The Canadian military is going to Haiti to assist in relief efforts. This deployment is part of what is being described as a whole-of-government response by Canada that also involves Foreign Affairs and International Trade Canada (DFAIT) as well as the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).
The military response, designated Operation HESTIA, includes the destroyer HMCS Athabaskan and frigate HMCS Halifax, both expected to arrive in Haiti today, after sailing from Halifax Harbour last Thursday. Both ships are packed with relief supplies, including the result of a clothing and toy drive among the crews (scroll down when the link opens). The ships will likely anchor off the south coast, since there is a growing mass of maritime traffic in the harbour of the capital, Port Au Prince.
The Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) has been on the ground since last week. DART equipment is maintained on standby at CFB Trenton in order to ensure proximity to the global reach provided by 8 Wing's Hercules and Globemaster transports. DART's primary mission is to provide medical care and to ensure a safe supply of drinking water.
The 200 members of the DART unit will be supplemented by 500 sailors and specialists from Athabaskan and Halifax. There are an additional 1,000 Canadian Forces soldiers who will be sent shortly. Their combined mission will be to provide aid, and to assist the civil authorities in keeping order.
Current casualty estimates place the number dead in Haiti as high as 200,000 people, with an additional 300,000 made homeless. The death and devastation has been staggering, placing this disaster on the same scale as a war.
Monday, January 18, 2010
Saturday, January 16, 2010
The Devil and the Jackal
Trust Fred Clark at Slacktivist to properly dissect and shed light on the true evil of Pat Robertson's utterances. Mr. Clark's post contains some important thoughts which bear repeating:
Video: On the following two videos, Rachel Maddow does an introduction to this topic, and in the second, Raymond Joseph, the Haitian Ambassador to the United States makes some remarks that provide a pointed reminder that one should never piss off someone who understands history.
If Robertson is the devil of the piece, then the jackal is surely Rush Limbaugh, the drug-addled radio personality who has come to represent the not-so-pent-up hatred of America's bigots. In the following video, Keith Olbermann comments on statements made by both Robertson and Limbaugh:
A day later, Olbermann responds again to a fresh outrage from Limbaugh, this one also drawing a sharp reprimand from Roger Ebert which begins "You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation." The Olbermann video follows:
As noted, Haiti's need is great. Donations can be made through the Canadian Red Cross, International Red Cross, MedecinssSans Frontieres, or other charity of your choice4
I'm accustomed to Pat Robertson being an unholy fool, but his remarks following the Haitian earthquake were astonishing even for him. By attributing Haiti's suffering to a supposed "pact with the devil," he manages to break two commandments simultaneously -- both bearing false witness against his neighbor and taking the name of God in vain.
That sort of double word score is typical Robertson fare, until one appreciates how utterly and explicitly he takes sides here. By labeling the revolutionary enslaved people who founded the Haitian democracy as literally demonic, Robertson sides with slave owners and against democracy, liberty and human rights. He declares that he and his god are on the side of oppression and that liberation is the Devil's work.
Wow. That this is contrary to the Bible Robertson claims to read is obvious to every tourist who has ever filed past the Liberty Bell here in Philly ("Proclaim liberty throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof").
But it's worse than that. He's not just contradicting some bit of scriptural arcana here, he's cutting to the core of Christianity and setting himself in direct opposition to it.
Video: On the following two videos, Rachel Maddow does an introduction to this topic, and in the second, Raymond Joseph, the Haitian Ambassador to the United States makes some remarks that provide a pointed reminder that one should never piss off someone who understands history.
If Robertson is the devil of the piece, then the jackal is surely Rush Limbaugh, the drug-addled radio personality who has come to represent the not-so-pent-up hatred of America's bigots. In the following video, Keith Olbermann comments on statements made by both Robertson and Limbaugh:
A day later, Olbermann responds again to a fresh outrage from Limbaugh, this one also drawing a sharp reprimand from Roger Ebert which begins "You should be horse-whipped for the insult you have paid to the highest office of our nation." The Olbermann video follows:
As noted, Haiti's need is great. Donations can be made through the Canadian Red Cross, International Red Cross, MedecinssSans Frontieres, or other charity of your choice4
Friday, January 15, 2010
Haiti, Hell, and Devils
A day before the January 13 Earth flyby of 2010 AL30, some tectonic rebalancing was happening beneath the Caribbean island of Hispaniola. The nation of Haiti occupies the western part of this island, and the quake occurred 25 km from the capital city, Port Au Prince at a depth of 13 kilometers. The consequence of that geological twitch was a Richter 7 earthquake, and the human devastation has been unimaginable -- current estimates place the death toll as high as 100,000 people. If that is indeed the case, that is nearly three times the total number of Canadians killed in World War Two. Or 40 times the number of people killed in New York City on 9/11.
Relief efforts began mobilizing as soon as the news got out. Both the Canadian Red Cross and the International Red Cross have been accepting donations, and three days later, there are groups on the ground delivering aid. Much more is needed.
Pat Robertson, an American televangelist, on the religious television program The 700 Club stated that Haiti and Haitians were "cursed by one thing after another" since they "swore a pact to the devil", a reference to the slave revolt which began in 1791. Robertson, as one of America's privileged elites, potentially descended from slaveholders, would of course have little sympathy for a populist uprising, particularly one where, in the words of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Any rejection of the god of Pat Robertson seems like a good idea to me, so it must have been a no-brainer for men and women desperate to throw off the shackles of real oppression and slavery for which someone like Robertson would have no understanding, and clearly even less sympathy.
Robertson's statement was described as "stupid" by the American government, and viewed with contempt and amusement in France.
In the blogosphere, P. Z. Meyers (who is much admired in these parts) said it best in his own post on the subject of Robertson's "pact with the devil" remarks: "If it makes you angry, turn your outrage into something constructive and use it to motivate you to donate to Haitian relief first. Deal with the evil scumbag Robertson later."
There is no need to believe in a devil, but there is ample reason to believe in Pat Robertson, and to take a stand against all that he represents. Haiti will be hell for months and years to come, but donations to the relief effort will be our way to help the Haitian people despite Robertson and those devils like him who seek to exploit this little bit of hell on Earth.
To Haitian friends and colleagues, we hope that your families and loved ones are safe. We wish we could do more.
Relief efforts began mobilizing as soon as the news got out. Both the Canadian Red Cross and the International Red Cross have been accepting donations, and three days later, there are groups on the ground delivering aid. Much more is needed.
