Tim J. Moerman

If you want something done right... well, good luck with that.

2012-01-01T08:23:00.011+01:00

I have to remind myself from time to time that incompetence is nothing new--it's probably a fundamental building block of the universe, eternal and unchanging, like hydrogen. But some days it seems like things are getting worse, or at least you hit a particularly rich vein of the stuff.

It started today with a visit to one of the local department stores to pick up a few items. This being the week after Christmas, everything was marked down considerably. However, when I got to the cash and my purchases were rung in, not one of them showed the discount. It's only because my sharp-eyed girlfriend noticed it on the screen (she spent a goodly amount of time managing a retail store) that I was able to get them to correct the errors. Even then, it took some arguing with the clerk. This was not for one item or two, but for all three of the things I was buying. The error amounted to some forty dollars on $160 worth of stuff. The store was full of marked-down prices but no mechanism seemed to be in place to communicate these markdowns to the cash registers.

Shockingly, and lest we too quickly write this off as a unique snafu on the part of one retailer (according to orthodox market economics, soon to be driven out of business by its own ineptitude and replaced with better competitors) I ran into the exact same situation in the next store I visited.

I'm not sure what was at work here. Deliberate deception and bait/switch by the retailers seems a stretch, though in recent years the degree of mendacity in corporate media and the financial industry makes it hard to rule anything out. I can certainly imagine a roomful of spreadsheet ninjas working from the premise that you can't fool all of the people all of the time--but that you don't have to, if you fool just enough of the people just enough, and just enough of the time.

More likely it's a symptom of the de-skilling and de-staffing of the retail industry (indeed, of the service industry generally.) When you rely more and more on bar code scanners and computer systems for transactions, reducing employees to minimum-wage scan-and-smile robots, and (now) on cutting costs by employing even fewer of these employees--well, eventually you get an infinitely replaceable, laterally-mobile workforce that can't do anything at all, much less do it right.

But I get it. It's one of those collective action problems. Every retailer has an incentive to cut his own costs, but when you take all those cost-cutting measures together they undermine the whole industry.

What's much harder to understand is the movie I watched this evening. Sarah's Key (Elle S'Appellait Sarah) is a French film about a Paris journalist investigating the past of her family's Marais apartment, and of the Jewish family that lived there before being arrested and sent to the concentration camps in 1942.

Now, I speak pretty decent French but I have trouble following the dialogue in movies, especially when it's actual French-French (as opposed to Quebecois.) So I put the English subtitles on.

And these subtitles were shockingly bad. Words were rammed together without spacing, many lines bore next to no relationship to what was being said in the film itself, and in many cases they were grammatically incomprehensible. Any viewer who understood English but not French would have been completely baffled and unable to follow the story. It was that bad.

I didn't get it. I understand that French culture has a bit of a thing that sometimes makes it resistant to accommodating non-French speakers. But even the most cartoonishly snooty Frenchman likes to make money, and the producers must have understood that the secondary English-language market for films is enormous. (This one stars Kristin Scott Thomas, fer chrissake!) When you spend millions of dollars on a movie and expect to make that money back, English subtitles aren't something you just dash off as an afterthought, like a software manual. Surely it can't be that hard to find a competent French-to-English dialogue translator?

It kind of pisses me off. For much of the twentieth century, the economy was growing so fast and everything was so dynamic that we could arguably afford screwups all over the place--it just contributed to the liveliness of the creative-destruction petri dish. But today, things have stagnated and lots of perfectly competent, talented people can't find gainful employment. Some of them are friends of mine. If you're one of the lucky people who's being paid to do something, at the very least do us the courtesy of doing it right.

Where does Ontario's electricity come from? (Winter edition.)

2011-12-23T03:51:00.023+01:00

Lately I've been involved in some arguments about just how effective solar panels are at reducing CO2 emissions. That's a topic for another post and it will be an occasion for extended ranting--stay tuned--but in the meantime, the debate has forced me to go digging for some data on the composition of electricity in Ontario.

Ontario (like many places) has a bunch of different generators in its electricity mix; each of them has its pros and cons, and they get cranked up to meet demand at various times according to a fairly complex set of criteria. What I wanted to know is, what combination of generators is providing power, and in what proportions, at any given moment.

What I found was the time-series data, going back a month, for the output of all the major (over 10MW) generators in Ontario. The data is disaggregated by hour, so you can graph exactly how much of each kind of generation is contributing to the system during any given sixty-minute period.

So I did. Here are the charts for four one-week periods, starting November 19th, 2011 and ending December 16th.

First, the basics. These charts are for seven-day periods, beginning on midnight Saturday. Each day, you see a sort of double hump in electricity production. It's low overnight, ramps up to a bit of a peak around mid-morning, drops off a bit around lunchtime, and then ramps up to a higher peak in the early evening before dropping back down at night. It sort of looks like a graph of someone's heartbeat...

Since you can't really store electricity (well, you can, but not at this scale) that production curve is a pretty close match for the demand curve--how much electricity people in Ontario are using.

The humps are less pronounced on Saturday and Sunday (left-hand sides of the graphs.) That's because people are sleeping in, they aren't all making coffee and toast at the same time, and of course a lot of businesses are closed so they're not drawing so much power.

There's a ton of interesting stuff in there--so much that I'll have to break this up over a series of posts. Check back later.

Reading the Energy Information Administration's oil production figures

2011-12-17T10:56:00.000+01:00

I feel like I shouldn't even bother with this. At this stage, commenting on peak oil and its implications seems so, well, five years ago. The world outside my window looks almost exactly like we would expect to see in the early stages of the global production plateau. Economic stagnation? Check. Confusion and denial? Check. Ominous sabre-rattling over and in oil-producing parts of the world? Check. Climate change suddenly going back to being a non-issue among Very Serious People? Double check.

So it seems almost redundant to comment here.

On the other hand, I am a huge nerd who likes to play with spreadsheets and was trying to learn how to do double-axis charts in Excel 2010. So, for the record, here are three charts illustrating U.S. Energy Information Administration's monthly oil production figures. (You can get the source data here... ya krelborn.)

This chart shows the total volume of crude oil, lease condensate, natural gas liquids, "other liquids" (generally ethanol and biodiesel), plus something called "refinery processing gain."

Things have certainly flattened out since 2004-2005. But the highest monthly production so far was in January of 2011, at over 88 million barrels per day.

Here's the same data, with the production disaggregated into (a) crude oil, and (b) everything else.

Here, the break in trend becomes a lot clearer. The actual oil production (the black bars) pretty clearly flattened out around 2005. The seeming increase in total production since 2009 basically comes entirely from natural gas liquids and the other stuff counted as part of the "total oil" figure.

But different fuels have different energy contents. Ultimately it's the energy that matters. A barrel of natural gas liquids has, on average, about 71% the gross heat content of a barrel of oil. So counting NGL's as if they were equivalent to oil tends to understate the degree to which the production of liquid fossil energy has stagnated.

Ditto with "other liquids." Ethanol has a much lower energy content than petroleum.

But the most misleading number comes from "refinery processing gain." Processing gain is what happens when you take a barrel of crude oil and refine it into a number of distillates (like gasoline, diesel fuel, kerosene, etc.), some of which have a lower density than the crude. So what happens is you put in a barrel of crude oil and you get out something like 1.1 barrels. You haven't gotten any more energy out of the process, it's just the volume that's swelled. But the EIA's figures count volumetric increases due to "refinery processing gain" as if if it were actual fuel.

So I adjusted the various figures to reflect their energy content. I counted a barrel of crude as a barrel of crude. A barrel of NGL's counts as 0.71 BOE (barrels of oil equivalent,) which is the world average I got from the EIA's heat content figures. Since EIA doesn't tell us what "other liquids" are composed of, I assumed it's ethanol and biodiesel, and on that basis assumed that one barrel of "other liquids" equals 0.75 BOE in energy terms. (Ethanol is about two-thirds as energy-dense than crude, and biodiesel about equal. If these "other liquids" made up a significant amount of total supply I would have made more of an effort to figure out what they represent in actual energy terms. As it is--more than two-thirds BOE, less than one.)

And I treated refinery processing gain as zero, since that increase in volume doesn't add to the energy supply at all.

And here's what I got:

As I said, this is increasingly beside the point. You don't need a spreadsheet to see that the world is in a fundamentally different place than it was in 2004, 1994 or even 1934.

But if climate change is any indication, people have a remarkable ability to ignore clear trends in favour of whatever the toob is telling them is important.

Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective (Part 5)

2011-12-14T16:01:00.054+01:00

This is the fifth in a series on the Back To The Future franchise as seen by a city planning nerd. Frame grabs are copyright Universal Pictures and are used here on the basis of fair use, for commentary purposes.

We left off with a quick look at Hill Valley's downtown, and specifically its central Courthouse Square, in five different time periods. The Courthouse Square, more than any other single location in the franchise, is our anchor--it's what tells us what year we're in, and what is going on in that period.

Our first introduction to downtown is in 1985, when Marty cruises through on his little four-wheeled death wish on his way to school. Growing up in the suburbs, I was--well, whatever the opposite of "streetwise" is, with a relatively blind eye to the poverty and decrepitude of the inner city. So I never really noticed, until years later, just how crappy and run-down Hill Valley 1985 is.

How crappy and run-down? If you've arrived at this blog, chances are you've seen the movies at least once and you know the story. So rather than rehashing it, maybe the best way to describe the change in Hill Valley over three decades is to imagine an alternate version of Back To The Future--one in which a teenager from 1955 is accidentally whisked thirty years into the future:

Our guy knows the Courthouse Square as a public green, occupied by people who to all appearances are there by choice. Pedestrian paths crisscross the green, providing shortcuts to well-dressed adults and comparatively well-behaved minors on their way to and from their various no-doubt-wholesome engagements. The streets around the square are lined with a variety of businesses--a travel agent, a stationery store, a record store, two movie theatres, a corner cafe and several others.

When he arrives in 1985, he is shocked to discover that the Courthouse Square has been paved to make a parking lot:

Surprisingly, given the 1980's shall-we-say muscular approach to foreign affairs, even the war memorial...

... has been torn out to make room to park one more Buick.

Our naïf from 1955 might conclude that, for all the talk about honouring the sacrifices of its soldiers, his country is more fixated on keeping its cars running--indeed, that the former talk is usually just a pretext for the latter. (And since this is 1985, not 2015, he could say so without being hauled off to Guantanamo to be pounded in the ass by the Taliban for the rest of his life.)

As for the businesses, they've been replaced by marginal operations including an occult bookstore, a bail bondsman, payday loan joint, and a shop dedicated to the sale of, um, adult accessories.

The travel agent is still there, oddly enough. Maybe it thrives because anyone who finds themselves in downtown Hill Valley is overcome by the urge to get out of town, fast.

Not everything has changed, of course. For instance, the movie theatre...

... is still there, albeit with different programming and slightly more talented actors.

A running joke in the original movie was that everyone in 1955 thought Marty was a sailor because of his "life preserver." I expect that our guy from the fifties would observe that half of downtown Hill Valley's business is now dedicated to sex industries and conclude that the entire town has been taken over by sailors on leave. Hopefully someone will clue him in before he passes the window where a dozen women in skintight costumes wave at every passing male, lest he misread their intentions...

Not that the entire town has been given over to marginality, sleaze and Spandex. The other movie theatre from 1955...

... is now a church, albeit of the evangelical thunder-and-tarnation variety.

(Spoiler alert: Just as the B-movie actor from 1955 is President in 1985, in the sequel our guy goes to 2015 and finds that every single candidate for the Republican nomination got his or her start preaching at that church!)

If our guy sticks around 1985 for awhile, he'll learn that suburbia has sucked the life out of downtown, to the point that no one lives there anymore. But this is not quite true:

All in all, our guy from 1955 will notice a pretty drastic change. It's summed up rather nicely by the sign, which in 1955 promotes Hill Valley as "A Nice Place To Live..."

But at bare minimum a town's motto has to be something people can say with a straight face, and if you can't say something nice...

...best say nothing at all.

As I've suggested earlier, BTTF is a remarkable piece of storytelling, not least because it makes us believe that Marty really, really wants to get back to this decrepitating shithole. But it sets a bit of a challenge for the sequel. Having established that Hill Valley is basically Frank Capra's Pottersville, we need to come up with an alternative so bad it makes this place worth saving.

Stay tuned...

Scary Perry

2011-12-11T22:50:00.003+01:00

Like the proverbial human brain, I haven't used 90% of the capabilities of this media-friendly Mac I'm working on. I have been practicing with my new digitizing tablet, which holds great promise for online smartassery, but tablets have a learning curve like Kilimanjaro and so far I've mainly succeeded in creating a pretty fair impression of a recovering stroke victim.

Meanwhile, this weekend the recent Rick Perry campaign ad (which by now should need no introduction) hit the Internet. Okay, I said it needs no introduction but regardless of your political leanings, surely all reasonable people can agree that this is the most vile, mendacious and small-minded campaign video ever to come out of a mainstream candidate's media office.

Within a couple of days, it crossed three important thresholds. Firstly, it became the most-Disliked video ever to hit YouTube. Secondly, it spawned a cottage industry of video mashups mocking it. Thirdly, and most significantly, it actually prompted me, a notorious late adopter, to open up a new piece of computer software and start farting around with it. The result is clumsy, amateurish and probably nothing that hasn't been done better elsewhere online.

But goddammit, I just couldn't not.

Heavy metal shop.

2011-10-18T04:25:00.003+02:00

One of the tricky things about blogging is that it lets you stick every half-baked thought on the internet as they occur to you. That's a bit of a problem because we all (I assume) start things and then, for one reason or another, lose interest and let them fall by the wayside. Fine if you're just thinking about building a bookcase or taking up the banjo, but when you announce your intention to do so and then fail to follow through, it makes you look like a bit of a flake. Too much of that and the Internet's reputation as a meeting ground for serious, intelligent people with well-thought-out positions on things might be tarnished.

I've got a few threads that seem to have trailed off and I apologize for that. My series on the advisability of going to university kind of petered out because, well, I work in an office doing research on the Internet all day and it's tough to ramp up the motivation to do it some more once I get home. Plus it's depressing. Kids these days are really getting hosed.

My Back To The Future series is still going, and I'll be posting some more installments during the cold, dark, blogogenic nights of winter.

As for my ambition to learn some practical manual skills on my own, that's been tricky because I live in a smallish apartment without an obvious workshop area. I can't just haul an arc welder into the dining room, start mounting bottom brackets to angle iron and expect to still have a girlfriend tomorrow morning.

But I've taken some steps. Last week I started an oxy-acetylene welding course at Algonquin College. Community college is a wonderful thing--they offer night courses in all kinds of stuff, and some of it is quite useful. (I knew there had to be somewhere people go to learn to actually do things, since there seem to be things getting done all the time.)

So I'm learning to weld, and next semester I may take woodworking or electricity. It may be awhile before I actually do anything with it, but I'm starting.

Other than that, this summer I learned to sail. I'm hooked, to say the least. Even better, it's a skill and a hobby that fits very nicely into both the comfortable world I'm in now and the rapidly disintegrating one I suspect might be coming. Today I can be a leisurely sailing dork, spending a day on the water before retiring to the clubhouse for a martini or six; tomorrow, I can get busy smuggling penicillin from Hamilton to North Bay under the nose of Admiral Fungus Humungous and his postapocalyptic mutant lake pirates.

I'm all about transferable skills.

Nostalgic for nostalgia.

2011-10-16T04:56:00.035+02:00

Steve Jobs is dead, the leaves are falling and the global economy continues to lurch around looking for brains to eat. It's hard these days not to think of decline and decrepitude, entropy taking its toll, the world winding down.

This weekend I had to go out to St.-Laurent Shopping Centre with Sarah to pick up some mundane necessities. I note with some shock that gradually, without my noticing, and even in major cities with nominally thriving downtowns, many basic goods can no longer be had in the urban core. Expensive niche goods for affluent bobos have taken over much of the urban retail landscape, while getting a basic pair of pants requires a trip to at least the inner-ring suburbs.

Once we finished at the mall, we made a Logan's Run to the outside to hit a local second-hand store. The neighbourhood around St.-Laurent has seen better days, to put it charitably. At one point it was Ottawa's rural hinterland--there's an old French Catholic cemetery nearby where, among others, my great-great grandparents and Sir Wilfrid Laurier are buried--but the Development Fairy arrived just after World War II and waved her magic can of whoop-ass. Now it's a run-down, charmless car ghetto that makes neighbouring Vanier look upscale. St.-Laurent itself is a standard automotive kill zone with the strip malls, gas stations and other bric-a-brac clustered to take advantage of six lanes of passing car traffic.

We broke for lunch at Rockin' Johnny's, one of a local chain of 1950's-themed chrome replica diners. You've seen these places, or others like them, in every city on the continent. They started springing up as part of the wave of desperate Happy Days nostalgia that seized North America after the 1973 oil embargo and that, subsequently, everyone agreed to squint real hard and mistake for optimism throughout the Reagan years.

If you're in the restaurant business there's probably a decor kit you can buy, containing neon Coke signs, rock-and-roll '45's complete with pre-drilled screw holes, and framed shrines to patron saints Presley, Monroe and Dean. One phone call will summon a van with four nostalgia installers in immaculate white Maytag Man uniforms. With NASCAR pit crew efficiency, they will roll out a Wurlitzer jukebox, slap black-and-white checkerboard tile on the floor and chrome on everything else, and reupholster the booths from a ten-foot-wide roll of sparkle-infused vinyl.

The appeal of these places is obvious--a longing for the perceived simpler time of cheap gasoline and giant tailfins, gainful employment for high-school graduates and (not least, for its target baby boomer demographic just then starting to develop post-adolescent metabolisms) a time when you could wolf down a giant cheeseburger with fries and a litre of chocolate shake without spontaneously inflating like the driver-side airbag in your Chrysler K-car.

But now here's where it gets meta. Because what can you say about a nostalgia-themed place that makes you wistful for a time you could go to a nostalgia-themed place that looked convincingly new? When I was young, if you went to a fake reproduction of a 1950's diner, that fake 1950's diner looked like it was just built. That was the whole point. If you're in a 1950's diner and it looks like it's thirty years old, that means you're in at least the 1980's and who the hell needs that?

As it happens, this particular establishment was pretty grim.

Its once-shiny chrome exterior was coated with grime from sitting next to a six-lane arterial for twenty years.

The blinds were pulled down over all the windows. When we arrived at 4:30 on a Saturday afternoon, we were the only customers aside from a pair of babushkas nursing their coffee.

The table jukeboxes had red duct tape over the coin slots. Perhaps they were out of order, or maybe they were just trying to prevent any customers from denting the already-shaky ambience by cranking up The Eagles or Huey Lewis. The wall plaster bore the scars of decades of being whanged with the napkin dispenser.

The mandatory iconic James Dean poster had faded into the same suicide-blue colour as the walls:

Since we were the only actual customers, it was tricky trying to take pictures without being noticed by the staff. It's too bad because possibly the saddest element (I couldn't get a decent shot) was a clock over the counter, looking distinctly unfabulous with long-burnt-out neon lettering reading "The Fabulous '50's." In a similar vein, the menus sported the slogan "Bring Back Great Times and Great Food." Hey, kitten, you wanna bring me Johnny's Irony Burger with a side of pathos?

For all of this, it wasn't an unpleasant experience. Truth is beauty, even at its ugliest. I found it delightfully freaky to be in a place that so sharply illustrates the end of the rope we find ourselves at, where even our shrines to the golden age are battered, grimy and all but abandoned.

Sarcastic Smurf.

2011-07-24T14:18:00.002+02:00

I went to a movie last night and saw that there's a Smurfs movie coming out--in 3-D.

This is amazing as it effectively triples the number of dimensions traditionally allocated to smurfs.

Gone to the dogs. But in a good way.

2011-07-06T03:25:00.014+02:00

I'm definitely a glass-half-empty kind of guy. So it takes a real effort sometimes to drag my head up out of the low-lying miasma of bad news and appreciate how good I have it.

Today was one of those days I was able to pull that off. I live in a nice residential neighbourhood right downtown, three blocks away from a world heritage site (the Rideau Canal, with all of its well-maintained NCC bike paths and recreational goodies) and five blocks from my job. In fact, my girlfriend and I both work right downtown, which means we can forgo owning a car completely.

This time last year it was touch and go, though. I was living in a sublet and trying to find an apartment in advance of Sarah's arrival from Moncton. Wouldn't have been a huge problem, ordinarily. But, you see, there's a dog.

Dogs are the Achilles heel of the renting class. All other things being equal, landlords prefer tenants with no pets. Most dogs don't bark at all hours, pee on the floor and otherwise make life difficult for the owner and neighbours. But it only takes a few bad apples to ruin it for the rest of us.

It gets all the more difficult if, like Sarah and me, you have a large dog. And even more so if it's one of those "bad" breeds--the kinds associated in popular culture with junkyards and trailer parks, skinheads and thugs and loogans. Jade is a ninety-pound might-as-well-be-purebred Rottweiler (there's something else mixed in there but everyone has a different opinion of what it might be.) Go apartment-hunting and your big slobbery Rottie lurks in the back of your mind, like a herpes infection or a DUI conviction, as your brain whirrs at a million RPM trying to peg the least-bad moment to disclose it.

When I arranged to view the apartment, there were sixteen other people interested. I've heard that landlords in Ontario actually aren't allowed to prohibit pets, but frankly I haven't bothered to verify if this is true or not. It doesn't matter what landlords can and can't do; the fact is, there is always a plausible and perfectly legal reason for why they chose to rent to one of the other prospective tenants.

