As I am apt to do in these moments, I called bullshit.

And then, with the help of the patient and curious party attendees, I organized an experiment.

We blindfolded Dalton and made him stand in the centre of a circle of human bodies (ours). Crucially, we left a gap in our circle, the width of one human body. We then made Dalton turn in a circle a few times, and asked him to identify where the gap was through echolocation. At first, we had a hard time not laughing while we watched him turn and click. So we botched the first few experiments by being too noisy and by revealing our relative positions. But we finally got quiet.

The first time that Dalton pointed directly to the open spot, I thought “good guess.” And then, I thought, “can you repeat that?” And then I thought, “we need more tests.” And test we did. We did it again. We moved the hole around. We took our experiment outside. We tried doing it ourselves to see if the blindfold was working. ¹ No one else could do it. But Dalton was right every single time.

When I think about it now, it’s less startling. But at the time I was amazed. Dalton, it turns out, has a great ear. He is, after all, a musician. But anyone can echolocate at home by doing this simple experiment. Blindfold yourself, preferably in a dark unlit room, and ask your friend to hold a text book in front of your face – or not. Try it about a foot away. Your job is simply to make sounds and guess whether the text book is raised in front of your face, or not. Keep track of your record of successes. Most people can do simple echolocation. Kinda neat though.

Anyway, some people are very good at echolocation. And, apparently, anyone can learn. But there’s a dark side.

A weekend-long rock camp for all adults, all genders, over 19. An experience like no other! Learn an instrument, form a band, write a song and perform like a rock star! No prior music experience necessary.

When it comes to stones and cake, the difference in longevity is mostly about the chemical makeup of the medium. There has to be a serious disaster to utterly destroy a stone sculpture. But degrees of permanence is not always so straight forward. Take Wikipedia, for example. There is a huge community of volunteers and a few paid staff that keep it running. And if Wikipedia lasts a hundred years, and it could, then it will not be simply because of the chemical properties of the medium. It will still exist be the sheer organizing effort of the community of supporters.

Violins are more like Wikipedia ¹ than a stone sculpture. It doesn’t take much effort to utterly destroy a violin. You would need much less than an earthquake to do so. Heck, our bunny rabbit could easily reduce one to toothpicks in about a day. But despite their relative frailty, violins tend to last well. They generally last longer than people do. Sometimes many centuries.² And this is evidence of the extent to which they are cared for by artists and artisans. It turns out that the violin is designed so that there is very little that you can’t repair.

It’s not every day that you meet a violin maker. But I did. And a couple weeks ago Galen Hartley showed me his workshop, his current violin in progress (nearly finished!) and the rough outline of the next one.

Him: I know I should be working right now … but the police actions were so fucked up …

Her: Yeah, no, I’m pretty sure the police are supremely fucked up as well. There are dozens of videos coming out of events of the weekend. Those people don’t have to do those things but they do. So they are just as fucked up as the powers that enable them to.

Him: Yeah, that’s true too … I can imagine that it would be hard to not be caught up in the fucked up culture of the police, that special mix of power, entitlement and legitimized use of violence …

Her: Yeah but they chose to become cops in the first place. if they get caught up in the culture of policing, it’s because they chose to be police. What they’re doing here is no different, fundamentally, than what they do most of the rest of the time. it’s the logical conclusion. I just have zero sympathy for someone who finds themselves in that position. I have these moments watching the videos where I think, none of these people had second thoughts about this? are any of these cops going to come forward and speak out about how fucked up this is? probably not. even if they are there in all their gear, they don’t have to be beating people up but they do, over and over again. people don’t do things that they can’t justify to themselves one way or another. They think they’re right. Each of these individuals is making decisions at any given moment and they think they’re making the right decisions. no sympathy here. :(

Him: Yeah, I agree with all your points … I guess I just want to be able to find ways of connecting and understanding … after the revolution, if you know what I mean, they will be part of society too … it feels too easy to just write them off. That said, when it comes down to who I have in my life, I’m not sure that I could be intimate with anyone who had chosen to be a cop. I’m ambivalent about it, I guess. Although I don’t want that to get in the way of having an honest discussion and critique of what they are doing.