Pat Robertson, an American televangelist, on the religious television program The 700 Club stated that Haiti and Haitians were "cursed by one thing after another" since they "swore a pact to the devil", a reference to the slave revolt which began in 1791. Robertson, as one of America's privileged elites, potentially descended from slaveholders, would of course have little sympathy for a populist uprising, particularly one where, in the words of former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide
To free themselves from the bonds of slavery,
our forefathers turned to the Ancestors in the
ceremony of Bois Caïman, in August 1791. In
other words, to become free, the slaves prayed
not to the God of his master but to the God
of Ancestors.
Any rejection of the god of Pat Robertson seems like a good idea to me, so it must have been a no-brainer for men and women desperate to throw off the shackles of real oppression and slavery for which someone like Robertson would have no understanding, and clearly even less sympathy.
Robertson's statement was described as "stupid" by the American government, and viewed with contempt and amusement in France.
In the blogosphere, P. Z. Meyers (who is much admired in these parts) said it best in his own post on the subject of Robertson's "pact with the devil" remarks: "If it makes you angry, turn your outrage into something constructive and use it to motivate you to donate to Haitian relief first. Deal with the evil scumbag Robertson later."
There is no need to believe in a devil, but there is ample reason to believe in Pat Robertson, and to take a stand against all that he represents. Haiti will be hell for months and years to come, but donations to the relief effort will be our way to help the Haitian people despite Robertson and those devils like him who seek to exploit this little bit of hell on Earth.
To Haitian friends and colleagues, we hope that your families and loved ones are safe. We wish we could do more.
Thursday, January 14, 2010
Passing in the Night
An object designated 2010 AL30 was discovered on January 10, earlier this week, headed in our direction at high speed. It zipped by yesterday on January 13 at a distance of about 130,000 kilometers -- roughly a third of the distance from the Earth to the Moon. The object was discovered by the MIT-affiliated, NASA-funded LINEAR project. LINEAR is an acronym for the LIncoln Near Earth Asteroid Research program, run by MIT's Lincoln Laboratory.
You can see on the fine print on the image that it was constructed from "stacking" a series of ten images to obtain this result.
When I wrote the first paragraph above, I had some indecision about writing 126,000 versus 130,000 kilometers, because this was after all just a rough estimate. Note that my indecision represented a distance spanning a goodly fraction of the width of North America, for a chunk of space debris about the size of a moderate living room. This thing was tiny -- but still moving so fast that it would potentially have been unpleasant if it had hit the Earth.
I have no idea of the composition of 2010 AL30, but it is not much smaller than the object which is thought to have precipitated the Tunguska Event. The Tunguska precursor object, believed to be "a few tens of meters" in size, did not actually make it all the way down to the ground, but disintegrated and in so doing caused an impact explosion in the atmosphere that was a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It flattened trees over 2,150 square kilometers, and would certainly have devastated a city.
Research programs such as LINEAR are part of a loose international association of asteroid monitors called Spaceguard. The American objectives were to catalogue 90% all Near Earth Objects (NEOs) larger than 1 km in diameter by 2008, with a proposed follow-on program whose objective would be to detect 90% of all near-earth asteroids 140 meters and larger by 2028.
You can see on the fine print on the image that it was constructed from "stacking" a series of ten images to obtain this result.
When I wrote the first paragraph above, I had some indecision about writing 126,000 versus 130,000 kilometers, because this was after all just a rough estimate. Note that my indecision represented a distance spanning a goodly fraction of the width of North America, for a chunk of space debris about the size of a moderate living room. This thing was tiny -- but still moving so fast that it would potentially have been unpleasant if it had hit the Earth.
I have no idea of the composition of 2010 AL30, but it is not much smaller than the object which is thought to have precipitated the Tunguska Event. The Tunguska precursor object, believed to be "a few tens of meters" in size, did not actually make it all the way down to the ground, but disintegrated and in so doing caused an impact explosion in the atmosphere that was a thousand times more powerful than the nuclear weapons used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It flattened trees over 2,150 square kilometers, and would certainly have devastated a city.
Research programs such as LINEAR are part of a loose international association of asteroid monitors called Spaceguard. The American objectives were to catalogue 90% all Near Earth Objects (NEOs) larger than 1 km in diameter by 2008, with a proposed follow-on program whose objective would be to detect 90% of all near-earth asteroids 140 meters and larger by 2028.
NOTE - The above photo was lifted from the blog of the observer team of the Remanzacco Observatory in Italy.
Thursday, January 07, 2010
National Anthem Blues
Over the Christmas break, at one of the events I attended, someone began a conversation with me by decrying how a particular radio spot wished the listener "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas". This, I was given to understand, was unacceptable pandering to "them" ("them" being unspecified), and had the effect of diluting the importance of Christmas, which was, after all, a Christian holiday.
Having attended Christian churches as a child and again as an adult after meeting my wife, I understand the importance of Christmas to Christians. However, many other cultures celebrate the solstice which occurs before Christmas. It is therefore not clear to me how acknowledging the importance of the season to all the other cultures who mark the solstice detracts from the Christian appreciation of Christmas.
I have no sympathy or agreement with the particular mindset which holds that there should not be any contrary viewpoint to the accepted religious or political position -- that any dissent is a distraction for the faithful. People who believe this believe that in order to marshal the faithful, it is important to provide ongoing messages that reinforce the basic belief structure.
This brings me to the title of this post. Earlier today, I was disappointed to receive a chain e-mail, subject CANADA 2010, which contained a strong (although somewhat incoherent) anti-immigrant stance, whose message was that as Canadians, we should get behind radio commentator Bruce Allen's desire not to have the Canadian national anthem sung in Hindi at the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. This particular chain e-mail is a thoroughly discredited piece of tripe, an egregious piece of racist trash.
There are also a couple of things wrong with it, beyond its hate-mongering anti-immigration stance:
First, there really is a radio commentator named Bruce Allen, and he really did broadcast an immigrant-bashing editorial on radio station CKNW that landed him in a certain amount of hot water. However, Allen did not mention anything regarding the national anthem sung in Hindi -- this was something creative added afterward, clearly by other interests with their own axes to grind. And in fact, this is an evolved version of something that circulated prior to 2007, attacking the idea of the American national anthem being sung in Spanish for a prior Olympics.
