bar to hang onto as you position yourself at the top of the ski jump. And there's the steep, steep, precipitous drop. It's kind of freaky and at the same time flattering that the Calgary parksboard thinks highly enough of me to trust me to behave safely up here. I'm a little surprised that no one has killed themselves trying to mountain bike down the ski jump, for example. The amount more daring and less common sense than me that it would take to think that was worth trying is well within human variation. Or a mickey of Crown Royal.

I go down the wooden stairs along the side of the ski jump and then back to the hotel. During dinner, Carlos replies to my call for locals. Remember Carlos? He guest-blogged about a high tech cement mixer he drove. I look it up and that was 2007. I guess a few very loyal readers may do. He lives in Calgary now and has time before his next shift to squire me around the city. He comes by in a low-slung car, definitely not a dump truck and we head downtown. He's rocking the aviator sunglasses and the Latin flair as he points out the Bow River trails and other sights during the drive.

We start off at the Calgary Tower. Every city has to have its phallic symbol. There's an elevator, so I don't have to walk up the stairs. At the top is a similarly dizzying view, with better safety features. There's a glass floor and we entertain ourselves "balancing" on the girders within it, and jumping into the "spaces." It's a fun game of mind over mind, to use the logical part of the brain to overrule the more instinctive part, the one that says, "there's no FLOOR there!" Then we walk all the way around the tower, looking at the landscape. We can see the Rocky Mountains, the suburbs, the airport, along with arrivals and departures, and some of the downtown. Part of the view from the tower is blocked by a tall building that wasn't there when the tower was built. Ironically, it't the same building the controller wouldn't give me permission to overfly at 7,100' a few weeks ago. Now I get a better look at it, closer to the ground. Carlos also explains his crazy scheme to learn to fly and build time as a commercial bush pilot in South America. I realize at this moment that we were so busy discussing his plans that I never got around to telling him that I might be working there this winter. Now he's going to kill me.

Back at ground level it's too late (i.e. within twelve hours of my report time) to have a drink at Carlos' favourite bar, so he vows to find me some dessert. He consults with his dispatcher from work while driving around the city. It's amusingly similar to me trying to get airport information from the FSS while in descent. It's late enough that the best bet turns out to be Dairy Queen, so Carlos pulls up to some young ladies on the sidewalk, cranks the charm up a several notches and gets directions to the nearest. Ice cream doesn't have to be fancy to be good, and this was quick and delicious to get me home in time for my required duty rest.

I remember asking Carlos if he wanted me to hold anything back in my description of the evening, and he said to go ahead and tell it like it was, so I must have been planning to mock him for something, but I've forgotten what it was. Probably his driving. I don't think I screamed at all though, so it's all good.

It's funny sometimes, that a guy doing his best to impress you might not come off as the most impressive, but it makes a girl feel good that he's going to the effort, so in the end she's happy. Carlos was tired and busy, but he postponed some important tasks to make sure I felt welcome and had a great time in Calgary. Yeah, tip for everyone: spend more effort making the person you're with feel important than making them believe that you are important. That takes me right back to some advice I received may years ago from another Albertan: "stop trying to show people how smart you are, and concentrate on letting them see how nice you are." It's a rare friend who will offer constructive criticism that requires them to point out your personality flaws. I don't know where he is now, but if you're out there, K'Harv, you know who you are.

Carlos came to Canada from Colombia and over the past few years I have had the privilege of witnessing his gradual mastery of the English language and his pride in his new country through our e-mail correspondence. He teased me with a put-on accent when I remarked on having expected one. He sounds almost like he was born here now. He's even writing eloquent letters to the CBC, and just had an excerpt from one on climate change read on-air on a province-wide show. You can listen to it via podcast (at minute 20:34), or read the unedited version at his new blog. He notes that the units for the diesel consumption mentioned in the letter read on air should be km/liter, not liters per kilometers.

I'm proud to have friends who stand up and speak out for what they believe in.

Metaphors for Life

Friends take a while to get it when I say things like, "I hope it will rain on the weekend, so I can go to the park!" But you see when you're an on-call photo pilot, you have to work on the sunny days. Today it's raining, but fortunately not a thunderstorm, so I'm at the amusement park with an eleven year old. Eleven year olds are about the best companions for amusement parks because they are big enough to go on all the rides and I've never found an adult who wants to go on the water flume ride thirty times in succession. I recently discovered that most parents consider taking their kids to the amusement park a chore. If this one works out, I think I'll get a season's pass and take all my friends' well-behaved kids, one a week all summer. Also rainy days are the best, because there are no lines. No lines at all, no one waiting, so we've been riding around and around on the water flume without getting off. The ride attendants don't care, less work for them. It's raining anyway, so we're not going to get any less wet if we get off. And water coasters are fun.

I've been around this same ride enough times to get philosophical. We went on wheeled roller coasters first, with the eleven year old bravely marching up to each one without giving himself any time to chicken out. Some things in life are quite as committed as getting on a roller coaster. You make your decision, you get strapped in, and then you're there, despite the fact that you may not enjoy the whole ride. His eyes were screwed tightly shut all the way through the roller coaster that went upside-down, and he was hanging on for dear life on the steepest one. Mind you, so was I. It really feels like you're going to fall out!

Going round and round on the water coaster he gradually comes to terms with the feeling of the big drop and when we finally get off, he wants to go back on the other roller coasters. They're still scary, but he's conquered them. And then we spend the rest of the day on the bumper cars. I adore bumper cars. If I win the lottery I am so getting my own bumper car arena, and you can all come over and we can smash into one another over and over again. On the way home it's all I can do to remember not to slam into the other traffic. I also remember to use the gear shift and not the steering wheel to engage reverse.

I find a place that repairs cameras, because even though I know my little camera is probably toast, I'd rather hear it from an expert than throw it out not knowing. I even pay a $25 diagnostic fee, to be credited to the repair cost if I give the go ahead, but forfeit if I decide not to have it repaired. I press a little, "do you think you'll be able to fix it?" but the technician impassively says he doesn't know until they examine it.

---

Ever post something and imagine someone might be reading it, but know it's very unlikely? That was me, sending best wishes to South Sudan a few days ago. How about this, reader ScurvyDog who blogs at Tales from the Clouds was in South Sudan on its first Independence Day, celebrating along with the nationals. I never get over the astonishing breadth of the readership here.

Topics, in Linguistics and Otherwise

I'm back to my fourth year topics class, the one in English about focus projection, not the Mandarin one. We're talking about focus still. I think focus is the entire focus of this course and I'm increasingly certain that a fourth year topics course, and probably most third and fourth year courses outside the rigid core curriculum in this discipline are nothing more than the professor taking advantage of a captive audience for his or her theories, rough drafts of papers, and favourite past publications. I don't think this professor has cited any paper yet that he didn't coauthor.

He says things like "Cleft clauses bring two implicatures: exostential and exhaustive," and I mentally scurry around like I'm doing a crossword puzzle, trying to fill in the meanings of the words such that they match up and make sense with the other things he is saying. Judging by context, cleft clauses are those in which the normal English word order is twisted around in order to change the focus. The exostential implicature means that you have to have established some external background knowledge before you can plunge into a sentence like, "It's John that Mary likes." And the exhaustive implicature is that John is the only one. To me, you could follow up on "It's John that Mary likes" with "And she also likes Randy, and Andrew, and Zach, and that guy who was flying the Beaver on Saturday, and I heard that guy from Weasel River was at her place on Friday," but perhaps that just means I've spent too much time in small northern communities. The professor did note that this implicature is not true in all languages.

