Twins!

Big congratulations to my cousin Amy and her husband Jeff -- twin boys born on June 1!

Dylan was born around 0315 EDT and weighed in at 4.2 lbs.

Adrian was born 12 minutes later at 0327 EDT and weighed in at 4.6 lbs.

As a point of comparison, Corwin (who was a premature birth) was 4.5 lbs, and just long enough to fit on my forearm.

I had gotten the news on Monday afternoon (from Mom) via the intra-familial packet-switched occasional-sneaker net. Thanks to my cousin Cindy (Amy's sister) for providing photos and details.

Amy and Jeff don't look nearly gobsmacked enough :-) Good job, guys! And of course, a rousing welcome to Dylan and Adrian!

Cables Make All The Difference

Recently, I had to buy a length of network cable for $22 from Staples. I resented the price, until I saw this offering:

For *only* $500 you can buy a cable made by Denon, composed of "pure copper". Presumably that price is in US dollars so all us Canuckie types will need to add roughly 20 percent - call it $600 loonies for discussion purposes.

And why would anyone pay $600 for a cable?

Well -- this product will allow you to "Get the purest signal from multi-channel DVD and CD playback through Denon receiver". One way that it achieves this is that the "Connector and cable structure designed to thoroughly eliminate adverse effects from vibration". Because, ya know, vibration causes all those little electrons to jostle together and not get to where they are supposed to go. Clearly, a product designed for audiophiles who operate at a level that I can barely imagine.

But don't take my word for this -- read the reviews. There are others, who like me, stand in awe and amazement at this product, and anyone who would buy it.

UPDATE - Audioquest make an ultra-deluxe speaker cable for $6800. This relegates the Denon offering to the little leagues. The $22 network cable I was bitching about doesn't even register. People who use this product probably aren't even in the same species as those of us who meet our cabling needs from the Dollar Store.

The Dangers of Re-use

In complete contravention of what the bottled water people say is safe usage, I re-use my plastic water bottle many times before it usually ends up being thrown out, typically by someone else. Of course, bottlers of water have no vested interest in making sure that you buy more bottles instead of using the one you have, nosirree.

The latest study from the plastics industry (news article here) showing health problems with re-usable bags strikes me the same way. No bias from this source, either.

On the other hand, I am probably not going to be incredibly sympathetic to someone who got sick because because they brought vegetables home in a bag that they had previously used to transport used diapers. Those cloth bags are in fact washable as well as re-usable.

Finally, the Star Trek movie!

This movie is worth seeing, and probably more than once. We watched this down at the Beaches Cinema yesterday. All three of us thought this was a good movie, although (as usual) I have issues. I had vague thoughts about taking the day off to line up and watch the first showing on Friday, but those never got past the vague thoughts stage. If this were 20 years ago, I would have done it, no question.

The review in the Toronto Star is generally positive.

Here are some of the issues (possible spoiler warnings) --

Delta Vega is fairly close to the energy barrier at the galaxy's edge, not between Earth and Vulcan.

"Red Matter"? WTF? This substance is used to initiate a black hole collapse. It should have been straightforward to insert a reference to dark matter here.

Replacing a planet with an equivalent mass black hole doesn't create an instant "vacuum cleaner" effect.

Most serious - a supernova explosion won't destroy a planet in the way that it is shown to occur.

However, the rationale behind the "reboot" is well done -- it allows therm to acknowledge all of the existing history without necessarily being tied to it.

After the disasters of Star Trek Insurrection and Star Trek Nemesis, this movie franchise needed a good entry to lift it back up - and this movie is it. Star Trek nerds can rejoice.

Cinco de Mayo, times ten

Today is Cinco de Mayo, a holiday held in high regard by our friends Angel and Bill on account of Angel's Mexican roots and Bill's many years of traveling there. But today is also Corwin's tenth birthday, which will occur at 8:26AM, about half an hour from when I am writing this.

Ten years ago at this moment, Jill was having the worst part of her labour, having already gone through more than twelve hours of it. To get to the hospital in time to be part of my son's birth, I had left my project in Detroit, and had traveled back by car overnight.

From those first moments of that small, helpless baby, it is amazing to think that ten years have gone by, and the wisecracking boy of today is the same child.

May Day baby

Our friends Dave and Marianna, whose wedding we attended a couple of years ago, had a baby girl overnight!

Congratulations to Marianna (who did all the recent hard work) and Dave, and welcome to Maia Willow!


Corwin's response to the photo above was "Mwaaahaaahaaa! Soon, another geek like us!"

Things That Go BANG In The Night

A gamma ray burster detected a week ago by the NASA Swift satellite and designated GRB 090423 (CNN article here) marked the discovery of the oldest known object in the Universe -- a supernova of a giant star about 600 million years after the beginning of the Universe itself. This object is about 13 billion light years away (red shift z = 8.2), about a billion or more light years more distant that the most distant quasars (z around 5 or 6). This object is important because it and others like it will provide a way to probe the earliest generations of stars formed in the cosmos.

A more recent bang in the sky was SN 1006 -- a star about 7,000 light years away that went supernova on April 30, 1006 -- 1,003 years ago. For calendar nazis, I understand that today is not the actual anniversary due to the Julian-to-Gregorian conversion. This object was somewhat smaller in scale than the GRB 090423 blast, but still pretty substantial, making it very probably the brightest star (other than the sun) seen by human eyes.


Above, the Chandra image in x-rays of the supernova remnant a thousand years after the blast. The bubble has expanded to a diameter of 20 parsecs -- over 60 light years. Below, a Hubble image of a ribbon of gas and dust from the same nebula.

Tracking Swine Flu using Google Maps

View H1N1 Swine Flu in a larger map

Infectious cases of the H1N1 Swine Flu—a mutation of a pork virus that jumped from pigs to humans—happened in Mexico City in March, and are spreading over the world thanks to the ubiquity of modern air travel.

On the map, the pink markers are suspect, the purple markers are confirmed, and deaths don't have a black dot in the marker. The yellow markers are negative.

People in Toronto are all too familiar with this, having gone through the SARS near-pandemic from 2002 to 2003. As of today, the number of swine flu cases worldwide exceed 2,000 -- a substantial percentage of the total SARS cases (over 8,000).

SARS had a pretty significant negative impact on the economy of the city of Toronto, and more generally, the world. The current swine flu outbreak is happening in the midst of a global recession, so I expect it will be a force acting to make the overall economic impact worse.

I have no idea who the creator of the map is, although the profile of the anonymous creator shows a reference to biomedical research.

Star Trek Advance Reviews

The hype machine has ramped up this week. An advance review on CNET dated April 22 from a writer who describes herself as a Star Trek virgin provides reassurance that the new Star Trek movie will appeal to people who have never seen any of the series or the movies.