It also seems, in this case, that they were so directly empowered by the state to take the violence to this level, so we also need to be critiquing that part of what made the violence possible – not instead of, but as well as critiquing the police.

Her: right, i feel ya =)

Luckily, I found this guy who had a solution to the missing photos issue. I actually didn’t implement his solution yet, but I downloaded the iPhone Explorer and found the photos on my phone and backed them up on my desktop. Now I’ll wait for Apple to provide a fix. The photos are there, they just need to be accessible via the iPhone camera roll.

So, 1 EVU is about 262,000 barrels, which is about 11 million gallons, which is about 44 million litres.

The spill gushing started on April 20th 2010.

The public relations strategy cover up by BP, and BP experts, have been steadily underestimating the flow of oil.^{2 3} It is interesting to note that prior to the rupture, BP had estimated the worst case flow rate of about 162,000 barrels a day. ⁴ That’s about 6.8 million gallons, or roughly 0.6 EVUs per day.

Steve Wereley, an engineer from Purdue University, initially thought the leak may be 70,000 barrels or roughly .25 EVUs per day. Later, publishing with Ian R. MacDonald, John Amos and Timothy Crone, they collectively estimated the flow at between 40,000 barrels and 100,000 barrels a day. That’s between .15 EVUs and .38 EVUs per day.^{5 6} It’s refreshing to read their article because it so clearly indicts BP in regards to their refusal to allow effective third party measurement of the flow.

So do the math

We’re coming up on two months of gushing oil. If you take the lesser estimate, we’re looking at about: 60 days x .15 EVUs = 9 EVUs

If you take the greater flow rate, we’re looking at about: 60 days x .38 EVUs = 23 EVUs

In conclusion

Looks like the BP oil catastrophe has so far gushed between 9 and 23 times the amount of oil that the Exxon Valdez dumped.

For Further Reading

1. Is America’s Chernobyl in Canada’s Future
2. Are We Poisoning Ourselves or What?
3. Dispersant is a Cover Up and a Toxic Chemical/
4. BP Executive Denies Oil Plume

Another kind of objectivity is related to the knowledge garnering process. I am referring here to the process by which we get knowledge. It’s no surprise that people who are more, shall we say, invested in the conclusions of a discovery process, are more likely to skew the results of that process.

Another kind of objectivity is related to the integrity and particular disinterestedness of the person making claims. So if I’ve been asked to count the pencils in your office, the number I arrive at is probably not controversial… unless I sell pencils.

Okay, so this isn’t rocket science. Everyone gets this. Moms get this. Dads get this. Kids get this. Don’t ask sales people if they like the product. Don’t expect an objective analysis from GM about Toyota. We trust people in certain contexts, given their expertise and investments in those context.

Ah, there’s a sticky point.

The folks that have the expertise in some contexts are also often the people with the biggest investments. This is because science is expensive. Science is, more and more, the slave of industry. It can be hard to find experts at arms length from critical issues. It’s even harder when industry hacks, industry front groups, and industry lobbyists are challenging and marginalizing the views of other experts. The tobacco lobby and the global warming denial industry are both excellent examples of how powerful this can be.

Latest estimates from scientists studying the disaster for the US government suggest 160-380 million litres (42-100 million US gallons) of oil have already entered the Gulf. Most experts believe there is more oil gushing into the sea in an hour than officials originally said was spilling in an entire day. — guardian.co.uk, Helen Pidd and agencies, Friday 11 June 2010 10.07 BST

Well we have a guest here in Victoria right now – a bunch of guests. And they’re all packing. Navies from six countries, and some eight thousand sailors have descended on our little town. And the USS Ronald Reagan is the largest and the meanest, I think. Supported by several submarines, and nuclear missile enabled, this is a machine that’s packing serious heat. And it’s manned by thousands of soldiers willing to serve, protect and attack on command – and who generally don’t demonstrate any understanding of the history or impacts of colonization, gendered violence or racialization. But they’re committed to our protection, right?

That said, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer size and cost and capacity of this titan of the ocean. A modern titan.

photo by Darcy Merrick

It Will Take Maturity & Patience

said the latest Chinese fortune. Now no silver spoon. Now no second piece of
cake. Both of us deprived children, before a blackboard in a French provincial
town: children who do not understand the inflection, hands behind backs
standing in the corner because the two girls have a smash on each other.
Yes I had a thing for you from the get-go, a thing hard to bury alive.
Submarine, aqua & teal green buoyed me up, angst my bride.