He then tells us that "Into the room walked Bill," presumably also a cleft clause, can answer the question, "Who walked into the room?" but not "What did Bill do?" For me, "Into the room walked Bill would be a very marked answer to either question and would only be valid as a somewhat showy description of a game show, or as an answer to "What happened next?" This is a post-verbal subject and gives the subject a presentational focus which is a good name for it, as you can imagine Vanna White gesturing towards Bill as he arrives. A sign that this is a special focus for presenting someone, it is almost impossible to get a pronoun into that position. You could say, "Standing over the body was HIM!" but only if the last word was accompanied by vigourous pointing and probably a dramatic camera angle and music cue.

We're working towards establishing two different types of focus which in English are made by the same constructions, but in other languages may not be. So now we go to some examples in Hungarian. Ninety-nine percent of you will probably be really glad that I didn't copy them down, nor pay rapt enough attention to rave on about them. For those of you who were hoping to learn about its focus strategies, I'm truly sorry.

I did rediscover that the middle of an afternoon class is an excellent opportunity to focus on what you'd rather be doing. And seeing as right now in my life that's actually more important than Hungarian having deaccenting and stress, I might as well ignore the fact that Hungarian stress falls on the leftmost element of the stress clause, and ponder what it is that I really want to be doing.

• I like the morning exercise of getting on my bicycle and coming to school. I should make that a regular thing, even if I don't go to school.
• I like learning things, and human contact.
• I'd rather learn most of them at a faster pace, skip to the next thing as soon as I grasp a concept, and have the opportunity to immediately find out more in depth if I like it.
• I'd rather be improving some of the languages that I sort of know (Hungarian not among them).
• It would be amusing to write a novel at the university, alternating between a quiet corner of one of the libraries and the back of dull classes.
• I'd rather be improving my knowledge of aviation, both useful and trivial.
• I like attention

As far as linguistics is concerned, I am interested in:

• writing systems
• deliberate language change or retention such as politically motivated dialectical divergence, or legislated prescriptivism
• factors contributing to language survival in the face of non-recognition/persecution
• anthropological linguistics especially with respect to population movement from Asia to and through the Americas

While I'm not completely uninterested in the different ways Hungarian establishes discourse new versus contrastive focus, it's not my first choice.

Adjuncts, according to the professor--I think we're back to English now--can attach to anything, but are sensitive to what they attach to. Suck it up, adjuncts. You can't always get what you want. And we finish the class with a recursive infinite tree. I swear these things are following me.

More Thoughts on the Build

I really wish we could have spent longer with the villagers. It wasn't practical. I suppose we could have brought hammocks and slept under the huts as they do, but camping may have been beyond some people's tolerance level, plus it would have exposed us to malaria during the hours of darkness. There was also no point in that. Beyond our material wealth, we had nothing to share that was of use to them, and having the great mostly-white donors get to know the small brown people as people introduces the risk of interpersonal conflicts and cultural judgements. Pol Pot was wrong: there's nothing inherently good or noble in being an uneducated rice farmer in a rural area. I wonder what they were cautioned to or not to do around us before we came.

We went to Cambodia be participants but I came away still feeling like an observer. We built those homes the way the mayor with the oversized pair of scissors built the new library he's opening. I keep telling myself, as I did in the previous post, that we did the important part. It's true. As we demonstrated, any idiot with a bit of instruction and practice could knock together those homes. We made it happen though. I'm the channel through which your generous donations became homes to improve people's lives. There, that did it for me. I'm the channel through which your generous donations became homes to improve people's lives. Thank you for making it possible for me to be that channel.

No one is pretending that the homes are a quick fix to anyone's problems, either. They are making some aspects of a few people's lives a little better. The roof won't leak. The wind won't blow the walls in. A cow won't knock it in by stumbling against it. They won't need to spend any time cutting, gathering, drying and weaving palm fronds for routine maintenance. Remembering how serious a small ailment can be in a culture with little access to medical care, houses that keep clothes and bedding dry, help people sleep better, and help protect food from vermin will probably save lives over the years.

I've been exposed to cultures and people from all over the world through immigration, movies, books, YouTube, and almost as many years of formal education as I have fingers and toes. But I'm sure visiting Cambodia has had an effect on me. I remember that kids in the city were curious about these pale-coloured, big-nosed people and now I wonder whether a couple of days of exposure to these aliens will have an effect on the people.

History shows that poor, uneducated people with nothing to lose are easily influenced and rallied to a cause. Couldn't we influence them towards the belief that everyone is worth something, and that helping your fellow man just because you can is a good idea? It's not as if they have to go very far for that. Buddhism's sila teaches equality and reciprocity. Perhaps that would have been a comprehensible answer to why we were there.

Remembering Sacrifice

The eleventh of November is Remembrance Day in Canada, a day set aside for us to remember those who died in the service of their country. It's not a victory celebration. It's not about pride in ones armed forces. It's not supposed to be a political statement about the nature of war. It's just a day, and specifically a minute of silence, to remember those who died fighting in the name of their countries. In Canada we wear poppies, or nowadays plastic and felt representations of poppies, as a symbol of our remembrance.

I explain this holiday every year, but this year I happened to have an experience that illustrates how I feel about it, and showed to me that I wasn't kidding myself. I was walking along an unfamiliar road and came across a cenotaph to the local war dead. It was of a common format: a square column with the dates 1914-1918 engraved on one face and 1939-1945 engraved on another, accompanied by a list of the men from the local community who had not returned from the corresponding combats. Of course I'm not old enough to have first hand experience of either of those wars, but those dates automatically bring to mind history class images of mud and barbed wire. I stopped and looked at the memorial, read some of the names and wondered what they were like, how bad it had been for them, wondered if their families still lived in the town. Then I walked on. Around the next corner was another war memorial, very similar to, but a hundred years older than the first. It was from a war I'd never heard of.

It was focus-changing. It reminded me that someday an ordinary person will have no specific emotional associations with the first and second world wars, and eventually even with the most recent gulf wars. Someone who paid attention in history class may recall the official causes and some of the combatants, but it will be nerd knowledge and not a topic of political debate. Does anyone today identify personally with one side or the other of the Thirty Years War? Perhaps some people do. I heard someone use the pronoun "we" with reference to the Saxon tribesmen who harassed the Roman soldiers in northern Europe. I don't think that sort of identification with past grievances is a good thing for a society to keep alive. I believe one can remember and honour the fallen without perpetuating the conflict that killed them.

I know I've made that step because it only occurred to me as I typed this up that the names I read on that first memorial were the names of people who may have either killed or died at the hands of people whose names I have read on other cenotaphs. It was in a village in Germany. May they all rest in peace.

Knowledge is not a Democratic Principle

I wanted to write a post about something scary for Hallowe'en, and I think I just found it. I came across this Answers.com question and answer. The asker wants to know if he can use the Archimedes principle to weigh an airplane without a scale. And he knows that Archimedes developed this principle to determine whether a crown purported to be solid gold was indeed solid gold.

Several people tried to answer this question. Two suggested that the way to do this would be to completely submerge the airplane, evacuating all air. One concluded that this would work, assuming one knew the density and composition of the materials from which the airplane was made ("measure the volume of water displaced and multiply it by the mean average density of the plane to get the weight") and the other, citing "I'm a vampire blur" as sources concluded that such calculations were not possible, "so neh." Three suggested floating the aircraft and one didn't read the question properly, so suggested weighing the airplane on scales, using more or less the methodology cited by the asker in the original question.