For hardcore fans like all in this household, the Gizmodo review is more meaningful. "Star Trek will disappoint no one." he begins, and goes on to enumerate the reasons why. My favourite quotes from the review:

The Star Wars cheap shot --

As the lights dimmed and the familiar Star Trek Federation logo slid on screen, the emotion of all those hours of watching Next Generation reruns as a kid came sloshing back into my brain, dripping out of my eyes as tears of pure happiness. I expect that it was essentially the same emotion Star Wars fans felt during the opening credits of Episode 1, but without the massive letdown afterwards. (Ha ha, suckers.)

On updating the look and feel --

That's not to say Star Trek is now gritty—it's just more...modern. And more sexy. Like when you upgrade from a six piece KFC meal to a 12 piece bucket: you're going to get more breast and thigh.

To paraphrase one of the Usual Suspects, I like thighs. They're juicier.

Just Call Me Joe-Bob

A few days ago, Ramey Ko of the Association of Chinese Americans was testifying before the State Elections Committee of the State of Texas in the US. In response to Ko's testimony regarding problems that Americans of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean descent have in voter identification in elections, State Representative Betty Brown, a Republican member of the Texas State Legislature representing District 4 (Athens/Terrell) said the following:

"Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it's a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?"

Additional source for this story here.

I am not Texan, or even American, but I just have to comment on this.

Brown's remarks undoubtedly summarize the intellectual position of at least some portion of the American population. And there are bound to be people of similar minds on this side of the border. I am reminded of the difficulties that I had growing up with a Chinese name -- one that was very different from the Anglo-Saxon mainstream. At my first job when I was a teenager, the advice given to me (I worked in in a telephone sweatshop) was that I should identify myself using a name that was more consumer-friendly.

However, that was then and this is now. Brown's colleague, Representative Trey Martinez Fischer and the people who run the Rum and Monkeys website have made available the "Betty Brown Name Generator", a web application that will help anyone with a name that is non traditional (or at least non traditional in Betty Brown's judgement) replace their name with one that people like Ms. Brown would understand and would identify with.

I am very pleased to report the following result from the Betty Brown Name Generator for me:

My Betty Brown Approved Name is Joe-Bob "WalMart" Brown.
Try The Betty Brown Name Generator yourself!
Created with Rum and Monkey's Name Generator Generator.

Y'all should call me "Joe-Bob", although if we are in a business meeting together, you could call me "J.B." At parties and in public, I will continue to respond to "hey you". While I have issues with being called "WalMart", y'all could call me "Wally" if y'all needed a nickname.

I can't help thinking that Betty Brown's problem with some names might be due to their (relatively larger) number of syllables as well as cultural context with which Ms. Brown may lack familiarity, even though she is an elected government official in a state of the wealthiest (and theoretically best educated) nation on Earth.

The Betty Brown Name generator can be seen to therefore have some wider application. In addition to the modifications to biology and astronomy textbooks that will be required to implement the position taken by the Board of Education of the State of Texas on intelligent design versus conventional scientific theories of cosmic origin and biological evolution, there could be similar rewritings of history textbooks as follows:

- replace "George Washington" with Forrest "Pabst Blue Ribbon" Brown. Even though General Washington is a Founding Father of the great nation of America, his name does have too many syllables in it for easy comprehension. Also, if this change is made, George Washington Carver can be Forrest Blue Brown Carver. Texas history books could thus immediately identify Dr. Carver as a man of colour by his name alone.

- replace "Benjamin Netanyahu" with Billy-Ray "Chicken and Dumplings" Brown. Although a long-time ally of the United States, Mr. Netanyahu's Hebrew name also has way too many syllables and "Benjamin" just makes him sound stuck up. Discussing Middle East history of the last few decades and how they were driven by an American ally named Billy-Ray should make this subject both more comprehensible and sympathetic to students in Betty Brown's Texas. Also, the "Chicken and Dumplings" nickname can be a vehicle by which the Texas educational system introduces the richness of Jewish heritage and culture and in particular, matzoh ball soup to ordinary Americans. But instead of forcing those ordinary Americans to learn the Hebrew word "matzoh", they could move with immediate understanding to "Chicken and Dumplings".

- don't replace "J. Robert Oppenheimer" with Joe-Bob "Cracker Barrel" Brown. Even though this distinguished American physicist and I share the same Betty Brown approved name (except for the nickname), Oppenheimer was attacked by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and in a Betty Brown world, it would be inappropriate to give him a name that makes him more like a "real American". (In the Sarah Palin sense of the term "real American").

- replace "Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar" with Billy-Ray "Cracker Barrel" Brown. This American physicist of Indian origin for whom the Chandra Space Telescope is named clearly has way too many syllables in a name which would be incomprehensible to people living in the world of Betty Brown. Therefore, physics textbooks in Texas can make reference to the "Cracker-Barrel Limit" instead of the Chandrasekhar Limit for calculation of the upper bound of stars which can collapse to form a white dwarf star. Keep in mind though that all this long-hair stuff is only a theory -- you know, like evolution. Or the Germ Theory of Disease. Or gravitation.

- and for goodness sake, definitely replace the names of Samuel Chao Chung Ting, Yao Ming and Kalpana Chawla. Real Americans in Betty Brown's Texas can't believe that people with names like these could win a Nobel Prize and be on the staff of a major scientific facility intended to be in Texas, or play basketball in Texas, or die in a space shuttle accident over Texas.

Betty Brown's remarks have done a lot to demonstrate the care and commitment that she feels toward people of Chinese descent, as well as to show the seriousness and credibility of some members of the Texas State Legislature. I, Joe-Bob Brown, her spiritual brother, wish her the very best political future that her remarks have shown that she deserves.

Coraline - Two Thumbs Up

We went on a family expedition down to the Beaches theatre on Saturday to see Coraline. It was a fine movie, and despite the fact that it is a true horror film, did not cause any squickiness.



It has been a while since I read Neil Gaiman's (children's) novel on which this movie is based. All of the important elements are present: Coraline's busy parents (whom I seem to remember were computer programmers in the book not gardeners as they are in the movie), the aging actress sisters, the mouse circus trainer. And of course, Coraline's Other Mother on the other side of the doorway. The horror is elegant and gradual, like a slowly tightening web.

Coraline is brave, determined, and intelligent -- exactly what every parent hopes their own child will be. She makes mistakes, but she works to overcome their consequences.

For most of the movies I watch, I generally have quibbles about the story they tell. Usually, writers or directors manage to do something to break my suspension of disbelief. I did not have any quibbles about this one.

This movie is definitely recommended.