In the event, I made a very good impression on the superintendent. My tendency towards obsessive preparation didn't hurt either; when I filled out the rental application I gave references for all my landlords for the past seven years. I imagine being one-half of a gainfully-employed professional couple was a plus. The one advantage renters have these days is that thanks to the manic housing boom of the oughties, pretty much everyone who qualifies for a mortgage (and many who strictly speaking don't) owns their own place. I imagine that quality tenants are hard to come by, which is why the super quickly called me back to offer me the place. Oh, and I didn't mention the dog.

When I got the lease to sign, I went over the long list of conditions, scanning for any mention of pets. I was on page three and almost out of the woods when there it was--"The tenant shall not keep any animal in the unit." Shit!

I called up the superintendent and brought up a few questions about the terms of the lease.

"It says here I can't bring bicycles in the front door. Is that negotiable? I really don't want to leave my bike outside."

"That's not a problem. Everyone here has bikes. Don't worry about it."

"Okay, great! Now, there's a bit about not making any holes in the walls. I might want to hang up some pictures, though."

"Oh, that! Pffff. Obviously you're going to hang up pictures. You realize this is just a stock, off-the-shelf lease, right?"

"Of course! Obviously. Just one other thing, then. It says no pets, but actually we do have a dog."

Silence. The long, awkward kind.

"What... kind of dog?"

Eventually we smoothed it over. I explained that Jade is very nice (true enough) and had had about three thousand dollars worth of obedience training. That last point was very clever as, although indisputably true, it said absolutely nothing about the results of all that obedience training.

It also helped that the superintendent was going out of town the next day for two weeks and wanted this stuff over and done with. He went to bat with the landlord and we got the place.

It's been a year and, after an initial few months of keeping Jade under Anne Frank-level security, everyone got comfortable with a Rottie in the building. She's pretty quiet; when she barks, which is almost never, it's a single earth-shaking WOOF! and that's it. She's made her point. That's the thing about big dogs; they've got nothing to prove. It's the little ones, the ones with names like Fifi and Mister Woogums, that yap all night.

What's great about all this is that we've paved the way for others. Six months later our neighbours got a schnauzer. There's a cat on the ground floor that wasn't there before, and our downstairs neighbours have babysat a puppy a few times. And I just learned the other day that the superintendent's girlfriend is moving in with him, and she's bringing her Australian shepherd with her.

At the end of the day, our landlord realizes that there are a few types of tenants. There are stable, responsible tenants who stay for a long time. There are tenants with no children. And there are tenants with no pets. The thing is, you almost never find a tenant who's all three. Singles meet other singles and become couples; couples either get pregnant and buy a house and move out; or else they don't have kids and get pets instead. It's just the way it is. That's life.

Once Upon A Time... WTF?

2011-06-05T16:43:00.018+02:00

Classical music is one of those things that, until now, I have simultaneously not been interested in but recognized that someday I probably would be. Last week, I headed over to the library and borrowed some CD's, intending to make up for years of indifference and see what I've been missing.

Even if you don't care about classical music, you've almost certainly been exposed to a lot of it just through movies and TV. At the very least, you've heard it in popular movies as a lazy shorthand for stuffy elite opulence. Whenever there's a string quartet playing, you can bet there's a bored pretty rich girl who's about to be spirited away by the charming working-class hero to a way funner party drinking moonshine down by the river.

Anyway, the first piece on the disc I borrowed is Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, better known to pop culture as Creepy Frankenstein Organ Music.

I'm still unclear on how any given piece of music, absent lyrics, can be "about" something. But I've always felt like this piece was about either the creation or the destruction of the world. That's because it was the theme music to a certain educational cartoon I used to watch when I was a kid.

I'm a bit of an anxious guy, and I was certainly an anxious kid. My childhood memories are of one apocalyptic neurosis after another. In grade four, during Fire Prevention Week, the psychopaths at the local fire department came to our school and showed us a film on fire safety that included a series of horrifying images of people who had died in house fires. Not just anonymous charred corpses on a coroner's table. I mean images of people where they were found, in context, all pathos and horror--real people whose tragedies were burned into your mind with shrieking Psycho strings. A half-naked man inches from the window, his upper body burned beyond recognition, who awoke too late and tried and almost succeeded in crawling out of a burning house in the dead of night. A woman, roasted in the fetal position, wrapped in towels in the bathtub where she tried to hide from the flames.

For years thereafter, I worried about spontaneous combustion, soaking matchbooks before throwing them out; even today I'll turn back halfway to work to make sure I've turned off the stove.

Rest assured, dear firemen, you've made your point.

Later there would be fear of fire of a more primal sort. In one year was the accidental shooting down of a Korean Airlines passenger jet by a Russian warplane, TV specials like The Day After and documentaries If You Love This Planet--this last shown to us by our spikey-haired peace activist teacher, who had determined that the most effective way to prevent nuclear holocaust was to scare the living shit out of seventh graders.

But throughout those years, extinction and immolation--my own and that of the world--were never far from my mind. And as far as I can tell it started with Bach's Toccata, and an educational cartoon called Once Upon A Time... Man.

TV Ontario in the early 1980's had a whole raft of educational and/or foreign kids' shows running for several hours after dinner. This parade of odd, not-quite-cool, but strangely gripping programs defined my early winter evenings for a few crucial years. A reading show with talking shoes, followed by Doctor Who (the old, crusty, un-hip version.) Then an epic French puppet series about a singing bear with a magic whistle stuck in his throat, travelling the world in pursuit of a kidnapped rat. And, finally, Once Upon A Time... Man.

OUATM follows a group of humans throughout human history, the same characters in more-or-less similar roles in different time periods, from the paleolithic through to the mid-twentieth century. I only dimly remember the show itself, but the opening credit sequence, Bach and all, has been lodged in my mind ever since.

Cold space condenses into the solar system. A fish in a stream becomes an amphibian, which crawls out of the water and becomes a lizard. The lizard becomes a monkey, then an ape, who picks up a spear and becomes an australopithecine. Ape-man to cave-man to Neolithic Man; Babylon to Egypt to Greece to Rome, the medieval to the Renaissance to the industrial to the modern; stagecoach to steam train to automobile to jet plane to, finally, a rocket ship, launched into the same starry sky from which it all emerged.

I am enthralled; the doors to my eight-year-old mind have just been pried open to an epic of geologic time, from the beginning of it all to the boundless future, brought to you by friendly and relatable cartoon characters.

But, wait. There's one more bit, tacked on to the end.

A man's face, terrified. Pull out. He is running towards a rocket ship, waiting on its launch pad. A dozen more follow, running for their lives. They board the rocket and blast off into space, moments before.... Earth explodes!

Cut to tonight's episode, which is about, I dunno, Egyptians or whatever. The eight-year-old, who has been given every reason to treat this entire sequence as factual, isn't exactly paying attention at this point. Hey, whoa, back up--what was that last part?

Tony the Oncologist

2011-05-23T23:05:00.000+02:00

Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective (Part Four.)

2011-05-23T15:44:00.028+02:00

This is the fourth in a series on the Back To The Future franchise as seen by a city planning nerd. Frame grabs are copyright Universal Pictures and are used here on the basis of fair use, for commentary purposes.

Downtown Hill Valley and Courthouse Square

As I noted before, it's Hill Valley itself that is as much a co-star as any actor in the Back To The Future franchise. We see various parts of town in one or more time periods. However, it's only the Courthouse Square and its surrounding city blocks that appear in all five eras.

Before we get into particulars, here are the town square's five incarnations, in no particular order.

Courthouse Square, 1955:

Courthouse Square Parking Lot, 1985:

Courthouse Square Mall, 2015:

Biff's Pleasure Palace Parking, 1985A:

Hill County Courthouse, 1885 (under construction):

There's so much going on here that I'm not even going to try to get into it in this post. I'll be going into detail in the next few weeks.

For now, suffice it to say that these images speak volumes about what has happened to North American towns in the past century, and our wishes, feelings and hopes in this regard.

Weird Internet hijacking

2011-05-10T05:39:00.005+02:00

Just for fun, I just googled myself. Always nice to know what a disembodied information cloud is saying about you.

There's a lot of software out there that intercepts Google searches and returns a site that appears to be just what you're looking for. Then, when you go there, it's just a bunch of ads for nothing remotely related to what you wanted, and indeed if you search that page for your search terms they're nowhere to be found.

But I just found a surreal little upgrade to that algorithm. One of the hits that came up was remarkably similar in wording to my own blog. (What are the odds?)

The text of the hit read:

Tim J. Moerman. city-limits artisan * activity beatnik * artisan * smartest guy in the room, depending on the allowance .... Tim J. Moerman: I'm an burghal ...

Sort of took existing hits and replaced a few words with synonyms (or not quite.)

But I rather like it. City-limits artisan? Activity beatnik? Why, that's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all week!

Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective (Part Two.)

2011-04-16T16:47:00.015+02:00

This is the second in a series of posts on the Back To The Future franchise through the eyes of a city planning nerd. The frame-grabs are copyright Universal Studios, and are used here on the basis of fair use for commentary purposes.

The Naming of Malls Is A Difficult Matter...

Doc Brown uses the parking lot of the local shopping mall as the testing ground for his new time machine. He tells us that thirty years ago, this was all farmland as far as the eye could see. The farmer was intent on growing pine trees--hence the name of Twin Pines Mall.

When Marty accidentally jumps the Delorean to 1955, he encounters said farmer, complete with shotgun. In his haste to get out with his skin intact, he runs over one of a pair of young pine trees at the front gate. Later, when Marty finally makes it back to 1985, we see that the mall has changed a bit:

It's a somewhat cynical rule of thumb in the development industry that you name developments after whatever they tore down to build it. Hence the endless series of subdivisions called Royal Oaks or Wildflower Estates or Convent Glen without a tree, flower or nun in sight.

To be continued...

Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective. (Part Three.)

2011-04-09T17:01:00.022+02:00

This is the third in a series of posts on Back To The Future as seen by a city planning nerd. Frame grabs are copyright Universal Pictures and are used here on the basis of fair use, for commentary purposes.

Getting Around Hill Valley - 1985

In 1955, Hill Valley is still compact enough (including a well-defined and thriving downtown) that cars aren't strictly necessary. Mass car ownership has only been underway for about ten years--not long enough to force the wholesale rearrangement of the built environment we live with today.

By 1985, though, the town has sprawled enough to present a by-now familiar plot problem for any movie involving teenagers: namely, how do we give someone enough access to his setting to make a story possible?

In most movies, we wave this problem away by assuming that the teenager has his own car, or at least access to one, at all critical story points. When we want to show that a teenaged character is a loser or otherwise some kind of underdog, we show him driving a, you know, really old beat-up car which is supposed to suck terribly. (In Savage Steve Holland's "Better Off Dead," released the same year as BTTF, being stuck driving the family station wagon to the local ski hill is apparently enough of an existential humiliation to justify multiple suicide attempts.) In fact, I can't think of a single movie where teenagers have to take the bus everywhere.

I think this explains a lot more about the world than we care to admit. When you're a kid, forming your first impression of how the world works, you're watching movies and TV shows full of people you're supposed to identify with. But they invariably have far more mobility and autonomy than you do. What's missing is the boredom. They seem to be always able to go where the action is, and get there before it's over. They don't have to spend two hours and three transfers taking transit to their friends' houses, and they don't have to duck out of the school dance halfway through Stairway To Heaven because the last bus is at 12:45. So you spend your first four years as a non-child wondering why your life sucks, and no one can quite explain why.

By the time you're sixteen, you've figured it out: North America is designed for the exclusive enjoyment of people with the health and wealth required to own and operate a vehicle. No wonder, when hard times hit, people are more likely to give up their homes and live in their cars than vice versa.

In this respect, Back To The Future faces the teenage mobility quandary more honestly than most films. Access to the family car is make-or-break for Marty's personal life, and when that car gets totalled he's up the proverbial creek, his upcoming hot date with Jennifer presumably replaced by an evening at home with a box of Kleenex.

Faced with the same shit sandwich as every real-life suburban teenager physically stranded in his elders' version of the American Dream, Marty's next-best option is... suicidally dangerous skateboard stunts in rush-hour traffic!

Maybe, like his grandfather suggests, he's just an idiot. (After all, he did need to be told that Riverside Drive in his hometown must be located next to the river!) But I think it's more basic than that. I don't know a single teenager who, faced with marooning in some Bungaloid Acres subdivision, wouldn't gladly sell his left kidney to Satan for an alternative--any alternative.

So it's significant that the top of Marty's big wish list is that shiny new Toyota 4x4. The definitive sign, once he's returned to 1985, that he's changed history is that he now owns one.

I once heard a critic chalk this up to that old 1980's materialism (dreadfully passé and dated, to hear him say it--yeah, like we're all a bunch of burlap-wearing monks now.)

But I think it really resonates with teenagers. It's like, "Well, I changed the past... my dad is no longer a coward and a failure, my mom is no longer an alcoholic and the meathead who tormented them both is now a neutered little lapdog. That's nice but the important thing is that I now have full access to the world around me!"

In any case, even before he goes back, Marty has it comparatively easy. According to the road sign in 1955, the site of his future home is a mere 2 miles from Hill Valley proper. He can walk there in about 45 minutes if he has to. Most suburban kids in 2010 (or in 1985 for that matter) should be so lucky.

But technological progress will make things worse by 2015.

"Where we're going, we don't need roads!"

2015 Hill Valley is a kitchy techno-utopian future right out of Popular Mechanics. The most noticeable change is the profusion of flying cars. Finally--oh, God, finally!--traffic jams are a thing of the past. Goldie Wilson III flat-out tells us so on his animated jumbotron ad.

And yet five minutes later, we learn that the skyway out to the future McFly home in Hilldale is jammed with rush-hour traffic!

It's actually so bad that it's dark by the time they get there.

So there it is, the lesson that some of the smartest people on the planet have spent a hundred years and billions of dollars failing to learn: No matter how advanced your technology and infrastructure, it still somehow takes 45 minutes to get across town. The only thing that changes is how big "town" becomes, how much it costs to build and maintain that system, and (presumably) how crummy and inaccessible the world becomes when you don't have a flying car.

To be continued...

Back To The Future: A City Planner's Perspective. (Part One.)

2011-04-09T10:43:00.032+02:00

A former student of mine recently emailed me to ask what had driven me to choose city planning as a career.

I told her about car dependency and its effect on the environment; the fact that the spaces we build and live in have a profound effect on our health and happiness and ability to deal with the world; and the fact that after living in three major cities and working in a half-dozen more, I had started to get some very definite ideas about what worked and what didn't.

What I left out is that I am a huge Back To The Future geek.

When the time-travel fantasy came out in the summer of 1985, I was so blown away that I went back to see it three days in a row. Twenty-six years later I've probably watched it a hundred times; I still find stuff in it that I didn't notice before.

And much of its appeal comes from its setting, the fictional town of Hill Valley, California. Over the course of the trilogy, we get to see Hill Valley in no less than five distinct time periods. Starting from its "current" incarnation in 1985, we see the same places in 1955, 1885, a parallel-nightmare-Pottersville version of 1985, and finally the impossibly far-flung future of 2015.

The town is more than a setting; in many ways it's the central character of the series. I wonder if there's anyone my age or younger in the planning profession who hasn't been influenced in it; who had the place-making bug stuck in their ear first by watching Hill Valley change through past, present and future.

At least I hope they were. 'Cause if they're getting their ideas from Star Wars we're all in big fat trouble...

This series of posts looks at the Back To The Future trilogy from a city planning geek's perspective. It is liberally sprinkled with frame-grabs from the films; these frames are copyright Universal Pictures and are used here on the basis of fair use, for purposes of commentary.

Part 1: Doc Brown's Lab

The first film opens in 1985 in the laboratory of Dr. Emmett Brown, a mad scientist with a clock obsession. We're not sure where this lab is, exactly. A framed newspaper clipping informs us that Doc's house burned down at some point, the land sold to developers. It's not clear when, exactly, but the clipping is yellow enough that it was probably awhile ago.

It looks like Doc has been living here in his lab for quite some time. But where is it? Where does a scientist go to lease laboratory space in a small town anyway? (A question that presumably dogs small-town mad scientists all over America. You may know how to build an eighth-dimensional balonium fraculator but try getting that past the zoning board...)

When Marty emerges from the building, we see that it is a run-down, single-storey structure at the back of a Burger King parking lot on a suburban commercial strip.

Anyone who's ever dealt with a suburban commercial chain-store developer knows their mulish refusal to work around anything that's already there, especially some crummy old shed. So what's the deal?

Finding himself stranded in the fifties, Marty looks up Doc Brown, who in 1955 lives somewhere called Riverside Drive. He's never heard of Riverside Drive; asking for directions, he learns that it's the street he knows in 1985 as John F. Kennedy Drive.

So he goes there to find a beautiful, graceful Arts and Crafts mansion on a manicured lot with a detached garage or carriage house. The garage looks familiar....

It's Doc Brown's lab from 1985!

Suddenly the whole site is thrown into context. When Doc Brown's house burned down, he moved into his garage and sold the surrounding land to developers, who went on to scrape the site bare and plop down parking lots, burger huts and gas stations all around the garage parcel. Riverside Drive has evolved bit by bit into a suburban commercial wasteland renamed John F. Kennedy Drive. It's taken a mere thirty years for this..

to turn into this:

It's Robert Crumb's A Short History of America come to life, and our first hint that Hill Valley in 1985 actually sucks pretty hard. It says a lot about how well the film is set up that we are able to believe that Marty really wants to get back to 1985. That Jennifer Parker must really be something...

The garage is one of those leftover buildings that line first-wave suburban strips all over North America. These former roads out of town gradually attracted one commercial development after another, which are now mixed in with rundown old houses from the street's past life as a rural road. These roads are typically no good to anyone. Because of the old lot fabric and access rights, there are driveways every forty or fifty feet, making the strip next to useless for moving traffic. And yet the built environment is completely devoted to cars at the expense of any pedestrian amenity. Old buildings remain but it's not worth keeping them up so they are allowed to decrepitate while the owners wait for Dunkin' Donuts to show up and buy them out. The strip is just commercially viable enough to suck the life out of downtown, but not enough to succeed as an environment in its own right.

Since this strip used to be called Riverside Drive, it's a safe bet that it's located along the river. In a chronically water-starved state such as California, what should be the town's major amenity is instead occupied by the the loading docks and dumpsters of convenience stores and lube shops built with their backs to the river. All that asphalt is probably wreaking havoc with drainage, dumping torrents of greasy stormwater and Whopper wrappers into the Hill River every time it rains.

We don't get to see this part of town in 2015. That's probably a good thing. In the real-life 2015, the urban boundary will have grown beyond even the old rural fringe. City Council after City Council will have spent a couple of stealth bombers' worth of tax money tackling the endless traffic snarl, upgrading John F. Kennedy Drive to as many lanes as it can hold. But you can't stop progress, and JFK won't be able to compete with new greenfield sites with more convenient traffic geometry out off the Interstate. A lot of this strip will be practically abandoned to pawn shops, payday loan agents and other sunset uses, while the retail and fast-food action migrates to Shonash Corners power center. When that day comes, Doc Brown's lab will probably still be there, used by his 21st-century counterpart to brew crystal meth.

Oh, and one more point about Doc's lab. The address in 1955 is 1640 Riverside Drive...

but in 1985 the street number is 1646.

I always figured Doc probably torched his own house to get the money to fund his time machine. But I only just realized, on viewing number eleventy, that before he did that, he subdivided the property, establishing the garage with its own address, allowing him to keep his lab while selling off the rest of the land unencumbered.

To be continued...

New editorial in the Times and Transcript

2011-04-07T04:28:00.003+02:00

The Moncton Times and Transcript was good enough to stroke my ego by running an editorial I wrote on Danish energy planning and its relevance to Canada the other day.

(Although it's about energy planning, the headline refers to "emergency planning." The overzealous MS-Word autocorrect strikes again, apparently.)

Mixing it up.

2011-03-20T22:07:00.003+01:00

The other night I cut through Rideau Centre on my way home from the bookstore. For those of you who don't live in Ottawa, it's a multi-storey shopping mall right downtown. As much as I dislike malls, I have to acknowledge the evil brilliance of the place. It's strategically placed between geographic, traffic and topographical barriers. Anyone going from the major Transitway stop on the Mackenzie King Bridge--which is to say, all the kids busing in from the suburbs--to the nightlife of the Byward Market finds that the path of least resistance takes them straight through that mall. Because the Transitway station is located on a tall bridge--that is, some three stories above ground level--the multiple escalators between Rideau Street and the station make the mall even more attractive as a shortcut.

All of which is to say that in the evenings and overnight, the centrally-heated, ice-free halls of Rideau Centre are full of bright young things in short skirts and heels making their way to and from the restaurants, bars and nightclubs on and around the Byward Market.

One girl in particular I noticed that night. At first glance what I took to be a black woman--I mean black as in, not dark-skinned-African but coal-black--was in reality a Muslim girl wearing a black full-body stocking and headscarf under her short pink club dress.

Every now and then you hear nativists, bigots and talk-radio loudmouths, yammering about how multiculturalism is undermining our values and immigration is going to make this country unrecognizable. It's the same refrain we've heard for generations: that the changes in our culture that happened until recently (be it 1850 or 1900 or 2011) made us who we are, sure, but the most recent ones (brought by the Somalis or the Ukrainians or those lousy, stinking Irish) are but the thin edge of the wedge that will swamp and destroy us... whatever "us" happens to be at that particular moment.

Sigh.