Second, my alert fellow Canadians are quite capable of going through the following simple mental exercise to understand that this hateful screed has little basis in reality. It goes like this:
Assume you are a Hindi speaking person in Canada who cares nothing for Canada. At a public event where you have the option of singing the Canadian national anthem you
(a) do nothing
(b) sing the national anthem of the country you care nothing about in your own language, after having spent time and effort to translate the words and arrange the music
Why would a person who cares nothing for Canada select option (b)? The suggestion that someone would is total anti-immigrant drivel. Before it got to me, the e-mail had been forwarded to 25 different people, and while it surprises and saddens me that something like this has any degree of acceptance, I am enough of a realist to understand that this is a symptom of fear, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness -- in fact, the same feelings that drive someone to forget their Christian ideals, and descend into anger over "Happy Holidays" versus "Merry Christmas". The more insidious problem is that there are those who would exploit these feelings to promote hatred and racism -- sending these e-mails to marshal the faithful and build a commonality of belief.
There is no better example of that than the other chain e-mail which I received a few hours after the first one (from a different source). This e-mail had the subject PRICELESS and purported to be a peace plan advanced by the comedian Robin Williams. It starts like this:
Then it continues with a ten point plan which in effect has the US, UK, Canada, and Australia saying "screw you" to the rest of the world. The plan itself was clearly unworkable, and my original thought was that here was another celebrity shooting off their mouth on a topic on which they have absolutely no expertise. The one thing which made me pause was that this rant wasn't funny. If it really was Robin Williams, I would have expected him to be funny, even discussing politics. And of course, this e-mail too was bogus.
The originators of this e-mail would have gotten a two for one deal. On the one hand, they get to send their jingoistic message out, and on the other hand they get to attribute it to Robin Williams -- a comedian who would not hesitate to mock this kind of stupidity.
I have written about this kind of message before. The process whereby these messages get out very much resembles a viral marketing campaign. Neither of the individuals who sent me these e-mails are drooling redneck idiots, nor are they unreasonable people. The message of hate, and the untruths, are buried underneath the ostensibly reasonable initial premise. Their target is the person whose circumstances lead him to be angry over "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas", completely forgetting the religious and cultural values of acceptance of diversity.
I have no big answers, but for me, this is how we can fight back against those who lie to us and who try to drag down our spirit. If my world is the sum of the small decencies that my family and friends do for each other, then I can extend my world through small decencies for my neighbour, for strangers. If nothing else, each such act is a thumbing of the nose against those who would spread hatred and lies and so drive us apart.
Having attended Christian churches as a child and again as an adult after meeting my wife, I understand the importance of Christmas to Christians. However, many other cultures celebrate the solstice which occurs before Christmas. It is therefore not clear to me how acknowledging the importance of the season to all the other cultures who mark the solstice detracts from the Christian appreciation of Christmas.
I have no sympathy or agreement with the particular mindset which holds that there should not be any contrary viewpoint to the accepted religious or political position -- that any dissent is a distraction for the faithful. People who believe this believe that in order to marshal the faithful, it is important to provide ongoing messages that reinforce the basic belief structure.
This brings me to the title of this post. Earlier today, I was disappointed to receive a chain e-mail, subject CANADA 2010, which contained a strong (although somewhat incoherent) anti-immigrant stance, whose message was that as Canadians, we should get behind radio commentator Bruce Allen's desire not to have the Canadian national anthem sung in Hindi at the upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Vancouver. This particular chain e-mail is a thoroughly discredited piece of tripe, an egregious piece of racist trash.
There are also a couple of things wrong with it, beyond its hate-mongering anti-immigration stance:
First, there really is a radio commentator named Bruce Allen, and he really did broadcast an immigrant-bashing editorial on radio station CKNW that landed him in a certain amount of hot water. However, Allen did not mention anything regarding the national anthem sung in Hindi -- this was something creative added afterward, clearly by other interests with their own axes to grind. And in fact, this is an evolved version of something that circulated prior to 2007, attacking the idea of the American national anthem being sung in Spanish for a prior Olympics.
Second, my alert fellow Canadians are quite capable of going through the following simple mental exercise to understand that this hateful screed has little basis in reality. It goes like this:
Assume you are a Hindi speaking person in Canada who cares nothing for Canada. At a public event where you have the option of singing the Canadian national anthem you
(a) do nothing
(b) sing the national anthem of the country you care nothing about in your own language, after having spent time and effort to translate the words and arrange the music
Why would a person who cares nothing for Canada select option (b)? The suggestion that someone would is total anti-immigrant drivel. Before it got to me, the e-mail had been forwarded to 25 different people, and while it surprises and saddens me that something like this has any degree of acceptance, I am enough of a realist to understand that this is a symptom of fear, frustration, and a sense of powerlessness -- in fact, the same feelings that drive someone to forget their Christian ideals, and descend into anger over "Happy Holidays" versus "Merry Christmas". The more insidious problem is that there are those who would exploit these feelings to promote hatred and racism -- sending these e-mails to marshal the faithful and build a commonality of belief.
There is no better example of that than the other chain e-mail which I received a few hours after the first one (from a different source). This e-mail had the subject PRICELESS and purported to be a peace plan advanced by the comedian Robin Williams. It starts like this:
You gotta love Robin Williams........Even if he's nuts! Leave it to Robin Williams to come up with the perfect plan. What we need now is for our UN Ambassador to stand up and repeat this message.
Robin Williams' plan...(Hard to argue with this logic!)
Then it continues with a ten point plan which in effect has the US, UK, Canada, and Australia saying "screw you" to the rest of the world. The plan itself was clearly unworkable, and my original thought was that here was another celebrity shooting off their mouth on a topic on which they have absolutely no expertise. The one thing which made me pause was that this rant wasn't funny. If it really was Robin Williams, I would have expected him to be funny, even discussing politics. And of course, this e-mail too was bogus.
The originators of this e-mail would have gotten a two for one deal. On the one hand, they get to send their jingoistic message out, and on the other hand they get to attribute it to Robin Williams -- a comedian who would not hesitate to mock this kind of stupidity.
I have written about this kind of message before. The process whereby these messages get out very much resembles a viral marketing campaign. Neither of the individuals who sent me these e-mails are drooling redneck idiots, nor are they unreasonable people. The message of hate, and the untruths, are buried underneath the ostensibly reasonable initial premise. Their target is the person whose circumstances lead him to be angry over "Happy Holidays" rather than "Merry Christmas", completely forgetting the religious and cultural values of acceptance of diversity.