A Modest Art Installation Proposal

We drove by the Art Gallery of Ontario earlier on Sunday. The new renovation has been completed and is open. Seeing this got me to thinking about the neighbourhood. The Ontario College of Art and Design is immediately south of the Art Gallery and the Sharp Centre For Design, part of OCAD, is also a striking piece of architecture -- it is built to resemble a giant table, looming over the other buildings around it.

I first saw this OCAD building a few years back from a vantage point further south, when I was visiting my cousin at a place he was looking after for a friend.

Given that the OCAD building resembles a table, I propose the following art installation:

On the roof of the OCAD building, at each of the sides of this giant table, create a place setting at an appropriate scale, consisting of a plate, a cup, a bowl, a knife, a fork, and chopsticks.

These place settings would be visible from all around the OCAD building - basically, from any structure higher than its roof. Each place setting would represent a particular group - for example, politicians, the economic elite, homeowners, and the homeless. But I propose sufficient ambiguity in the design to allow viewers to create their own symbolic OCAD dinner party.

I can't possibly be the first one to have had this idea -- someone should do it!

2009 Hugo Nominations

The 2009 Hugo Award nominations list has been out for nearly a week. Among the Usual Suspects, it was not surprisingly (but disappointing nonetheless) Jill's and Michael's story didn't make the cut. Nor did Dave's story. However, what was very very surprising (and very very disappointing) was that Karl's novel Pirate Sun failed to make it onto the ballot.

The good news, however, is that Metatropolis, an audiobook that Karl co-authored, was nominated -- the first audiobook to be nominated for the Hugo.

Tesseracts Twelve contributor Gord Sellar is up for the John W. Campbell award.

And finally, local fan artist Taral Wayne whom I have known for nearly thirty years, was nominated for the Fan Artist Hugo.

Latest Star Trek trailer!

The last movie was a disaster. This movie, upcoming, is supposed to reboot the series. I am looking forward to it, although with some trepidation.

Chang'e Lunar Mission Ends, Kepler Launched

Earlier this week, the Chang'e 1 lunar reconnaissance mission came to an end when controllers crashed the spacecraft onto the lunar surface. Launched by the Chinese National Space Agency on October 24, 2007, the probe spent 16 months sending back high resolution surface images of the moon. The moon has been the focus of a number of recent Asian space probes -- in addition to Chang'e, Japan's SELENE and India's Chandraayan are both still in lunar orbit and operational.

Late yesterday, NASA launched the Kepler spacecraft. Eventually destined for an orbit trailing the Earth around the sun, Kepler's mission is to conduct a telescopic search for planets around other stars by measuring tiny brightness fluctuations in a large number of stars over a period of years.



The above photo shows the Delta 2 rocket (Image credit: NASA/Jack Pfaller) carrying the Kepler spacecraft just after liftoff from Cape Canaveral last night.

That's no moon....

A new moon of Saturn is discovered.

Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

In the sequence of three images above, obtained by NASA's Cassini spacecraft over the course of about 10 minutes on October 27, 2008, you can see the path of a newly found moonlet in a bright arc of Saturn's faint G ring. The moonlet was initially seen in Cassini images from last August.

In each image, a small streak of light within the ring is visible. Unlike the streaks in the background, which are distant stars smeared by the camera's long exposure time of 46 seconds, this streak is aligned with the G ring and moves along the ring as expected for an object embedded in the ring.

Cassini scientists interpret the moving streak to be reflected light from a tiny moon half a kilometer wide that is likely a major source of material in the arc and the rest of the G ring. Debris knocked off this moon forms a relatively bright arc of material near the inner edge of the G ring, the most visible part of the ring in these images. That arc, in turn, leaks material to form the entire ring.

This view looks toward the un-illuminated side of the rings from about 5 degrees above the ringplane. The view was acquired at a distance of approximately 1.2 million kilometers from Saturn and at a sun-Saturn-spacecraft, or phase, angle of 23 degrees.

Image scale for the first image is 7 kilometers (4 miles) per pixel. The second and third images were taken at further reduced resolution. This is definitely nowhere near the level of detail required to show surface features.

The Cassini mission has been extended until 2010, and if the spacecraft continues to function correctly, may be extended again.

Hugo Nominations

I almost forgot to submit my nominations ballot for the Hugo Awards by the midnight February 28 deadline. But I did manage to get my ballot in with about a half hour to spare (gotta love online voting). Now to see whether the rest of the world agrees with me...

Force Projection

I went to the Ontario Science Centre with Corwin's class field trip on Friday. There is a special exhibit on currently called Sultans of Science, and one of the displays reminded me of something that I noted over Christmas and had been meaning to write about.

The display that got my attention was about Zhang He -- born to a Hui Muslim family in Yunnan Province but captured as a boy and delivered to the imperial capital in Beijing where he grew up to become one of the greatest mariners in history. Zhang He was the admiral who led 7 Chinese expeditions consisting of hundreds of ships and thousands of men into the Indian Ocean in the early 1400's, and possibly around the Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic. The last of these expeditions was in 1433. After Zhang He's time, the Ming dynasty gave up naval development, and Chinese sea power became a thing of the past.

In late December 2008 -- 575 yesrs after the last voyage of Zhang He -- the Chinese navy sent a flotilla consisting of two destroyers and a supply ship to join the international force currently patrolling the Gulf of Aden off the coast of Somalia. This area has achieved some notoriety by the actions of Somali based pirates who have attacked shipping, and captured various merchant ships which have been held for ransom.

Canada had a naval presence here, in the form of Task Force Arabian Sea, consisting of (mid 2008) the frigates HMCS Ville de Québec and HMCS Calgary; the destroyer (and command ship) HMCS Iroquois; the supply ship HMCS Protecteur. Canada led Combined Task Force (CTF) 150 from the beginning of June 2008 until handing off to the Danes in the middle of September. CTF 150 was a multinational naval coalition that operated from the Red Sea to the Strait of Hormuz, through the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea as far south as the coast of Kenya. The Canadian part of this effort was called Operation Altair. In January 2009, CTF 150 was replaced by CTF 151, an American-led international initiative.


Chinese participation in the protection of merchant shipping in the Gulf of Aden consists of the missile-armed destroyers DDG-171 Haikou (photo above) and DDG-169 Wuhan, and the supply ship Weishanhu. These are reported to be among China’s most sophisticated vessels, having all entered service this decade. They will operate alongside other international warships, including the Canadian frigate HMCS Charlottetown, patrolling the area near the Gulf of Aden, part of the Suez Canal route.