What I saw the other night was, or should be to any reasonable person, a sharp rebuttal to that view. I saw a girl from a different culture with its own rules (including the idea that women should stay covered head to toe) and who found a way to follow those rules while fully participating in what our culture has to offer (such as the right to be smokin' hot in public.)

I don't like nukes either. Have you got a better idea?

2011-03-15T04:08:00.004+01:00

This is an editorial I wrote for the Moncton Times and Transcript two years ago. Given the current situation with the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan (as of this writing, worse than Three Mile Island, not as bad as Chernobyl) I thought it an opportune time for a re-run.

I don't like nukes either. Have you got a better idea?
Originally published in the Moncton Times and Transcript, May 26, 2009

Much has been made of partisan gridlock in politics, with two factions utterly unable to find common ground for the common good. Typically the factions are so busy demonizing each other that they lose sight of how ridiculous they have both become.

Much the same thing goes on in the debate over energy, and in particular nuclear power.

On what I'll call the right-wing, technocratic side of the debate, we hear that nuclear power is innocent and unfairly maligned--target of the greatest smear campaign since the Dreyfus Affair. Its dangers are grossly exaggerated by ignorant left-wing tree-huggers with an axe to grind. The "too-cheap-to-meter" nuclear-electric utopia promised in the 1950's is stifled by pointless, cumbersome government regulations that add years and millions of dollars to the cost of building a reactor. Nuclear power is perfectly safe: after all, in 60 years of the civilian nuclear power industry, there has never been a single fatality from a nuclear accident in North America. The 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, of course, was just an advance preview for the collapse of Communism--a system so flawed and riddled with incompetence that disaster was inevitable.

And the media, with their obvious left-wing bias, will never tell you that.

On the left-wing, granola-head side, we hear that nuclear power is not only dangerous but unnecessary. We could run our entire civilization, including plug-in hybrid Volkswagen buses, on solar panels and wind turbines. Unfortunately, the corporate Dr. Evils of the nuclear industry (along with the fossil fuel mafia) use their money and power and neckties to suppress clean energy sources. The production of nuclear fuel is massively polluting, and there's no safe way to dispose of the radioactive waste, assuming it doesn't get turned into weapons first.

And the media, with their obvious right-wing bias, will never tell you that.

Guh.

Okay, I should probably declare my own bias here. If you were to hold a gun to my head and force me to choose one of the above camps to stand in, I would have to go with the granola heads. I don't trust big corporations. Money makes people do crazy things, especially when a corporate structure keeps them from being held personally responsible for the consequences. I know how the tobacco industry responded to the link between smoking and cancer (deny, delay, logroll, repeat) and how the fossil fuel industry has responded to climate change (ditto.) I have to take what any industry says about itself with a very large grain of salt.

But on nuclear power, both camps are off the mark. It's not surprising. The average MBA or economist knows about as much about physics as the average English or history major, which is to say, not a lot. And these are the "educated" people. The closest many people come to learning science is watching Shark Week on the Discovery Channel. We have neglected science education, and nickel-and-dimed our school system, for decades. As a result, most adults are just not equipped to have a meaningful discussion about science and technology. So of course the debate is going to get goofy.

First things first. We cannot keep living the way we have been using just wind, solar and hemp oil. I'm sorry, Sunflower, but not even close. Our energy habits are massively out of scale with what we can practically get from those sources. It's no conspiracy: there are technical reasons that make big, on-demand power sources like nuclear- and coal-fired plants necessary to the way we live today. For a lot of reasons, nuclear power is probably the least-bad of a very bad lot.

Conversely, the idea that nuclear power is inherently safe based on its record is absurd. Part of what has kept North American nuclear accidents to a non-catastrophic minimum is probably the dense thicket of safety regulations that must be followed. If those regulations weren't in place, the nuclear industry would probably be about as well managed as a hedge fund, with comparable results. And, yes, most reactors have been trouble-free in their first few decades. So are people, usually. But as any senior citizen will tell you, a lot more goes wrong when you're seventy than at twenty-five. We should not blithely assume that our luck will hold forever.

The ugly truth is that energy is neither cheap nor safe. It's like Bilbo Baggins' magic ring: the more you use it, the more risk you assume, and the closer you come to accidentally destroying yourself. The more energy we demand--the more flat-screen TV's and weed whackers and backlit pylon signs on the highway--the more power plants we have to build. And the more power plants we build, the greater the likelihood that one of them will eventually go blooey and turn (for example) southern New Brunswick into a radioactive Forbidden Zone for generations.

I think we are going to need nuclear power in the coming years. I think the risks can be managed, but only if we are honest with ourselves about what those risks are. Most of all, we need consumers to realize that every kilowatt-hour used is, indirectly, another trigger pull in an enormous game of Russian roulette. If everyone understands that, maybe we'll all be a bit more conscientious about leaving the lights on.

Timing is everything.

2011-03-13T18:40:00.008+01:00

When I was a kid, my mom tried for awhile to expose me to religion. This took the form of reading me stories from an illustrated children's bible. It didn't take. I had no interest in these hippies in housecoats, grovelling before invisible space monsters. The only part of the book that held any interest for me was Genesis. Night after night, I asked for that creation-myth blockbuster until Mom got sick of it and forever gave up on my religious instruction.

Creation myths are compelling. We want to hear about where we come from, even if the story doesn't make any goddamn sense.

I recently watched Nowhere Boy, a biopic about the teenaged John Lennon. It was enjoyable enough, though I can't help feeling that I've seen this story, in one form or another, about a zillion times before. The rock and roll biopic is a genre that is so well established and formulaic, you could write 'em in your sleep.

(Come to think of it, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story did just that, as a parody. The genre is so predictable, in fact, that even what should have been hilarious--it's got John C. Reilly fer chrissake!--actually was kind of boring. For something to be funny, it has to be surprising. Rock and roll biopics are too predictable even to be fertile ground for parody.)

But they keep coming. People love a good creation myth, and rock-and-roll biopics are the creation myths of a certain large demographic cohort. The Baby Boomers love to hear about how awesome the music of their youth was, and how It Changed Everything Forever. It's a safe bet that any competently executed film about a major musical act that emerged from 1955 to 1969 will put asses in seats.

I've never been a Beatles fan. I don't dislike them, but I honestly never saw what was so exciting about them. I listened to a lot of sixties rock when I was a teenager (what was the alternative? It was the eighties!) But I was never into the Beatles. What's the big deal?

The Beatles came along in 1963. They did their spot on the Ed Sullivan show in February 1964, which was (do the math) almost exactly eighteen years into the postwar baby boom. A spike in the teenager population had just been cranked up to eleven.

Combine overwhelming numbers with the raging hormones and shall-we-say forgiving taste of teenagers, and I would imagine that any moderately talented band that came on the scene in 1963 to 1965 would have stood a good chance of becoming absolutely fucking huge. And by playing such a central role in the formative consciousness of such a gigantic demographic bulge, they would forever be recognized (through the permanently-youth-tinted lens of their early fans) as the greatest thing ever.

The Beatles didn't make the greatest music ever, any more than Microsoft makes the best operating system ever. They just came along at the right time.

Pretty good timing for a band with Ringo Starr in it.

Language and its consequences

2011-02-27T02:43:00.006+01:00

Words have consequences. It's said often enough that I can't nail down who said it first. (My gut feeling was that it was Dick Cheney, but google it and you get a bunch of answers.)

Anyway, I often wonder what are the consequences of English, the current global lingua franca. It has some quirks and chinks that, in certain contexts, make it very easy to misunderstand and to propagate misunderstanding.

A big one is the fact that our words for a million, a billion, a trillion etc. all sound alike--alike enough that a figure quoted when you're not paying attention is hard to remember accurately. Do we spend millions or billions on higher education? On defense? On subsidies to the tar sands?

It's not a trivial distinction. The difference between a million and a billion is the same as the difference between a thousand and a million. If I told you three million people died in the World Trade Center, you would immediately know I was off by several orders of magnitude. But when we learn that Government Program A costs a million dollars a year, while Program B costs a billion, we have a hard time feeling the difference and therefore deciding how we feel about them.

The other one that's occurred to me is the word "falsify."

Did you know that climate scientists have spent decades systematically trying to falsify the science on global warming?

Here's the definition of the word:

falsify [ˈfɔːlsɪˌfaɪ]vb (tr) -fies, -fying, -fied

1. to make (a report, evidence, accounts, etc.) false or inaccurate by alteration, esp in order to deceive

2. to prove false; disprove

The second definition is the essence of science. Scientists test theories, look for evidence, and try to disprove each other's theories. That's why you can trust science--it's set up so that whatever theory someone advances, there are a legion of very smart people whose careers can be made by successfully demonstrating that one of their rivals is wrong.

But the same word is used for fraud, for manipulating evidence, for concealing truth. It is the direct opposite.

This makes it all too easy for the exact same statement to carry two contradictory meanings, and thereby to sow confusion instead of understanding.

Some numbers, implying certain things about biofuels

2011-02-18T04:35:00.031+01:00

As I write this, the global economy is "recovering" and the price of oil is creeping back into the hundred-dollar-a-barrel range. Thanks to some combination of input costs, rising demand and spectacularly bad harvests, food prices are also spiking. In other words, the world is looking an awful lot like 2006-2008 again.

Last time around, this combination of circumstances led to a great deal of discussion about biofuels and their potential for replacing oil and gas. So I thought I'd throw some numbers out there, with their verifiable and qualified sources, so that the black-and-white facts of the matter will forestall any irrational exuberance and policy driven by wishful thinking.

(That last bit--kidding. Facts influencing people's behaviour. Ha! Anyway...)

Let's start with what a biofuel-powered world looks like, which is to say, the Middle Ages.

The following table gives an estimate of the total energy consumption of the world in the 11th century AD. (The "MToe" is short for "million tonnes of oil equivalent," as in, the amount of gross heat contained in million tonnes of petroleum.)

Table 1: Evaluation of global energy consumption in the 11th century (Mtoe/year)
	MToe/year	(%)
Human	0.38	7.2%
*Man*	0.18	3.4%
*Woman*	0.16	3.0%
*Child*	0.04	0.8%
Bullock/Animal power	0.24	4.5%
Fuelwood	4.61	86.8%
Wind and water	0.08	1.5%
Total	5.31	100%
*(%)*	100%
Table adapted from Bashmakov 2007, Bashmakov 2009

A few things worth noting:

First, the vast majority of that energy (about 87%) was from firewood and most of this was for domestic purposes. Most of the rest was in the form of food consumed by people and draft animals who then did work--tilling fields, smithing iron with hammers, and making the rounds on corpse day. (Remember, plague victims go in the black bin, cans and bottles in the blue one.)

Fast forward to 2008. Gross annual energy consumption worldwide was 11,295 MToe. That's over two thousand times more total energy use than a thousand years ago. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of that energy comes from things other than biofuels and food.

Now, in fairness, there are a lot more people around today--nearly seven billion of us, compared to something like 300 million in the eleventh century. (That's a very rough estimate--about the middle of a range of 245-354 million given in a variety of sources.) There's a whole other conversation to be had about whether we can sustain anything like that population and what it's doing to our ecosystem. But to be fair, if we're going to compare our energy lifestyle to that enjoyed by medieval people, we should look at energy per capita:

Table 2: World energy, population and energy intensity, 1000 and 2008 AD
Year	Population	Primary Energy Consumption (Mtoe/year)	Energy per person (kgoe/cap/year)
1000	300,000,000	5.3	17.7
2008	6,749,678,000	11,294.9	1,673.4
Factor increase	22.5	2,127.1	94.5
Data source: BP 2008, OECD 2008, USCB 2009

So, worlwide, the average person today uses about 95 times as much energy as back in the good old days.

Even that's not a totally fair comparison, though. A lot of people today live in conditions that, frankly, are not all that different from the Bring Out Your Dead guy's. If we're looking to use biofuels to support our current lifestyle or part thereof, we should be comparing per capita energy use in 1000 AD to per capita energy use in the developed world today.

The OECD countries (that is, the developed world) has about one-sixth of the world's population but uses nearly half the energy.

Table 3: World energy, population and energy intensity: World 1000 vs. OECD 2008 AD
Year	Population	Primary Energy Consumption (Mtoe/year)	Energy per capita (kgoe/cap/year)
World, 1000	300,000,000	5.3	17.7
OECD, 2008	1,186,542,000	5,508.4	4,642.4
Factor increase			262.3
Data source: BP 2009, OECD 2008, USCB 2009

So our comfortable Western standard of living uses over two hundred and sixty times as much energy as back in the day. Do you really think we can make up more than a tiny fraction of that amount by boosting biomass production?

Sources:

Bashmakov, Igor. Three Laws of Energy Transitions. Energy Policy 35-2007, 3583–3594.

Bashmakov, Igor, Personal communication. August 11, 2009.

British Petroleum. BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2009.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD World Factbook: Economic, Environmental and Social Statistics. 2008.

United States Census Bureau. International Programs. Historical estimates of world population. Accessed October 6, 2009.

An old favourite that wasn't until now.

2011-02-13T02:34:00.007+01:00

I haven't drawn comix for awhile, for a variety of reasons. Part of it is simply that since I became a city planner, my creative energies and impulses have been directed towards my day job/calling. It's a good life, one full of meaning and possibility. I can't complain.

But I was looking through my old comix from about ten years ago and came across this one. It was never my favourite, just a strip I dashed off because it struck me as mildly amusing and I had nothing better to do that day.

Of course, I knew my life wasn't complicated. It still isn't; not really; not the way most peoples' lives are at my age. But I knew it would be someday. What is the word for being nostalgic for the moment before it has even passed?

I don't want to go back to those days. I remember them fondly but they belong in the past.

Still... some days you wish your biggest problem was which bodily function to deal with first.

A plug: Hyperbole and a half

2011-02-13T02:18:00.006+01:00

Usually when people with blogs don't post for awhile, they start their post with "Sorry I haven't posted lately." I refuse to do that. It's a blog; I'm doing it for free; I post when I feel like it. Dammit!

Which is why you should not interpret my posting twice in one day as a kind of spasm of remorse, massive overcompensation for failing to update a blog that is mostly followed by immediate family members who have heard this stuff a million times already.

Okay, that said: I found an awesome blog by a girl named Allie, who is one of those rare creatures whose ability to tell a story with a combination of words and pictures qualifies as genius. She seems to be both genuinely eccentric and hyper-talented--an exceedingly rare combination, as anyone who's been to art school can attest. Allie seems to draw using some low-res image program like Windows Paint or some such. But she's so good with a mouse (I am told she actually draws with a mouse, not a stylus) that her drawings come out with a kind of gestural energy combined with master draftsmanship that reminds me of Ralph Steadman without the splatters.

And her stuff is funny. Go see her blog. It's called Hyperbole And A Half.

Okay, that's my second post today. There might not be any others for awhile. Depends how I feel.

Please come back from time to time, though, just to make sure.

They don't make 'em like they used to.

2011-02-12T04:43:00.013+01:00

I was nine years old when I first saw The Empire Strikes Back and, like most kids, what happened in that movie was a source of speculation and anxiety for the next three years. What's gonna happen to Han Solo? Is Darth Vader really Luke's father? These were deep and vexing questions. But the one that nagged at me the most was this: How's Luke gonna be a Jedi without a lightsaber?

As you'll recall, Luke gets his fighting hand lopped off in that climactic battle. Off it goes, saber and all, into the big screaming vaccuum-cleaner void underneath Cloud City. The hand's no big deal. It's sci-fi; they'll build you a new one. They have the technology. But a lightsaber? Where are you gonna get another one of those? The Jedi are extinct; you can't just walk into the Jedi Supply Store and get another one. That was the last one. They just don't make 'em anymore.

I'm not a materialistic person in the usual sense. I don't want a big house and a ten-thousand-dollar stereo and a garage full of sports cars. But I'm not serene enough, evolved enough or masochistic enough to embrace a fully minimalist lifestyle.

I used to. For years I lived out of a backpack and a duffle bag, sleeping in a sleeping bag on the floor or on friends' sofas, a stripped-down hobohemian unburdened by material possessions, utility agreements or a fixed address.

But what feels fun and free when you're 25 is much less so when you're pushing forty. You want some stability in your life. Your back hurts and so you need a bed, a proper desk and chair, not a thermarest and a laptop. You want cooking utensils and a place where your mail can find you. The Buddha reminds us that everything is temporary but we don't have to like it.

A few years ago I started gathering the accoutrements of a settled, mature existence--mainly furniture and clothes. I'm a professional adult who works in an office and so it's appropriate that I look the part. From the outset, the goal was to buy quality stuff that I wouldn't have to replace in six months; stuff that would cost more up front, but that would be well-made enough to last for decades, to age gracefully, to accumulate a lifetime's patina of personal history and meaning.

If I thought I could persuade you I was some kind of environmental saint, I might say this is because I resent the idea of a throwaway society, where resources are used up forever to make a thing that will have to be replaced next year. But this would only be half true. The other half is that I'm a cheapskate and I really, really, REALLY hate having to pay money for something and then, almost immediately, have to pay again. Goddammit!

If you want to be that kind of cheap, though, you have to be prepared to spend a whack of money, at least up front. You get what you pay for.

Unfortunately, what I'm finding is that quality goods are exceedingly hard to come by, no matter how much you are willing to pay. The old saw is false: You don't get what you pay for. You pay for what you hope to get, but you probably don't get it.

Last summer I went out and bought a navy blazer with the full intention of never buying another one. I bought a very reputable, high-quality brand in a classic cut and spent about six hundred dollars on it. It fit very well.

Now, this winter I put on a bit of weight. Not much; about ten pounds. But enough that I needed to get that jacket let out a bit so it would fit comfortably. So I took it to my tailor, who opened it up and informed me that the manufacturer hadn't left any material on the inside of the seam. (Historically, tailors and clothing manufacturers left enough material that you could let a garment out by up to an inch and a half--which you're going to have to do if you intend to keep something into middle age.)

So he couldn't do anything with it. He was as annoyed as I was; the manufacturer had saved about twenty cents' worth of material, but at the expense of creating a $600 jacket that becomes unwearable if you eat a box of donuts.

I've had comparable experiences with shoes, furniture--well, I was going to run off a whole list of all the things I've tried to buy quality and gotten junk, but there haven't been that many categories. For eight years I've kept buying clothes, shoes and furniture in the hope that I'll finally be getting something worth the trouble, and keep having to replace it for one reason or another. The hamster wheel of trying to get a pair of dress shoes that lasts more than a year has eaten much of my disposable income.

The point is this: It is increasingly starting to seem as though quality goods cannot reliably be had, no matter how much you're willing to spend.

This is deeply distressing. I don't want my civilization to be in decline. I think about the last days of the Roman Empire and imagine people walking around, looking at these magnificent marble buildings built by their grandparents, and saying "Hmm, it's funny.... they don't make 'em like that anymore. I wonder why?"

I have had to resort to buying antique furniture and vintage clothes. The difference in quality is obvious and overwhelming; I'm talking about department-store jackets from 1950 that are twice as good as anything you could buy today. All right, perhaps there is a survival bias at work here. Maybe there was always this much crap in the system, but all the crap has since been sloughed off to landfills and only the quality stuff is left.

I don't know. What I do know is that when I do find something in a vintage shop that fits me, or a piece of furniture in an antique shop, I feel an overwhelming need to buy it because I will probably never find another item that good. The "vintage horizon", that consumer K-T boundary before which things were made well and after which the fast-turnover junk economy took over, is receding fast. Items from Before become increasingly rare, lost to entropy or quality nuts like me who know the score. Things as prosaic as a good-quality jacket become priceless relics, not to be had at any price, except when fate smiles upon you and entrusts you with an heirloom like a grandfather on his deathbed.

Misguidance Counsellors Part 3: Student Loans

2011-01-08T21:55:00.000+01:00

I'm going to start my discussion on the pros and cons of university by looking at student loans.

The Canadian Federation of Students, not surprisingly, keeps track of the numbers on this. Average student debt at graduation in 2010 from a four-year degree ranges from about $13,000 in Quebec to over $28,000 in the Maritimes. These numbers represent significant increases from thirty years ago; in 1982 the average graduate from a bachelor's program in Canada emerged with $8025 (for males) or $7595 (for females) in student debt. (Figures originally given in 1990 dollars here; adjusted to 2010 dollars using the Bank of Canada Inflation Calculator here.)

Okay, I promise I'm not going to keep hammering you with numbers--not unless it's absolutely necessary. I just wanted to make sure you knew I'm not pulling this stuff out of my small intestine. Let's talk about what these numbers mean.

First off, you could argue that $13,000 or even $28,000 isn't really that much money, especially when compared to the statistics on lifelong earning potential of university graduates. I'll agree that on average, over your lifetime, you make enough extra money thanks to a university degree to pay off your loans and then some. This is the kind of dry, bean-counting logic used by the people in charge of justifying cutting support to higher education.

But numbers don't always tell the whole story.

First off, beware of the average. There's a big spread in there. Some people, thanks to scholarships, rich or indulgent parents (or at least parents with foresight and a sense of basic responsibility to their offspring) graduate with no debt. Such was my happy case; when I graduated from my bachelor's degree in 1994, I had zero debt. I was free to spend the next several years living in cheerful bohemian poverty, writing screenplays and drawing comix and other economically-worthless pursuits. My roommate came out over twenty grand in the hole and spent the next five years staggering under the payments before finally defaulting and becoming a credit harijan for another seven. Averages hide the fact that while some people emerge unscathed, others--many others--are completely crushed.

Secondly, just because they call it student loans doesn't mean it's the only debt a student incurs. More and more students have to resort to running up big credit card debts during their four- or five-year run in school. It's well known that credit card companies pounce on freshmen with all manner of offers. The results are predictable. I know one person who has the statistically-typical $28,000 in student loans, plus another $20,000 in credit card debts.