And just because a minority government gets a non-confidence vote in the House, a whole new election doesn’t have to get triggered. When a government falls, it’s just not true that the only option is to have an election. But you hear this falsehood spoken often. You hear journalists say it. You hear newspaper editors say it. And you hear big business say it. And of course, lately the Conservatives have been saying it.

When a minority government falls, any other portion of parliament can come forward with the intent to form government. The majority of Canadians voted against Harper’s Christians last election. I would prefer a coalition.

If you want to relinquish ALL control of your computer to Western Digital, then this is a good choice. If you get annoyed with software that auto-starts, can’t be shut off, and consumes virtually all computer capacity for extended periods of time “categorizing your files”, then stay away from Western Digital Smartware (I prefer to call it “Dumbware”). I bought the 1TB Essential and it will be my last Western Digital purchase. My second drive was a Seagate — and that’s where I’ll stay. Software developers and distributors who usurp control (apparently because they know what I want to do better than I do), should look forward to a purgatory of infinite loops! — Ron Williams – December 18th, 2009 at 1:27 pm EST

So Jenny wrote a manuscript. Her genre, very broadly, is creative nonfiction. Yup, that’s right. It’s nonfiction, written artfully. Think documentary but executed with enough thoughtfulness, attention to audience and writing talent, that you might be interested in it even if it’s not about your personal weekend hobby.

Jenny has written about the arctic and her journeys there. She is, among other things, an expert paddler. As it stands, it is an unfinished manuscript, although I have no doubt that she will find a publisher. I know this because I had the pleasure of attending her defense and while I haven’t actually read the manuscript, I have listened, carefully, to those that have.

I was delighted to discover that much of the challenge of writing such a book is in telling stories about the wilderness with integrity.¹ This has been on my mind lately. Many conservation organizations choose to focus on the charismatic megafauna like the baby seals, grizzly bears and bald eagles, in their public communications. From a public relations stand point I totally get this. Humans that lack biological training, after all, have more compassion, emotional connection and willingness to act on behalf of elk than they do for invisibly small fungus and such.

But at least one concern is that while these public relations strategies make sense on an individual basis, there may be an aggregate affect of these campaigns on the public’s imagination. Over the course of forty years of saving whales, could it be that we’ve constructed a lopsided, incomplete, and too simplistic image of the wilderness we’re trying to protect?²

Now this was not exactly the centre of Jenny’s defense. Well, maybe it was. It was certainly on the minds of the committee members. These academics were, in moments, shall we say, disappointed, by the portrayals of wilderness by some authors and organizations. And it seemed to me that they spent the majority of their time during her defense pressing on Jenny to justify her literary decisions in this regard.

And while Jenny has been very cognizant of these, well, literary obligations, she was broaching them a slightly different angle. It seemed to me that the challenge occurred to Jenny as a challenge to shake readers out of our common and cliche conceptions of arctic wilderness and human experience there in. Maybe my reading of this is clouded by my experiences doing communications work. But as an author (or a brand manager) nothing is scarier than the preconceived ideas that folks have about your topic (or industry or company). People jump to conclusions, they pigeon hole, they try to know you. And then they fit you, and your topic, into a tiny little box. And then they pat your head and say good girl. All of this is tolerable if it’s an acceptable little box. But it’s an absolute nightmare if it’s a box that you really hate.

Of course there is a certain amount of this that is about ego, and about rejecting a mainstream view, and about distrusting the public, and about underestimating your reader, and about dismissing others as ignorant, and about repositioning yourself in the marketplace of ideas, and about dismissing your competition or those that have gone before you. But this is also about trying to see the world as new; about making the world new.