I have no big answers, but for me, this is how we can fight back against those who lie to us and who try to drag down our spirit. If my world is the sum of the small decencies that my family and friends do for each other, then I can extend my world through small decencies for my neighbour, for strangers. If nothing else, each such act is a thumbing of the nose against those who would spread hatred and lies and so drive us apart.
Friday, January 01, 2010
Happy New Year!
We want to wish our family, friends, and colleagues a Happy New Year for 2010.
So it is finally 2010, and even though we are definitely living in the future, Dr. Heywood Floyd is not the ex-Chair of the National Council for Astronautics in the US, nor is he the Chancellor of the University of Hawaii. But there is no more Soviet Union, and no Chinese space station poised to become a manned Jupiter-bound spacecraft. Sadly, there is no derelict spaceship called Discovery parked at a Lagrange point in the orbit of Io around Jupiter, close to a vast black monolith of non-human origin. Even more sadly, there is no series of giant wheel-shaped space stations around the Earth, nor is there a regular Earth-Moon cargo and passenger service supporting a vast industrial complex at Clavius which doesn't exit, and an excavation site at Tycho which also doesn't exit.
What we do have is the beginning of an interplanetary internet, and a recession that is ending although for regular people rather than large, wealthy corporate entities, the reality of that ending will take longer to realize.
We also have two little rovers called Spirit and Opportunity on Mars. From Geoffrey A. Landis, science fiction author and NASA Rocket Scientist, here are
So it is finally 2010, and even though we are definitely living in the future, Dr. Heywood Floyd is not the ex-Chair of the National Council for Astronautics in the US, nor is he the Chancellor of the University of Hawaii. But there is no more Soviet Union, and no Chinese space station poised to become a manned Jupiter-bound spacecraft. Sadly, there is no derelict spaceship called Discovery parked at a Lagrange point in the orbit of Io around Jupiter, close to a vast black monolith of non-human origin. Even more sadly, there is no series of giant wheel-shaped space stations around the Earth, nor is there a regular Earth-Moon cargo and passenger service supporting a vast industrial complex at Clavius which doesn't exit, and an excavation site at Tycho which also doesn't exit.
What we do have is the beginning of an interplanetary internet, and a recession that is ending although for regular people rather than large, wealthy corporate entities, the reality of that ending will take longer to realize.
We also have two little rovers called Spirit and Opportunity on Mars. From Geoffrey A. Landis, science fiction author and NASA Rocket Scientist, here are
New Year's resolutions for the Opportunity rover:
1. I will get more exercise. In the new year, I will try to take a long walk every day!
2. I'll do some travelling this year. Visit new places, see new things!
3. I will stop making fun of my big sister Spirit for being a stick-in-the-mud. She says it isn't funny any more (even though it is).
4. I promise to call home every day, even if I don't have much to say.
5. And I will be an obedient rover and do everything my people tell me to, because I'm a nice rover, not like my sister who just lies around all day like a slug.
6. And I hope everybody in my family has a real real real good new year, too! (Even Spirit). Best ever!
--Love, Opportunity
Thursday, December 31, 2009
The Titan Saturn System Mission
There was another five year anniversary this last week -- on Christmas Eve, 2004, the Huygens lander separated from Cassini and went on to land on the surface of Titan three weeks later. This recent Cassini image shows the glint of sunlight due to specular reflection from what is almost certainly a liquid on the surface of Titan, in the Kraken Mare region in the northern hemisphere. At the temperature and pressure on Titan's surface, the liquid is a hydrocarbon compound, probably methane.In 2009, ESA and NASA merged their outer planets exploration concepts to move forward with a cooperative exploration venture. One of these, the Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) was to be a next generation successor to Cassini-Huygens. The mission would comprise three spacecraft -- the first being an American orbiter whose main focus would be on Enceladus and Titan, but also able to observe Saturn, the ring system, and the other moons. Along with the orbiter, two European Titan probes would be deployed: a balloon to be placed in the atmosphere, carrying an instrument package (presumably including cameras); and a surface probe whose objective would be to splashdown onto one of the liquid methane seas, probabaly Kraken Mare.
NASA and ESA collectively decided that the Jupiter/Europa mission had higher priority, due to higher technical feasibility. However, TSSM is ranked quite high in scientific importance, and work will move forward. Based on arrival at Saturn in the late 2020's, I'll be in my seventies by the time the first data comes back.
Note -- According to the Secret Star Trek History of the World, sometime after the 1960s, likely best guess in the 2005 to 2015 timeframe, a manned deep space expedition was sent to Saturn. The mission was led by Colonel Shawn Jeffrey Christopher, son of John Christopher, who in the latter half of the 1960s was a USAF Captain assigned to Omaha Air Force base. Unfortunately, our reality appears to have diverged substantially, although one can still see events in the timestream like the TSSM proposal that reflect the other reality. TSSM is a highly ambitious mission, but it is nowhere close to the level of complexity (and expense) required for a small group of astronauts to be sent to Saturn.
A blast from the past
This story presented the best opportunity for ending the year with a bang -- Phil Plait's Bad Astronomy blog reminds us of the story that was lost five years ago in the wreckage of human lives and property damage that occurred when a massive tsunami struck the eastern Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004. The story from a day and a half later, on December 27, 2004, got much less coverage. A massive burst of energy was observed from a magnetar, a type of neutron star. The blast was powerful enough to knock out satellites, and had it been closer, it would have potentially been an extinction level event.The magnetar in question was SGR 1806-20, now believed to be the most powerful magnetic object known -- strength of 10E15 gauss (compared with between 1 to 5 gauss on our own Sun). 10E15 is the number 1 followed by 15 zeroes. To put this in context, a fridge magnet has a field strength of about 100 gauss, while more exotic neodymium-based magnets can be 10 to 20 times more powerful, up to 2,000 gauss. A medical NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) imaging device will generate magnetic fields from 10,000 up to 30,000 gauss. The field surrounding this particular magnetar is a hundred billion times more powerful than the NMR machine.
I thought initially that the SGR designator was a reference to its location in the sky (which would be toward the general direction of Sagittarius or SGR), but in fact SGR is a reference to "Soft Gamma Repeater". From a much greater distance, this event would have appeared as a very high energy transient event, so it is possible that events like this can help in the explanation for Gamma Ray Bursts like GRB 090423.