The Chinese news agency Xinhua has said that the fleet will mainly protect Chinese vessels, including those from Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan, but will also escort foreign ships passing through the area on request. After three months the ships will be replaced by another flotilla, depending on UN Security Council decisions and the situation at the time. China has said its warships will investigate any suspected pirate vessels, and approach them and demand that they show their relevant documents and certificates.

The three ships of the Chinese flotilla left Hainan Island on December 26, and within days passed through the Strait of Malacca, arriving in Somali waters by January 6. Upon arrival, they immediately began their escort duties. In the last two months, they have conducted over twenty escort runs each involving multiple ships, including protection of at least one Taiwanese ship and rescue of an Italian freighter.

These types of operations will give the Chinese navy an opportunity to develop and practice their blue water capability -- the ability to operate far from home for extended periods of time. The developing Chinese space program will make similar demands, requiring tracking ships to be deployed at long distances to support communications with orbital missions.

Comet Lulin Appears

Comet Lulin (C/2007 N3) is a comet discovered by Quanzhi Ye, a student at Sun Yat Sen Universty from sky photos taken at Taiwan's Lulin Observatory. About 20 hours ago around 0300 ET in the early morning of Feb 24, the comet made its closest approach to Earth at a distance of 0.41 AU.

The comet appears to be a first time visitor to the inner solar system. The NASA Swift Ultraviolet and X-Ray Explorer has been used to get images of the comet at ultraviolet and x-ray wavelengths. The data from Swift shows that it is shedding water at a rate of 3,000 litres per second (enough to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool in about 15 minutes), and surrounded by a Jupiter-sized cloud of cyanogen and diatomic carbon, glowing green as these compounds fluoresces in sunlight.



This amazing photo was taken by Joe Wheelock of Fort Davis, Texas, USA, a couple of hours before the closest approach. He has the following notes:

I think I caught a tumbling satellite in between Comet Lulin and Saturn in this picture. Photo Details: Comet Lulin and Saturn Taken on Feb. 24, 2009 (12:05 A.M. CST) with 105mm Sigma telephoto piggybacked on my 16inch F/4.5 Newtonian Telescope Canon XSi DSLR 120sec. exp @ISO 1600 f/3.5. Image processed with Adobe Photoshop CS3, Digital Photo Professional, Blackframe Noise Reduction and Neat Image. In between Saturn and the comet appears to be a tumbling satellite?

The orbital path of Comet Lulin can also be visualized using the small body database maintained by JPL.

Comet Lulin currently has a brightness of visual magnitude +5.5. This level of brightness will drop over time for two reasons - first, due to increasing distance as the comet gets farther away from us. The second reason for a drop in brightness is a change in the amount of light reflected by the comet. As the comet reaches perihelion and starts moving farther from the sun, the amount of material blown off by heat and solar radiation will decrease, and the comet's extended halo and tail will decrease in size resulting in less light being reflected.

At +5.5, Comet Lulin will be difficult to spot in Toronto with the naked eye, although it should be fairly easy to see with binoculars for the next few days. Darker locations away from the middle of a city, like Lake Herridge, or Almonte, or the middle of Saskatchewan will be more ideal.

Feedback Controls

A big chunk of my work life has been in the automotive finance industry, but I can't really say that I am a car guy. A car is a necessary evil, not the raison d'etre of existence.

So it was that in early January, after delivering our friend Annalee to the airport, I noticed an instrument panel light that I had never seen before. A quick check showed no flames or smoke or other serious issues, so I continued driving, and got the car home before I hauled out the manual.

This particular problem, it said, was related to the exhaust system, prompting dark thoughts about the expense of replacing a catalytic converter. According to the manual, this problem was serious and needed fixing. Or Bad Things Would Happen.

The mechanic at our favourite garage was more enlightening. It wasn't the catalytic converter -- instead, it was an oxygen sensor. Of which there were three -- two in the engine itself, one in the exhaust. Our failure was the one in the exhaust.

At which point a light came on over my head. The oxygen sensor in the exhaust is the last part of a feedback loop providing information to the car's onboard computer. The computer adjusts the fuel mix until it achieves a preset level of oxygen in the exhaust, indicating that a predesgned fuel to air ratio had been achieved. The system is designed to monitor the output so that the input can be tweaked. Leaving this uncorrected would have meant that the car would have been doing strange things to the fuel mixture -- potentially damaging the engine, but certainly not optimizing for fuel consumption efficiency.

So, a feedback loop. A useful idea -- one could imagine monitoring the activity of, say, a financial institution and its effect on the economy. Then tweaking the government bailout money going in until the required output goals were achieved. Or one could imagine feeding bailout money into the auto industry based on what kind of vehicles it was producing -- set the feedback loop to optimize for fuel efficiency and low carbon emissions.

The Avro Arrow

Fifty years ago yesterday, on February 20, 1959, the Canadian government of Prime Minister John Diefenbaker cancelled the development of the CF-105 fighter plane -- the aircraft known as the Avro Arrow.

In hindsight, the Arrow was just another 1950s era fighter plane, although for its time, it was the fastest and most advanced. And while it is possible to debate the upsides and downsides of the aircraft (fast, great climb rate, potentially capable of Mach 3+ on the upside versus heavy, high drag, low manueverability on the downside) it is the cancellation of the aircraft that results in one of the "might-have-been" myths of our shared Canadian experience. What might it have been, what could we have achieved, if the Arrow had gone forward to full production?

Cancellation of the Arrow project led to a lot of engineering talent moving south, and enormously benefiting the American space program. It also ensured the loss of an entire industrial sector -- Canada never again produced its own domestic military aircraft.

The lesson is an outsourcing lesson -- the country gave up some existing capability to save money. In doing so, it also shut down some future possibilities. In just the same way, a company which outsources its IT, or its manufacturing, or its marketing in order to realize some immediate bvenefits will give up some future capabilities -- and in fact will make it impossible to travel down some possible paths.

More on Tesseracts Twelve

From Claude Lalumiere's page on Facebook, a most interesting essay by Matthew David Surridge on Tesseracts Twelve, and how it avoids or sidesteps the traditional themes of Can Lit.

I read Margaret Atwood's Survival more than three decades ago for an English class. I was sufficiently impressed with it to go out and buy my own copy. But you'll note (he said, with wry understatement) that English Lit didn't end up being my field of study or the focus of my work life. However, this essay has inspired me to go find and re-read Survival.