See, in academic jargon, the wilderness is, arguably, a human construction.³ Wilderness is a human concept. Sounds crazy to some. Many would just prefer to say that human stories about the wilderness are human stories, and that human experience of the wilderness is human experience and that human thoughts about the wilderness are human thoughts. Most folks would also prefer to say that the wilderness is still real even if we can only ever think of it, while we’re thinking of it. No big deal. We don’t need a Ph. D. to acknowledge this. And we don’t need a bunch of “quotation marks” everywhere. We don’t need to refer to other people’s ideas of wilderness as “wilderness” and we don’t need to arbitrarily dream up strained cognates of this word (wyld?), and start using them instead. I do, however, like the use of the word “wild.” And, like any philosopher, I love a good distinction.

And, admittedly, it’s easy to forget that our understanding of wilderness, is just an understanding. I’ll conspicuously switch to the first person here, so I don’t offend my reader’s intelligence. Sometimes I forget that the things I think I know are just things I think I know. And sometimes I forget that the thoughts I have about the arctic wilderness are just thoughts. This is a pretty common trap for me. ⁴

Jenny, luckily, has escaped relatively unscathed by these academic madnesses.⁵ Her genre actually depends on the concept of truth. And so, nonfiction, even creative nonfiction, actually has to work and give meaning and shape to the slippery concepts of truth, integrity, and representation.⁶

Plus, she’s a solid story teller, a disciplined writer, a great humourist, and someone willing to earn her moments of emotionally heightened story telling. And she’s willing to talk politics, gender and privilege. Like, she’s willing to actually talk about it. Good work, Jenny.

http://www.timirvin.com/2010/04/how-to-get-a-picture-of-an-tundra-wolf-howling/

Canada’s climate researchers are being muzzled, their funding slashed, research stations closed, findings ignored and advice on the critical issue of the century unsought by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government…

Harper is the guy that once claimed that global warming was nothing but a socialist conspiracy after all. And Harper is from Calgary. But, in defense of Calgary, there are many scientists that live there and there are even a few that don’t work for Big Oil. I guess that’s why Harper decided to just muzzle them. A scientist from Edmonton, writing in the Ottawa Citizen, said this:

It is clear that muzzling under the Harper government is the most oppressive in the history of federal government science. Incredibly, some of the most eminent scientists in Canada have been forbidden to speak publicly on scientific matters where they are recognized as world experts, ranging from climate change to pollution of lakes and rivers. Instead, the public is referred to media-savvy spin doctors, who usually know very little about the science of these topics, spouting the party line.

The report that got this all started was written by the Climate Action Network and can be found here. There is much that is interesting in this report and one detail that I found particularly  interesting was the fact that Harper has appointed climate change skeptics to the boards of two super important granting bodies: NSERC and CFI. So just to explain how this works, students in Universities that are working at the graduate level in the sciences are funded by granting agencies like NSERC. In fact, I believe the National Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) is responsible for the funding of all of the PhD scientists I know. And NSERC has the difficult position of selecting and denying applications for funding. Not everyone’s research gets funded and not all research gets the green light. So the significance of Harper’s appointments to the board, is very very real.

One of these appointments is Mark Mullins. Mark Mullins was the Executive Director of the Fraser Institute for four years.

Another one of the appointments (to CFI) was John Weissenberger. He’s a geologist from Calgary who worked in oil and gas for twenty years. He’s actually a friend of the evil-overlord himself and was a chief of staff for the evil-overlord’s government. The author of the Climate Action Network report, Andrew Cuddy, took the time to include a quote by John Weissenberger and I’ll sign off by quoting the quote. But first, you should know that Weissenberger didn’t write the following soundbite alone. He was joined by George Koch, who I’m assuming is from the Koch family of Koch Oil. The Koch family are all pious followers of Ayn Rand even, I believe, requiring that their employees and executives read Rand’s books. The Koch’s, in short, are libertarians and conservatives.

“[T]he great weakening of the Stalinist intellectual monument of global warming theory continues in regular increments.” — George Koch (from a blog published jointly with Weissenberger), September 13, 2008

It’s a good study with significant social relevance. And Maclean’s Magazine wrote an article about it. ²

But the comments on this Maclean’s article tell the story of racism in Canada, as much as the research itself. This comment by “Julie LaFlamme” might constitute hate speech. Apparently she thinks all people with racialized minority names are immigrants. Wow. And apparently she thinks it’s acceptable to discriminate on the basis of race. Wow. And apparently Maclean’s thinks this kind of comment is acceptable. Heck.

