Lost in Transliteration

The view from the top of the Pacific

Mike — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:09:15 +0000

This is a little old, but some folks might enjoy my photo expedition to Mauna Kea from 2008. Some things have changed — Saddle Road, for instance, is a lot better than it was even two years ago — but for my money, Mauna Kea remains one of the most interesting things you can do on the Big Island that most people never see.

I’d like to welcome our new photophytotoxic overlords

Mike — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 23:56:31 +0000

I know it was a somewhat silly series of books, but I had “The War Against the Chtorr” in the back of my mind while watching this:

Does fire kill this stuff? Jeez, that’s terrifying.

Single national narratives

Mike — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 07:35:08 +0000

Andrew Coyne, Canada is a French country:

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.

Thanks a lot, James May

Mike — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:35:25 +0000

It turns out that the Eyjafjallajokull eruption that stranded me in the United Kingdom earlier this year was all James May’s fault. Seriously. If you watched the first episode of Series 15 (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, uh, shame on you and you can fix that problem right now), you’ll no doubt remember James’ decision to drive up Eyjafjallajokull in a Toyota Hilux. Fine, whatever — Clarkson made some jokes about it in the episode, and that’s all great.

But then James hoisted aloft his souvenir trophy from the volcano. Anyone who knows anything about volcanoes knows Pele gets kind of pissed off when people steal rocks. “Oh, sure,” you say, secure in your belief that the ancient Hawaiians were on glue. “It’s not like Pele’s Curse is real, and besides, isn’t it only supposed to affect people who take stuff from Hawaii?” Well, maybe. I don’t know. But consider this: James took the piece of lava home to Great Britain after having recorded the theft on video. The ash cloud that Eyjafjallajokull spat out more or less made a beeline for the United Kingdom, and then sat there. For five days. Closing airspace. James May has a pilot’s license, and a job that is somewhat dependent on travel.

I can’t prove Pele was behind this. But it sure looks like punishment to me. Moral: don’t steal from the volcano. Ever ever ever.

Also, after having typed Eyjafjallajokul several times in this entry (mostly ensuring the muscle memory is there for the next time I need to type it; look for my forthcoming book on the ash crisis entitled “With Immediate Effect, Until Further Notice: Eyjafjallajokul and the Airplane,” wherein I type that word many more times!), I am forced to think endlessly about this.

It also says you can’t put squirrels down your pants for the purposes of gambling

Mike — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:43:37 +0000

So I was reading through the Canadian Aviation Regulations this afternoon looking for something specifically prohibiting me from dropping things from airplanes. (It turns out there isn’t any such regulation, as long as you do it safely.) And then, I stumbled on 602.25:

602.25 (1) No person shall enter or leave an aircraft in flight except with the permission of the pilot-in-command of the aircraft.

(2) No pilot-in-command of an aircraft shall permit a person to enter or leave the aircraft during flight unless
(a) the person leaves for the purpose of making a parachute descent;

(b) the entering or leaving is permitted under section 702.19; or

(c) the flight is conducted in accordance with

(i) a special flight operations certificate – special aviation event issued under section 603.02, or
(ii) a special flight operations certificate issued under section 603.67.

I think the moral of the story here is that if you decide you want out of the airplane while it’s flying, you should get permission from the pilot-in-command before opening the door and leaving. Which seems reasonable enough. But it’s the “entering” part that I find remarkably interesting — so I guess all the movie malarkey of climbing onto a helicopter’s skid after it takes off but before it gets too far away from the ground is actually illegal! Also, it goes without saying that flying up to another plane and docking to it for the purposes of inserting a commando squad in the event of a terrorist takeover is also illegal, but hey! Maybe they got 603.02/603.67 dispensation! Kurt Russell and Steven Segal at 38,000′ qualifies as a special aviation event, doesn’t it?