Now, some will object that if students max out their credit cards, that's hardly the system's fault. I have now spent a goodly chunk of my life biting my tongue as I listen to grayhairs behind me in the line or sitting at the next table, bemoaning how irresponsible "kids these days" are. If you get involved in one of these conversations, you'll likely learn that young people today are so overindulged and impatient to get everything now, they'll max out their credit cards buying designer clothes, iPods and two-hundred-dollar sneakers. No wonder they come out of school bleeding red ink.

Let's leave aside some of the obvious responses to this--for instance, that if our kids are irresponsible with money, well, they had to have picked it up somewhere. Responsibility only goes in one direction here, from the old to the young. Parents have to take some ownership of their kids' behaviour. Kids aren't responsible for anything their parents did.

But the galling thing about this kind of attitude is the assumption that these kids blew all that money on toys. It's an attitude that's hard to maintain when you look at how expensive basic necessities have gotten in the past thirty years. The housing bubble has gotten all the press in the past few years but they don't talk so much about what's happened to rental housing. Of course the two are related; part of what holds rents down is the fact that if they go too high, it becomes more cost-effective to buy a place. But let the cost of ownership go up the way it has, and suddenly the cap is off the market rate for apartments too.

Okay, I promised I wouldn't hammer you with numbers. I also lied, kind of. When I began graduate school in 2001, I faced what was probably the most ideal situation you could have as a student. I was going to school in Quebec, which meant that about half my roughly $9000 a year in student aid came in the form of grants, not loans. Tuition was only $2600 per year--as far as I know, the cheapest tuition in Canada. (Compare that to undergraduate tuition in some regions, which can top $5000 a year.) Thanks to Quebec's insanely strong tenant-protection laws, my rent on an apartment walking distance to school (so I didn't even need a bus pass) was about $300 a month. I had $4000 in savings, a part-time and summer job that paid about 11 bucks an hour--that is, substantially above minimum wage. It was a two-year program so there was less time to go racking up debt.

And with all that on my side, I still came out of it with $8000 in student debt. I reiterate, I was not living high on the hog here. There were no major discretionary purchases--no iPods, no trips, no spring breaks at Fort Lauderdale. That $300 apartment was cheap for a reason: it was a decrepit shithole where, for one two-month period, there was no water whatsoever. So you could go over my budget in much more detail, looking for ways I could have saved money, but I guarantee you will find nothing. I was living about as frugally and responsibly as an adult can be expected to. And still I came out with debt.

I'm not complaining; it turned out to be very manageable, because I was fortunate enough to also graduate with a master's degree in city planning at the beginning of an unprecedented housing- and development-boom, where planning grads were walking into jobs right after graduation. In other words, it worked out the way it is supposed to... in my case.

But still... eight thousand bucks. What happens to a kid who's spending $500 a month on rent for four years and paying five grand a year in tuition? And what happens when that kid happens to graduate with a history degree at the beginning of an recession instead of a boom?

Duluth, Minnesota, February 2008

2010-12-11T14:36:00.003+01:00

Thanks for nothing.

2010-11-20T16:42:00.003+01:00

Dodging a bullet.

2010-10-28T05:16:00.010+02:00

Winnebago Man is a documentary about the "Angriest RV Salesman" in the viral video. If you haven't seen the video itself, it's a series of outtakes from a Winnebago sales video, wherein the salesman keeps blowing his lines and swearing at the camera. It's pretty funny and apparently quite famous, although I'd never heard of it until the documentary came out.

The documentary relates what happens when someone decides to track down the angry RV salesman twenty years later to find out who he is and what happened to him. It has its flaws but at its best it's a reflection on how Youtube has, for better or worse, catapulted ordinary people in obscure videos to low-grade viral-video infamy, usually through video footage that catches them at a really bad, unguarded or ill-judged moment. We all have such moments and we always did; but video cameras used to be expensive and bulky, and opportunities for footage to reach wide audiences were pretty much limited to America's Funniest Home Videos. Under those circumstances, it took a real effort to humiliate yourself in front of millions of people.

It makes me grateful to have been born when I was, because most of my opportunities to embarrass myself on camera happened before the 'tube came along. There's a home movie of me that circulated among my family for years, from when I was about twelve, ripping off a George Carlin routine minus the swear words. Throughout my teenage years I conclusively disproved the existence of telekinesis, for if it were at all possible to effect action at a distance then every copy of that video would have been erased by my brainwaves of sheer will.

Later there was another incident where someone else's good sense or at least embarrassment probably saved the day. When I was nineteen, the summer before I went off to film school, I was playing with a video camera with some friends. We were using a very bright film lamp I had found at a garage sale, and one of my friends who had been interning at a TV station pointed out that you usually put some kind of diffuser over it. The video shows her demonstrating by putting the lamp under her t-shirt, whereupon her shirt catches fire. The scene explodes into Three Stooges chaos as I stare on, slack-jawed, painfully slow to understand what's happening.

Fortunately, Wendy wasn't hurt and the house is still standing as far as I know.

(In fairness, I was momentarily blinded by the brightness of the light and so I blame the giant phosphenes for my slowness on the uptake. But such is the unforgiving nature of video, which purges all context and leaves only the image. I don't video well in profile--I have kind of a pudgy face and a moronic hillbilly jawline--and with my mullet, ball cap and sleeveless wife-beater T-shirt, not to mention the glacial pace of my reaction, the video makes me look like one of the roobs in People of Wal-Mart.)

Wendy wisely kept the video and probably destroyed it. Today it would likely have ended up on Youtube, and if we were really unlucky it would have become an indestructible viral phenomenon, uncontrollable, undeletable, fifteen seconds of electromagnetic pee in the worldwide media pool.

Just about everyone born after 1980 has had the opportunity--the alignment of technology, youth and inability to grasp the idea of consequences or that someday you might be in a position to be taken seriously--to screw up their digital identity forever. For each of them, there's a chance that someday they'll be running for city council or receiving the Order of Canada and there it'll be: an old clip of the candidate punching a clown or molesting a dead pig head, taking them down in a burst of drive-by ridicule or worse.

Misguidance Counsellors, Part Two

2010-10-18T02:01:00.007+02:00

So I'm wondering how to go about this series of posts on whether it's still a good idea to go to university.

I'll let you in on a bit of a secret: I am not a new-media kind of guy. I feel a certain affinity for old-school journalism and academic research papers and the professional standards typically associated with same: in particular doing extensive research, citing authoritative facts, and editing everything before you publish. It makes me kind of skittish about posting opinions that might turn out to be wrong.

But those are values that aren't particularly valued in the blogging realm. This medium seems to lend itself more to stream-of-consciousness, throwing out ideas as they come to you, and maybe going back and editing them out later. There is always the risk that if you say something foolish or factually incorrect, some anonymous commenter will rudely correct or berate you. However, since this is the internet, this is likely to happen even if you don't say anything foolish or factually incorrect. So I wouldn't lose any sleep over the possibility.

The other nice thing about it is that you've got a bunch of other people reading your drafts. Some of them will have useful things to say. In the ideal case, they end up doing all the work for you by posting comments that are way more insightful than anything you could come up with.

With that in mind... The university thing.

As a starting point, let me define what I mean by "going to university."

For the purposes of this discussion, I'm talking specifically about the conventional approach which high school seniors/Grade Twelves are encouraged to take by all the appropriate authorities. You start applying in your last year of high school. Once you've been accepted by one or more schools, you pick one and enroll officially as a full-time student the September after high school graduation. You take out student loans, pay your tuition, and supplement the cost of school and living expenses with part-time jobs (during the school year) and summer jobs (during the four-month breaks between school years.) Depending on the program you're in, you either choose your major field of study right up front, or else spend your first year sampling a bunch of different courses before deciding what to focus on. After four or five years of continuous study, you graduate around age 22 or 23 with a Bachelor's degree in your chosen field, whereupon you decide whether to go on to graduate school (e.g. a professional or academic Master's, or else a doctorate) or go straight into the workforce. In the latter case, it is presumed from the outset that that Bachelor's degree is both necessary and sufficient to secure a job that is lucrative enough to pay back the debts incurred in getting it. Then your life starts.

Okay, that's a mouthful. Lots of stipulations and caveats. Could probably use some carriage returns. But it is, I think, a fair representation of what your parents, guidance counsellors and teachers expect of you as the default choice. It's the right way to go about doing things. Any deviation from this plan will be viewed as unusual at best, probably reckless or irresponsible, and at worst downright stupid.

Chew on that for a bit and I'll see you later.

Misguidance Counsellors, Part One

2010-10-10T18:57:00.005+02:00

There's an old joke to the effect that if guidance counsellors knew anything about career moves, they wouldn't be guidance counsellors.

That's a bit harsh but like all jokes, there is a truth there, exaggerated to comic effect though it may be. Guidance counsellors give a lot of bad advice. In some respects they can't be blamed. At my high school of 2000 students, there were two guidance counsellors--which one you got depended on whether your last name started with A to M or N to Z. In a work year of 2000 hours, that meant each student got a total of two hours' attention from a guidance counsellor. Imagine being expected to shape someone's future in the time it takes to watch Avatar.

I'm thinking about this now for a few reasons.

First, this is the time of year that high school seniors are getting their university applications together. Fully a year before they start post-secondary education, they are expected to have a pretty firm idea of where they want to go and what they want to do. That's overwhelming enough.

But, secondly, they are getting most of their advice from Mature and Respectable Adults--not just guidance counsellors but parents, teachers and society at large--which is to say, pretty much by definition from people who made their own decisions in this regard under radically different circumstances.

Strictly speaking, that category includes me. Having gone to university in the very early 1990's, before the wholesale deregulation and de-capping of tuition, I faced a radically different cost-benefit analysis. For instance, my undergraduate tuition was about $1600 per year, about one-third what it would cost today. I was also insanely lucky. My parents paid the full cost of my undergraduate degree. Housing costs were dirt cheap, and preposterously so in Montreal where I went to school. Because everything went exactly right for me, I graduated with no debt, free to do whatever I wanted. Even so, many of my friends were not so lucky. Twenty years later, that kind of luck is even harder to come by.

The contrast between today's situation and that of someone in 1970 is even more extreme. Those people lived on a whole different planet, with a completely different atmosphere and everything.

So I'm writing this series of posts for any high schooler who is looking at going to university; who will almost certainly be getting a lot of unconditional encouragement to do so; and who in any case will not be in a position to properly evaluate their decision until after they're committed.

I'm not going to say university is a bad idea or that you shouldn't go. The case I'm going to make is that it's not that simple; that there are pros and cons; but that most of the advice you get will tend to overemphasize the arguments for, and discount the arguments against.

Take this series of posts as one opinion of many. Your parents etc. might disagree but if they do, they should be able to articulate why. Actually, that's the first lesson: critical thinking, and learning to distinguish between good advice and bad advice. Shit too often closely resembles shinola. Thinking is hard; start practicing. You still have a year.

To be continued.

Bibendum Lost

2010-10-10T17:52:00.002+02:00

About five years ago, at a flea market in Paris I saw (but did not buy, stupid stupid stupid!) an old Michelin poster.

It’s from, I’m guessing, probably the late teens, and it’s an ad for some kind of rubber resistance-strap workout device. Apparently Michelin was at one time involved in the manufacture of various rubber products beyond tires.

It shows Bibendum, very jaunty and unconcerned—I think he’s even wearing a monocle—with his walking-stick hooked over his arm. And he’s simultaneously, effortlessly, punching and kicking a pair of very Gallic-looking muggers—kind of one fist going out sideways this way to hit one of them in the nose, the opposite leg striking out the other way to nail the other. Paf! Paf! A Belle Epoque Charles Atlas ad.

I have since scoured the Internet and better poster shops everywhere, looking for a copy of this. No one else is aware of its existence. I’m starting to think I imagined the whole thing.

If anyone can direct me towards a print of this poster or (failing that) proof of its existence, I will be very grateful and reassured of my own sanity.

This Old House

2010-10-09T19:19:00.002+02:00

I don't post a lot on this blog. If you're a fan, sorry about that. But I do write a lot of emails, carrying on a fairly interesting correspondence with various people. I suppose I could post my side of these conversations as blog posts--they might be interesting--but it kind of feels like cheating.

The other day I was talking to the Primate about House. I had indicated that I kind of like the show, although of course my ability to like or dislike it is severely limited by the fact that I don't have a TV and don't watch shows online. I've seen it a couple of times, though, and what I said I liked about it is that the main character is really smart and, despite a lot of pain and ugliness in his backstory and completely substandard social skills, remains basically on the side of the angels. Then I said

"In a world where smart people have to pretend to be pleasant, even to the point of avoiding stating unpleasant truths (even as stupid and dishonest people are freed from any obligation to be civil) seeing a fictional character who is both smart and blunt is refreshing. I wish it wasn't."

I guess this isn't really a new thought. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity" said Yeats. Sort of the same thing.

300 bank robberies a year?

2010-09-24T23:55:00.009+02:00

Okay, I'm not obsessed with movies. Really I'm not. You'll have to take my word for it because a fair number of the postings on this blog have to do with overthinking some bit of cinematic trivia.

But this one has stuck in my head because it makes me feel like I'm taking crazy pills. (In the interests of disclosure, I have a cold and have just snarfed down a full pack of Fisherman's Friend. But to the best of my knowledge, the only side effect of those is to make you smell like an overturned tank truck of Vicks Vapo-Rub.)

I've seen Inception twice this summer, which means I have also seen the trailer for the Ben Affleck vehicle "The Town." Cool working-class antiheroes, bank robberies, doomed love affair. Okay, but one of the first things you hear is that

"... there are over 300 bank robberies in the Boston area each year."

What?

Now, there are 365 days in a year. Subtract the weekends, when of course banks aren't open, and you've got something on the order of 260 weekdays. Subtract holidays and you're down to maybe 250 opening days.

So, if we're to believe Ben Affleck, there is on average one bank robbery every single day in Boston, plus one bonus day each week where there are too. (Are Fridays your lucky day? I feel like Wednesdays.)

And that's a business that's only open from about 10am to 4pm.

No wonder these guys have to have split-second timing!

In real life, someone has tried to check these figures and it turns out that there are, in fact, about 300 "bank crimes" on average every year in Massachussets. Maggie Lloyd of Boston's The Tech cites FBI statistics to this effect, and stipulates that they don't know how many of the crimes are in the Boston area. They also mention that the "bank crimes" category covers a whole range of things, of which however the most common is walking up to the teller and demanding money. The stats are then followed up with a number of anecdotes about specific armed robbers.

Granted, I don't live in Boston but I think I would have heard about it if there were a bank robbery (in the commonly-understood sense of the word) every day or every other day. That's the kind of thing that newspaper editors live to put on their front page. I have stayed up really really late and drunk way too much beer with friends who lived in Boston and never once did the subject come up.

I would gently suggest that the vast majority of these bank crimes involve someone depositing a phony check at an ATM and immediately withdrawing the whole amount. "Bank robberies" as presented in The Town are to bank crime as... well, as marijuana is to illegal drugs.

Why do I care? Well, it seems to me that an awful lot of people (1) can't do basic math and (2) have an exaggerated fear of violent crime. From their obsession with handguns and long-gun registries and the freedom to shoot back should the King of England try to quarter troops in one's basement, you would think we lived in a constant state of low-grade warfare, where any trip to the ATM could be your last. Those people tend to (3) vote for yahoos who promise to do anything--ANYTHING--to keep everyone safe from the veritable Wild West Show seemingly unfolding outside their front doors.

Not helping, Ben. Not helping at all.

***UPDATE***

Well, the ever-knowledgable Idle Primate read this and, once again leaving me gobsmacked with not just the depth but the directions of his knowledge, had this to say:

"I don’t know any stats, but bank robbery is incredibly common and banks do everything they can to not publicize it. you’ve probably been in a bank while it was being robbed.

Most bank robberies are a guy walking up to a teller and passing a little note saying, “I am armed give me x amount of money.” The teller can draw $2500 from the machines without any extra authorisation and they are trained to do just that in those situations, and hand it over. To any bystander, it looks like a regular transaction. Bank tellers find it exciting and flirt with bank robbers.

It's small change to a bank, but there is shitloads of it going on."

Huh.

Interesting.

Well, maybe I stand corrected.

Maybe Ben Affleck isn't a douchebag after all. Actually, no, that's going too far.

Mad Max

2010-09-23T01:35:00.016+02:00

You need to be careful about attributing too much meaning to movies, especially big noisy action movies. Reading the cinematic tea leaves for deep relevance to the world of today is a mug's game, or at least a game for those poor souls who have opted to do graduate studies in film.

At the same time, part of what makes a movie work is how it taps on our familiar experience and resonates in the audience's mind. Any movie, if it's any good, is a little bit true--even if it's an over-the-top fantasy.

Idle Primate and I went out to see Mad Max recently. That's the first of George Miller's postapocalyptic trilogy set in the Australian outback and arguably the least iconic of the three. When people talk about a "Mad Max dystopia," they're usually referring to The Road Warrior, the second film in the trilogy, set after a nuclear war. That's a very simple world--rampaging motorized gangs of punk rock mutants in a completely lawless post-nuclear wasteland, where civilization is clearly and indisputably dead and gone.

Mad Max is more interesting in that it takes place while things are falling apart. It's not post-apocalyptic so much as... well, I guess pre-post-apocalyptic is the best word. (Which technically should just be "apocalyptic" but it's not really that either, because apocalypse suggests a clear and sudden transition and that's not really what's going on here.)

Max and the other good guys are highway-patrol cops, chasing down the first generation of the emerging road gangs that will have completely taken over by the time we get to The Road Warrior. It's clear that the police force is on its last legs as a civic institution; the cops themselves are starting to look and behave like just another (albeit relavitely benign) gang operating out of the trashed-out remains of the Halls of Justice.

But what's striking is that no one seems to think the world has ended. Notwithstanding the obvious failure of major institutions that is underway, a good chunk of the movie involves Max and his Sears-catalog family piling into the station wagon and going on a pleasant road trip, even though we know those roads are full of biker gangs. The bikers themselves are kind of goofy and clean-cut--a missing link, the last of the 1960's-style bikers, sort of a coelocanth-like specimen of pre-Altamonte Hell's Angel, from just before it split once and for all from the hippie genus and became something vicious and malignant. The kind of bikers you would imagine doing security for the Monkees.

At the same time, ambulances still come when you call them; lawyers still show up to get their clients out of jail; whiskey and hookers are still bought with money, not cans of Spam.

So the film and its characters exist in this odd space of apocalypse denial. In this respect Mad Max is a much more realistic film than The Road Warrior.

The big problem I have with survivalists and hard-core doomers is not that they anticipate some serious shit going down; it's that they seem to expect and even hope for a very clear-cut situation to emerge afterwards, where life is a matter of having lots of guns and being willing to use them. Where all complications of society, rules, expectations and having to deal with other people are swept away, and where life--if nasty, brutish and short--is at least freed from bullshit.

But as we've seen in Russia and Afghanistan and even the late Roman/early Frankish period, civilizations don't collapse that neatly. There is never any clear-cut signal that says, "NOW it is necessary and okay to quit mailing out resumes, pick up a machine gun and start marauding." You can lose and lose and lose some more--retirement plans, public schools, the rule of law--and yet that blessed state of nature never seems to come. The survivalists and Tea Partiers are bound to be disappointed. Just what does someone have to do to get a Hobbesian war of all against all going around here, anyway!

Of course, in Mad Max, the title character gets just that signal. Something Changes Forever and the hero is freed from all obligation to the old world, freed to become the Road Warrior.

It's only a movie, guys.

What's really interesting is how plausible even the implausibilities are. In this crumbling world, where even the police station looks like a trashed-out squat, the roads are still being maintained with beautiful smooth asphalt, well enough to drive on at eighty miles an hour. Absurd on the surface of it; roads are fragile and take an insane amount of effort and coordination to keep functional at all, and in a general center-not-holding-things-falling-apart those roads should turn into cowpaths right quick. Except that in real life, while civic institutions such as schools and city halls and libraries have to close due to collapsed tax bases, the half-assed thrashing of governments trying to jumpstart the economy is largely directed towards road building. Suddenly Mad Max seems eerily prescient.

Getting ready to make a mess!

2010-07-26T01:19:00.014+02:00

So this weekend I've started looking into what's involved in this learn-to-make-stuff thing.

Something I've been wanting to do for some time now is to build some bicimaquinas. The word is Spanish and was coined by a group called Mayapedal in Guatemala. They take donated bicycles and carve them up, modify them and put them back together to make stationary pedal-powered machines. So far they've designed and built a blender, a corn grinder, a water pump and a number of other useful devices that make life a hell of a lot easier when you live somewhere without a reliable, affordable electricity supply.

Depending on who you ask, that might include a lot of us in the next few decades.

Even if you're not of an apocalyptic bent, there's a lot to love about these things. We're surrounded by clever technology that lets us imagine we're really in charge of the universe, but an awful lot of it doesn't work at all unless we keep feeding it some form of concentrated fossil sunlight.

Bicycles are sort of different; they take the power output of a human being (up to 300-400 watts in short bursts, more like 75 watts over long periods of time) and strip away as much friction as possible, allowing us to get the most work done with the least effort. It's a truly clever invention, an elegant solution to a persistent problem that dogs every animal on the planet, i.e. moving around without blowing your calorie budget. It's an honest invention that doesn't rely on a geological trust fund to work its apparent magic. In this respect it's a much bigger achievement than a car or an airplane or a moon shot.