Something else to lie in bed awake at night thinking about: as noted in the article abstract in the journal Nature, this object released more energy in a fifth of a second than the Sun in 250,000 years. Nature doesn't do lurid speculation, but if it had been 10 instead of 50,000 light years away, its effect for everyone on the half of the world facing it would have been equivalent to being less than 10 km away from a 12 kiloton nuclear blast. Fortunately, there are no magnetars within 10,000 light years of Earth.
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
Giant Buddha
Hugh has some great photos of the giant Buddha statue on Lantau Island, just north of Hong Kong.
These photos bring back some memories -- I was there with my parents in 1998. Jill was along on that trip, although she was pregnant with Corwin at the time, and I suspect many things were a hazy blur of exhaustion for her.
These photos bring back some memories -- I was there with my parents in 1998. Jill was along on that trip, although she was pregnant with Corwin at the time, and I suspect many things were a hazy blur of exhaustion for her.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Happy Winter Solstice - 2009
Today was the Winter Solstice. The sun's path on the ecliptic returned to its ascending node for the Northern Hemisphere at 12:47 ET today. The days get longer from here -- but in the meantime, we have to get through Christmas in a few more days, and also incidentally the depths of winter. Happy Solstice - and may 2010 be a brighter New Year for all of us!
Sunday, December 20, 2009
The Known Universe in Six Minutes
The American Museum of Natural History has updated one of my favourite movies with their presentation of The Known Universe (suggestion - use the Fullscreen button which is the second button brom the right on the Youtube playback bar):
The Known Universe movie is based on visualization of current astronomical and astrophysical data which the American Museum of Natural History maintains through the affiliated Hayden Planetarium as part of its Digital Universe Atlas.
The favourite movie that I referred to earlier is Powers of Ten, made by Charles and Ray Eames in the 1970s. For many years, the film made as a proposal (in the late 1960s) for the final Powers of Ten film was shown in the Ontario Science Centre.
The final Powers of Ten film is a short documentary, lasting under ten minutes. Narrated by Philip Morrison, it has what I think of as a cosmic part and a quantum part. The cosmic part zooms out from a height of one meter above a couple at a picnic. Every ten seconds, the scale increases by a factor of ten. At one hundred million light years, the perspective is reversed back to the starting point one meter above the couple. At that point, the scale zooms inward, until it ends up focused on the nucleus of a carbon atom in the hand of one of the picnickers. Forty orders of magnitude are covered, and in a very compact way, the movie shows the continuity of the physical world from everyday experience to both the cosmic and quantum.
Unlike Powers of Ten, The Known Universe does not stop at 100 million light years, but instead goes all the way out to the horizon of the known universe at 13.7 billion light years -- two and a fraction orders of magnitude farther out.
Those extra orders of magnitude are due to the advances in the 32 years between the two films. The work that had been done by Allan Sandage in calibrating the cosmic distance scale had allowed distances to be derived for galaxies out to 25 and 50 million light years with objects like M100 and M101 in the 70s and 80s, more tentatively for objects at greater distances. For the state of the art in 1977, 100 million light years was a pretty substantial distance.
The revolution in available data and knowledge that came with the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, the other Great Observatories space missions, and COBE, allowed the distance scale and the Hubble Constant to be much more firmly nailed down, and this in turn made possible the truly awesome visualization that the AMNH has done.
The Known Universe movie is based on visualization of current astronomical and astrophysical data which the American Museum of Natural History maintains through the affiliated Hayden Planetarium as part of its Digital Universe Atlas.
The favourite movie that I referred to earlier is Powers of Ten, made by Charles and Ray Eames in the 1970s. For many years, the film made as a proposal (in the late 1960s) for the final Powers of Ten film was shown in the Ontario Science Centre.
The final Powers of Ten film is a short documentary, lasting under ten minutes. Narrated by Philip Morrison, it has what I think of as a cosmic part and a quantum part. The cosmic part zooms out from a height of one meter above a couple at a picnic. Every ten seconds, the scale increases by a factor of ten. At one hundred million light years, the perspective is reversed back to the starting point one meter above the couple. At that point, the scale zooms inward, until it ends up focused on the nucleus of a carbon atom in the hand of one of the picnickers. Forty orders of magnitude are covered, and in a very compact way, the movie shows the continuity of the physical world from everyday experience to both the cosmic and quantum.
Unlike Powers of Ten, The Known Universe does not stop at 100 million light years, but instead goes all the way out to the horizon of the known universe at 13.7 billion light years -- two and a fraction orders of magnitude farther out.
Those extra orders of magnitude are due to the advances in the 32 years between the two films. The work that had been done by Allan Sandage in calibrating the cosmic distance scale had allowed distances to be derived for galaxies out to 25 and 50 million light years with objects like M100 and M101 in the 70s and 80s, more tentatively for objects at greater distances. For the state of the art in 1977, 100 million light years was a pretty substantial distance.
The revolution in available data and knowledge that came with the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, the other Great Observatories space missions, and COBE, allowed the distance scale and the Hubble Constant to be much more firmly nailed down, and this in turn made possible the truly awesome visualization that the AMNH has done.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Blogging Mistakes
Michael Hyatt, who has a great blog on management and leadership, has a list of 10 Blogging Mistakes. I am clearly a poster child for almost every one of them, but especially the first one -- I don't post enough. But then, that ensures that my readers aren't bored with what I have to say...
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
We Support Peter Watts
Our friend Peter Watts, a PhD marine biologist and brilliant science fiction author, lived through my worst nightmare last Tuesday. On his way home from the US, he was stopped by American border guards and thrown in jail for questioning the reason for being stopped in the first place. Journalist and author David Nickle reports on his blog as follows:
In Peter's own words written last Friday:
The Facebook page Against The Arrest and Beating of Peter Watts had 20 members when I found it on Friday night. By the time I clicked the JOIN button, there were 23, one being me. The numbers increased progressively over the weekend, with 1,170 members a few minutes ago -- around 4 days after the page was first created.
Jill and I are going spend the family Christmas fund on a donation to Peter's defense costs, and I encourage others to donate as well. I do this entirely selfishly: if this can happen to an articulate, personable white guy like Peter, then what are the prospects for me?
Robert Ashby raises the related question "since when did 'at least I didn’t get strip-searched and beaten' become our standard of service?". Robert's essay is a companion piece to Madeline Ashby's post on the subject on her blog.
Here is a selection of online articles which have appeared in the last week:
The definitive story appeared on David Nickle's blog with a posting about the initial incident, with a brief correction and a follow-up post providing details of how Bakka-Phoenix Books is helping to get donations to Peter.