The Archimedes principle is this:

"When a body is wholly or partially immersed in water, the upthrust, or loss of weight is equal to the weight of the water displaced."

One of the people who gave me my start in science and mathematics had come from an educational tradition where students learned things by rote memorization and demonstrated their knowledge by standing next to their desks and reciting them. A generation or so earlier they probably had to say it in the original Greek. That was never demanded of me, in any language, but when learned snippets of natural philosophy are recited by someone you respect, they stick anyway. I never have to look that up. Rote memorization is obviously not sufficient for understanding and application, but it's an anchor for the knowledge.

An airplane could be weighed by the water displacement method if you put it on a floating platform in a tank of water, and noted the water level in the tank. Then you hoist the airplane off the platform and measure how much water you must pump in to fill the tank back to the identical water level. That is the amount of water the weight of the airplane displaced, and by multiplying its volume (which you measured while pumping) by its density at that temperature, you have the weight of the airplane. That's easier than filling the tank to the brim without the airplane then collecting and weighing the water that spills over the top when you add the airplane, but it's functionally identical.

But because this is the way the world works now, on Answers.com people voted on which was the correct answer. The vampire blur who wanted to sink the airplane "won." I know this is by no means the nadir of stupidity in online question and answer polls. You might tell me not to get too upset about this because he only received two votes and one of the floaters received one, but it's a second risk of the democratization of knowledge: not only has popularity become the definition of truth, but low voter turnout makes it easy to influence "truth."

Once upon a time in some parts of human history, when people didn't know things and they couldn't easily test them for themselves, they went to people who were wise, or powerful or lucky and asked them for the truth. What they said was accepted as the truth, even in the face of meticulous contradictory observations. Then came the scientific revolution. It wasn't about new knowledge. It was about how we know knowledge. We test it in a way that anyone can reproduce, and experience as truth instead of being told. That's the purpose of laboratory science training in schools, to show students that what they are learning is real and discoverable, not rote and on faith. Scientists worked in Latin and Greek not to be obscure and elitist, but to communicate. The Greeks and the Romans had the first literate engineers in the western world, and theirs became the tradition for communication. Newton reported on some of his discoveries in English, and despite a few centuries of language change, it's some of the most clear readable reporting of primary scientific results you'll ever read. It's not laden with jargon, just uses and defines existing terminology for the phenomena.

Since then knowledge has become more esoteric, experiments more expensive, scientific language more obscure, and people have to rely not only on others to do their experiments for them, but on others to read the results and filter them. We've gone back to individuals choosing which wise man they will turn to, and we've lost the distinction between philosophy and experimental knowledge. There's nothing wrong with turning to someone whose experience, subject knowledge and capacity for thought is greater than yours and asking for help understanding the world. There's nothing wrong with taking ones own knowledge of the world and trying to share it with others (at least there had better not be, because I do it all the time). But it results in a breakdown in the distinction between what is empirical fact and what is opinion. There is very little real historical fact. Some bones, some photographs, some rusted swords, are all. We assume that when numerous sources close in time and space to the occurrence agree with each other and with the physical evidence that we have historical fact, but we have to be open to the possibility of collusion by the only people who knew the truth. Wikipedia has rapidly become a major source of information for individuals and for the media we depend on to give us a broader view. Wikipedia is kind of a shoutocracy. When the only version of events that anyone looks at is the one laid down by he who shouts loudest, then did anything else really happen. Ethics have no empirical truth, and all we can do to determine which are right is to consult our wise people, our consciences, and the norms of our society. But some things are either real or not, and when there is a conflict among voices on determinable facts, but the "winner" is determined by volume¹, popularity, tenacity, intimidation, tradition or apathy, that is very scary. Happy Hallowe'en.

1. Not by immersion in water, but that might be nice, in certain cases, incidentally settling the matter of who is a witch, just in time for Hallowe'en.

Not a Zero Sum Game

I posted a blog entry a few weeks ago on how, through e-mail, I introduced two people I had never met resulting in an increase of happiness for all involved in the transaction. It was aviation related and it was also the highlight of my week, so I blogged about it. I was reporting on the fact that by doing absolutely nothing of difficulty, effort, or cost to myself, I suddenly felt amazing. I claimed no intellectual analysis of the possible improvement in someone's life, therefore resulting in a more peaceful planet. It was just some happy chemical released in my brain when Michael thanked me, inducing joy.

Most people have done something in their lives that was trivial to them, but meant a lot to another person, so most commenters empathized. There were, however, two fascinating dissenting opinions that I want to talk about, and rebut in a way, but not without leaving the comments open for more discussion of the topic. I am delighted to have so many people read my blog and am honoured when people of different philosophies still take the time to visit. It's easy to read things written by people who agree with you, so when I have regular readers who disagree with me, I know I have a connection with people who challenge themselves and want to change the world to the way they think is better. Everyone should be so bold. You might want to open the comments from that blog entry in another window, as I'm going to refer to them but not requote them extensively, and I want you to catch me if I paraphrase something unfairly.

One commenter, Anon #1, felt that the experience offered to the refugee was inappropriate because of his race and religion, and suggested that the newcomer should demonstrate that he has fully integrated into his new country by--if I read the comment correctly--recanting his religion before he he was given such an opportunity. Anon #1 also stated that the opportunity given to the particular refugee represented a loss of opportunity to Christian children. I will look at those two points separately.

Integration of new immigrants into the cultural whole is important for a country. The understanding is that if everyone feels like part of a whole then they will look out for one another, be willing to pay their taxes, obey the laws, join the armed forces and endorse the mores of the community. People who feel disenfranchised might foment civil unrest or become targets for terrorist recruitment. Presumably that is the reason that the teenage refugee programme is funded in the first place. I agree with Anon #1 that young Abdul (I don't know his real name) should integrate into society, and strive like every other American to make it a better, more ideal place to live. So what does that mean he should do?

I don't agree that he should convert to a new religion. As part of his citizenship exam, I'm sure he had to study the US Constitution and amendments thereto, including the First Amendment which begins ""Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof." Part of his assimilation should therefore include the knowledge that in his new country people are allowed to freely worship in whatever manner suits them. He knows that he can be a fully patriotic American regardless of the direction he faces to pray, and that he may not discriminate against others for not holding the same religious beliefs. Evidence is that Anon #1 values his religion above his country, because he goes to the Bible's third commandment before his constitution's first amendment; therefore he can deduce that asking someone to choose between religion and country will create rifts instead of patriotic new Americans. For all I know, the reason Abdul is a refugee is that he and his family are Christian converts who fled to the USA to escape persecution in a Moslem regime, but that's not very relevant. The ideals of the United States, if not the reality, accept all religions equally and both Abdul and Anon #1 should work as patriotic Americans to discard prejudice against people who are different.

What else do Americans believe in? Would Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness be a good summary? The American Dream, as I understand it, is to work hard, succeed and have a fine home, family and life comforts. (Canadians are more about winning the lottery and having enough beer). Step one in working hard is to work: stay in school and then graduate and get a job. To this end Michael (the reader who contacted me about Abdul's chances as a pilot) elicited from his class ideas on what they wanted to do when they grew up. Having a career goal inspires good schoolwork in children of any background, and to pay for his training, Abdul will have to get other jobs first, and establish himself as a trustworthy person liked by his coworkers. In the United States a commercial pilot must be declared free of "moral turpitude." I think that means he will have to be a moral, law-abiding citizen of his adoptive country. That all seems like a pretty good definition of integration to me.