(Let's leave aside for the moment that making replacement parts for bicycles itself depends on an industrial system that may or may not be able to function, even at a drastically reduced level, on the available renewable energy sources. Someday even bicimaquinas might not be viable. But in the meantime...)

What I also like about the bicimaquina concept is that, even for us pudgy and comfortable first-worlders, it deals with some of our current problems as well as our future ones. Leave aside the whole issue of reducing energy consumption for environmental reasons. Right now we've got labour-saving machines doing a lot of our physical work for us, while we go to gyms to work out on different machines whose purpose is to help us burn off extra calories while doing no useful work.

The Dutch cheapskate in me finds this objectionable.

So I'm gonna start with bicimaquinas because, of all the greasy, dirty, hands-onny get-stuff-doney crafts, bike repair is the one at which I am least inept. I've actually got a decent grasp of how bicycles work, though I haven't actually worked on one in years. So there's something to start with.

I think eventually I'd like to build a pedal-powered washing machine. Something like that would give you a good workout over the course of half an hour or so and get something done that, frankly, I tend to avoid. (Of course I tend to avoid exercise too...)

But for now I think the first project will be a stationary stand to mount a bike frame on--the power plant for whatever other devices I then decide to hook up to it.

Gonna have to learn how to weld...

A new career awaits you in... something or other...

2010-07-24T16:23:00.015+02:00

The past year has been enlightening in an embarrassing sort of way.

Enlightening, in the sense that I've learned some new things in a really fundamental way. Embarrassing, because they're things that I frankly already knew for a good long time already... just not in the same way, and not at the same level.

I'm not putting it across correctly. Here's an analogy:

Everybody knows that cigarettes kill people. Even people who smoke know this; despite all the obfuscation and water-muddying of the paid tobacco lobby, nobody really doubts the simple fact that tobacco is likely to kill you, be it through heart attack, stroke or the Big C. They know this but they keep smoking anyway. It's a superficial knowledge, one whose roots haven't penetrated down and taken hold, or that have yet to find a way around the inner delusion that perhaps this particular smoker will be the exception.

Then there's the other kind of knowledge--the one with deep roots, the one that wraps itself around your heart and spine and squeezes and says, Cut the bullshit, now it's time to do something. For the smoker, maybe it's your first heart attack, or the lump that turned out (after several months of panic) to be benign. The sound of a bullet whizzing past your ear. Whoa!

My knowledge that the world is about to change in a serious way is like that. Since 2003 I've been aware of peak oil and the implications of same. I've been one of the more vocal people (in my profession at least) on the need to prepare for the end of cheap fossil fuels. I've known all this time that a lot of the jobs that exist today, simply will not in the future. Not just obvious stuff like car dealers and gas-pump jockeys and drive-thru Timmie's baristas, but more fundamental vocational extinctions arising from a breakdown in complexity.

A decomplexifying society has trouble finding the surplus resources ("surplus" being almost entirely subjective, on the part of the decision makers in that society) to support roles like theatre actors, flower arrangers and big-stone-head carvers. It also has a tendency to concentrate on immediate needs rather than long-term thinking... so useful investments in long-term problem solving such as pure science and education and planning increasingly become seen as luxuries.

Planning. Hmm.

You can see where I'm going with this.

My knowledge has thus far been superficial; it hasn't really driven any major behavioural changes on my part. To the casual observer, that may be surprising. I don't drive a car, I live in town, and I've been known to stockpile jars of peanut butter in case of sudden famine. But these are things I would have done anyway. I hate driving and for various reasons really shouldn't drive anyway; and I acquired the bomb-shelter hoarding instinct from my grandparents through my dad, whose experience in Holland during WWII taught them that when there's extra food available for cheap, you buy a whole flat of cans and store 'em.

But I've still been operating on the assumption that one way or another, my own niche in all of this will still fundamentally be a brainy thinking role. As a planner helping to develop a strategy to adapt our cities to reduced fossil fuel supplies; as a government policy wonk, part of the Brain Trust, developing such strategies at a national level.

I hope this will still be on the menu for the next forty or so years I expect to linger in this world. But lately I've started to wonder.

I saw a disturbing headline in one of the newspapers whose vending boxes festoon street corners in Ottawa. Seems the newly-barely-elected Conservative government in Britain, with its new pals the Liberal Democrats, are proposing to downsize the various government functions and devolve those powers and responsibilities onto the volunteer sector. The functions mentioned include things like public transit. In other words, not little peripheral things like arts administration or daycare, but fundamental public services that almost EVERYONE agrees are necessary on some level and require highly-trained, professional management and staff.

I'm not going to comment extensively on the insanity of this, except to say that there's nothing new in its principle except the scope. In his "Common Sense Revolution" of the mid-1990's, Mike Harris proposed to gut public services and let them be replaced by "volunteerism."

Well, of course he did. Nobody shreds a basic service without providing some fig leaf about how it will be done better, more democratically and more efficiently by someone whose core business is elsewhere--be it maximizing profit (when the service is proposed to be privatized) or feeding themselves and paying the mortgage (when it's proposed to be taken up by volunteers.)

It's obviously horseshit, it never works as advertised, and we've seen enough movement-conservative governments over the past thirty years by now to know exactly what happens. Monetary deficits avoided by one branch of government are moved off the books, into less-readily-quantifiable balance sheets such as human resource capacity, social equity and sustainability. Real costs are moved from today and into tomorrow; real benefits are hoovered up from everyone tomorrow and stuffed into the pockets of a happy few today. Public, collective debts foregone by e.g. government's cutting student aid and un-capping tuition are cut up and transferred, dollar for dollar, to individuals who have made the foolish and naive decision to go to university to become nurses, teachers, engineers, scientists or any of the other professions who will be needed to keep things running in a few years.

This makes the current goings-on very interesting in the Chinese-curse sense of the word, for someone's whose vocation is some version of public service. Don't get me wrong: My Plan A is still to play some role in government, helping my civilization manage the transition from a cheap-energy economy to something much less energy-intensive but still recognizably civilized.

But when I hear about the British-conservative-volunteerism plan, or see Americans turning against the best president they are likely to ever see in their lifetime, or people in Ontario bitching about the Liberal government because they just don't like the gosh-darned HST...

We've seen this before. In the 1970's, oil prices spiked and economies went into extended recession. After some panicked running-around-in-circles, the response was to elect governments--from Thatcher to Reagan to Mulroney--whose solution was to get things back to normal by stripping out government's power to act on problems requiring collective action. So, for instance, creating the next generation of fuel cells, solar panels and energy efficiency was left to the private sector to decide to undertake if it appeared immediately profitable.

Which for the most part it wasn't, so they pretty much didn't.

Any progress on these fronts was slow, delayed, too little and too late, and completely dwarfed by the massive proliferation of sprawl, globalized supply lines and the complete devastation of passenger rail service in favour of the energy black hole of commercial aviation.

In the past two years, we've seen a sort of moment of confused inertia like the spinning of the 1970's, akin to the couple of seconds after Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff but before he realizes he's about to fall. Cue little hand-held sign: "Help!"

Now I get the impression that the reaction to this stage in collapse will not be a sustained rallying in favour of collective and equitable action, but rather a wholesale jettisoning of "dead weight."

Another analogy. If you're on a sinking ship, it will quickly become apparent to everyone on board that you can slow the sinking by throwing stuff overboard. (You might even imagine that if you throw enough stuff overboard, you can prevent the ship from sinking entirely.)

In this analogy, the choice of what to throw overboard has so far (i.e. since the 1970's) generally been to toss the third-class passengers into the water. (You COULD ask the first-class passengers to toss some of their oversized luggage and steamer trunks instead, so the navvies and Irishmen don't have to drown. But that would be "class warfare" and a chorus of media finger puppets will ask why we are so intent on punishing success?)

Perhaps this is human nature. If it is, it's still no excuse. I think human nature (and, indeed, our nature as animals) is full of good and bad things, and things we can and should overrule with our brains and things we can't, and things that we maybe can't but must try to if we are to have a hope of surviving. There are bad brainstem habits we have to live with, there are instincts that it would be unhealthy to repress, and then there are instincts and habits that are unworthy of rational, compassionate beings and must be challenged if we are to retain any claim to legitimacy as the alpha species on this planet. A lot of our failures in the twentieth century have grown from a failure to distinguish between these. We treat imperatives as impossibilities, we champion lost causes that aren't worth winning and ignore key issues that, unless they are successfully dealt with, will make all the others academic.

Even if I were to concede the necessity of throwing the steerage passengers overboard in order to preserve the comfort of the better class of people--which I do not--I am gobsmacked by how readily people go along with it. My astonishment is purely for pragmatic reasons. As in, it doesn't surprise me that people behave in such selfish ways, but rather that they seem so unaware of where their self-interest truly lies.

Because most of us are travelling second-class. As long as things are going fine, it's easy to forget that. We get regular meals and soft bunks and even the opportunity to hobnob with the first-class passengers and the luxury to imagine that we'll someday be travelling first-class ourselves.

The key difference between liberals and conservatives may be where they expect they'll end up if second-class gets split up between the other two.

We travel on tickets that are very poorly printed, even hand-scrawled by a careless ticket agent. A "2" can look a lot like a "1" or a "3", depending on the light and how you squint. When it gets wet, the ink can run in ways that will surprise you.

So I would advise my fellow second-class passengers to think carefully before you advocate a particular jettisonning strategy. The way ships are built, there are a lot more people in steerage than in first class. And in the chaos and poor light and salt spray of a sinking vessel at midnight, your "2" may turn out to be a three after all.

I've digressed a little bit. This post started about me learning something.

For a long time I've thought in an abstract way about learning to do and make concrete things with my hands. It's not something I was ever particularly good at. I'm creative in that I can draw and I can write and I can think but when it comes to actually creating functional objects--things you can use to do things--I'm almost completely inept. Or not inept--just inexperienced. When you're Good At School and clearly bound for brain work, nobody really goes out of their way to insist that you learn how to fix things; they're so glad you're not going to be stuck in the dying factory-worker economy of the de-industrializing late twentieth century that the point doesn't get pressed.

But I think maybe that's run its course. I think that in my lifetime, people who can make or fix things--who have already become a pretty rare breed--are going to find those skills more and more useful. I think maybe it's time to become one of them.

I'll keep ya posted.

It gets worse.

2010-07-05T23:38:00.005+02:00

Man! I do a post on the Census, laying out some questions I'd like to see added, and next thing you know, the federal government announces it's going to eliminate the long-form census entirely.

I'm sure there's no causal relationship here. Pretty sure, anyway.

The long-form census--this is the detailed one that gets sent to one in five households--provides the really useful information like mode of travel to work, housing costs for owners and renters, number of households spending over a certain threshold on housing costs, and a bunch of other very useful pieces of information for citizen researchers and academics.

It's the information that lets you prove certain inconvenient truths--that real incomes are stagnating, that more and more people use and need public transit, that housing costs are turning an entire generation into serfs.

The census is also a key historical document. It allows researchers a hundred years from now to reconstruct the basic facts of our time. Abandoning the long-form census is like burning the library at Alexandria. Some bigoted, ideological a-hole does it once and then it's gone forever.

Cancel the census and our age goes dark.

It is very convenient to self-identified conservatives that these facts will no longer be available at any meaningful level. Facts are what people use--have to use--to challenge the status quo, to demonstrate that it's not in fact morning in America. Established power lives on inertia and elite opinion. Reality has a liberal bias. Census data helps us prove this. Without data, it's all just opinion.

Who's to say that the streets aren't full of welfare queens driving their Cadillacs to the gravy train station?

Who's to say that your inability to afford housing is part of a larger trend, and not just a personal failure on your part?

Who's to say?

Without the long-form census... well, nobody.

Just like global warming. Can't prove it conclusively, therefore do nothing.

How's that working out for you?

Collecting proper census data isn't an "issue," the way health care or unemployment insurance or the deficit are issues. Opinions can vary on those, based on the facts available and one's interpretation of those facts. The census is a meta-issue. It is an issue that determines whether we can make informed decisions about other issues.

Write your MP about this.

And get off the goddamn couch and vote during the next election.

All I want for Census is my two cent's worth...

2010-06-27T05:06:00.020+02:00

How you mark time says something about what kind of person you are. If you're a political junkie, election years make a big dent in your consciousness. If you're a sports nut, maybe you remember events as being in the same year as the Olympics. These regular events can be the metronome of your life, ticking by multi-year intervals on a frequency to which only you, and those who share your obsessions, are attuned.

For me, census years are a big deal. As a professional planner and amateur spreadsheet nerd, the collection of detailed statistical data every five years is eagerly awaited. Unfortunately, in the case of the Canadian Census, the processing and error-checking takes awhile, and fine-grained data is only published several years after being collected. I remember the angst of doing my thesis in late 2003, knowing that the statistical data I was using was from the 1996 census, knowing that the 2001 data would become available literally the same week my thesis was due. My research would be based on data at the very end of its shelf life, obsolete the moment it was completed.

In any case, when the census does come around, it produces a fresh(er) data set from the last one. Our picture of the country moves forward five years. It's like time-lapse photography. Look at three or four censuses (censi?) and a story starts to emerge.

Some of these stories need to be told. When I looked at rental costs in Ottawa, digging up this info from as far back as 1951, I was shocked. Rent, even adjusted for inflation, was a small fraction of what it is now. ("Now", at the time, being 1996--even before the massive gentrification and housing bubble of the early 21st century!) Shocking, yes, but not surprising. It confirmed yet another suspicion harboured by most people my age and younger, which is that when it comes to basic necessities, the last generation had things ridiculously easy--like, Marie Antoinette easy.

(I wish I had better pictures than this, but the graphics above--pulled from my Word copy of my 2002 GIS project--is a thematic map of rents in the Lowertown district of Ottawa. The numbers, and thus the colours based on them, are indexed to 1996 dollars. Darker colours represent higher values--a lot higher.)

All census nerds have their favourite sections. For me, it's the travel-to-work data--seeing how many people drive to work, ride as passengers, take transit, walk or bike. This kind of data, especially at the DA level of geography--the smallest unit published, generally a few city blocks--is invaluable in proving a key point in city planning: namely, you don't need to build everything with giant parking lots because in a lot of areas, many people don't drive. (Rents being what they are, who can afford a car?)

Conversely, some really interesting and useful questions are not asked on the census. Now, I know there are limits to how long the questionnaire can be. Every field is going to have its wish list and if everyone got their way, the questionnaire would be a hundred pages long. That said, though, there is an extraordinary amount of space in the published census devoted to questions of... well, questionable relevance or practical value. For instance, of the eight or so CSV files that make up the published census, one is devoted almost entirely to languages spoken in the home. I'm not talking about just English or French, or even the major languages of the world. There is row after row after row telling us how many people speak Aleutian or Hakka.

Now look--I'm all for multiculturalism, and I don't think people should be excluded or overlooked because they don't look or talk like me. But honestly--what possible policy direction could come from knowing how many people in a district speak Hakka, especially since numbers are rounded off to the nearest five and therefore, in the vast majority of DA's, round off to zero?

It seems to me that if there's room on the census for questions like this, they can fit in a few from my wish list. Here it is:

1. How many automobiles are owned/leased by your household? This is a key data point that would let me work some magic. I've lost track of the number of times I've heard planning commissioners or developers refuse to consider development--even right downtown, in walkable areas next to high-level transit service--without suburban levels of parking. Asking the question "how many cars" will throw into stark relief the difference between suburbia and the city--and therefore the amount of space we need to be devoting to our cars.

2. How much does your household spend on transportation per month? Cars, for most people, are their second-biggest household cost, amounting (last time I looked ) to something like $7000-$8000 a year on average for one car. We routinely ask how much people pay in major housing payments or rent. One of the things I always hear about the suburbs is that it's cheaper to live there. That may be true if you're comparing the cost of a single-family house in Orleans versus one in Westboro. But when you compare the transportation options in the burbs versus the city, and count the total [housing + transportation] costs, I suspect the difference evaporates pretty quickly. When you consider that owning a car costs $500-$700 a month, suddenly saving $300 on housing payments by living at the butt end of nowhere instead of downtown doesn't look like such a good deal. By pretending that transportation is not an inherent cost of living where you live, we disguise a relationship that must be understood if we are to make intelligent decisions about how we live.

New rule.

2010-06-06T04:58:00.001+02:00

Okay, new rule:

Anyone who wants to criticize how Barack Obama is handling the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico must first write a 1000-word essay on what President John McCain would have done differently.

The Donkey Kong economy

2010-05-13T03:26:00.007+02:00

Since my return from Denmark in February I have enjoyed the dubious pleasure of the modern job-hunting process. It's over now; in two weeks I'll be going to work as a municipal planner for the downtown core. It's exactly the kind of thing I got into planning to do and I'm really looking forward to it.

I'm keenly aware of how fortunate I've been and how easily it's gone; three months, thirty CV's, seven interviews, and at least two offers (one has yet to get back to me.)

Considering there's a Great Depression on, not too shabby.

Nonetheless, it was a miserable, hateful experience that I would not wish on my worst enemy. I have been told that people who survived the first Great Depression were forever scarred by the experience and I believe it. Being out of work for even a couple of months makes you question every decision you've ever made. Granted, I'm generally an anxious person but I also had some savings in the bank, no debts, cheap rent, no kids and minimal overhead. I had it easy and still it was tough.

The worst aspect of job-hunting, at least in the modern economy, is the completely one-sided flow of information. You find a posting, tailor your resume and write a punchy cover letter, make your application and then you wait. If you're lucky, there's some kind of signal that your application has in fact been received. Often, however, there is no such signal. Silence, emptiness, a black abyss with the occasional tumbleweed.

To the extent that anyone even wants a resume anymore, they usually want you to apply electronically--i.e. to send your CV by email. This raises a whole host of interesting compatibility issues. I'm running Mac OS X, which means that the version of Microsoft Word to which I have access is a buggy, crashy mess that can only be relied upon to screw up your formatting. Send someone a CV to be opened on Windows and God knows what it will look like. Alternately, you can print to a PDF but again, the results there are uneven. If formatting matters, the process of applying electronically offers no guarantee that even your best efforts will count for anything.

That's if you get to send a CV at all. I found that a lot of places I applied now use online application forms. First and foremost, they make everything you've ever learned about writing an eye-catching resume almost completely irrelevant. On these forms it's about shoehorning as many keywords into the text field as you can, because the initial short list will be created by a computer program that looks for resumes that seem to be most congruent with the job description. (Perversely enough, we're back to where we were in high school, where the jobs you'd apply for were in the form of... well, a form. We learned to write CV's because "real" jobs require it. Now it turns out that even senior management positions want you to fill in the blanks, like they were applying to run the shake machine at McDonald's...)

That's assuming the application even gets received. Half of the online forms I used were glitchy. If I backed up a screen to change something and then tried to go forward, I found that all my information had been erased. If I tried to start again, the software informed me that I had already applied for that position. The problem wasn't that my information would vanish--that was annoying, but I could deal with it. The problem was that I didn't know where it went. Did the information I just lost end up in the file before it was erased, or did I just submit an application with a big blank field where my work history is supposed to go? Often there is no way of knowing, no way of finding out.

I thought of the old video game Donkey Kong, wherein a working-class schmuck has to run an obstacle course while trying to outsmart a computer-simulated ape. If he gets to the end of the course, his reward is to be kicked to a new obstacle course where he has to beat a slightly faster version of the ape. This continues indefinitely, until Mario is killed one too many times or the player runs out of quarters. But Mario never reaches his goal; the game is not programmed for that eventuality.

I realize that the human resources field is fraught with its own challenges. The various online applications, electronic submission processes, text scanning and even the deafening radio silence are all deemed necessary to manage the flood of applications for various positions--especially now. HR people are as overworked as anybody.

But I really question whether the technology is helping or hindering the process. The more hoops you make people jump through, the more you are selecting people on the basis of their ability to jump through hoops. Like an IQ test, job applications test an ability that is sort of related but not the same as the thing you really want to know, namely, can this person do the job? Just because someone can get the high score on Donkey Kong, does that mean they're qualified to take care of apes at the zoo? It seems to me that these are two very different skill sets!

By extension, I wonder what happens when most of the key responsibilities in a civilization are held by people whose essential skill is successfully applying for jobs. We have some serious problems to deal with. I worry that the best people might not be in a position to deal with them because they've put too much effort into e.g. learning how to adapt to climate change, and not enough into the art of evading the flaming barrels of the HR department.

And now for something completely nerdy.

2010-04-22T00:31:00.005+02:00

I'm almost embarrassed to have written this, to say nothing of posting it. But it's something that's nagged at me for a long time now.

If you're like me, you grew up loving the Star Wars trilogy. Whether these were brilliant movies or merely clever bits of candy that came along at just the right time for people of a certain age, is beside the point. Certainly they've had more sheer sticking power in most of our minds than, say, Gremlins or The Last Starfighter. Having to wait for three years to find out what happens to Han Solo, and speculating as to whether Darth Vader was really Luke's father and who was "the other one" that Yoda mentioned, were defining elements of my later childhood.

For better or worse, Star Wars was really important to a lot of people, myself included. Which is why it was such a bitter disappointment when the long-awaited second trilogy opened in 1999 with Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.

I can't describe how utterly awful it was, or the sinking feeling I got as I sat through it, waiting for it to stop sucking, and realizing ten minutes from the end that it wasn't gonna happen. And--and let's get this out of the way--it wasn't just because I was an adult and seeing it through adult eyes. I've heard that before and it's a cop-out. The second trilogy in general, and The Phantom Menace in particular, is completely incoherent and unsatisfying from a story standpoint. Coming from someone who is so often trumpeted as a master of Campbellian mythic structure, it's baffling and inexcusable. It's all the more frustrating when you consider that Mr. Lucas had a filmmaker's dream setup to work with: complete creative control, bankrolling it out of his own pocket, no studio suits interfering and telling him to change stuff, a compelling and established backstory, and the dead certainty that no matter what he came up with, hundreds of millions of people would go and see it.