Article on BoingBoing with a follow-up post on Making Light which makes reference to the "demonstrable mendaciousness" of the account in the Port Huron Times-Herald. Both the BoingBoing and Making Light discussion threads became politicized, with trolls appearing in force. Charles Stross, who conducted an interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman at the last Worldcon in Montreal, and who shared a book reading with Peter at the same convention, found it necessary to stomp a troll.
The Globe and Mail article raises interesting questions related to privacy.
Article in the Toronto Star. The spokesman for the US border crossing at Sarnia insists that Peter "assaulted" their officers. What would have happened to him had he waived his Miranda rights?
John Scalzi's Whatever blog with a post on Helping Out Peter Watts.
John McDaid appears to have the definitive summary of the news coverage.
Peter's Blog:
Not The Best of Possible Worlds on Dec 11, quoted above.
Squidgate. Update. later on Dec 11.
Happiness is a Warm Parka. And Friends I Didn’t Know I Had. from Dec 13.
Donations: As noted previously, cheques can be made out to Peter Watts, and mailed to Bakka-Phoenix Science Fiction Bookstore, 697 Queen St. West / Toronto, Ontario / M6J 1E6. Cash donations will also be accepted if you drop by the store. Electronic payments may be made to donate(at)rifters.com, or via this link.
Peter, a Canadian citizen, was on his way back to Canada after helping a friend move house to Nebraska over the weekend. He was stopped at the border crossing at Port Huron, Michigan by U.S. border police for a search of his rental vehicle. When Peter got out of the car and questioned the nature of the search, the gang of border guards subjected him to a beating, restrained him and pepper sprayed him. At the end of it, local police laid a felony charge of assault against a federal officer against Peter. On Wednesday, he posted bond and walked across the border to Canada in shirtsleeves (he was released by Port Huron officials with his car and possessions locked in impound, into a winter storm that evening). He's home safe. For now. But he has to go back to Michigan to face the charge brought against him.
In Peter's own words written last Friday:
If you buy into the Many Worlds Intepretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no apparent reason; or perhaps they did, and I simply kept my eyes downcast and refrained from asking questions.
Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.
In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.
But that is not this universe.
Stay tuned.
The Facebook page Against The Arrest and Beating of Peter Watts had 20 members when I found it on Friday night. By the time I clicked the JOIN button, there were 23, one being me. The numbers increased progressively over the weekend, with 1,170 members a few minutes ago -- around 4 days after the page was first created.
Jill and I are going spend the family Christmas fund on a donation to Peter's defense costs, and I encourage others to donate as well. I do this entirely selfishly: if this can happen to an articulate, personable white guy like Peter, then what are the prospects for me?
Robert Ashby raises the related question "since when did 'at least I didn’t get strip-searched and beaten' become our standard of service?". Robert's essay is a companion piece to Madeline Ashby's post on the subject on her blog.
Here is a selection of online articles which have appeared in the last week:
The definitive story appeared on David Nickle's blog with a posting about the initial incident, with a brief correction and a follow-up post providing details of how Bakka-Phoenix Books is helping to get donations to Peter.
Article on BoingBoing with a follow-up post on Making Light which makes reference to the "demonstrable mendaciousness" of the account in the Port Huron Times-Herald. Both the BoingBoing and Making Light discussion threads became politicized, with trolls appearing in force. Charles Stross, who conducted an interview with Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman at the last Worldcon in Montreal, and who shared a book reading with Peter at the same convention, found it necessary to stomp a troll.
The Globe and Mail article raises interesting questions related to privacy.
Article in the Toronto Star. The spokesman for the US border crossing at Sarnia insists that Peter "assaulted" their officers. What would have happened to him had he waived his Miranda rights?
John Scalzi's Whatever blog with a post on Helping Out Peter Watts.
John McDaid appears to have the definitive summary of the news coverage.
Peter's Blog:
Not The Best of Possible Worlds on Dec 11, quoted above.
Squidgate. Update. later on Dec 11.
Happiness is a Warm Parka. And Friends I Didn’t Know I Had. from Dec 13.
Donations: As noted previously, cheques can be made out to Peter Watts, and mailed to Bakka-Phoenix Science Fiction Bookstore, 697 Queen St. West / Toronto, Ontario / M6J 1E6. Cash donations will also be accepted if you drop by the store. Electronic payments may be made to donate(at)rifters.com, or via this link.
Sunday, November 01, 2009
15 Useful Guides
The MakeUseOf website has an article containing links to 15 (actually 16) useful guides that provide a lot of (not necessarily obvious) information for day to day geekly living. Here is the list of guides that the article links to, with my comments:
1 – Internet Guide for the Movie Addict - includes a discussion on how to fix bad/corrupted video files. Unfortunately, nothing on how to remove Vodei encoding.
2 – Internet Guidebook for An Audiophile - this is a howto guide covering internet music, including free sites.
3 – The Incredible Free Manual for Every Mac User - Mac users probably should read this.
4 – The Underground Guide to the iPhone ditto for iPhone users.
5 – Twitter: Best Practices & Tips - some thoughts on how to best take advantage of this (relatively) new communication tool.
6 – The Ultimate Guide to your Windows Mobile Phone - for anyone whose phone runs Windows CE
7 – A Computer Geek’s Smart Productivity Guide - all about time management and productivity. See also the (unrelated) Pomodoro strategy over on the Lifehacker site.
8 – Building a Media Center for your Home - instructions on how to set up a media server for your home theatre/home audio system.
9 – The Only Easy Guide To Computer Networks - this won't teach you how to manage a Cisco-based network with hundreds of hubs, but will help you set up your home network and get it working.
10 – The Big Book of BitTorrent - how to use BitTorrent to download files. The more generic parts of the discussion should also apply to uTorrent and other Torrent apps.
11 – A Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux - Linux is the future of computing, and this guide will help you get started. [Note - I am presenting the title as they appear in the original source, but my editorial instinct here really really wants to change "to Linux" to read "with Linux".]
12 – The Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop - this guide won't replace a formal course in how to use Photoshop, which is one of the most most capable (but also most complex) software packages out there. However, the guide will give you a starting point -- with the guide, and hours of practice, you too can plant a moustache on your co-worker's Christmas party photo.
13 – The Big Book of iTunes - I don't use iTunes or an iPod myself, but I will probably read this guide anyway just to get a handle on the technology.
14 – The Idiot’s Guide to Building Your Own PC - an important document if you are going to either build a new PC or if you plan on swapping out and upgrading a motherboard on an old PC.