Comment by “Julie LaFlamme” to MacLean’s article on 22 May 2009:

So this is a surprise? Funny I thought that if a company was paying its employees a fair wage, submitting their taxes on time, and generally behaving in an acceptable way, it could consider the type of employee it would choose to hire also based on the ability to fit in with the culture of th business ( how many .A.S.P.s do you see working at retail establishments in Chinatown?)
If people don’t want to hire immigrants, why should they be obligated to interview them? This is taking political correctness just a little too far. Why should an immigrant get a job over a natural citizen, whose parents & grandparents have built the country up.
I am so tired of catering to immigrnats – who seem to think nothing of trying to bring their conflicts & screw-ups from their old homes here with them.
Hopefully those who work in immigration will grow a set & start doing their jobs screening undesirables who end up being citizens of convenience, not contibutors to our society.

Well the answer to that question is too long ¹ for this post. So instead what I’ve tried to do here is outline a few of the challenges facing the modern journalist by summarizing six challenges of publishing in this modern context.

Six challenges

First of all, newspapers are a businesses. They have clients. And their clients are businesses that want to advertise. But they lose these clients when the newspaper promotes views and says things that don’t align with the bottom line interests of said clients. So an oil company based out of Calgary, for example, has a fiduciary duty to be opposed to policies that limit their profitability. That in turn means that they can’t spend money on advertising with broadcasters or publishers that promote policies that hurt their profitability. And that means that journalists have to write in ways that don’t make their editors choke on their ties.² I call this the challenge of compliance.

Second, this is happening in an internationalized context where newspapers are losing market share and profitability because of “the google”, or the “interweb”. So the pressure on journalists to say something of more interest and value than say, a blogger, is immense. I call this the challenge of attention.

Third, issues are complicated. Climate science is complicated. Social policy is complicated. Police brutality is complicated. Did so-and-so “die”? Or were they “killed”? This is sometimes a very tricky business. And given the possibility that someone with money or an agenda might sue you for libel, it’s easier to just write about the sports. In a complicated world it can be very hard to find out the truth or reasonable approximations of it. I call this difficulty, the challenge of integrity.

If finding the truth and understanding complex situations is difficult, try doing it on a timeline. And that’s the kicker: publishing for a newspaper means saying something on time. The traditional newspaper has a press that runs on a rigid schedule for economic reasons and reasons of scale. And because newspapers, and the old people that read them, hate trees and don’t understand the interweb-thingy, they still produce content on this rigid schedule. This is the challenge of production.

Fifthly, the pressure for journalists to understand a situation, produce some engaging copy, say something non-threatening for their advertisers, not get sued by a person in the story, get it to print on time all the while bearing the weight of the future of the newspaper, is intense. The financial future of all the staff is on their shoulders and the weight must be spine-crushing. After all, if Canwest fails to avert their bankruptcy and the whole empire tanks, the Aspers won’t lose their retirement savings or their house. Contra a common capitalist myth, it’s actually the employees that bear most of the real risk of the Canwest empire crumbling. Employees that have moved their families and invested in mortgages or are carrying the debt of their journalism degrees can’t afford for Canwest to go broke. So all of the myriad staff that it takes to design and print a newspaper, distribute it and find advertisers all rely on the content produced by the reporters. That’s a lot of pressure. The reporters are accountable to their fellow employees in a major way. I call this the challenge of positive-thinking-will-hopefully-keep-this-boat-floating-until-we-all-pay-our-mortgages.

And finally and perhaps most significantly, journalists need to worry about their own jobs. I actually don’t know this for certain. But this is the word on the street. Journalists, apparently, are losing there jobs. And, apparently, it’s not just Canwest that has been losing employees. So it turns out that reporters need to keep their editors very very happy. So, in deference to the first challenge, I also call this the challenge of compliance.

In Summary

1. The challenge of compliance (for editors)
2. The challenge of attention
3. The challenge of integrity
4. The challenge of production
5. The challenge of positive-thinking-will-hopefully-keep-this-boat-floating-until-we-all-pay-our-mortgages.
6. The challenge of compliance (for reporters)

This guy knows things about the future of journalism. Actually, he also has some good tips on just writing a blog. ³