If the original Star Wars trilogy is characterized by childlike wonder and endless possibilities, then the second surely represents the bitter disappointment of adulthood. Take the long arc that goes from knowing in your bones that you will grow up to be Batman, to realizing you're a balding and divorced desk jockey and your best years are behind you. Compress it into two hours and that was The Phantom Menace.

Look, I don't want to wallow here. The point is this: The fact that the prequel trilogy was so badly executed kind of ruined the whole franchise for me. It used to be, I could watch the first Star Wars film--yes, even as an adult!--and hear Ben Kenobi tell the story of how Darth Vader turned evil and killed Luke's father, and feel like I was having a tantalizing glimpse into a story that had yet to be told, in an immersive universe of wonder and mystery and endless stories. Now I watch that scene and all I can think of is the utter narrative trainwreck, complete with cringeworthy dialogue, zero-dimensional characters and flat-footed pseudoscience, that is the Phantom Menace. A tale of sound, fury and CGI, signifying nothing.

So I wrote this to calm my own mind, and so I could imagine that there's a coherent backstory behind the films that I loved as a kid and still do. George Lucas couldn't tell that story so I did. If you feel like me, you might enjoy this.

This treatment/story edit of The Phantom Menace is intended to stick to the original story and characters, as much as possible, while making characters and motivations and events and storylines make sense. If you're an aspiring screenwriter yourself (and if you are, God help you) this might be a useful reference for how to go over a wretched, sinking mess of a tangled storyline and turning it into something that makes some kind of sense.

Patton Oswalt said, on this general subject, "I don't care where the things I love come from--I just love the things I love." To which I would add, when someone else stomps all over them, I feel perfectly justified in taking them back and fixing them.

Goldman Sachs

2010-04-17T13:09:00.005+02:00

I am far from being an investment banking expert, and so the ins and outs of the SEC charges against Goldman Sachs are perhaps better dealt with by other bloggers. But there are a few points I could make.

Firstly, the timing of all this this reinforces my sense that the Obama administration knows what it's doing. It's not the administration that's suing GS, but they've got a banking reform bill about to go through Congress and Obama has underlined the need to regulate derivatives trading, going so far as to say he'll veto any bill that doesn't include it. For the past year a lot of people have been complaining that the government isn't moving fast enough to get to the bottom of all kinds of iffy transactions with GS at the center. That inaction, combined with the presence of a lot of GS alumni in high places in the administration, contribute to the notion that the government is in bed with the banksters who crashed the economy.

Obama knows he can't fight a two-front war. The first year, he concentrated on health care reform and as soon as that's nailed down, the government moved against shenanigans in the financial industry. You can take on the health insurance industry or Wall Street, but try to do both at once and you'll get pulverized. I don't know if the SEC and the administration have coordinated the timing of their respective moves but it works out well this way.

Going into the midterm elections, the moves against Goldman Sachs will help to defuse the populist anger that Republicans have tended to mobilize in their favour. It's hard to criticize the current government as being in bed with big business when (a) it was your party that had near-total control of all three branches of government for most of the past eight years while the crisis was brewing and, in particular, failed to take serious action in the wake of Enron and Worldcom, and (b) your party is now obstructing the administration's attempt to crack down on securities fraud. There is some nonsense even Limbaugh listeners won't fall for.

That's the first thing. The second thing is that this initial move is a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution. Some may see that as a half-assed compromise, i.e. if successful, GS will get a slap on the wrist and no one will do any jail time. But as I understand it, criminal charges are much harder to prove than civil damages. The real effect of a civil suit is to get some relatively senior people on the stand and make them answer questions under oath--where, if they lie, they'd be subject to serious criminal charges on that basis alone.

So I think the civil suit is just a prelude to criminal charges down the road.

Which brings me to my third point. In the Yahoo News article on the GS charges, the following line jumps out at me:

"'The fact that the only individual charged here [Fabrice Tourre, creator of the allegedly fraudulent securities], after what was presumably a very thorough investigation, was a vice president rather than a managing director or higher, is relatively reassuring news for Goldman,' said Bank of America-Merrill Lynch research analyst Guy Moszkowski."

Thing is, whenever you move against some big organization, it's pretty standard to first aim at someone just below the guys at the top. That way you get someone who is in a position to give evidence on the real bad guys' involvement, in exchange for some degree of clemency or immunity. If I were Fabrice Tourre, and assuming the charges are ultimately proven, I would consider myself very lucky: it's the guy who gets targeted in the initial crackdown who has the most opportunity to cut a deal for himself by rolling over on his bosses. Unlike the actual Mafia, there is no omerta on Wall Street.

Energy Intensity of Urban and Intercity Passenger Modes

2010-03-27T13:12:00.006+01:00

Here are some more charts showing the energy intensity of various travel modes. The data comes from

Gagnon, Luc. Comparaison des options énergétiques: Options de transport. Hydro-Quebec. 2008.

I built these charts using the data in Gagnon's paper. (Actually, he had some charts in there as well; they were really good and look a lot like these. But they were in French, plus they were in PDF format, which often gives weird results when you swipe an image for, say, a PowerPoint presentation for a class you're teaching.)

If you want to make a point on energy and transport options to an English-speaking audience, feel free to use mine.

Obama and health care

2010-03-23T15:54:00.004+01:00

As I write this, Barack Obama is scheduled to sign the new U.S. health care reform bill into law. As a Canadian with free access to high-quality, single-payer public health care, this makes me really happy. The barbarism of the system that is about to be replaced makes my head spin. ANYTHING would be better than what they have now.

But a lot of people, especially on the progressive/left end of things, are unhappy with the bill because it leaves out a lot of things they felt were important. I confess I agree, up to a point.

However, I would (grudgingly) suggest that the fact that the bill passed by such a narrow margin means it included exactly as much compromise as it needed and no more. In other words, whatever's in this bill is the absolute best thing that could have passed.

A lot of other people, especially in the mainstream media, are punditting around about how the cost of the bill (in money and in political capital) mean Obama won't be able to get much else done.

Let's leave aside the laughable notion that somehow his insistence on going ahead despite Republican opposition lowers his chances in the future of brokering bipartisan compromise (laughable because you can't go lower than zero.) What's striking, to me, is how time and again people have predicted Obama's failure at this and that, and how those predictions--once they were proven absurdly unfounded--were completely forgotten.

In early 2008 he was either not black enough or too black to win the nomination, depending on who you asked.

In late 2008 the Obama-Clinton primary fight had caused irreparable damage to the Democratic Party.

Now turning health care from something that was utterly intolerable into something that merely disappoints is going to be his political swan song.

We shall see.

Oil price fluctuations from 1998 to 2009

2010-03-15T17:51:00.004+01:00

I always have a hard time building charts and tables in spreadsheet programs. When I get one that works, I'm really happy.

Here's a chart, in nice basic black-and-white JPEG format, showing the highs and lows of oil prices over the past eleven years. Useful to anyone who's trying to illustrate peak oil concepts and who has as bad a spreadsheet juju as I do.

Data are in nominal US dollars for West Texas Intermediate at Cushing, Oklahoma and rounded off to the nearest whole dollar. The source of the data is the United States Energy Information Administration.

Feel free to use as you see fit.

Future shock in Rotterdam

2010-03-02T19:26:00.004+01:00

Swans with porn shop.

2010-03-02T18:54:00.002+01:00

Just cleaning out my camera after several weeks in Europe. I didn't think this one turned out and in a way it didn't, but in a more interesting way, it did.

I just noticed...

2010-02-28T19:36:00.001+01:00

that the remote control for my DVD player has an "eject" button on it.

So I can eject the disc without getting up from couch.

Then what?

Pirate Shmirate Redux

2010-01-29T20:58:00.009+01:00

I saw the movie Pirate Radio today, which is the European-release title of The Boat That Rocked. I posted a few months ago on what it appeared to be, based on the trailers. The comment on the film trailer was really just a jumping-off point for a rant about the ease with which myths of rebellion (especially the confluence of social/cultural/historic/demographic conditions known as "The Sixties") are used to flatter ourselves that partying is the same as pursuing social justice.

As it happens, the movie (I mean the movie itself as a story and as entertainment, never mind what it brings to mind about the real world) is... not bad. It's not great, it might not even be good, but it's not awful either.

I do have my beefs with it, chiefly the portrayal of the British government minister assigned to shut down the offshore rock 'n' roll station. This guy starts out as a stock stick-up-the-keister Face Of Authority right out of a Twisted Sister video or Police Academy XII, and becomes a figure of such cartoonish callousness and evil it sort of demolishes his credibility as a person and therefore as a villain. (It doesn't help that his chief hatchet man is actually named Twat.)

In his last act as Villain, he actually orders his underling NOT to send boats to rescue the crew of the sinking radio station/ship, perfectly willing to condemn them to freezing death in the North Sea. I'm not a maritime lawyer but I'm pretty sure this would be among the most serious breaches of international law, not to mention basic human decency, on the books. This kind of abrupt levelling-up from Officious Prig to Indirectly Murderous Motherf**ker is a really clumsy breach of tone for what is supposed to be a comedy.

But one saving grace--and the reason I'm bothering to post on it at all--is one knife-in-the-heart scene by Philip Seymour Hoffman. It's a scene that is so poignant and insightful and full of truth that it makes all the rest of the nonsense worth sitting through.

Hoffman, the rock 'n' roll pirate hero at the top of his game, sits on the deck and confesses the thought that has been tormenting him for months, which is: These are the best days of our lives. Everything that comes after will be a letdown.

Maybe, he concedes, the kid will get lucky and even better things are in his future. (The line is delivered with a particular blend of weariness, hope and mendacity. In an age when there are so few true markers indicating that we have moved from one stage of life to another, maybe this is one of them: The first time you have to tell a half-truth to someone younger, in order to temporarily shield their hopes from the crushing that yours have already endured.)

But, there it is: This is as good as it gets. From now on, every day will be better than the next. We fear it is true and hope it is not, but there comes a time when there's just too much evidence to deny. Personally I'm not there yet, but I know that moment is out there.

In the end, this is what storytelling is for: it reminds us that in all the awful things we fear and will have to face someday, including our own personal extinction, we are not alone. That a fictional character has spoken our fears means that a real person shares them.

It's not much but in the cold black waters of the North Sea, you'll gladly cling to anything.

Four states of control and chaos.

2010-01-19T19:17:00.002+01:00

Just a thought: Consider that you can classify a situation in one of four ways:

1) Under your control;
2) Under control, not necessarily yours;
3) Out of control;
4) Beyond control.

(The last two courtesy of the film "Ever Since The World Ended.")

What does this mean for how you think about events?

The Lost Continent

2010-01-19T18:38:00.004+01:00

Tomorrow I'm getting on a train to Amsterdam, having made the decision to leave graduate school in Aalborg. The reasons are complicated with much pro and con on both sides. In the end it comes down to the fact that formal education is subject to diminishing returns, and I am probably better able to learn on my own (pursuing my own specific interests, free to go down whatever rabbit hole seems most promising) than in a structured environment.

So, after a brief vacation in Holland (which I've been trying to visit for years, only to be thwarted by freak accidents and economic collapse) I'll be heading back to Canada.

I'm sad to be leaving Europe, of course, but in a way that runs deeper than would otherwise be the case. I'm keenly aware of the world's energy predicament and of the fact that commercial airlines are probably going to be among the first victims of peak oil.

James Howard Kunstler has pronounced on this subject at length, so I won't go into it into too much detail. I like Jim personally and I've always enjoyed his writing, finding much of it to be spot-on with regards to all the important points. I do think that at times, he gets a bit too apocalyptic in his prognostications for the immediate future, and this can be counterproductive. It's an occupational hazard, when you're trying to draw attention to an impending problem of which very few people are even aware: you find yourself having to scream to be heard over all the chatter, and when they do notice, the fact that you're screaming is as likely to prompt panic as it is reasoned attention to the issue. It also makes you look like a crazy person to someone inclined to view it that way.

But when it comes to air travel, I think Jim is right on. Airlines are dependent on cheap fuel, and during the last price spike in 2008, a lot of budget airlines went bankrupt. The rest of the industry has been tightening its belt for years, cutting redundancies, charging extra for services that used to be free, and still losing money.

I could feel the noose tightening as I bought my one-way ticket to Boston. In winter 2010--i.e. the low season, during a recession to boot--my one-way ticket on a budget airline cost what a round-trip on a regular airline would have cost ten years ago. I'm limited to 20kg of baggage, forcing me to ruthlessly jettison possessions and goods for fear of incurring a 10-euro-per-kilo surcharge.

It's funny; back in the 1970's, we thought that by the 21st century we would travel in rocketships as casually as we boarded a 747. It's turned out to be true, sort of, but not the way we expected. Rather than space travel becoming routine, it is air travel that has taken on all the complication, planning, hassle and expense of an Apollo moon shot.

(Okay, maybe the comparison is unfair. There are big differences. For instance, the Apollo astronauts brought their food along in liquid form, in squeeze tubes. They wouldn't be allowed to take that onto a jetliner.)

But all kidding aside, it feels to me that whatever else does and doesn't happen as oil supplies peak and decline, the age of casual air travel is coming to an end. There are a bunch of things that would need to happen in order for it to continue as we know it--i.e. so that shmucks like you and me can afford to treat a flight as something other than a once-in-a-lifetime investment--and none of them are happening and arguably most of them can't happen.

All of which is to say, when I leave Europe, I am painfully aware that it might be the last time I see it. The day is coming that other continents may be, for most of us, as remote as the Moon.

Hammertime!

2010-01-17T11:05:00.002+01:00

Planner humour.

2010-01-15T09:32:00.007+01:00

Here's a graphic I did for a presentation in 2004 on NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) opposition to development proposals. Any planners out there, I feel your pain.

At Ground Zero of modern history

2010-01-05T21:37:00.005+01:00

Well, I'm back. Apologies for the lack of posting but I have been pointedly avoiding computers for the past few weeks as I travel around central Europe.

At one point my travels took me to Berlin, over a bitterly (and, I am told, unusually) cold couple of days. There are plenty of things I could say about the place. The short answer is that I highly recommend it (and the Aloha Hostel on Torstrasse where I stayed.) It's particularly appealing if, like me, you lived in Montreal in the early 1990's and pine for those days when a huge metropolis, still staggering from the forces of history, had ample nooks and crannies and spaces for broke and eccentric people to do cheap and fascinating things. It is changing, alas, as all such places do, but for now Berlin is still a great place to be young and interesting.

The weather being as I said absurdly cold during my visit, I was drawn more than usual to museums and other outposts of the great indoors. I must confess that I like the idea of museums more than I enjoy museums themselves. I am always disappointed to go somewhere full of relics and artifacts of the past and find that the past does not come alive, that I cannot feel the Middle Ages or the revolutions of 1848, that this is just a collection of stuff. It is the feeling I imagine I would have if I were to open up an old high school yearbook, seeking comfort and connection in the past, and finding that I do not remember any of these people. It's a letdown.

One museum that did not disappoint, however, was the Story Of Berlin museum on Kurfurstendamm in the old West Berlin. This is a very well designed multimedia experience (I mean multimedia in the true sense, i.e. sound and film and light and text as appropriate to convey information and understanding, not in the more usual sense of "the latest computerized doodad designed to impress you with its deterministic program disguised as interactivity.")

For instance, while most of the museum is located on the upper floor and arranged in more-or-less chronological order, there comes a point where you make the descent into the Nazi years. (You can't have a Berlin museum or decent Indiana Jones movie without Nazis.)

To get to this section of the museum, you literally descend three flights of stairs. At each landing is a collection of black-and-white photos of famous Germans of the era. At the top landing, all the frames have pictures in them. The next landing down, some of the frames are missing photos, replaced with words like "emigrated." The next flight down, more missing pictures, and words like "murdered," "suicide," "preventative detention." Meanwhile, from below, the hellish lights of burning books and recordings of chanting crowds. The air gets colder. It is literally and figuratively chilling.

What's even scarier is the tour of the bunker under the museum. (Fittingly, even lower than the Nazi exhibit.) This is a Cold War-era bunker designed to house about 1300 people in the event of a nuclear attack. All steel and concrete and blue light, like a vintage James Cameron movie. The guide, with the black ironic humour that seems to be standard issue in the old Eastern Bloc, pointed out that all the bunkers in Berlin could house about one percent of the population. As he detailed the conditions under which the bunker would be expected to operate, it became clear that these things would never work. Over a thousand people, eighteen-inch-wide aisles between bunks, three toilets and probably a lot of people with radiation poisoning. Next to no ventilation (and even those shafts would be likely as not to be clogged from the destruction up above, on the surface.) These were nothing but a public-relations exercise--something to keep the public from objecting too strongly to an insane arms race in which there could be no victory, just varying degrees of defeat. The German slogan, equivalent to our "Duck And Cover," translated as "Everyone Has A Chance."
As a planner, I wonder what it must have been like to be one of the guys designing these things. Did they know it would never work? Did they consciously block out that knowledge and just do their jobs? What an awful way to make a living--confronted every day with the total destruction of the world and knowing that even your best efforts will make no difference.

When I was a kid, I took it for granted that I would not live into my thirties; the destruction of the world seemed imminent and inevitable. The threat of nuclear annihilation isn't gone. We now have arguably even more serious problems on our hands. For all its terror, nuclear annihilation required that a handful of people decide to do something incredibly stupid. Now, avoiding a different disaster requires that everyone decide to get real smart, real fast. It's enough to make you feel like a kid again.

But here we are, surprisingly enough. Despite my generally anxious and pessimistic nature, I need to remind myself from time to time that sometimes disasters are averted. Then again, a lot of those blank picture frames on the way down to the Third Reich exhibit probably told themselves the same thing.

Kjell Aleklett et. al. versus the International Energy Agency

2009-12-18T19:04:00.010+01:00

I just read a very good article by Kjell Aleklett and others ("The Peak of the Oil Age - Analyzing the world oil production Reference Scenario in World Energy Outlook 2008." Aleklett, K. et.al. Energy Policy (2009), article in press.)

It's a critical look at the International Energy Agency's 2008 reference-case projection of 106.4 million barrels per day of oil demand in 2030 (including conventional, unconventional and NGL.) That's up from 84.3 Mbbl/day in 2007.

A key point is that

"...the issue is whether future oil production can match the projected demand and sustain continued economic growth rather than the IEA approach of predicting future demand and assuming supply will simply keep pace."

The paper looks at the various fractions of future liquids output dealt with by the IEA's projections and considers whether the reference scenario is realistic.

Aleklett finds "nothing to object to in the IEA's outlook for crude oil from currently producing fields," while noting that some very big investments need to be made in order for these production rates to be realized, and that the IEA seems to recognize this. Similarly, with regards to enhanced oil recovery, Aleklett "can consider the future outlook for this fraction as acceptable."

When it comes to production from fields yet to be developed, however, "The IEA is expecting the oil to be extracted at a pace never previously seen [i.e. depletion rates exceeding the 7% of remaining reserves per year, thus far seen only in the North Sea] without any justification for this assumption."

For fields yet to be discovered, Aleklett sees no problem with the expected amount of new oil to be discovered, but again, "an assumed production of 19 Mbbl/day in 2030 from fields yet to be found is based on an unrealistically high depletion rate never before seen in history." To put it in perspective, Aleklett applies a North Sea-level depletion rate to these 114 Gb and finds 9 million barrels per day--less than half that projected by the IEA--to be optimistic but still plausible.

For unconventional oil, Aleklett finds the expectation of 8.8 Mbbl/day in 2030 to be unrealistic. The main discrepancy is in the assumed 4.5 Mbbl/day for in situ recovery from oil sands. Aleklett points out that even with massive investments in the oil sands, Cambridge Energy Research Associates and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers give figures implying a much smaller production rate from in situ. (I would further note, with tongue placed firmly in cheek, that CERA is hardly the poster child for insufficient optimism when it comes to future oil supplies.) In any case, Aleklett concludes that the projections for unconventional oil are unrealistic, to the tune of 2.3 million barrels per day.

But the real howler is IEA's treatment of natural gas liquids, projected to reach 19.8 million barrels per day in 2030.

The first flaw in this is to treat a barrel of NGL as being equivalent to a barrel of oil. In fact, in terms of energy content, natural gas liquids have about 75% the energy density of petroleum. So 19.8 million barrels of NGL is really only equivalent to 14.9 Mbbl of petroleum.

The second flaw is that even that 14.9 Mboe/day figure is inconsistent with IEA's own projections for natural gas production. Natural gas liquids, as a percentage of dry gas production, are very consistent at about 15%. For NGL production to basically double by 2030 as the IEA suggests (going from 10.5 Mbbl/day in 2007 to 19.8 Mbbl/day in 2030,) implies that natural gas production as a whole will also double. (Actually increase by 90%.) But the IEA's own projection for natural shows only a 47% increase over that time frame. So, barring some wildly different behaviour by natural gas finds, there is a huge inconsistency here.

When all is said and done, Aleklett projects 75.8 Mbbl/day (after adjusting the NGL barrels to their real equivalent in barrels-of-oil-equivalent) compared to the 106.4 Mbbl/day stated by the IEA scenario.

Why is this important? Well, first and foremost, 75.8 Mbbl/day is well below today's production rate of about 85 Mbbl/day. Use Aleklett's methodology and you find that there is less oil available in 2030. IEA says there'll be more. When I look at these projections and the assumptions behind them, it really supports the notion that we'll hit peak production sooner rather than later, if we haven't already.