Surridge has a much wider knowledge of Canadian literary criticism than I do, and observes that the stories in Tesseracts Twelve largely avoid the recurrent Man-Versus-Nature theme of traditional Can Lit, as extensively documented by Atwood and others, although

... nature is strongly present in the anthology in the form of animals; but these are animals which in one way or another blend into the human. “Intersections” is probably the only story without an animal presence. Humans and mammoths share mentalities in Derryl Murphy’s “Ancients of the Earth”, Michael Skeet and Jill Snyder Lum give us fox spirits and a surprisingly talkative tanuki in “Beneath the Skin”, Chen has men and women changing into dogs and goldfish, Randy McCharles’ story “Ringing the Changes in Okotoks, Alberta” has witchcraft linking a man and a goat, Gord Sellar’s super-hero tale “Wonjjang and the Madman of Pyongyang” includes a Japanese cat-woman, and “Wylde’s Kingdom” is the story of a man hunting and being hunted by a giant squid — with, inevitably, a hint of empathy between hunter and hunted towards the end. So perhaps this anthology represents a new Canadian mentality; no more of the garrison, no more of the conflict between man and wilderness, now our stories are those of man and nature merging.

Surridge goes on to this conclusion:

...Tesseracts Twelve may signal, ultimately, a change in Canadian literature to mirror the changes in the country itself. Where the country has seen its demography shift, has managed with surprisingly little strain to incorporate a wealth of voices and cultures within itself, has changed its traditional narrative of its own founding and development, the book suggests new themes for Canadian writing, new models for its story. Hints of the old are still there, certainly, as they should be, but not given the stress they might have carried in the past...

I like this idea -- that the collective narrative changes as culture and demographics change, each driving the other but also rooted in the past.

Happy Chinese New Year 4707 - The Year of the Ox

Kung Hei Fut Choy!

As the Year of the Rat draws to a close, we look forward to the Year of the Ox. For all our sakes, let us hope that the Ox heralds a speedy return of a Bull Market!

New Tesseracts Twelve Review!

So a new year began, and there was a Presidential Inauguration in the US, and Stephen Harper didn't think to prorogue the recession, which would have been truly useful as opposed to merely proroguing the current Parliamentary Session.

But in the midst of the January cold and gloom, there is a spot of warmth in the form of a new Tesseracts Twelve review by Jason Sanford on The Fix Online.

Here are the relevant bits:

...
Then there are the stories in Tesseracts, not a single one of which isn’t good or great....

In Michael Skeet and Jill Snider Lum’s “Beneath the Skin,” ancient Japan comes alive as a samurai, Hirota Satoshi, tries to solve a mystery while being simultaneously manipulated by spirits, ghosts, and his overbearing daimyo lord of an elder brother. Well written with extremely sympathetic characters, this story follows in the footsteps of many recent fantasies set in ancient Japan, with the story’s plot loosely resembling that of Peter S. Beagle’s masterful “The Tale of Junko and Sayuri.” But despite not treading any new fictional ground, this is still a very good story.
...
Overall, this is one of the best original anthologies I’ve seen in the last year and one that deserves more attention than it received.
...

Yes, I freely admit my bias here, and the following is an unabashed plug for my wife and my friends.

Hugo nominations are now open, and nominations will be accepted until February 28. Among The Usual Suspects, you can nominate Jill's and Michael's story "Beneath the Skin" for best novella. But while you're at it, you should also nominate David Nickle's story "Wylde's Kingdom" at the same time. The entire Tesseracts Twelve collection should be nominated for Best Anthology.

For non-Tesseracts stories (yes, there were some) certainly Karl Schroeder deserves a nomination for Best Novel for "Pirate Sun" (and he has a list of other work from 2008 that is deserving of consideration as well).

Christmas Greetings

To all our family, friends, clients, colleagues, associates and others who might happen on this blog:

Thank you for all of your encouragement, friendship, and for being part of our adventure in 2008!

As we wind down for this year, we would like to wish each of you a holiday season filled with the joy of being with family, friends, and loved ones. May you be blessed with happiness, good health, success and prosperity in 2009 and may you rise to meet all the challenges that you will encounter in the New Year.

best wishes
from Corwin, Jill, and Do-Ming


NOTE - These words were taken from the Lum family Christmas message from 1998 -- a decade ago -- and updated. Hard to believe that so much time has passed.

Happy Winter Solstice!

Today was the northern hemisphere winter solstice of 2008. The actual moment that the sun returned to its northward-ascending node along the ecliptic occurred at 7:04 EST this morning. At 7:04 EST this morning I was still asleep, recovering from the previous two days.

Two days ago, on Friday morning, with a light snow in progress, and a major snowstorm predicted, I headed off to work, intending to take advantage of my non-employee status as a contractor to leave early and avoid the mess (and also shovel out the driveway). Alas, this was not to be -- a problem with a system kept me there until 6:30.

In the morning, the view from the office across the Don Valley Parkway, looking to the southwest, was not promising. Wind and falling snow limited visibility.

As more snow fell, the wind picked it up and made snowdrifts around any obstacles -- like in this picture of the parked car of some poor schlub down in the parking lot. Not my car -- I was afraid to go around to the other side of the building because of what I might see.

Like the rest of the city, things at work started to close down around 3:00. By 3:30, almost everyone was gone. By the time the problem was resolved and I got outside, this was what I saw in the parking lot:

The parking lot had been snow ploughed, but there was an island of snow around my car and that of some stranger who was evidently working even later than me. The drive home wasn't fast but I got there to find a clear driveway from the efforts of Jill and Corwin, who had gone out three times during the course of the day to clear snow.

Shortly after I got home, the city snow plough went by, and I did my bit by shoveling out the comber of snow that the plough had put into the end of the driveway.

Saturday started out sunny but cold -- and fortunately, no snow. Lorna and Michael's Christmas gift this year to Corwin, Cameron, and Robin was a performance of the Pantomime at the Elgin theatre downtown. This year's play was Cinderella.

By early afternoon, we had picked up Cameron and Robin, found parking at a public lot, and hooked up with Lorna and Michael in the lobby of the Elgin. For the rest of the afternoon, theatrical drama worked its magic on young minds. With a curtain time of 2:00, the show was over by 4:30. Although bitterly cold, we enjoyed a Toronto tradition -- looking in the decorated windows of the old Simpson's store, now a Hudson's Bay outlet but still maintaining the Christmas tradition.

Our favourite window was the one that showed a family decorating a Christmas tree, while below the floorboards, a mouse family celebrated their Christmas as well. The mice, however, looked like they went nearly to the man's hip, which prompted much laughter and remarks about "the giant rats of Sumatra" for the rest of the evening.

The day was far from over. For dinner, we went to Gio Rana's Really Really Nice Restaurant, where Cameron and Robin's parents, Chris and Liza, joined us. This restaurant, also known as "the Nose" because of the sculpture of a nose on its sign, is in a building which used to be a bank. The vault in the back is both wine storage and a dining area -- it has a table suitable for 10 or 11 people, which can be reserved. Gio Rana's is quite busy, so getting the vault is always nice, because it ensures a relatively quiet dinner away from the main dining room.