15 – Laptop Buying Guide for 2009 - a guide to all things laptop.
(BONUS) PSP Up- and Downgrading Guide - a howto guide for PSP owners to help with getting around those pesky lockouts that prevent homebrew apps from working properly.
1 – Internet Guide for the Movie Addict - includes a discussion on how to fix bad/corrupted video files. Unfortunately, nothing on how to remove Vodei encoding.
2 – Internet Guidebook for An Audiophile - this is a howto guide covering internet music, including free sites.
3 – The Incredible Free Manual for Every Mac User - Mac users probably should read this.
4 – The Underground Guide to the iPhone ditto for iPhone users.
5 – Twitter: Best Practices & Tips - some thoughts on how to best take advantage of this (relatively) new communication tool.
6 – The Ultimate Guide to your Windows Mobile Phone - for anyone whose phone runs Windows CE
7 – A Computer Geek’s Smart Productivity Guide - all about time management and productivity. See also the (unrelated) Pomodoro strategy over on the Lifehacker site.
8 – Building a Media Center for your Home - instructions on how to set up a media server for your home theatre/home audio system.
9 – The Only Easy Guide To Computer Networks - this won't teach you how to manage a Cisco-based network with hundreds of hubs, but will help you set up your home network and get it working.
10 – The Big Book of BitTorrent - how to use BitTorrent to download files. The more generic parts of the discussion should also apply to uTorrent and other Torrent apps.
11 – A Newbie’s Getting Started Guide to Linux - Linux is the future of computing, and this guide will help you get started. [Note - I am presenting the title as they appear in the original source, but my editorial instinct here really really wants to change "to Linux" to read "with Linux".]
12 – The Idiot’s Guide To Photoshop - this guide won't replace a formal course in how to use Photoshop, which is one of the most most capable (but also most complex) software packages out there. However, the guide will give you a starting point -- with the guide, and hours of practice, you too can plant a moustache on your co-worker's Christmas party photo.
13 – The Big Book of iTunes - I don't use iTunes or an iPod myself, but I will probably read this guide anyway just to get a handle on the technology.
14 – The Idiot’s Guide to Building Your Own PC - an important document if you are going to either build a new PC or if you plan on swapping out and upgrading a motherboard on an old PC.
15 – Laptop Buying Guide for 2009 - a guide to all things laptop.
(BONUS) PSP Up- and Downgrading Guide - a howto guide for PSP owners to help with getting around those pesky lockouts that prevent homebrew apps from working properly.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Happy Halloween 2009!
Happy Halloween -- take care tonight amidst the ghosts, ghouls, and asorted creatures of the night.
(Thanks to Mike M for finding the images, which are anime/manga fan art. The first in the series was created by Mutsuki Ai, the second through fourth are unknown)
(Thanks to Mike M for finding the images, which are anime/manga fan art. The first in the series was created by Mutsuki Ai, the second through fourth are unknown)
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Sputnik Day 2009
Fifty two years ago today, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite.
Fifty two years later, the Soviet Union is no more, but an international crew including Canadian and European astronauts along with Russians and Americans serve on the International Space Station. Earlier in the week, Guy Laliberte, the first Canadian space tourist, founder of the Cirque du Soleil, arrived at the ISS on a Soyuz spacecraft launched from Baikonur. Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk and the other members of Expedition 20 were on hand to greet Laliberte on his arrival.
I am waiting for the concert which Laliberte's One Drop Foundation plans later this week.
Above image: The current crew members of the ISS gathered in the Zvezda service module for a conference with family members and representatives on the ground. The crew encompass Expeditions 20, 21, and 22. From left to right, my best guess as to who's who based on their biography photos: Flight Engineer Roman Romenko, Flight Engineer Nicole Stott, Flight Engineer Frank de Winne (Expedition 21 Commander), Flight Engineer Michael Barratt, Spaceflight Participant Guy Laliberte in the foreground, Flight Engineer Robert Thirsk, Flight Engineer Maxim Suryaev, Expedition 20 Commander Gennady Padalka, Flight Engineer Jeff Williams (Expedition 22 Commander). Photo Credit: NASA TV
Fifty two years later, the Soviet Union is no more, but an international crew including Canadian and European astronauts along with Russians and Americans serve on the International Space Station. Earlier in the week, Guy Laliberte, the first Canadian space tourist, founder of the Cirque du Soleil, arrived at the ISS on a Soyuz spacecraft launched from Baikonur. Canadian astronaut Robert Thirsk and the other members of Expedition 20 were on hand to greet Laliberte on his arrival.
I am waiting for the concert which Laliberte's One Drop Foundation plans later this week.
Above image: The current crew members of the ISS gathered in the Zvezda service module for a conference with family members and representatives on the ground. The crew encompass Expeditions 20, 21, and 22. From left to right, my best guess as to who's who based on their biography photos: Flight Engineer Roman Romenko, Flight Engineer Nicole Stott, Flight Engineer Frank de Winne (Expedition 21 Commander), Flight Engineer Michael Barratt, Spaceflight Participant Guy Laliberte in the foreground, Flight Engineer Robert Thirsk, Flight Engineer Maxim Suryaev, Expedition 20 Commander Gennady Padalka, Flight Engineer Jeff Williams (Expedition 22 Commander). Photo Credit: NASA TV
Monday, September 21, 2009
Holiday Greetings at the Autumnal Equinox
Today on the last full day of summer, I am taking this opportunity to say "Eid Mubarak" to Muslim friends, for whom the month of Ramadan ended on September 20 at sunset. The end of the fasting month of Ramadan is the beginning of the Eid-ul-Fitre festival, which is an important event in the Muslim calendar. I hope you all had a great day with family and friends!
For Jewish friends, this past weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the day of judgement/day of remembrance marking the beginning of a new year. So to all of you, "Shona Tova", Happy New Year, and our best wishes for 5770 to be a good year!
The actual Autumnal Equinox is late this year -- it will take place tomorrow afternoon 2009 Sep 22 at 17:18 EDT as the world (or at least the Northern Hemisphere part of it) hurtles inexorably toward the cold and dark of winter.
For Jewish friends, this past weekend was Rosh Hashanah, the day of judgement/day of remembrance marking the beginning of a new year. So to all of you, "Shona Tova", Happy New Year, and our best wishes for 5770 to be a good year!