Lost in Sysadminning

Mike — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 06:43:55 +0000

Buying a Unix system guarantees you a descent into Hell.
–Philip Greenspun

We’re back up and running (somewhat) normally, following ~18-ish hours of weirdness that stemmed from a badly botched update of WordPress. It started when I decided to bring the CMS software up to date — I’d been running on 2.8 for a while, and 3.0 being out, I thought perhaps I should consider updating things a bit. But version 3.0 of WordPress required a version of MySQL that I wasn’t using, so I needed to change database servers, and… you know what? It doesn’t matter. Point is, I had to change both the database backend and the CMS at the same time, and as you can well imagine that did not go well.

I blame MySQL, personally. As a database system it seems to be quite happy to fail in opaque ways; like its commercial brethren, it seems to pride itself on its inscrutability. As a piece of free software, it needs to be a thousand times harder than it should be, just to prove how much more advanced it is. The culprit was a bunch of SQL, written by the export tool, that the import tool proceeded to choke on. My SQL isn’t good enough that I could figure out what was wrong — it looked okay to me, but what do I know? Ultimately, I had to re-import the old database to the old database system, re-install an old version of WordPress, export from within WordPress itself, then bring the WP export back over to the new version of WP and the new database. Many, many, many new curse words were invented last night.

But it seems to work. Now. Euy.

Homemade pornography!

Mike — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 02:35:55 +0000

(Man, I wonder what the search engines are going to do with these airplane porn posts…)

It’s the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Canadian Navy — whatever we want to call it this year — and, to mark the occasion, Victoria was inundated with naval personnel and activities over the past week. Almost a dozen ships from a half dozen countries came to town to mark the occasion. Saturday, they moved out to anchor off Royal Roads, and the Governor General came out to inspect the assembled fleet.

Then we were treated to a bit of an airshow. Highlights below the cut, or go here for the complete gallery.

Also, I learned that — despite its relatively short lens — the G11 is actually pretty good at taking airplane pictures. Who knew?

More filthy pornography!

Mike — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 12:24:36 +0000

The Australian Department of Defence released this awesome series of photographs of one of their brand-new F/A-18Fs doing some low-level flying. They are staggeringly cool pictures.

Also, a very interesting view of a 787-8. I say it too much, but I can’t help it — this plane looks better and better every time I see it.

Quick Hits

Mike — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 17:08:03 +0000

Item 1: We are so living in the future now, says William Gibson:

Say it’s midway through the final year of the first decade of the 21st Century. Say that, last week, two things happened: scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the 21st Century, which happens to be the one you’re living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.

But don’t just rely on the excerpted graph! There’s a lot more — about the nature of science fiction (in particular, and fiction in general), about the way that Gibsons novels have evolved over time, and about the idea that the future isn’t going to be The Future!! anymore but rather just the future, with stuff followed by more stuff followed by more stuff. This is, in essence, the basis of the grim meathook future, which still contains the best description I’ve ever heard of the future: “it holds what the past holds: a great deal of extreme boredom punctuated by occasional horror and the odd moment of grace.” (via)

Item 2: I’m always amazed at the willingness of people to whine about air travel. (“A flight attendant on my last flight didn’t smile at me, am I entitled to compensation?”) So with that in mind, the good folks at the AAdvantage forum presentthe stupidest, most inconsequential thread ever. By design. It’s a thing of beauty.

Item 3: I wasn’t aware there was a point behind Van Halen’s infamous demands about brown M&Ms. It turns out there was a very good point, and who ever knew David Lee Roth was so sneaky?

Item 4: Depressed? Angry? Bored? As your attorney in this matter, I strongly advise you to ensure you get your daily dose of adorable assed animals. You will thank me later.

Set my soul on fire

Mike — Sun, 30 May 2010 05:46:50 +0000

How I was unaware of this version of “Viva Las Vegas” until quite recently (well, actually, yesterday to be exact) is a bit of a mystery to me. But I have since found it, have fallen in love with it (not surprising, given who did it), and think you’ll like it too:

That bass line is… magnificent.