And finally, after dinner, all nine of us went to our friend Sarah's housewarming -- or more accurately, condo warming.

Needless to say, sleep came easy to all of us by the time we got home, and we were all oblivious at the moment where the sun poised at its southernmost point and began its trip back toward the northern latitudes.

This morning, we woke to another 15 cm of snow, which of course meant more shoveling, which I did with Corwin.

Shoveling with Corwin carries with it certain inherent parental dangers that involve the possibility of unexpected missiles, lovingly crafted by Corwin from snow, suddenly hitting a body part, accompanied by shrieks of mirth.

Later in the morning, we had dim sum with Madeline and her husband, Mr. Ashby. Food, however, was only a prelude to the geek happiness of getting Mr. Ashby's new computer at Canada Computers at the Pacific Mall.


Observation: due to snow shoveling and dim sum, we arrived at the Pacific Mall after the noon hour. There was no parking in the basement, but we easily found a spot outside -- unheard of for this time of year. Although we initially thought that a combination of weather and the economy was hurting business, we revised that estimation by the time we left -- the mall and the parking lot were packed, as usual.

We got home late in the afternoon, just in time to shovel the 1 or 2 cm of snowfall that had accumulated on the driveway, and to deal with the leavings of the snow plough that had come while we were out.

This was the view from the back yard looking toward the front earlier this evening as the longest night of the year began.

A new year, and new possibilities are just around the corner. Happy Winter Solstice.

A supercomputer cluster for Christmas

Physorg has an article about two scientists who built a supercomputer using 8 Sony Playstation3 consoles. The instructions for creating your own are here, released under a Free/Open Source license.

So if we can find eight PS3's that no one is doing anything with, we're all set. The other route that we could go is to use older PS2's, which we could get cheap from gamers upgrading to newer/faster hardware. We could build a beowulf cluster using 70 PS2's like the National Center for Supercomputing Applications did a few years back.

Once we get it built, I'm thinking the first problem we can work on is to simulate the massive nuclear explosion at the earth's core that a recent theory postulates as the cause of the moon's formation. This satisfies two goals -- research on something that goes bang, and research on something that might further the Ultimate Goal of World Domination.

Swiffer Will Kill Your Puppy. Or Not.

The blog post that I am linking to contains strong language, but I endorse the spirit of the author's rant.

The internet, as wonderful a tool as it is, also turns out to be equally effective at spreading disinformation, urban legends, and just plain crap.

The article referenced above speculates, without going into much detail, that possibly the attack on Swiffer originates with a Proctor and Gamble rival. This is not all that far-fetched -- can you imagine how effective a marketing campaign for your own product would be, if at the same time your competitor's product had a negative story spreading about it on the internet?

In a similar way, consider the popular e-mail that circulates about the "Stella Awards", that supposedly celebrates frivolous lawsuits:

For those unfamiliar with these awards, they are named after 81-year-old Stella Liebeck who spilled hot coffee on herself and successfully sued the McDonald's in
New Mexico where she purchased the coffee. You remember, she took the lid off the coffee and put it between her knees while she was driving. Who would ever think one could get burned doing that, right?

That's right; these are awards for the most outlandish lawsuits and verdicts in the U.S. You know, the kinds of cases that make you scratch your head. So keep your head scratcher handy.

Then it goes on to cite outlandish awards for lawsuits, phrased in such a way as to raise the ire of any reasonable person...

...except that none of the lawsuits actually happened. Snopes ends their analysis by writing

"...Yet on the other hand, we don't want to see those who have legitimate cause denied their right to sue (or in the case of the seriously injured, their right to sue for an appropriate amount). We also don't want to see corporations run unchecked, free to turn out whatever dangerous product they like because the combination of capped awards and their deep pockets render them bulletproof.

"It's a complicated issue, one not made any easier to make sense of by lists of fake cases of horrendous miscarriages of justice. One has to wonder why someone is so busy trying to stir up outrage and who or what that outrage would ultimately benefit."

So call me paranoid, but it occurs to me in this case that weakened consumer protection laws and limitations on the circumstances under which one can sue would be just great for some corporations -- the ones that want to "run unchecked, free to turn out whatever dangerous product they like because the combination of capped awards and their deep pockets render them bulletproof".

In a similar vein, one of my favourite chain emails is the I AM A BAD CANADIAN rant that I manage to receive several times a year.

YES, I'M A BAD CANADIAN

I Am the Liberal-Progressives Worst Nightmare. I am a Canadian.

So the first observation is that there is no doubt about who originated this, and who this is supposed to attack. The implication here is that if you are liberal or progressive in any way, you are not a Canadian.

I believe the money I make belongs to me and my family, not some Liberal governmental functionary be it NDP, Liberal or Conservative!

This sentence is internally self-contradictory, but then what did you expect based on the lead-in? A member of a Liberal government wouldn't, by definition, be NDP or Conservative. Or perhaps the original author wanted to slam civil servants, whose small "L" liberal values allow the Liberal-Progressive agenda to be promoted? As far as the anti-taxation part, the author seems to be unaware that we are all connected to the economy. If the rant had been to demand maximum value for our tax dollars, that would have gotten my sympathy, but disconnecting from all responsibility for taxes is just silly. Damn, that sentiment may cause me to be reviled as a conservative in some quarters.

I'm in touch with my feelings and I like it that way!

I think owning a gun doesn't make you a killer, it makes you a smart Canadian.

Being in touch with your feelings here obviously means to shut down your brain and just make your decisions based on how you feel.

Despite gun control being well thought of by the undoubtedly Liberal-Progressive Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police, and a significant proportion of Canadians being in favour of it, the author seeks to draw a positive association between Canadian-ness and gun ownership. I don't buy it. I can see the need on Aboriginal reservations for hunting, and on farms and in smaller rural communities for hunting and rodent control, but it is not clear to me that heavily armed neighbourhoods would serve most communities.

I think being a minority does not make you noble or victimized, and does not entitle you to anything.

I believe that if you are selling me a Big Mac, do it in English.

Here is the real heart of this screed. Being a minority does not make you noble or victimized, particularly when we come to express our opinion about how we dislike your differences. And it certainly doesn't entitle you to protection under the law when we come to kick the crap out of you, because that is an entitlement only for "real" Canadians.

Serve me that Big Mac in English, because it is clear that I don't know what a quiche is, or Tsingtao, or sushi, or biryani, even weinerschnitzel. This is a denial of the multi-cultural nature of Canada. Or even the historical nature, if you happen not to believe in multi-culturalism. But it is interesting that people can feel so threatened and respond in this way.