(Actually, I'm getting a little bit tired of hedging my words on that point. I'm naturally a pretty cautious guy and I don't want to cry wolf, even if it's 99.9% likely the wolf is right at the door. But it's been a few years since oil production has basically stagnated and I have yet to see any evidence that we have NOT hit peak. If somebody would like to show me some, I'm happy to look at it. But so far everything I see points to a peak in 2005.)

To put things another way: When you're in some discussion about whether we're at peak oil sooner rather than later, and someone says "Well, the IEA says blah blah blah and we'll have 106 Mbbl per day in 2030 which means we haven't peaked," you can answer very simply:

The IEA expects all future oil fields (i.e. those yet to be discovered and/or developed) to behave completely differently from every oil province we've dealt with in the past.

It also assumes that natural gas will behave completely differently and provide twice as much of those nifty NGL's that appear to fill the gap so well on paper. They don't give any explanation for why these resources will behave so differently, and so conveniently for our needs.

As well, the IEA has expectations for the tar sands that exceed those of some of the biggest optimists in the business.

(It also assumes that the required investments will be made, which is an entirely different kettle of fish--and one that's gotten considerably stinkier since the economy went and collapsed on us last year.)

Working definition of peak oil

2009-12-15T12:28:00.009+01:00

A few years ago a graduate student contacted me to ask me about peak oil. At that time I was working as a municipal planner and had given a few presentations on the subject which were pretty well received.

She asked me what I thought was meant by peak oil. It was an interesting question because up to that point I had mainly been concerned with the big aspect of it, which is that oil production doesn't just go and go and go until there's no more oil and then stop. It increases, and then stagnates, and then declines. At the time--that is, before it seemed really likely that we had already hit the global peak in production--further nuance wasn't really that important. The main thing was to get across the idea that statements like "we have XX years of oil left at current production rates" are completely irrelevant and that energy supplies are going to be an issue sooner rather than later.

So I formed the following working definition, which I think does a pretty good job of incorporating all the variables.

"Peak Oil is the moment when

1. geology
2. geopolitics
3. geography
4. economics
5. environmental considerations
6. infrastructure problems

and/or

7. the limits of technology

combine to create a growing gap between the demand and supply of oil, refined oil products and/or viable alternatives."

That's not a perfect formulation. For one thing, it sets aside the fact that if oil prices go high enough, your economy crashes and then for awhile demand and supply are back in line. But unless a permanent recession is acceptable to you, I'd consider that a cure that's worse than the disease.

But it does a decent job of illustrating a key point, which is, the world to which we've become accustomed depends on a lot of things going right all at once. If one or two of these things goes wrong--a war in Iraq, or an embargo, or a hurricane in the Gulf of Mexico--as long as everything else goes more-or-less right, you can muddle through. But if a lot of these things start to go wrong at the same time, it becomes a problem.

And that's an important distinction. The simple "peak oil for dummies" formulation basically says that at a certain point, one big thing goes wrong (i.e. geology, you reach a certain point in the depletion curve and then production declines no matter what you do.) That's an oversimplification but it gives you the big picture. It tells you there's an iceberg ahead but at that point you don't need to know the exact shape of it.

The way I've stated it, there are a bunch of factors and you can afford to have one of them go wrong in a big way for awhile, as long as everything else keeps going smoothly. So, for instance, the Gulf War in 1990 was disruptive but it was the only thing going seriously wrong at that time. Or you can have several things go a little bit wrong; and it's still a problem but you can manage.

What started happening in the middle of the past decade is that too many things started going too wrong, all at once, for too long. That's the thing about icebergs. You're cruising along and you think it's still twenty meters ahead and suddenly.... CRUNCH.

(Of course, that analogy starts to break down. Seeing an iceberg ten or twenty meters ahead is like projecting peak oil in ten or twenty years--it's close enough that you need to be really taking serious measures to change course. In real life, our captains have basically been saying, "Well, we don't know for sure if it's ten or twenty meters, so let's just keep going full speed ahead until we can see it more clearly." Not recommended.)

Now, on balance, are things getting better or worse? Are more things going right, or wrong? I would have to say, if your goal is to have cheap energy and a booming economy, they are generally getting worse. I base this on the fact that today's oil price--on the order of $70 US/bbl--is about what it was in 2005 during Hurricane Katrina.

In other words,

(X + Y + Z) + economic recession
=
(X +Y +Z) + economic boom + Hurricane Katrina
=
$70/bbl

If the price of oil reflects a number of factors, then two of the really huge factors in September 2005 have since been subtracted. Logically, the fact that prices are where they were then means the sum of X, Y and Z has gotten bigger since. That's not particularly encouraging.

Ornery Planet

2009-12-09T03:33:00.007+01:00

As the holidays approach, I'm looking forward to travelling a bit around Europe. I've been here a few times before, but only to Paris and London; in the former case, I was on the way to Morocco and in the latter, my plans to travel more widely were thwarted by an explosion and fire in the Channel tunnel, an economic collapse and (maybe I'm projecting here) a plague of locusts with my name on their bellies.

This time, though. This time I'm gonna do it.

My impending tour of Europe notwithstanding, though, a lot of the blush is off the travel rose, at least when we're talking about the less-developed countries favoured by penniless backpackers like me.

I worked for a few years in a travel-accessory store in Montreal and among the items they stocked was the entire Lonely Planet guidebook series. Over the course of three years' worth of slow periods, I read a good chunk of that library and in doing so, was immersed in the modern Traveller's ethos.

The Traveller's ethos proceeds from the notion that "there are tourists, and then there are travellers," that these are two distinct breeds, and that the latter is superior, entitled to a double ration of smugness by virtue of its willingness to immerse itself in local cultures and really get down with the lively carnival of diversity that is the global Benetton ad in which we live.

Conversely, the tourist is pampered and childish, laden with cameras and camcorders, loudly wondering why he can't get a Coors Lite in Islamabad on a Friday afternoon, dragging his giant suitcase across the rutted streets of Phnomh Penh on his way to the killing fields where he will make a beeline to the gift shop.

The traveller knows how to use chopsticks; the tourist doesn't need them for his Big Mac.

That's the idea, anyway.

In reality, in the less-affluent and more exotic places in the world where I've been, I've been gobsmacked to see how everything has been rearranged to cater to Western backpackers, and in particular to Western backpackers who don't want to be reminded that they are being catered to. The desire to be Sir Richard Burton, first white man to penetrate the deepest jungle/desert/Temple of Doom is a lucrative one for those who know how to cater to the illusion. The locals aren't stupid; in their circumstances they don't have the luxury of being stupid. They know there's a billion affluent Westerners who hunger for the authentic, unvarnished globetrotter's experience, and so they are damn well going to manufacture that authenticity.

So, in Morocco, I was approached every thirty paces by a guide offering to show me some local attraction, with the first words out of his mouth being, "It's not touristic." He didn't know me from Adam but he knew what I was after.

In Cambodia, just a year after that country had been removed from Robert Young Pelton's "five skulls" category of lethality, I was met at the mini-bus depot by a horde of moto drivers who got into a minor riot in order to be the one to take me where I was going.

In Thailand I saw guesthouses that played Hollywood movies all day, including the decidedly postmodern spectacle of young Western backpackers spending all day watching movies like The Beach, a Leonardo DiCaprio movie about a bunch of young Western backpackers who go to Thailand and are disappointed that Thailand is full of young Western backpackers who sit around at guesthouses watching Leonardo DiCaprio movies all day.

Now, I can hear some of you saying, "Well if you don't like travelling, then don't travel. You're very privileged to have that option. Quit your bitching." Okay, it's not that I don't like travelling, and I am acutely aware of how fortunate I am to live in a time and place where "polio" and "aerial bombardment" are just words, let alone having the option to travel all over the globe. So I'm not bitching. I've won the historical, geographical, ethnic and gender lottery.

What I'm saying is, a lot of us have this idea that by travelling around the world, we're gathering some kind of authentic experience and engaging in some transformative ritual that will make us come out the other end a better, wiser, more enlightened person. I've had the sadly humorous experience of watching two seasoned travellers try to one-up each other with their travel stories, like two nth-degree black belts in a kung fu movie, determined to prove once and for all who has the most killer move. Anywhere you've been, I've been somewhere more remote, more beautiful, more untouched, more authentic--a lot like the place you went, before people like me and you started going there by the planeload.

There's a whole publishing industry devoted to the frantic checking off of life experiences. The Ur-example is "1001 Unforgettable Places To Visit Before You Die." What a desperate, frantic, joyless pursuit of notches that implies! Hurry up, half your life is over and you're only at #207! At this rate you'll never finish by the time you're done.

Oil, gold, forests and bison are scarce resources on a finite planet. So are authentically untouched places, or even moderately untrampled ones. Telling ourselves otherwise is to pretend that Space Mountain is a real rocketship ride, or that the call girl is doing it 'cause she loves us, and not for the discreet envelope we have left on the mantelpiece.

It's fun to pretend. Sometimes we have to, just to stay sane.

But when it comes to authentic travel, be careful what you wish for. The world is a very different place compared to when Cartier and Cabot, Lewis and Clark, Stanley and Livingstone, even Jones and Ravenwood did their stomping around. The population of this big round theme park has nearly doubled in my lifetime and that cracking sound you hear is the joists of the boardwalk in the first stages of Malthusian collapse. For most of the people in most of the places you're likely to go, the authentic experience is hunger and desperation, blotted out with pirated Britney Spears recordings, seasoned with diesel fumes and oceans of discarded plastic water bottles.

Space Madness

2009-12-08T05:00:00.004+01:00

Aalborg is located at just over 57 degrees north latitude, which means among other things that the inhabitants all have to walk around slightly stooped to avoid banging their heads on the Arctic circle. At this latitude, the length of the night in winter (and the day in summer) becomes rather extreme; on the solstice, I am told, the sun will rise at around 10am and set around 3pm, with much of the intervening five hours of daylight being a sort of long twilight.

This, combined with being in school and especially a project-based phase of that schooling (i.e. no classes or structured events this late in the semester) creates an odd sense of timelessness and limbo that is not entirely unpleasant. It will be interesting to see what it's like in summer when the sun is out almost all the time.

But as it is now, I inhabit an odd sort of science-fiction space colony existence. This is underscored by the institutional kollegium where I live, with a tiny shared kitchen (a galley, really) and very small individual quarters. I get up in what the clock assures me is the morning and get to work, spending hours doing brainy science stuff with a computer, with very little in the way of external signals as to what time it is. Outside, it is dark, flecked with pretty lights.

To make it even more science-fictiony--I didn't plan it this way--I'm listening to an online archive of old radio shows that were broadcast in the 1980's and early 1990's. I have basically parked my spaceship twenty light years away from Earth so I can listen to signals sent out decades ago, which are just getting there now.

Of course, in many ways this place is far less lunar than back home. The temperature doesn't go much below zero, and the landscape of North America--shopping malls, parking lots, individual houses separated by unbridgeable distances--is much more like the denatured futurist world of bubble cities and rocketship landing pads that seemed so exciting to Hugo Gernsback but that turns out (in my experience) to produce a chronic quiet desperation beyond Thoreau's wildest imaginings.

Here, I can ride my bike to where I want to go, should I choose to go out at all. That's more than I can say for somewhere like Orleans, Ontario in December, which (this time last year) had the added hassle of a public transit strike which drove home the inherent isolation of suburbia in winter.

The darkness was getting to me for awhile but I think I've adjusted. The new crewmen always need a bit of time to adjust to their surroundings. After awhile the daily routine of demagnetizing the fraculator, sideloading the balonium plant and cleaning tribbles out of the air ducts becomes a pleasantly monastic existence. At least until one of my shipmates comes back from EVA with an alien organism in her chest and inadvertently looses it on the crew.

Coffee and half-chewed Danish.

2009-12-02T09:49:00.006+01:00

I've been living here in Denmark for three months now but I haven't done a lot of posting about it because (a) I've been kinda busy, (b) I've been crazy busy, or (c) some combination of (a) and (b).

It's an interesting place, occasionally dull, but dull in that way that extremely civilized countries can be. No bracing road duels with hillbillies in Hummers while riding your bike; no crazy people in the streets, cut loose by a shredded social safety net; and, unlike in North America, nearly everyone is trim, healthy and dressed like adults all with like dignity 'n' stuff.

The biggest challenge so far is that I can't understand a word anyone is saying, at least when they're speaking Danish. Now, that sounds kind of trivially obvious, Danish being a foreign language to me and all. So let me clarify. It's not that I don't know the meaning of the words that people are saying in this foreign language (though that too); it's that I can't understand what the hell they said. I could not take what someone says and transliterate it into a string of letters and then look up that string of letters in a Danish-English dictionary and determine the meaning of the word.

Danish stands out among languages for not being pronounced anything like how it is spelled. Consonants and syllables get smooshed together into this indistinct paste. The other day, one of my housemates asked another for the kitchen roll (i.e. paper towels.) The Danish word for this item is kokkenruller--superficially, four syllables, including a distinct k, n, r and l sound.

In fact, the word is pronounced with one and a half syllables: "kughghruh."

The closest analogy I can think of in English is where words like "worcestershire" get pronounced "wooster." Imagine that that rule applies to every word in the language and you start to understand the principle of Danish.

Actually, the "o" in kokkenruller is that Scandinavian o-like thing with a slash through it. Not only do they not pronounce their consonants, apparently they had to make up a bunch of new vowels that look a lot like existing vowels but make different sounds and--just to make things interesting--lie at the end of the alphabet. So o-with-a-slash, a-e dipthong, and a-with-an-orange-on-its-head all come after z, with evident implications for someone trying to look up a word.

I'll keep trying to learn the language. But if I need to wipe up a spill in a hurry, I'm liable to fall back on English.

Marty McFly has a difficult life ahead of him.

2009-11-30T02:59:00.007+01:00

It's not wise to over-think movies, especially the kinds of summer junk-food movies that seem to lodge themselves so firmly in our hearts at a young age. These are, after all, transient entertainments, with just the right mix of internal consistency, panache and charm to make a big impression when we first see them. Unfortunately, with the help of VHS and DVD, we end up watching these films over and over again, and around the three hundredth viewing you start to see the strings.

So, for example: The Empire Strikes Back is easily the best entry in the whole Star Wars franchise. But it occurs to me that the time Luke Skywalker spends on Dagobah, learning (we are later told) almost everything he needs to know to become a Jedi, is about the same time as Han and Leia spend fleeing from Hoth to Cloud City. He accumulates generations of ancient wisdom and gnarly paranormal powers during what is basically an extended car chase. That's like going to a Tony Robbins seminar and coming out with a black belt in every martial art ever invented, plus a doctorate in particle physics.

Another thing that's troubled me lately (if by "troubled" we mean "occurred to me as I lie here waiting for my flu to blow over") is Marty McFly's future in Back To The Future. If you'll recall, the most important thing that happens in that trilogy is that he goes back to 1955 and changes the past, so that when he gets back to 1985, his life is way better. His dad's not a coward anymore, his mom's not an alcoholic anymore, his brother's not a loser, they have more money etc.

Which is great. But the thing is, now he's going to spend the rest of his life with a completely different set of memories of his family than they have. (That's how it works in BTTF. Matchbooks and photos get rewritten when the time they came from changes, but your memory of things stays the same. I know--it only occurs to you after the 600th viewing. Or when some jerk with a blog points it out.)

But isn't this going to make him kind of crazy? I mean, his family are now completely different people, and their experiences over the last 17 years will bear little ressemblance to what he remembers. A lot of the things that they've done together (from Marty's perspective) now never happened. No one will remember the trip they took to Six Flags because, in this new/improved timeline, George McFly made enough money to take them to Disneyworld. Every Christmas and Thanksgiving for the rest of his life, he's going to sit there while everyone talks about old times and he won't know what the hell they're talking about. Even his own experiences with the rest of the world will probably have been completely different.

The more I think about it, the more awful it sounds--like your family has been replaced by replicants and your own life lived by a stranger. You'd feel like an impostor, or like everyone else is. If you ever disagreed with anyone about the fact of a past event, you wouldn't have a leg to stand on. Your confidence in your ability to remember anything would be permanently shaken, more and more as time goes on, as memory itself gets fuzzier and timelines confuse themselves without any help from a flux capacitor.

Mandatory parking requirements part 3

2009-11-17T13:49:00.037+01:00

Well, here I was thinking no one reads my blog... safe in the solipsistic self-indulgence of publishing into the black hole of the Internet. And then I get this email from a fan who's been waiting with bated breath for the next installment in my oober-nerdy parking series.

My apologies. Where were we? Right--parking in back.

Okay, so putting parking in front is a non-starter if you want a real Downtown. What if we put it in back? If you’ve been paying attention to the previous posts, you should already be forming an answer to this one.

But we need to deal with it anyway because it’s a pernicious little meme that’s gotten out there: We can have parking, and a lively urban environment—just put the parking in back! You hear this a lot from people who self-identify as New Urbanists or neotraditional development people. I have nothing against New Urbanism—they are doing some good work and it is a damn sight better than what we’re used to getting.
But if you think you’re going to solve your parking-vs.-design quandary by putting the parking behind the building, you’re going to be disappointed. It stems from a desperate belief that we can have our cake and eat it too.

We can’t. Here’s why:

If you’re going to put parking behind the building, you need to get the cars in and out of there. That means you need to have space between your buildings. Now, right away this clobbers your small lots—they’re just wide enough for a two-way driveway as it is, and that’s what they become.

You’ve already broken up the street wall. Remember how that Main Street has this nice continuous street wall? This street will not feel like Main Street. It starts to get kind of an Alfred E. Newman gap-tooth thing going.

And of course, everything I said about parking lots in the previous section applies here too. You need 20’ of depth for the stalls, plus another twenty feet for an aisle.

One thing you notice is that your lot needs certain minimum dimensions to accommodate parking. Not just area, but linear dimensions. To handle a single-loaded parking area, the minimum dimension is forty feet. That’s what the third building from the left has—that lot is twelve meters or forty feet wide. And even then, it can’t make good use of its space. Half the frontage is taken up by the two-way driveway; three quarters of the lot is asphalt, with only one-quarter left for the building. And of that paved area, only one-third of it is useful.

The building on the far left has it somewhat better because it’s a big lot. It has enough depth to accommodate a double-loaded parking lot, and enough width to have a driveway, and still have some room left over for a building. That’s basically your best-case scenario, and he’s still only getting to build on about a third of his lot.

But the land economics are just ruinous. You have to buy land Downtown, which is always more expensive than out in the suburbs. You have to put money into two-thirds or three-quarters of the lot—paving, drainage, snow clearance—that isn’t directly contributing to your business. Your building gets relegated to a tiny corner of the lot.

And development can’t compete with the suburbs on these terms. If we start from the proposition that development must have parking, then Downtown cannot compete. There isn’t enough space. That space is expensive. It is encumbered by old lot fabric and a patchwork of owners. You can turn two-thirds of your Downtown into parking and you still won’t have “enough parking”—if by “enough parking” you mean a free or almost-free parking stall for anyone who wants it, any time, right next door to their destination.

What ends up happening is that the smaller lots become unviable—they’re carrying all this economic dead weight around--the buildings are abandoned, and eventually they’re condemned and torn down, or burned down by crack heads or insurance fraudsters. And then you’ve got a street with a couple of buildings, and a whole bunch of parking. Not even a whole bunch of parking, really, not compared to the Price Slasher out off the highway.

But, finally, you have enough parking. But you’ve only gotten there by turning your street into a wasteland. No one wants to be there, so of course there’s plenty of room to park.

Cars are are sort of like Adolf Hitler.

First he comes to you and he's all in your face. “I want more land! Gimme more land or I’ll make your life miserable!” So you go, well, he’s a jerk but just to get rid of him, here. Here, take Czechoslovakia.

And you hope that’ll do it. But then he comes back and says, “It’s not enough space! I want more! Gimme more or else!” So you go, eugh, okay, fine, let’s pave some more land and put in parking stalls.

Next thing you know your cities are in ruins.

Look, cars take up a lot of space. It’s never enough. We’ve covered half the continent with roads and highways and parking lots and yet there’s still traffic jams and you still can’t find a spot right next to the door. There’s no way around this.

You can build to a human scale—the kind of environment that people will feel comfortable in—or you can try to build to the scale dictated by convenient parking. You cannot do both. There really is no middle ground.

Okay, one caveat—you can do both if you’re willing to build stacked parking structures. A lot of cities have done this—rich cities, or at least cities with a lot of rich people in them. But a stall in a stacked parking structure costs many times more than a surface parking stall—like, ten, fifteen, twenty times as much. Twenty thousand dollars per stall is not an unusual cost for stacked parking. So that parking is not going to be free, or cheap. Somebody is going to have to pay for it. And even then, after all that expenditure, it still might not work. Women, in particular, don’t like parking garages and I don’t blame ‘em. They’re dark and creepy and full of nooks and crannies where Joey the Rapist can hole up and wait for you to pass by.

So as a general rule, parking garages are not a solution. Parking garages, generally speaking, are a very expensive way of pretending you can have both ample parking and urbanity.

In an upcoming post I'll get into the economics of all this.

Rails to Moncton.

2009-11-11T21:34:00.012+01:00

Pirate shmirate.

2009-11-08T23:03:00.006+01:00

There's a new movie coming out called Pirate Radio. It's about, well, a pirate radio station off the coast of Britain in the 1960's.

I will probably end up seeing it, if only because the movie options here in Aalborg are kind of limited. I don't know; maybe it will be great. But from what I can tell from the promotional material, there's something about it that just rubs me the wrong way, in a spot that's been rubbed raw over the years.

