But if the history of Canada is an unbroken chain of sovereignty, Francis to Elizabeth, Champlain to Johnston; if what is important about it is not the change from French to British rule but the continuity between them—if we are not a British monarchy, or even a French monarchy and then a British one, but simply a monarchy, throughout—then the Conquest is not the pivotal event in our history: it is just an event. The effect, in turn, is to deracinate the British inheritance. What is valuable is the inheritance—Crown, Parliament, the common law, the Constitution—not its Britishness.

It’s practically a legal requirement for Canadians to do some serious thinking about their heritage and how this place came to be, and those of us who’ve lived through a Quebec separatism scare or two probably understand how to do this better than most. This article by Coyne is quite possibly the single most interesting thing I’ve read on the subject in at least 20 years. And there’s something deeply, deeply appealing about his thesis — if he’s right about what the Prime Minister is trying to do; even if Harper isn’t trying to do this, however, I still love the idea. The subtle unification of the two European-derived narratives into a singular story is one hell of a rhetorical trick; for the life of me, I can’t figure out why no one has done this before.

We’re reaching the point where, as a country, it no longer makes sense to define ourselves in opposition to something else, or at least in negative terms (“not British,” “not French,” “not American,” etc). Official policy surrounding concepts like multiculturalism make this difficult — we’ve lacked, almost by design, a unifying narrative to explain how we got here because we’ve fostered the creation of thousands of individual narratives. Because we were, and still are, an immigrant nation (and because most great Canadian fictional works have, at their core, been immigrant stories), the idea of having a singular story is alien to us; we don’t have a parallel to “in order to form a more perfect union” or anything along those lines. It was just a bunch of people who showed up, some more people who showed up, shots were fired, stuff happened, and then we turned into this weird country. And — for some bizarre reason — we teach this as history, but we don’t celebrate it as heritage. Maybe it’s because we just don’t understand the implications of that history.

I’m certainly not going to argue in favor of diminishing the other narratives of formation — mine, yours, the natives, anyone else’s. But while we can all talk about how we got here, in some sense we should probably have an idea of how here got here. This single national narrative — either as an idea started by the PMO, or as an original creation by Coyne and others — is a hell of a good start.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2010/07/single-national-narratives/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2010/05/research-idea-number-21/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2010/05/research-idea-number-21/#comments Tue, 11 May 2010 01:43:13 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=534 Why haven’t refractory problems been bred out of populations? What is the prevalence of refractory errors in other animal species? How would you measure this?

(Or, perhaps: “It can also be argued that DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species, relies upon genes to be its memory system. So man is an individual only because of his own undefinable memory. But memory cannot be defined, yet it defines mankind. The advent of computers and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought, parallel to your own. Humanity has underestimated the consequences of computerization,” to use a non-made-up example.)

You know how this works. It’s not bad, just… different… to see characters speaking in what amount to relatively full, self-referential paragraphs. And, as I usually do when I encounter this kind of thing, I wonder whether this was a function of the original writing, or whether it was a function of the translation.
]]> http://fumbling.com/lost/2010/04/late-to-the-party/feed/ 0 http://fumbling.com/lost/2010/02/a-chilean-paraphrase/ http://fumbling.com/lost/2010/02/a-chilean-paraphrase/#comments Sat, 27 Feb 2010 19:36:29 +0000 Mike http://fumbling.com/lost/?p=508 Continue reading →]]> Overheard / participated in:

A: “Wow, there was an 8.5 magnitude earthquake off Chile.”
B: “I think it was closer to 8.8.”
A: “Does the 0.3 make a difference?”
C: “Well, with moment magnitude, that’s 2.8 times the energy.”
A: “… oh.”

One thing that digital decidedly did not make easier was picking a new camera. Used to be that you could simply evaluate the camera, particularly a point and shoot, in the context of its lens and how it felt in your hand, and be reasonably assured of getting a reasonable product and good results once you shoved some film in the thing. The limitations were really with your own creativity; I took some staggeringly good pictures with absurdly cheap cameras when I was a kid, and you can still have this kind of fun with something like a Lomo if you’re willing to put up with the crappy lens. (This is how things like the Yashica T4 turned out to be such brilliant deals — great lens + compact form + right film = woo!)

Now, however, it isn’t enough to evaluate the lens and the form factor. You have to have some understanding of noise reduction algorithms and methods. You need to know whether a camera has an anti-aliasing filter (and, indeed, what an anti-aliasing filter is). How does the white balance work? What’s the sensitivity at the various ISO levels (which aren’t really ISO levels at all)? If someone had tried to buy a film camera and had to make decisions about not just the camera and lens but also the film, the lab, the printer, and probably the framer at the time of purchase I think that person probably would have gone nuts. It would have been a frigging miracle if anyone had actually managed to buy anything.

It reminds me a little of trying to buy medium format gear; you have to, before you can even think about lenses or bodies, decide — sometimes with basically no background information — what size you want your originals to be. Of course, there actually is a correct answer here (6×6), but I remember the heat and light that these discussions used to generate on photo.net and rec.photo.* — it was intense. But medium format, like all film photography, could in some senses be saved by film choices; if you got a crummy slow lens you could play around, find the right aperture, park it on a tripod, and get the finest grained film you could find, and generally figure out how to salvage your work. With a digital camera, though, you’re stuck with the same film, the same lab, and the same printer, as well as the actual hardware. Forever. (Well, maybe not: I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the CHDK project, which is interesting and probably useful if you’re trying to push the limits of what the small-sensor Canons can do.)

And then you get the yahoos for whom cameras are gadgets, and for whom pixel peeping is the end-all, be-all of photographic quality… oh, it’s really irritating. I suppose this is why people use shorthands: “Buy the top-end Canon and don’t worry about it too much.” OK. I did this twice and it worked all right; what are the odds it works the third time, too?

I am agnostic on this issue, since I can find plenty of people to dislike on the other side. It would be easy to say that, given the CRTC’s historical position on fee-for-carriage (oppose) that if you’re satisfied with the status quo you might find yourself on the same side as the cable companies — but then you look at what you pay for cable service, and how much you’re getting in return, and realize that maybe you’re just going to stop paying attention altogether.

This might be the first time I’ve seen people get this worked up over a proposed CRTC decision since the blank media levy was introduced in 1997…