We're starting a major downturn in the economy. As times get harder, I expect that the "threatened by outsider" response will happen more. An example of that is the Ford dealership that ran the racist ad attacking Toyota vehicles. This example is American - I'd like to believe that this won't happen in Canada, but I've also stopped believing in the tooth fairy.

I believe everyone has a right to pray to his or her God when and where they want to.

Left unsaid, of course, is that you'd better not be praying to Allah. Or Visnhu. Or making observaces to Buddha. 'Cuz, dammit, it ain't Canadian.

My heroes are John Wayne, Babe Ruth, Roy Rogers, and whoever canceled Jerry Springer.

Here is revealed the true intellectual bankruptcy of this piece -- all of the icons invoked are American, not Canadian. What I suspect but can't confirm is that this was originally an American GOP-conservative "rally the supporters" type of notice that found its way north of the border and got edited by an enthusiastic fellow traveller.

I know wrestling is fake and I don't waste my time watching or arguing about it.

This was the only sentence in the entire piece that communicated anything useful. But remember that I, the commentator, am a conservative Liberal-Progressive, and my opinion can't be thought of as a "real" Canadian opinion.

I've never owned a slave, or was a slave, I haven't burned any witches or been persecuted by the Turks and neither have you! So, shut up already.

The conclusion, once again, from this sentence is that if you are black, or Armenian, or an English Pilgrim, or a refugee, or anything else out of what the author thinks as "the ordinary", then you aren't a "real" Canadian.

I believe if you don't like the way things are here, go back to where you came from and change your own country! This is CANADA.

If you were born here and don't like it you are free to move to any Socialist country that will have you.

Because, dammit, we don't want your kind here! See above re minorities. And while we're at it, bad people are socialists, because socialists and Liberal-Progressives are somehow related.

I think the cops have every right to shoot your sorry rear if you're running from them.

I also think they have the right to pull you over if you're breaking the law, regardless of what colour you are.

And, no, I don't mind having my face shown on my drivers license. I think it's good......

There is no controversy regarding pictures on drivers licenses -- that particular point is a distraction. Similarly, Canadian police in any jurisdiction do pull people over without regard for skin colour. There are some arguments that suggest that non-whites are targeted more often for enforcement, but if so, it is not clear to me that this happens on the road, in cars -- where practically speaking, a police officer would see the car first and might not actually be able to see past the tinted glass into the interior.

And as far as being shot by the police -- anyone who believes that they are a real Canadian also knows that the police don't make mistakes.

I think if you are too stupid to know how a ballot works, I don't want you deciding who should be running our nation for the next four years.

This bit provide extra credence to my belief that this originated originally in the US. But it is not beyond the realm of possibility that the real Canadian who wrote this was unfamiliar with the way the Canadian government works.

I dislike those people standing in the intersections trying to sell me stuff or trying to guilt me into making 'donations' to their cause.

Again, this sentence speaks of being threatened. There is a lot of fear and intolerance coming out.

I believe that it doesn't take a village to raise a child, it takes two parents.

Unspoken: they'd better not be same-sex parents!

I believe 'illegal' is illegal no matter what the lawyers think.

This sentence is just astounding. Lawyers and judges and the Canadian parliament define what is "legal", and that definition is tested adversarially every time there is an issue. It is called "English Common Law" and has been in effect for roughly a thousand years.

I believe the Canadian flag should be the only one allowed in CANADA!

Excuse me, I need to contact the appropriate ministry in every Province and Territory to tell them that they need to get rid of their provincial or territorial flags. And I guess we'd better not have any foreign flags flying in front of embassies. The author doesn't address the UN flag flying beside the Canadian flag on various peacekeeping missions, but we probably better get rid of that as well -- gotta be a real canadian after all...

If this makes me a BAD Canadian, then yes, I'm a BAD Canadian.

If you are a BAD Canadian too, please forward this to everyone you know.

We want our country back!

At the end, there is the appeal to forward the crap on to all your friends and e-mail contacts. And closing with one final, irrational appeal to bigotry, that somehow real Canadians aren't in charge in their own country.

No one who sends me this rant (and as I said, I get it several times a year) are real Canadians in the same way that the Campbell family of Holland Township in New Jersey (or is it Pennsylvania?) are real Americans. These people are possibly real Americans to a level beyond that of the real Americans cited by Sarah Palin during the recent Presidential campaign in the US.

It seems to me that people focus on a few key words, like the bogus call to emulate a standard of real Canadian-ness, and they stop thinking about the larger implications of the hatred and bigotry in the message. And that drives me nuts.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled economic crisis.

The MikeFeed -- December 2, 2008

My friend Mike is an omnivorous speed reader with enormous mental bandwidth. Through the course of the day, I get *many* e-mails from him -- each one containing a (usually) provocative subject line, and a link to an article. Mike provides enough material to keep a blog going for weeks, every day. The only reason I don't use more material that he sends me is because, well dammit, this might as well then be HIS blog.

Today, in a brief exchange of e-mail, I made a disparaging comment about BoingBoing being like the Reader's Digest of the internet. Mike thought we could do better, and I agreed. Just for fun, I thought I would summarize some of today's links from Mike and provide some (limited) commentary. I've tried to organize these by topic, but keep in mind that I get these in no particular order.

Canadian Politics

Luminosis has never been overtly a political blog, but politics is one of the few modern day acceptable blood sports. It is impossible not to be affected by politics. As a politics junkie, the events unfolding in Ottawa are pretty interesting. History will be made here, if the Opposition parties have the balls (and the capacity for the hard work) to put together a coalition to take down the Conservatives.

TheStar.com - Harper to blame for political crisis
Reuters - Canadian government slams opposition coup plan
adamyoshida.com: How I Triggered a Constitutional Crisis - this is a blogger, new to me. One of the great things about being on Mike's distribution list is that I get stuff that I would likely never find myself. This one strikes me as a wingnut who created a blog just to rant about the current situation -- as of today, there is only one entry on that blog -- no history.
Metafilter - Greatest histories written in the toughest times
Canada victim of power-grabbing politicians
Metafilter items often have great comments -- the above two are no exception.

PoliticalFilter - Canada coalition deal inches ever closer - Hmmm -- must look at the rest of PoliticalFilter.
Tories begin battle against coalition


American Politics

The GOP's "God Problem," Part Two


The Economy

Because we're all getting hit by some aspect of the economy today...