I really don't see how 'integration first' would work. One day while I was volunteering in an outdoor program for special needs children there was a young client who was deaf and partially blind. Her vocalizations were not intelligible, but she could sign a little and understand some signs if they were made right in front of her face. One of her regular caregivers said that she could do better if she had some specialized glasses that would allow her to see better, but that her parents had said she could have new glasses when she asked for them herself. Asking an immigrant to integrate first and get information about a career second seems like asking an eight year old to learn to communicate in order to ask for the tools she needs to learn to do so.

Anon #1's second point is more interesting to me. He felt that because Abdul and his fellow international immigrants received a tour of a flight ops facility, other non-Arabic children were discriminated against. Perhaps I was at fault for not explaining what happened in more detail. I was sitting on the couch watching Law & Order reruns and looking at pictures of cats with cute captions. Michael was moving down the list of aspirations and looking for a dentist who was willing to tell a fourteen year old what her job was like and how she got there. The people in the airline ops department were frantically solving the latest scheduling crisis, or possibly also looking at lolcats, depending on the weather and mechanical aptitude of their airplanes that day. The airline pilot who would ultimately give the tour was partaking in some off-duty pilot activity, maybe sitting on the couch with a cold one, watching Jamie and Adam blow up a cement mixer. I sent an e-mail and it inspired the airline pilot to take the class on a tour. Wasted leisure time was converted to happiness. It's possible that the airline pilot cancelled an appointment to inspire white, Christian, American-born children in order to meet with the immigrants, but that's highly unlikely. In fact the reverse could be true: perhaps leading the tour was fun enough that he resolved to take a local school class on another tour next week. The point is, as Sarah said, helpfulness is not a zero sum game. It's a fully renewable resource. You don't need to worry that because someone, somewhere, was nice to someone that there is now less niceness in the world available to you and the people you approve of over your lifetime.

Lets say Abdul is inspired, and has what it takes, and works his little tail off over the next ten years in order to buy a small airplane to learn to fly in. (That's actually a smart, cost-effective way to do it, when you consider all the time building he'll have to do). You could look at Abdul's career progress as competition against your kid, but surer threats are the kids with airline fathers who have had all the contacts, the money and the opportunity their whole lives. Abdul's enjoyment of his hobby could inspire other youths to chase their dreams. Generally one person doing well has a better effect on the people around him than one not doing well. Would you rather Abdul become a flight instructor and try to get your kid to spend money on flying lessons or become a drug dealer and ask your kid to spend money on those wares? Maybe your kid gets a pilot licence too and gets to build some cheap time on Abdul's plane. Or after Abdul has been giving airplane tours for a while he buys a second plane and hires your kid to fly the first one. Maybe your kid goes out of his way to help Abdul, so five years later Abdul serves as a job contact for your kid. Maybe your kid does nothing in particular but Abdul pays taxes that ensure your kid doesn't starve. It is of course possible that Abdul is not able to achieve anything and your kid is the one whose taxes support Abdul. The point is, it is in your family's interest that the people around you succeed, even if they don't look or think like you.

The second anonymous dissenter, who signed off as Person in the Middle, is a little more mysterious. He or she (I'll guess he) writes in fluent English with North American "-ize" spellings, and his errors are those of a native speaker such as occasionally using the wrong homonym. I would have assumed he lived in the US, but he states that he is neither in the twenty-five richest western countries nor "at the bottom of the pile, where someone will pick them up and emigrate them to a country like yours." Most have-not countries that use English as a first or widely-studied second language use British English, but I think China may be the exception. But native-like English would be a ticket to ride in China. I think I'll stop playing this game and assume that PitM is an American or Canadian speaking on behalf of the downtrodden of unspecified countries.

His first objection seems to be that I had the opportunity to do something good only because of the advantages I already enjoy. It's true that I have a pretty good life, and I can see that one commercial pilot calling on another might seem like an exotic transaction to someone outside of aviation. Heck, that's part of why I reported it: it was an example of the power of blogging. I knew both of those people only because they had written me in response to the blog. So I had this power as a result of my own efforts in blogging. I suspect anyone who blogs in a specific field will collect an impressive list of associated contacts. But although the feeling of being a power broker was fun, it isn't being someone who knows someone that triggers the happy.

I know this because I felt just as good when I gave a drug addict my socks. (I was out for a jog and she was sitting on the pavement outside the hospital, having been discharged after treatment for an overdose. She had no money and just shredded nylon stockings inside her running shoes, and a long way to walk. I don't take any money or bus coupons out jogging, so I gave her my nice thick running socks and ran home with my bare feet in my shoes). True, it wasn't my last pair of socks, and I'm doing better than most of the world to own running shoes and multiple pairs of socks, but the point I'm trying to make is that you don't have to be Bill Gates to help someone out. You don't have to give anything physical, even. The Dalai Lama makes this point more eloquently:

If people have compassion, naturally that's something they can count on; even if they have economic problems and their fortune declines, they still have something to share with fellow human beings.

Person in the Middle emphasizes that many people are in circumstances from which they cannot escape, and who are ignored by their own countries and the world. It seems like he's saying that because I cannot help these people I should not take pleasure in helping anyone. Kind of like the rule from grade one that you can't bring candy to class unless you have enough for everyone. That can't really be his point, because no one can ever help everyone, so the only way to be fair would be to help no one ever, and that would be a sad world. Unless you're in an explosive atmosphere or have to conserve oxygen, it's better to light a single candle than to sit and curse the dark.

I'll end this by clarifying that neither of these posts is meant as a claim that I am exceptionally generous nor that the things I have done for anyone are particularly momentous, or even positive, either for them or the world in general. The first post I would summarize "isn't it cool that we're hardwired to take pleasure at helping" and this post as "you don't need any special skills or connections to be nice to people."

Feel free to choose your own path to happiness.

Do You Regret Silence or Speech?

Today I am looking for an inspirational poster to give to someone so he can see it while he works out. I know he doesn't want to be a bulgingly muscled bodybuilder, and he's not into any particular sports, so I was looking for something generally inspirational, depicting the healthy human form. I liked this one with the Olympic rings over a muscled golden man wearing a crown of laurels and the chariot. Then I looked closer and realized that it was for the Berlin Olympics in 1936, and decided that Aryan eugenics wasn't what he wanted to have in mind while striving for the ideal.

It's almost impossible to take typical motivational posters  non-ironically after seeing the parodies, but I looked at that category anyway. Then I saw this one. If you can't see the image at right, the quotation is: I often regret that I have spoken; Never that I have been silent. It made me do a double take. Just how chatty was this Publilus Syrus?

I take his point. Sure there are times that it is better to be silent than to speak. By talking too much you might cause others to think/realize that you don't know what you are talking about. You might interrupt someone who would otherwise have given you wisdom. You might embarrass someone by telling them something they could otherwise have been happily oblivious to. You could let slip confidential personal, competitive or military information. You might be talking about your cabin when you should be focusing on maintaining airspeed in icing while intercepting the localizer.