The actual Autumnal Equinox is late this year -- it will take place tomorrow afternoon 2009 Sep 22 at 17:18 EDT as the world (or at least the Northern Hemisphere part of it) hurtles inexorably toward the cold and dark of winter.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Tesseracts Thirteen Book Launch
The Toronto book launch of Tesseracts Thirteen was held last Saturday September 12 at BakkaPhoenix Books on Queen Street. Nine of the anthology's authors, including Jill and our friend David Nickle, were on hand to do readings, greet customers, and sign books.
The authors who participated were Kelley Armstrong, Alison Baird, Suzanne Church, Michael Kelly, Jill Snider Lum, David Nickle, Andrea Schlecht, Jean-Louis Trudel, and Edo van Belkom.
During the course of the event, I took a couple of hundred photos [yes shutterbugs R us :-) ] and also successfully videotaped the reading.
Edge Publishing used many of my photos (uncredited, unfortunately, but now you know) on the sidebar of their webpage for EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing/Tesseract Books. Edge also have a blog devoted only to the Tesseracts series, called Totally Tesseracts.
Copies of Tesseracts Thirteen are available from BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto. If you were so inclined, you could almost certainly contact BakkaPhoenix or Edge Publishing for a copy by mail order. You can also order the book from Chapters Indigo, from Amazon, or for our American friends, from Barnes and Noble.
Following are some photos from the launch event and the impromptu (but traditional) post launch gathering at the Wheat Sheaf pub at King and Bathurst.
Somewhere between forty to fifty people attended (it was hard to count numbers in the bookstore) and it wasn't clear that there was a one-to-one mapping between attendees and book sales. However, the one observation that was possible to make was that the pile of books available diminished substantially during the course of the afternoon.
For the second year in a row, our friends Warren, Ann, and their son Aaron came out to support us by buying a book. Thank you very much, and hopefully there will be more events like this!
The post launch gathering moved down the street to the Wheat Sheaf, where the talk (as you might expect) revolved around science fiction, canlit, and publishing.
As the evening progressed, a pool game started. After defeating Dave Nickle, Brett Savory went looking for other victims, and found a volunteer in Corwin.
Corwin demonstrated that he has a better grasp of applied physics than his old man, especially with regard to the consequences of elastic collisions. However, despite coaching from Dave, he too went down to defeat.
Our evening ended shortly thereafter -- apparently there is a law in Ontario that says a minor can't be in a pub after 9pm.
Our thanks to all those who came to the reading or to the gathering afterward. It was a great party, and a great launch for the book in Toronto!
Additional photos from the launch as well as photos from the gathering afterward are available on Facebook.
The authors who participated were Kelley Armstrong, Alison Baird, Suzanne Church, Michael Kelly, Jill Snider Lum, David Nickle, Andrea Schlecht, Jean-Louis Trudel, and Edo van Belkom.During the course of the event, I took a couple of hundred photos [yes shutterbugs R us :-) ] and also successfully videotaped the reading.
Edge Publishing used many of my photos (uncredited, unfortunately, but now you know) on the sidebar of their webpage for EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing/Tesseract Books. Edge also have a blog devoted only to the Tesseracts series, called Totally Tesseracts.
Copies of Tesseracts Thirteen are available from BakkaPhoenix Books in Toronto. If you were so inclined, you could almost certainly contact BakkaPhoenix or Edge Publishing for a copy by mail order. You can also order the book from Chapters Indigo, from Amazon, or for our American friends, from Barnes and Noble.
Following are some photos from the launch event and the impromptu (but traditional) post launch gathering at the Wheat Sheaf pub at King and Bathurst.
Somewhere between forty to fifty people attended (it was hard to count numbers in the bookstore) and it wasn't clear that there was a one-to-one mapping between attendees and book sales. However, the one observation that was possible to make was that the pile of books available diminished substantially during the course of the afternoon.
For the second year in a row, our friends Warren, Ann, and their son Aaron came out to support us by buying a book. Thank you very much, and hopefully there will be more events like this!
The post launch gathering moved down the street to the Wheat Sheaf, where the talk (as you might expect) revolved around science fiction, canlit, and publishing.
As the evening progressed, a pool game started. After defeating Dave Nickle, Brett Savory went looking for other victims, and found a volunteer in Corwin.
Corwin demonstrated that he has a better grasp of applied physics than his old man, especially with regard to the consequences of elastic collisions. However, despite coaching from Dave, he too went down to defeat.
Our evening ended shortly thereafter -- apparently there is a law in Ontario that says a minor can't be in a pub after 9pm.
Our thanks to all those who came to the reading or to the gathering afterward. It was a great party, and a great launch for the book in Toronto!
Additional photos from the launch as well as photos from the gathering afterward are available on Facebook.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
C3PO's No-Good Roommate
Stated last night by our friend Mark Azevedo, and reported on Facebook:
"Doesn't H1N1 sound like it should be C3PO's no-good college roommate? Hey, dude, I'm not a proto-col droid, I'm a party-call droid!!"
I am starting the ball rolling here, to make this the next internet Star Wars meme.
"Doesn't H1N1 sound like it should be C3PO's no-good college roommate? Hey, dude, I'm not a proto-col droid, I'm a party-call droid!!"
I am starting the ball rolling here, to make this the next internet Star Wars meme.
For Linda
I saw my cousin Linda at the family wedding gathering over the Labour Day weekend earlier this month. Other than a brief visit in July, this was the first time we had seen Linda since David's funeral.
My cousin is looking good. This is still a time of transition for her from her her life with David built over the last two decades to something new. This should be a time for those close to her to let her grieve and come to terms with her loss. Whatever Linda needs, whatever decisions she makes for her life, we'll be there to support her.
David absolutely doted on Nicole and Matt, and a day or two after an event like the wedding, there would have been an e-mail to David's peeps with lots of pictures of both of them.
But right now, it is all about Linda -- and for Linda to make the decisions to determine how she wants to move ahead with her life and those of Nicole and Matt. So, you go, girl! You have our love and support always.
My cousin is looking good. This is still a time of transition for her from her her life with David built over the last two decades to something new. This should be a time for those close to her to let her grieve and come to terms with her loss. Whatever Linda needs, whatever decisions she makes for her life, we'll be there to support her.
David absolutely doted on Nicole and Matt, and a day or two after an event like the wedding, there would have been an e-mail to David's peeps with lots of pictures of both of them.
But right now, it is all about Linda -- and for Linda to make the decisions to determine how she wants to move ahead with her life and those of Nicole and Matt. So, you go, girl! You have our love and support always.
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