It's a movie about youthful rebellion, set during the 1960's. At the time, as with the rest of Europe, the radio spectrum in the UK was much more tightly controlled than in America. As a result, programming was a lot less hip; kids could barely hear rock 'n' roll, outside of a few specialty programs during designated time slots. So this bunch of ragtag rebels and misfits showed up on a ship in 1964 and broadcast from offshore, pissing off the stodgy, square British authorities and awakening the millions of British kids in their cool retro-1960's wardrobes to this awesome, raunchy, liberating sound of blah blah blah...

See, I get tired just commenting on it. We all know the story, the Promethean Dead Poets Footloose Society Riding On The Storm and challenging authority with the power of music/poetry/dance/fire.

The idea that youthful energy and rebellion and sexuality is subversive and threatening to established power is fun to believe, especially if you're young and horny. There's even some truth to it, in that every generation has to shake things up a bit, and just acting like a young person tends to rattle your folks because they're not young anymore and they've kind of forgotten.

But this kind of thing stopped being credibly subversive a long time ago, if indeed it ever was. Youthful rebellion is the safest, most blue-chip marketing strategy there is. Teenagers and young adults are insecure, inexperienced and churning with hormones. Give them credit cards and no understanding of compound interest and it's like shooting fish in a barrel.

So the marketing industry (including the scary Pod People corporate monster that taken over what at one point was a music industry capable of producing new and exciting music) has spent the past forty years flogging this idea that rebelling against your parent's tastes and values is an inherently useful and revolutionary activity. It's gotten kind of threadbare.

I wasn't there for the sixties so I don't know--maybe it really was a hidebound time that desperately needed to be shaken up. I find it hard to believe; it was the 1950's that produced rock 'n' roll, and in Britain the Beatles and the Rolling Stones came out of the early sixties, long before all the groovy social revolution we've all been bludgeoned with. Maybe Britain in particular was stodgy and not real exciting. Of course, it's worth keeping in mind that they had spent the past fifteen years rebuilding what the Luftwaffe destroyed, and under those conditions being hip is a bit of a luxury.

But the overarching conceit of this kind of movie is that what's really oppressing us is some rigid, Apollonian power structure that doesn't want us to have fun. To the extent that that was ever true, I don't think it's been particularly so, let alone relevant, for decades now. There's a power structure all right, and it's oppressive in other ways. But to rebut the Beastie Boys, no, you don't really have to fight for your right to party. Indeed, most of our consumer culture wants us to party, all the time, as long as we're using their party favours--big TV's, big cars, big tubs of carbonated sugar water, big stadiums with thousands of people watching millionaires jump around with guitars. Dionysus has a very comfy seat at the table, thanks very much.

In fact, if anything, the obsession with commercialized hedonism is the problem. We're so busy being cool, being hip, living for the now and having it all, that we've forgotten that we're supposed to be responsible adults with a collective civic job to do. Namely, to ensure that the world we hand off to the next generation is in basic working order, with functional infrastructure and viable farmland and education and an ecosystem that isn't on the verge of full-blown collapse.

Every day for the past six years I put on a suit and went in to my planning job in municipal government and spent the day doing what I could to improve the world. I'm not blowing my own horn; I consider this to be the most basic responsibility of citizenship. But some people thought I was some kind of hero for doing what, two generations ago, would have been the bare minimum required to call yourself an adult. And this says more about how far everyone else's standards have fallen than it does about how awesome I am. The fact that to doing this felt deeply subversive--that is, completely at odds with the predominant ethos of me first, show me the money, and I want to rock and roll all night/party every day--is a sign of real trouble ahead.

All of which is to say, I don't really need another story about how cool it was to be a rebel in the sixties. We know what you were rebelling against. I'm knee-deep in the debris of it all.

Misinformation technology

2009-11-04T20:27:00.002+01:00

I was just having a conversation with a friend about vaccination, and marvelling at how this mass movement of spectacularly ill-informed people has arisen to rail against, of all things, giving people injections to prevent them from getting crippling or deadly diseases.

Look:

Autism is bad. Polio is worse. Mercury poisoning is bad. Diptheria, tetanus and hepatitis are worse. Doctors are people who, for all their flaws as people, spend years studying how the human body works. Jim Carrey is a rubber-faced comedian who makes fart noises.

One would think this would represent a decisive end to the debate.

I think the story of information technology has not even been a teensy bit told yet. It's still so new that people are marvelling at what it can do and what it appears to have done. But it's like standing there after a giant meteor has struck and saying, "Gee, there sure is a lot of dust in the air... I guess the main effect of that giant meteor has been to make a lot of dust." But you're not even close to seeing the whole story. Wait for some of the dust to settle, or to block out the sun for a few seasons.

But it's been difficult so far to articulate a position of suspicion or caution because it's hard to get the nuance across. ("What, you don't want people to have access to information? You think it should be controlled by someone?") It's hard to be anti-information and that's how suspicion of information technology is liable to be taken.

The availability of blogging is great to the extent that it allows smart people to get their views out there without being censored by e.g. corporate media concerns. It's bad to the extent that it allows dumb, ignorant or misinformed people to get their views out there without being censored by e.g. a basic regard for science and facts.

How many are there of the latter, compared to the former? What proportion of each group blogs? How much influence to bloggers have? I don't know. Maybe I'm worrying about nothing here.

It makes it all the worse when the "quality" information--peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, which, whatever their flaws, have at least been evaluated by people qualified to do so before being published--is restricted to people actually in universities or willing to pay thousands of dollars for a subscription to Elsevier.

But information technology is even more dangerous in other applications. I was having a conversation in class today, where we're learning to use Excel to do moderately complex techno-economic modelling. The prof warned us to be careful, because sometimes you can construct a model that makes your conclusions appear extremely sensitive to a change in one variable--much more so than they are in real life. (Anything where you use a quotient i.e. rate of return as a percentage of an investment is particularly vulnerable to this.) Any model is limited in its ability to reflect reality, and sometimes numbers do lie--or, rather, they conceal and misdirect.

My dad always says, "He who lives by the spreadsheet dies by the spreadsheet." More generally, I got to thinking that once upon a time, if you wanted to work in a job that involves a lot of math, you had to be smart. Smart enough to have learned the math. That doesn't mean wise, necessarily, or good, but at least of a level of intelligence (whatever that means) to be able to learn challenging and not-immediately-exciting stuff. It demanded, arguably, a certain strength of character in this regard. Homework sucks. If you're going to learn math, you have to do a lot of it.

But now that we have spreadsheets, you don't have to learn how to do math. You can create all kinds of complex models with only a bare understanding of what these concepts represent.

Excel has a function called NPV (Net Present Value) that allows you to reduce the value of the future with a couple of keystrokes. Frankly, I have a lot of problems with NPV and discounting, but at least, if you have to understand the math yourself, there's an opportunity for it to become apparent what you're really assuming here.

But with a pre-programmed spreadsheet function, you add a level of abstraction to the process. You can do it without understanding--indeed, without ever being presented with the argument--how crazy the conclusions are when applied to real life. And you can put those conclusions in an executive summary and no one has time to reverse-engineer the logic that got them there, and so bit by bit all kinds of mathematically-sound but completely crazy conclusions get adopted as reality.

Mandatory parking requirements, or, How to kill your Downtown real fast without even trying, Part 2.

2009-11-01T16:45:00.011+01:00

So here’s a plan of a stretch of Main Street, basically what you saw in the pictures in the last post. I drew it in PowerPoint but it’s basically to scale. You’ve got buildings right up to the sidewalk. The lots—see the black dashed lines? They’re anywhere from twenty to sixty feet or more in width. Lot depth is sort of irregular. There are some alleys and side streets but for the most part it’s a continuous street wall.

Here’s the lot fabric without the buildings:

Like I said, it’s not exactly tidy. Some very small and, in particular, very narrow lots. Now, that’s a really good thing—in a proper, pedestrian-friendly Downtown, you want to keep that articulation of the street wall at a human scale. And of course there are existing buildings on these lots, which means a lot of neat little spaces for small businesses to start up in.

You need some big anchors. But small businesses are key to your Downtown. Without them, it loses all its personality and local colour. You need those small spaces.

So, once you leave Main Street, there’s a lot of vacant lots (or old, clapped-out buildings ready to be torn down) with this kind of fabric. You want to put buildings on them and build yourself more Main Street.

Now, someone may object at this point and say, “Why are we stuck with this lot fabric? Why can’t we buy up some of these vacant lots and put ‘em together and make bigger lots?” Well, you can do that up to a point. But the problem is, as soon as you’re dealing with three or four landowners, each of them wanting a good price for their land. There’s usually one who will hold you hostage—usually once you’ve bought out the other three. I think in developer-speak there’s a word for this—it’s called a “ransom strip.” Consolidation is hard. Maybe you can put together two lots but beyond that, you’re basically stuck with the lots as they exist.

Now, suppose you tried to build more of this—exactly like this, exactly what people want, on some of the vacant lots around your existing Main Street—but with one difference. The difference is, your land use by-law requires any new development to put in parking stalls.

Well, the simplest and cheapest way to do that is to just put the parking in front. So if you do that, here’s what you get:

A parking stall has to be at least twenty feet (6m) deep. So the new development has to be pushed back twenty feet from the sidewalk to accommodate a row of cars parked out front.

This has two immediate effects.

First of all, you’ve just turned your street line into a parking lot. Anyone walking down this street will feel like they’re walking through a parking lot because their interface will be the butt ends of a bunch of cars. And during off-peak times, when those parking stalls are empty, it’s a twenty-foot-wide strip of asphalt. Just imagine walking through that, and then ask yourself if it’s somewhere you particularly want to be. If you're going to have to walk through a parking lot to get to where you want to be, you might as well just go to the mall.

Secondly, by taking up the front twenty with parking, you’ve seriously reduced the buildable area of the lot. This is particularly true of the small and shallow lots. That one on the far left—the one that could be the candy store or the little buck-a-slice pizza place—has just lost almost half of its buildable area. Same with the one on the far right. You want small spaces for small businesses, but if you make them TOO small no one can use them.

Now, obviously you wouldn’t build it that way. If you did, you’d have a huge traffic problem because the street line would be one big driveway opening—five or six blocks with cars backing out and pulling in along its whole length.

That’s why parking lots have defined driveways where you drive in and then go down a parking aisle to your stall. Like so:

So, realistically, for even a single-loaded parking lot, you have to push the buildings forty feet (12m) back--twenty for one tier of stalls plus twenty for the aisle. You’ve immediately doubled the width of that nasty asphalt strip.

And to make it worse, you’re actually getting LESS parking. Because part of that frontage has to be reserved for the driveways so people can get in and out.

So the minute you try to put in a semi-realistic parking lot, you double the asphalt and actually get less parking for your trouble. Anyone trying to build and rent these buildings is going to have to factor in the cost of the land and the cost of the paving and drainage into their rent and it’s going to make that floor space more expensive.
Meanwhile, look at those guys on the far left and far right. With a forty-foot setback, you’ve basically made them disappear. There’s no room on those small lots for anything but a couple of parking stalls. Actually, one parking stall each! You’ve traded two small-business spaces for two parking stalls.

So for all intents and purposes, those small lots don’t exist. That’s one time it’s easy to do land assembly: when you have a lot that’s so small that any moron can see it’s useless under the existing development rules. When that happens, those small lots get bought up and turned into driveways and a couple of parking stalls.

Realistically, if you want your parking lot to work, you’ll need some kind of barrier along the street line. This is the “green space” that everyone talks about. It’s a little narrow strip of grass that forces everyone in the parking lot to use the driveway. It also holds snow banks in winter. But by making it “green space”—what’s often called a “buffer”—we get to pretend that we have created an attractive urban space. Forty feet of asphalt is terrible, but take forty feet of asphalt and put it behind three to six feet of grass and suddenly it’s okay.

(Sarcasm doesn’t come through in print. So, please note: I am being sarcastic. “Green strips” are another word for “lipstick on a pig.”)

Anyway, that "green strip's" main function is going to be to store snowbanks in winter.

Also, you’ll need a little sidewalk in front of the building itself for people to walk on once they’ve gotten out of their cars. You don’t need much—maybe another three to six feet (1-2m.)

So here’s what you’ve done. You’ve obliterated two small building lots; cut the buildable area of the others in half; paved half the land; and all in exchange for one, two, three... twenty-one parking stalls.

In other words... a strip mall.

Nice work, Gropius.

In the next post I'll talk about why putting the parking around back doesn't really change anything.

Mandatory parking requirements, or, How to kill your Downtown real fast without even trying, Part 1.

2009-10-31T22:26:00.021+01:00

One of the neat things about Moncton is that, unlike a lot of cities, they don’t require parking if you want to build something Downtown. This is something that shocks people when they call to ask about development rules because it seems that a lot of cities still make you put in X amount of parking, even if it’s right in your central business district. Moncton doesn’t do that. The minimum parking ratio for a development in Moncton’s Downtown is zero.

And as a result, Moncton has seen a lot of good urban development in its downtown core over the past five or six years. For instance, this office building extension was built on the existing building's parking lot.

By making parking optional, it allows developments to happen that couldn’t happen in a city that requires X number of parking stalls for every square foot of floor area.

But every now and then, someone comes along and says, “I had trouble finding a free parking space in the middle of the business day! Don’t builders have to put in parking? Why the hell not?” And they’re outraged and they make a lot of noise.

The short answer is, If your goal is to destroy your Downtown, then by all means impose a minimum parking requirement.

Here’s Main Street in Moncton.

It’s very small—really just five or six blocks. It is, by all accounts, a pretty successful place. It’s mostly bars and restaurants at street level, supported by a lot of office space. There’s not much in the way of retail. But it is a very pleasant urban space. It’s not Paris but for a small-town North American Main Street at the end of almost a century of automobile-dominated urban planning, it is doing very well indeed.

Now, Moncton’s Downtown is actually much, much larger than just this stretch of Main Street. It actually occupies almost the the entire area that was built up by about 1920. And once you get off Main Street, Downtown is a mixed bag. There’s a lot of area that’s been bulldozed for parking.

There are some residential areas and some secondary commercial areas. Some of them are really nice.

Some have seen better days, but have "good bones" and a lot of potential:

And some... well, the less said the better:

But in Main Street we have the seed of a proper Downtown—something around which to crystallize. There was a big design charrette for Moncton’s Downtown in 2006, and there were a lot of opinions and lots of discussion but one thing everybody agreed on is, “We want more of this:”

We want more of the kind of thing we already have on Main Street.

Now, you can build more Main Street, as long as you’re willing to accept some tradeoffs. There are obstacles and complications but you can work around them. But one thing you can’t work around is this: the instant you impose a parking requirement, it’s completely doomed. You may get development in your Downtown but it will be Downtown in name only.

In the next post I'll explain why.

A plug

2009-10-31T11:14:00.004+01:00

If you're reading this blog (which, judging from the number of visits I'm getting, you're not) you may enjoy my good friend Idle Primate's blog. If I'm the smartest guy in the room then he's often the wisest, and certainly fun to read. At the very least, he reminds us that the digisphere has not been completely colonized by mouth-breathing Palinites, boner-pill hucksters and Nigerian inheritance middlemen.

Abandoned box store

2009-10-30T13:58:00.010+01:00

I was back in my hometown of Orleans, Ontario last Christmas. It had been years since I lived there, and so I was flabbergasted by two things.

One, the old edge of suburbia--which I remembered as farmland--had been completely gobbled up by suburban development, going (I am told) as far as Navan in one direction and Stittsville in the other. I knew sprawl had continued apace, but I was shocked to see how far it had gone.

Two, some of this suburban development had already been abandoned in favour of slightly-more-favourable (to the chain store owner) locations two or three intersections away.

Such is the case with this hardware store, built in 1992 or 1993 and now abandoned.

The box store below is in Moncton and it isn't abandoned (at least, not as of this post.) But I like the desolation of it. I had a narrow window of opportunity between the time the place closed (so the parking lot would be empty) and the time the sun moved out of the optimal angle.

(Okay, I did Gimp some distracting crap out of the image, but that's okay. This wasn't intended as a pure art photo, but rather as raw material:)

Suburban versus urban land use

2009-10-30T13:36:00.006+01:00

This is a pair of land-use maps I did in planning school back in 2003, based on GIS data from McGill University. They illustrate the land-use pattern on an old, pre-WWII urban neighbourhood (the Plateau Mont-Royal, left) and the pattern in post-war suburban development (the West Island, and more specifically the area around the Fairview Mall, where Pointe-Claire and Dollard Des Ormeaux meet.)

Both maps are at the same scale. They really illustrate the finer grain of land uses in old urban neighbourhoods. (It's worth noting that the actual residential density of the residential parts of the Plateau--i.e. the yellow bits on the map on the left) is much higher than in the 'burbs.

One of the results of this is that the Plateau is much more walkable, and much less dependent on cars.

I'm not going to get into theories of urban design and form here; there's a lot of good stuff out there on the topic. I'm just posting this 'cause you might find it illustrative. (Even though I've stated a copyright on the above image, feel free to use it for non-profit purposes e.g. education, advocacy, or otherwise persuading the powers-that-be to quit building suburban sprawl. All I ask is that you credit me and let me know you'vre used the image. I do have an ego that needs stroking from time to time...)

Who I'm not.

2009-10-28T00:36:00.003+01:00

Gotta love the digital era. Until recently, if someone wanted to underline how the world has changed, they would reminisce about how when they were young no one had to lock their doors.

I'm not old enough to remember that time, but my generation's version of it is, "Back in the day, we didn't have to go through our credit card bills, call Equifax, make sure they know we moved, and periodically Google our names to make sure there was nothing unflattering about us floating around the Internet."

Anyway, I was googling myself just to see what's out there and it turns out there's another Tim Moerman out there. If my name were John Smith it wouldn't be weird to find someone else with the same name, but this is kind of eerie--all the more so because he's also in municipal government.

It seems to me that people might reasonably confuse me with the other Tim Moerman so it's worth doing some disambiguation here.

I'm Tim J. Moerman, a Canadian urban planner, formerly of Ottawa, Montreal and Moncton. I've been known to draw comics and to write newspaper editorials on energy issues, especially peak oil. I've presented at conferences in Saint John, St. John's, Fredericton, Vancouver, and Moncton.

The other guy is Tim A. Moerman. He's American, a midwesterner, an economic development director with the City of Ankeny, Iowa. He's also worked in Mason City, Iowa. Different guy.

Because Hummers are for weenies!

2009-10-25T23:52:00.001+01:00

Monkeytown Comix Jam Poster

2009-10-23T10:42:00.004+02:00

I did the illustration for this poster way back in July, then promptly forgot about it until Eric Dyck sent me the finished layout yesterday. Unlike me, Eric is a full-on professional illustrator and his stuff blows my mind.

The Monkeytown Comix Jam is a monthly event where people get together and draw comix and, I must say, it has produced some spectacular stuff over the past year and a half.

The future of the airline industry, such as it is...

2009-10-22T11:15:00.005+02:00

As I've alluded to elsewhere, I don't have high hopes for the future of the airline industry. They were having big, big trouble due to fuel costs back when oil was in the $100-a-barrel range, with discount airlines that proliferated during the cheap-oil '90's popping like a string of firecrackers.

I won't get into it here, but suffice it to say that oil prices can easily go high enough to kill off the commercial airline industry as we know it. (How soon? Well, trying to time these things is a mug's game and notwithstanding anything I say anywhere else, I refuse to be pinned down on this one. But put it this way: I'm in Denmark for school until early 2011 and I'm not counting on being able to GET back to Canada once I'm done...)

Which raises the question, what is the "scrappage value" of this enormous investment we've made in commercial aviation? In other words, how much of the expertise, industrial capacity, etc. currently devoted to designing and building 747's and Airbuses, can be adapted to e.g. renewable energy, conservation and the like? How much lemonade can we make with this big pile of lemons?

From my energy planning courses, it seems like a lot of this technology can be adapted to a low-energy environment. The gas turbines used in combined heat/power applications are basically identical to jet engines. This technology is of course dependent on there BEING gas or light oil to run them, and in the long run that'll be a problem. But as Galbraith said, in the long run we're all dead. In the meantime, to the extent that CHP lets us make better use of a limited resource, it's very useful and so, surprisingly, is everything we've learned about building jet engines.

Airfoil technology is another useful product of the aviation era. Modern wind turbines have blades that work on the same principle as airplane wings (i.e. Bernoulli's principle, whereby air passing at different speeds over/under a foil results in lift, pulling the foil one way.) Now, turbine blades are a lot bigger than airplane wings--I saw some turbines the other day that had 85-m blades and that's hardly unusual--but the principle is the same. Could the factories that currently make jet wings, be retooled to make (much bigger but otherwise similar) turbine blades?

Some aviation manufacturers such as Bombardier also make railway rolling stock, so I would guess there's a lot of overlap in those two fields. (Presumably car manufacturers would be well-placed to make this transition as well.)

In a newspaper editorial some months ago, I suggested that bailing out the auto industry is of short-term benefit at best, and that we'd do better putting those resources to work building wind turbines. That goes double for the airplane manufacturers that are going to be in real trouble in the coming years.

I can never remember.

2009-10-21T22:24:00.004+02:00

Adventures in inking...

2009-10-20T00:03:00.004+02:00

I hate inking. It's really hit and miss with me--sometimes it turns out well, but a lot of the time I just end up ruining a perfectly good pencil drawing. This is one of the few times I've been happy with how it turned out.

Welcome to the blog!

2009-10-19T22:51:00.002+02:00