But if Publilius Syrus (Wikipedia and Internet consensus favour that spelling) regrets nothing he has neglected to say, then does he never think of what he could have done? I'm thinking of the first officer who didn't say, "Go around!" in Little Rock, or at least didn't say it in a voice loud enough to be picked up by the cockpit voice recorder, and of all the pilots who ever died because they saw something that wasn't quite right but assumed that the flying pilot had it under control, or that it would be safer for them and the cockpit atmosphere to remain silent than to nitpick a small discrepancy. I guess Publilus Syrus never knew anyone who committed suicide because he thought no one cared about him. Maybe Syrus was so irritating that he didn't have any friends, so none of them ever died leaving him wishing he had told them something. And if he followed his own wisdom, he never spoke out against injustice against others, even though he himself was a former slave.

Ironically it was Syrus' smart mouth that got him out of slavery. Had he remained a silent slave, his master wouldn't have been so impressed by his wisdom and entertainment value as to free him. It appears that Syrus became a professional maxim writer. I guess that's the equivalent of someone who makes a living from a cafepress store today. He was pretty good at his job, considering the number of sayings attributed to him that are still in use today, such as "a rolling stone gathers no moss."

I have no quarrel with "It is a bad plan that admits of no modification," (although if that plan is a published instrument approach, ad hoc modification is a very bad plan indeed).  "If you wish to reach the highest, begin at the lowest," is true, but I prefer the way Lau-Tzu put it. Syrus strikes both sides of the coin with the complementary, "Nothing can be done at once hastily and prudently," and "While we stop to think, we often miss our opportunity." That way whatever you choose to do, you have a quotation to back you up. One of his sayings, "It is a good thing to learn caution from the misfortunes of others," is part of the slogan of the Aviation Safety Newsletter, from which I keep highlighting things I mean to blog about and then not doing so.

According to Wikipedia, he also worked as a mime. I must admit that as a reflection on a performance as a mime, those words are spot on. But I doubt he was so bad a mime that he kept forgetting not to talk.   Another of his sayings, "Let a fool hold his tongue and he will pass for a sage," I think is a clearer expression of the same sentiment, but I still say speak out. If you are a sage, then someone can learn something from you. And if you aren't, someone else will likely speak out and help ameliorate your foolishness. And I suppose there are a dozen readers out there who silently think I'm a fool and should regard Syrus' advice.

And in other news, apparently some Indian pilots don't know how to fly. Indian reporters are having trouble reporting, too. Raw data flying is several steps removed from just turning off the autopilot, and if the pilots can't fly raw data in cruise, the chief pilot should be doing a lot more than sending circulars.

No Surprise

Terse e-mail today informs me I should cancel my flight to the scheduled training I've been preparing for. Maybe the examiner remembers me after all, and fled the country in horror when he heard he might have to get back in an airplane with me. Or maybe the autopilot doesn't work; the boss got a contract and needs me flying not training/testing; we're selling the Weedwhackers and buying an all-jet fleet; Transport Canada didn't approve the RNAV training programme; or someone's horoscope said it was a bad month for PPC renewals.

I think it's a game the universe plays with me. I drifted off to sleep last night thinking of how well the flight test would go, and the e-mail arrived, now that I look at the header, pretty close to the same minute I probably fell asleep. Perhaps it will keep playing it until I don't even twitch at the prospect.

Bring it on, universe. Bring it on. I'll keep studying, as the training will be rescheduled sometime in the next couple of months.

Year in Review

This wasn't a stunning year, career-wise. In fact, I think the only thing I did to further my career was to fly my bosses' airplanes to the best of my ability. I didn't do anything to damage it either, except grow a year older, so maybe I come out even. I didn't resolve to get a jet job this year, just said I might like to, and wishes aren't jet planes any more than they are horses, so that's that. I've been pretty passive, but that's because I've been comfortable, and the latter is better than the opposite.

Here's what I did resolve for 2009:

• 1. Never read the comments on YouTube videos or LOLcat cartoons. No matter how funny or intelligent the images, the comments will be illiterate and inane, and I'll regret the time spent reading them.
• 2. Eat only the best chocolate I can afford.
• 3. Whenever I can gain something of merit without risking anything but my pride and my Internet surfing time, I will make my best try to do it.

Hmm. I did pretty well on number one. I've definitely broken the habit of clicking on comments in search of intelligent debate. I've finally learned that my own blog is one of the few places on the internet where the comments hold intelligently considered opinions and insider information supplementary to the main article. My readers can even snicker at zebra penises and make it sound erudite. So SUCCESS, and I have no desire to relapse on that one.

Number two went pretty much perfectly up for almost ten months. I rationed imported European chocolate made out of "sugar, cocoa butter and vanilla." I didn't touch anything made by Hershey or containing soya lecithin or polyglycerol ricinoleate. But then came the latter half of October. People, there were giant boxes of mini Kit-Kats, Smarties, Coffee Crisps and Aeros available at every grocery store, even in the north, for about $12. Everywhere bad chocolate was being given away. I'm only human. I was no match. And then when Hallowe'en was over, I went back to the vending machines. And there's a Fun-Sized Aero bar in my home, but I haven't opened it, even though I had to pick it up to see how to spell ricinoleate. I think I can give myself a PARTIAL SUCCESS on this one.

The third resolution is pretty nebulous. I lose by not having looked very hard for such opportunities, but I went on a couple of great bike trips, made some new friends, built a raft out of beach-found materials and paddled it, entered a 10 km footrace, and demonstrated the carpe diem spirit right up to the end by venturing onto a foreign military base to fly the simulacrum of a giant airplane, so I'm going to count it as a SUCCESS too.

So I had a pretty good year by the standards I set out for myself. I hope your own year went well, or at the very minimum that you can salvage something from the memories that you can hold up as a success. I've a few days left to figure out my 2010 resolutions. I'll tell you about them on New Year's Day.

Screw Bronze

I got distracted from my own blogging by a stunning and terrifying blog by someone whom I first accused of being nothing like me, but the more I read the more she is like me. I've been barely keeping a day ahead of posting about the North Carolina trip -- ask John, he's the one who has been receiving chapters to censor as little as an hour before the post goes out. It might be a while before I catch up with writing my own adventures. It might be a while before you want to read mine again, after reading Elizabeth's.

Elizabeth McClung is a Canadian, but she refuses to fall into the national characteristic of settling for third place. She survived some very dark childhood chapters, wrote an award-winning novel, excelled as an amateur epeeist, fell prey to a bizarre and inexplicable disabling condition, took up boxing (yes, in that order), went to Japan, and now endeavours to send postcards to everyone who needs them. There's a tiny Flowers for Algernon feel to some entries, as you get to read first hand accounts from an off-the-charts intelligence on what it's like to lose temporal lobe function.

She's also aiming to keep breathing almost twenty-four hours a day. Most people would include that last one in their goals, if prompted, but few people have to work as hard at it as Elizabeth does. Most people would be dead if they had to. She goes at everything about 150% harder than I do, such that when she was told to get an electric wheelchair because she didn't have the physical capacity for a manual one, she got a manual one and started competing in 10 km races. If I pushed as hard as she does I'd be flying the Space Shuttle by now. All the life lessons in the blog can be overwhelming, but it's readable and hilarious (remember the bit about award-winning novelist) and I've also discovered that people who love goth and animé aren't as different from me as I thought, and I can handle that one. Who even knew there was Goth Hello Kitty?