Auto execs prepare for second run at Washington - MarketWatch
Synthetic CDO's: tsunami event when major bankruptcies reaches 9


Game Tech

It is an article of faith with me that the ultimate motivation for all geekness is video games.
Shot of Xbox 360's 256MB internal storage
Best of 2008: Top 5 Wii Games
When Video Game Weapons Attack In Real Life


Tech

BitTorrent Will Destroy The Interwebs!
Boeing Airborne Laser Weapon Fires for the First Time
gOS Cloud - From zero to web browser in just a few seconds
Steam Linux on the way?
Linux Evolution Reveals Origins of Curious Mathematical Phenomenon
Vietnamese security firm: Your face is easy to fake


Science

Jupiter, Venus and Moon to form frown in evening sky
Planet Found Orbiting Puffed-Up Star


Photography

50 Stunning Examples Of Reflective Photography
Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous Sucking


Pop Culture

Five New Wolverine Photos


Weird Stuff and Humour

Holy Book of Bacon
6 Baby Names You Probably Shouldn't Give Your Kid
World War 2 as an animated GIF using an online game metaphor
Prayer vs. hard work checklist
Cracked - 7 Historical Figures Who Were Absurdly Hard To Kill
Found On Craigslist: Nissan Ninja Hauler Kicks Ass


What I learned from doing this post is that Mike sends me a *lot* of links. This post only contains a fraction of one day's worth!

Processing all those e-mails into a blog post regularly requires some way of autogenerating the HTML -- I need to grab the Subject line and the URL stored in the body of the e-mail, while at the same time avoiding text.

More on the Tesseracts Twelve book launch

Derryl Murphy commented overnight on my previous post, and Dave put up some of Karen's photos from yesterday on his own blog. Karen took much nicer photos of Grace and Elaine, and includes one of Corwin, who for most of the afternoon was immersed in reading a book in a back corner, away from excitable adults...

Tesseracts Twelve book launch

Saturday mornings in the Lum household usually involve a certain amount of being dazed and confused, particularly if the evening before was a late night.

On this particular Saturday, Jill left prior to the first crack of dawn to get groceries from the St. Lawrence Market, a Saturday morning ritual that she performs with Michael and Lorna.

Corwin and I indulged our state of dazed confusion until noon, by which time Jill had returned with groceries. Corwin and I left to get hair cuts from Rocco and Robert, the barbers supreme in Etobicoke. We managed to get home by 1:00pm, which left some leisurely time to get ready for the important event of the day -- the Tesseracts Twelve book launch at Bakka-Phoenix!

We picked up Michael enroute, got over to Queen and Bathurst, and for once, Towedaway, god of urban parking, smiled upon us: we managed to get a street parking spot a few doors away from Bakka. After a careful examination of the lingerie models in the window of Miss Behavin' across the street, I strolled over to Bakka with Jill, Michael, and Corwin.

The launch party was already starting when we arrived. I had an opportunity to meet (and collect autographs from) Claude Lalumiere, editor of the Tesseracts Twelve anthology; Brett Alexander Savory who wrote the Foreword; Grace Seybold, who authored the story "Intersections"; and Elaine (E. L.) Chen, who wrote "The Story of the Woman and Her Dog". Our friend Dave Nickle ("Wylde's Kingdon") was there. And of course, Jill and Michael were participating for "Beneath the Skin".

The highlight of the afternoon were readings. Claude read from the works of the three authors who weren't able to be present -- Derryl Murphy and Randy McCharles in Alberta, and Gord Sellar, somewhere in Korea. The authors who were actually present -- Jill and Michael, Grace, Elaine, Dave -- read brief excerpts from their stories.

Using the video function on Jill's camera, I was able to capture almost the entire reading. I missed the introductory remarks by Chris, the manager of Bakka, and part of the introductory remarks by Brett. A posting to Youtube may be in order.


In the above photo are Brett, Claude, Grace, Michael, and Jill.


Jill, Dave, and Grace during a lull in the signings.


Grace and Elaine. Apologies to Grace, who looks either gobsmacked or else she was goosed by Dave, whose arm you can see on the left. Actually, Grace was being surprised by someone walking up. I used this photo because it is the only shot I took that has Elaine in it. Below is a much nicer photo of Grace, signing our family copy of Tesseracts Twelve.



The turnout was great today. I talked to many friends who came to show their support. And Bakka sold a lot of copies of the book.

Important stuff (the shameless promotional part of this blog post)- If you are in Toronto, you can buy copies of Tesseracts Twelve, which are still available at Bakka-Phoenix.

For our American friends, you can buy this from Amazon.com or Barnes and Noble or Borders. It is almost certainly available at other fine bookstores or websites as well. Let us know if you spot it.

For those of you elsewhere in Canada, Bakka-Phoenix will ship if you order from them. Amazon.ca or Chapters Indigo are alternative choices. Again, please let us know if you spot it in a local bookstore -- let us know the date, the name of the bookstore, and how many copies you saw. (Not that we are obsessively trying to evolve a view of the book's distribution pattern -- no, not at all).

If you visit us, and bring a copy of Tesseracts Twelve, we will do our best to ensure that you get your copy autographed by Jill, Michael, and Dave at the very least.

Finally, note to self -- Gord Sellar is reputed to be in Korea. Must check with Krystal and Peter - after all, the Canadian ex-pat community in Korea will be large, but won't be so large as to rule out the possibility of an acquaintance among them.

Tesseracts 12 Book Launch this Saturday Nov 29

The story which Jill co-authored with Michael is called "Beneath the Skin" and it is available in the collection Tesseracts 12, published by Edge Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing, an Imprint of Hades Publications Inc. Mailing address -- P.O. Box 1714, Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7, Canada.

Edge publishes a *lot* of SF and Fantasy, but I have noticed one unfortunate problem with Tesseracts 12 -- it isn't available yet on Amazon!

We went to the World Fantasy Convention, which was held this year in Calgary over the Hallowe'en weekend. While we were there, Jill met with the people from Edge, and had a chance to do some book signings. Michael and Jill talked with Colleen Cahill, who subsequently wrote a positive review which appeared in the SFRevu website.

Karl Schroeder thinks this could be the best Tesseracts anthology yet, and hopefully a lot of people will agree with him.

There will be an opportunity to do more book signings in a couple of days -- Bakka-Phoenix Books is having a launch party for the book here in Toronto. Besides Jill Snider Lum and Michael Skeet, Claude Lalumiere (the editor) and David Nickle are expected to be there. I understand that possibly some other authors of stories in Tesseracts 12 may be there as well, but at this point I don't know which ones.

Bakka-Phoenix is located at 697 Queen Street West, in the middle of the first block west of Bathurst, deep in the heart of the Queen West Village. Directions to the store are available from their website.

UPDATE:I was wrong about the book not being available through Amazon. The issue was that I did a search on "Tesseracts 12" and got no results. However, it works just fine based on a search on "Tesseracts Twelve", which is the correct title of the book.