I know if you've been on the net as long as I have you've heard this one before, but Elizabeth is not a little boy named Craig trying to get into the Guinness Book of World Records. She is a real person, feeling a little cut off from the world because she doesn't get outside much anymore. So here's my Christmas request: Read enough of her blog to get a little feel for her as a person. It doesn't really matter if you read the early entries full of epee fighting and praise for her novel, the newest entries about the Olympic Torch relay and badminton, or something in between: she's the same person throughout. Some of the entries are about dying in horrible pain, but not so many as you might expect from someone who is doing exactly that. If you like her, send her a postcard to say hi, or some stickers, cards or stamps (U.S. or Canadian) that she can use for her project. When she approved my posting her mailing address she insisted that I let you know that she would love to send a postcard to anyone who is lonely or who would just like to have a postcard.

Elizabeth McClung
PO Box 2560
Port Angeles, WA 98362
USA
(Yes it's a US postbox: she lives near the border).

If you're going to forward this in any way, please include a link to one of her blogs so that people can check to make sure postcards are still wanted and she and her partner are not buried in millions of postcards, the way the former home of Craig Shergold is.

I'm going to make this post the beginning of my end-of-year blogging break. I'll put up one more post in the next couple of weeks reviewing the year, and then I'll see you again on New Year's Day.

Inconvenience Stores

You know how people say "this must be for a reason" when they find themselves in the midst of miserable things? I've decided that the reason for some of the tribulations I have endured is to ensure that I never again think things are bad. I started for a moment to call this post "Middle of Nowhere" but then I gave my head a shake and reminded myself that this town has several businesses which are not snowmobile dealerships, is located on a paved highway that is usable twelve months of the year, and in either direction one can reach an international airport. That is not the middle of nowhere. It might however be the near edge of nowhere.

It's nine p.m. and I'm not especially interested in the healthy snacks I have in the room. I want some chocolate or candy. There's a vending machine upstairs in the hotel, but the selection isn't great, so I asked Google maps for "seven eleven near" my address. It produced two, equidistant and each over 50 km away. Oh, right. Let's not be so picky, Aviatrix. I tried "convenience store near." Nothing nearer. How about "stores near." See? Lots of stores.

The nearest one is a Cat Rental Store. I entertain the image of sharing my hotel room with a nice furry rental kitty just long enough to click on the link. They rent bulldozers and winter illumination. There's also a Trailer Store, a 24-hour lock shop, and a Flooring Gallery. Booming metropolis. In Weasel there were no trained trades people, so the competence displayed in the execution of anyone's floor, driveway or appliance installation was a reflection of the competence of the householder and householder's circle of friends.

Also there's a gas station across the street, but after all that, I decide I don't need a chocolate bar. Life is good, down south here in the Cold Lake area.

Message from the Past

I've often thought about advice that I would give to my past self, but not long ago Irregular Webcomic asked "What would your younger self say if they could see you now?" That inspired me to think about it.

I think the strongest thing she would say was "I thought you were going to accomplish more." And she might not have the tact yet to avoid saying straight out, "I was better than this in school. What happened to make you so ordinary? How come you've forgotten so much?" She'd surmise "So I guess science wasn't all it's cracked up to be?"

She wouldn't mention the physical shape I'm in, because she had plans to get stronger, and it hadn't occurred to her back then that she wouldn't succeed or that it it would be any effort to maintain fitness. I think she'd compliment me on my hair. It looked terrible back then, and if she hung out for a while I'd probably make her ask "How do you do that?" a few times.

She's disapprove of lots of things, in her naïve idealistic way. She would want to put me back on track. I can remember her helping mentally ill people with resumés and job searches, just because they needed a hand and she was confident in her knowledge. "Let me help you make a plan," she'd say. And she'd know me too well to be fooled by my excuses.

Maybe I'd give her plan a try for a while. But I'm tired of trying to succeed.

Blue Feather

Richard Bach, the author of Johnathan Livingston Seagull, also wrote a book called Illusions. In it, the character who is seeking answers to some of life's questions is travelling with a professional barnstormer. The barnstormer is a kind of guru who tries to help him answer his questions. He tells the seeker that he can have anything he wants from the universe, he just has to ask for it. The seeker doesn't believe this, so the messiah asks him to test it with something simple.

"Okay," says the seeker, "a blue feather." He looks around and the messiah tells him he'll find it soon. The next day, or maybe a few days later, they're in another town eating breakfast and the seeker is thunderstruck to see a picture of a blue feather on the side of the milk carton. It's from the "Blue Feather Dairy."

He's astonished and points it out to the messiah who just says "I thought you wanted an actual feather."

I think of this story every time I find a blue feather. I found one today on the grass next to the apron, right where I was about to lower the stairs. The hardest part may not be getting what you want, but figuring out what it is that you really want.

Freedom

In which Aviatrix tries to get to the point that eluded her last time.

My last blog entry wandered off on a tangent, but I hope not before making the point that equally intelligent people can come to completely different conclusions from the same data just because they believe the world to be constructed of different kinds of cheese. What is self-evident to me may be a crazy idea to you, so if I want to convince you to take an action, I must create a logical path to that action that begins with something that is self evident to you.

A while ago I had a long e-mail exchange with someone whom I knew to be intelligent, logical and compassionate. He was, and still is, very concerned about the spread of the Muslem religion in the world. He believes that it will lead to a global decrease in human rights. He exhorted me to act. "But what do you want me to do?" I asked. And at every iteration he responded by saying that hope was not enough. I finally said, "Are you asking me to take up arms against every Muslim I see? Write letters to my congressman? Sneer at women in headscarves?" I of course didn't think he wanted me to shoot anyone, as he is respectful to his Muslim neighbours and customers. His problem is with the proponents of fundamentalist law. I was hoping by my question to get him to say what action he was actually asking for. He is very concerned about people being complacent to the threat, and spent a lot of energy urging action.

We remained cordial, but he never answered the question in a way that made any sense to me. After a few revolutions of the argument we both accepted that it was something that just wasn't going to cross between our minds. He said "I've made it clear enough.....We just don't speak the same language." And we dropped it.

It came to mind recently as an example of a baffling impasse and I mentioned it in an e-mail to someone who was helping me understand why Texans were getting angry at me for being scared of them, and he had an explanation for this too. It still doesn't entirely make sense to me. It may not be the correct explanation, but it is an explanation, and even brings this whole thing back to an aviation example. He wrote:

Ah! Ok, he wants people who believe in the rights and freedoms that are enshrined in the Constitution, to defend those rights. He won't tell us how to do that (though he may give advice if pressed), because one of the things he believes we need to defend against is one group of people telling others what they should do. He may not have understood your question, but if he had I would predict it wouldn't help. He would probably say something like "Do what ever you can".

It's really quite extraordinary that we have this invention caled language, that, most of the time allows me to make noises, or transmit squiggles, and you to hear the noises or look at the squiggles and a reasonable facsimile of my thought appears in your head. I should really be amazed by how often it works, rather than being confused by the times it doesn't. Sometimes the gulf can be bridged by stating the obvious, but it's a skill to articulate the obvious. The people who have, say Newton giving his La ws of Motion or Descartes equating thinking with being, are lauded as philosphers. They say things that we kind of already knew, but never knew we knew. What 17th century farmer hadn't noticed that stuff stays where it is unless you push it, the same push has a greater effect on smaller stuff, and that if you push something, it pushes back at you? But to recognize those as axioms of motion -- that took Newton.

Thomas Jefferson is also held to be a great man, and he put into words some things that he and free thinking people of his time were coming to believe.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

If you don't consider these things to be self-evident truths, then you are going to be baffled by some of the arguments made by people who do, unless those people are clever enough to build their case from another direction.

And finally, I promised to bring this back to aviation, my correspondent gave this example.

You have run up against one of the principle differences between Canadians and Americans. Canadians believe in building consensus and the few making small sacrifices for the good of the many. Americans believe in personal freedom and personal sacrifice to defend it. The rules around VFR flights are a good example of this. In Canada we can't fly more than 25nm without telling someone else where we're going. In the US as long as we avoid controlled or restricted airspace we don't have to tell anyone. Personal freedom trumps making it easier for SAR to find us.

Axioms of Thought

In Which Aviatrix falls so far into her own metaphors so as to no longer have room for the story she was trying to tell.

Sometimes I have discussions with people who don't seem to make sense. A lot of people have such discussions, which I think is why some people think liberals are stupid, some people think conservatives are ignorant, and why religion gets so much flak. It's far easier to assume that the person on the other side of the argument just doesn't get it, than to figure out the misunderstanding. I try to start with the assumption that the person is neither insane nor stupid, and go from there.

I had a months-long on-and-off internet argument with someone once. I thought it was a point of philosophy that I was begging him to compromise on for the sake of a project and he just kept throwing it back in my face, seemingly refusing to even acknowledge that there was a risk. That was finally resolved when we discovered two words crucial to the argument were synonyms to him, but had a vital contrast for me. Being that the argument was in text, his written English was near flawless, and the position he seemed to be taking was not uncommon, it took that long to track down the discrepancy. And this was an easy one, because it didn't really represent a difference in our underlying axioms.

By axioms I mean things that people believe or know in order to know or deduce anything else. Those of you with a mathematics background know that you can't have a system of knowledge without having some arbitrary ground rules first. Our mathematical system is based on axioms like things that are equal to the same thing are equal to one another. I mean duh!

The problem is, people often don't even know they have them. They build what may be a perfectly logical and coherent argument up from a base that the other person isn't standing on. It's like trying to get someone from an island over to your mainland by building a magnificent bridge between the mainland and completely different island. Here is where people start to think one another are insane morons. The islander says he can't drive over what the mainlander knows is an excellent bridge, so the mainlander decides it's all due to religious prejudice and gives up on islanders all together.

The nature of an axiom is that it is something so self-evident that it doesn't even need to be stated. So people assume that everyone accepts that axiom, or even when they know that some don't, they don't see that their logical arguments depend on it.

A common axiom of thought is that the world is God's divine creation and that He is omniscient and omnipotent. People for whom this is axiomatic can't prove it. They feel it, they know it, the enormity of creation demonstrates it. It is true because it is the original Truth. I need a short name for people who hold this to be a self-evident truth, and "creationist" won't do because believing in divine creation doesn't require belief that it happened in six days, six thousand years ago. I'll call them God-ists, because it's short. For the purpose of this discussion it carries no other meaning than "people for whom divine creation is a self-evident axiom," and I've made it up solely to abbreviate the phrase.

God-ists nowadays universally know that not everyone shares that belief, but it doesn't stop them from thinking arguments based on it should sway non-believers.

Don't think I'm being unfair to God-ists here. Their frequent adversaries, those whose axiom is that the universe is a completely logical place, entirely governed by forces that can be understood in a physical sense, often do not realize that that is an unprovable belief, an axiom that all their knowledge rests on. It is every bit as unprovable as the existence of an invisible pink unicorn. But many Sci-ists can't imagine someone being able to get through their daily life without seeing the self-evidence of this truth. They dismiss God-ists as deluded without it.

That's a simplistic presentation with lots of room to argue about. I only intended it as a familiar example. Many God-ists embrace the Sci-ist's axiom as a kind of Second Law of Godotics: "God set up the universe as a logical place, governed by physical forces, except for when He intervenes." That combination seems to be to be the closest fit to what we've observed, except that a Sci-ist states the identical observation as "The universe is a logical place, governed by physical forces, even when something happens that we don't yet know the physical explanation for." Just because once upon a time every sunset and sunrise was understandable only as an act of the gods and now we can understand the workings of cells and atoms doesn't mean that God didn't set it up that way, and just because we are unwinding more and more of the wrappings of our physical world doesn't mean that there isn't still something at the core that is not susceptible to physical laws.

Whew, this got way more theological than I intended. I wonder if that's the feeling of the theoretical physicists who end up writing books or participating in projects like What The Bleep Do We Know? when all they are doing is trying to understand chaos theory and the fundamental nature of energy and matter in a rigid scientific way. I think of science and religion both working on the same immense jigsaw puzzle, with science rigidly sorting out all the edge pieces and carefully fitting pieces one into the other, trying to build up in a consistent manner from the border to the inside, while religion plucks pieces out of the box and tries to fit them together without knowing or caring which way up they go or how they relate to the border. A lot of the tabs are very similar in shape and size, so quite often both parties make errors in fitting pieces together. Each trumpets the other's errors as evidence that the other is all wrong, and even spends some time trying to take apart the other's assembled pieces. The advance of science has now built the puzzle to the point that religion has had to realize that many of their pieces are from a different puzzle altogether, but I suspect we're just reaching the point where some of the pieces that religion has assembled are going to match up with what science has assembled. No one, of course, has access to the picture on the box. It's probably kittens with string.

Whee, that was so much fun I never got to the story. Next time. Oh and Canadians, don't think about it too long: your 2008 taxes have to be filed by midnight tonight.

This Bike Is A Pipe Bomb

Boing Boing lists a news story in which a band sticker on a bicycle shut down an airport. The name of the band is "This Bike Is a Pipe Bomb," and apparently it isn't the first time its appearance on an innocently parked bicycle has caused a bomb scare.

Everyone can appreciate that security at an airport has to be taken seriously, but it seems a little odd to base the alert level on the label. If a bicycle being a pipe bomb is a credible threat, restrict bicycle parking to a secure bunker. A bicycle sticker reading, "This bike is not a pipe bomb," wouldn't calm anyone down any. If I knew that there was one bike on the whole rack that was a pipe bomb, I'd expect it to be the one with the only stickers being the manufacturer's name and local registration. The words "pipe bomb" precipitate the security response. Not the credibility of the threat. It has been illegal for as long as I remember to make jokes or false statements about carrying dangerous items while at airport security, but this shouldn't be extended into making any statements about security or dangerous items while at airport security.

A car bombs makes a bigger bang than a bike bomb. I'd love to see a bumper sticker for cars reading "This could be a car bomb," but you know that instead of being taken as either a silly joke or a reminder to maintain constant vigilance, it would get you in trouble. They can be perfectly truthful statements, but if your t-shirt says "Some terrorists look like me" and there's a sticker on your computer saying "No explosive residue," you should probably be wearing underwear that says, "I knew I'd get strip searched today."

I'd buy that underwear, though.

And I'd need some new underwear were I forced to use this bicycle lane.

And finally, despite the really corny gaggle of geese, this animation of the US Airways landing in the Hudson River is very well done.

It Started With Telemarketers

Canada recently instituted a nationwide do-not-call list for telemarketers. Apparently the US Congress recommended such a thing fifteen years ago, but the final decision was to have individual telemarketers maintain their own do-not-call lists. That is fairly stupid, because there are so many companies that you'd never get on all the lists before one company folded and reemerged as another, quite possibly using its old do-not-call list as its new list of hot prospects.

Canada's new do-not-call list is equally stupid. There's a website you can go to in order to register your number(s) as do-not-call and any Canadian telemarketing company or foreign company making calls on behalf of a Canadian corporation is supposed to check their list against the registered do not call numbers and not call them. They can be fined $1500 for calling me anyway, so it sounds like something with teeth, but it disregards the fact the telemarketing is a scummy industry, and it's implemented in a stupid way.

Instead of being required to submit their call lists to be checked and pruned against a master list, the companies are required to buy the master list. That's right, telemarketing companies can buy a list of every Canadian who has asked not to be called by telemarketers. And the way the system works, the larger the company, the more they have to pay for the list. So of course what has happened is that little tiny companies open for the sole purpose of buying the list for cheap, and then selling it offshore where they can call me with impunity.

I got a call today, one of those machines calling. It told me that a friend had entered my name at the Bay or Zellers and that I had won a trip to Costa Rica. Now the Bay and Zellers are Canadian companies, and my friends are smart enough not to enter me in dubious contests, so I knew this was not above board. I pressed 1 to talk to a customer service representative. He had an impenetrable accent, so I couldn't understand his name, nor the name of the company calling when I asked for it. I think he may have made it deliberately unintelligible because when I asked him to spell it, he said for more information he would have to transfer me. Transferring is good, because the higher up the chain of command you get, the more of a nuisance you are able to be. In order to transfer me he wanted to know my name. I told him I wasn't giving him my name because he called me and therefore the onus was on him. He said he had to have my name to transfer me, so I told him sarcastically it was Jane Smith. He either didn't or chose not to recognize that as a default generic name and accepted it, but then wanted to know if I had more than $5000 in credit card debt. I told him I didn't give out that kind of information, just to transfer me please. He tried a few more times to get me to tell him. I told him the answer was Mu. He insisted on a yes or a no, and when I made it clear I wasn't giving it out, he hung up on me.

Scumbucket telemarketing company. This sort of thing is bad for my blood pressure or something, I'm sure. The *69 call told me that the call was from 616-980-2643 which is in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Their service provider is named Lucre but the company name is ex-directory. Michigan has do-not-call laws protecting Michigan consumers, but what can I do about it? Global telecommunications is such that every single country in the world would have to be signatory to a global death-to-telemarketers pact before do-not-call registries are of any use whatsoever. I can't screen my calls by number, because I get calls from all over and who knows when some pilot friend is calling from a hotel or an FBO in Grand Rapids telling me they are coming north and can I meet for lunch? And screening by always letting the machine pick up also causes you to miss important calls from people who want to talk to you now or not at all. I could solve this with technology, but it's not just about telemarketing.

While I was still fuming about this, a story came on the radio about a chemical plant in Canada that had been sold to someone in Edmonton who just walked away from the responsibility of the plant when the economy took a nosedive. No payroll no forwarding address no nothing. Because I live in a modern, responsible country, the government stepped in with an emergency order asking the workers to stay at work and make sure that the plant didn't just explode, or pump hazardous chemicals into the environment or become the incubation ground for a new Batman villain, or whatever happens to untended chemical plants. I'm not sure anyone knows. The government then tried to track down the owner of the company and apparently the trail ends in Slovenia.

That's the way the world is these days. I'm horrified to think of what is happening in countries with lesser ability to step in and deal with this kind of situation. A Canadian company could just walk away from responsibility in Zaïre and who is going to be able to do anything or even know? Someone knows, and with today's global communication I'm sure I could find dozens of such cases documented by concerned individuals, but how is anyone to distinguish real should-be-crimes from made-up stuff posted on the loony websites of whacko sky-is-falling nutjobs? And even if the whole world knows, who can prosecute or hold to account a numbered Uzbekistani company with investors listing addresses in Slovenia, Paraguay and Delaware? For countries that have environmental regulations, it would be possible to require, as part of the initial environmental permitting process for new facilities, the posting of a bond sufficient to safely close down production and clean up the area in the event of abandonment or catastrophe, but that would be a large amount, and the savvy investor would just build the facility in a jurisdiction with a more short-sighted desperation for jobs.

Anything that happens in the world affects the whole world these days. The working conditions and pay at your job may be cantilevered by unions and government regulations, but ultimately in the global economy it is dependent on what the most desperate person will accept. And that person can be anywhere in the world. We can't just fix our own countries. We have to fix the whole world to get this to work. How do you fix the whole world? Historically, the spread of law has followed conquering armies. I don't think conquering the world for freedom from telemarketers is the way to go here. More optimistically, manufacturing and environmental standards also spread by economic pressure. The kids who grew up in the Cold War had it good. They knew they'd be wiped out by the Bomb. Me, I can't figure out which worldwide disaster to be concerned about.

The telemarketing part had a happy ending. I called the Bay's customer service and they efficiently transferred me to a customer service rep who knew about the usurpation of the company's name and assured me that their loss prevention department was working with the relevant authorities to stop the telemarketers, who apparently were also fraudsters. I assume they are going to nuke them from orbit, so if you live in Grand Rapids, you should probably go out of town for the weekend. And if you comment on this blog entry, do take into account that the official Posterperson for Readers of Aviatrix's Blog is employed in the telemarketing business, so any comments demonizing all telemarketers will not be taken well.

Ville de Montréal

There's no problem getting my required rest, as I have the next day off. I've spent enough time in Montréal in the past that I'm not interested today in seeing the museums and cathedrals, nor overeating on smoked meat and poutine. It's nice to be back in a big Canadian city, with every amenity I could possibly want, and a few old friends live here too.

One of my co-workers complains about the signs being in French, making it hard to get around. Funny, it's one of the things I like about the place. I don't think it's much harder to get around than any other city. Right turns on red are forbidden by default in the city. It has your typical maze of crooked downtown one-way streets, turn restrictions and bridges forking into highway ramps, but I don't recall any signs that didn't conform to international standards. You don't have to read more than a highway number and an arrow to take the proper exit from an overpass. I guess there are people who don't know their ouest from their est, but that's about the only source of confusion I see. My colleague, and others I've spoken with, feel that the French are being deliberately difficult, but I would say that Québec is more accommodating to English speakers than the rest of Canada is to French speakers.

It's true that language laws restrict the display of English signage, resulting in what to me is an amusing forest of signs advertising goods and services with familiar logos but twisted names and slogans. Canadian corporations go to some trouble concocting names that work equally well in both official languages, like the former Canadi>n Airlines, using a chevron to cover the difference between the French and English spelling.

I'm proud of my country's history, and that includes both solitudes. Quebec is a nation within a nation. It is different, and in a more significant way than Newfoundland is different from Alberta. I don't believe that the culture and language of a people should be subjugated just because their ancestors lost a battle two hundred odd years ago. I'm pretty sure it was exigency not planning that left society and legal system of Lower Canada unchanged after the English victory, but I like the resulting plurality of my country. I see what happens in countries where nationalists of once-independent states are suppressed. Heck, it happened here in Canada the 70s, before the laws. Now the quebecois are more confident in the security of their culture, so there is no need to kidnap cabinet ministers. Sure, some tourists are confused. Other tourists enjoy an exotic experience without leaving their own continent. And you have to get pretty far from the cities before a plaintive, "Does anyone speak English, please?" wouldn't be met with help. Get far enough north and people don't speak much English, but keep going north and they don't speak much French either. How's your Cree? Damn, I love my country and all its crazy languages and cultures.

Montréal has excellent public transit. I take a bus to the metro and buy a six-pack of metro tickets in anticipation of a few more snow days.`(A "snow day" is what you call it when school is cancelled because there is too much snow for the snowploughs to get through).