Photography: More Stuff

More photography catching-up...

Grange Park

While I worked at Points, my office looked out over Grange Park. So, naturally, I ended up taking a lot of photos there. The old tower of St. George the Martyr Anglican Church was a favourite.

Here's the view from my office. The tower of St. George the Martyr is nicely ivy-covered, which makes for great colours -- green in the spring, red in the fall, and all nicely dead and cemetery-ish in the winter. You can also see University College about 1300m away in the back.

The wildlife likes the place too, though their easier to see in the larger version of the photo.

While photographing the tower I noticed this behind it. Several hundred people heading off somewhere, barely showing up in my viewfinder.

Random Stuff

For Christmas I got Lori a ring flash, so we spent a lot of the family get-together photographing random things around the house.

Another "happen to have the camera while walking home late at night" shot. The hosta happened to be in the beam of a spotlight in front of the Grand Hotel on Jarvis St.

A commenter on Flickr had trouble recognizing this one. Doesn't everyone have a leather elephant?

"Fluffernutter" is our nickname for him. Because he's fluffy, and nuts.

Geocaching in Paris

The Paris & Brantford area is really good for geocaching -- lots of caches and lots of river trails to hike. We were out there in May and did a couple of caches.

The Wheeler Needle Works -- and old church -- would be much better to photograph if it weren't cramped up between other buildings and didn't have this annoying power cable running right across the front. The only way I could get the whole facade in was to make a mosaic (using Autostitch).

On the path we met this moth. He cooperated for a bit.

That's as far as I've gotten caught up in my uploads. More to come over the next few days. Feel free to leave comments, eh? Either here or on Flickr. Read more!

Photography: Lots O' Stuff

The job hunt progresses apace. One offer turned down, one good prospect that didn't go anywhere, and two good prospects in the works. Plus the adult web-cam network company that needs someone to do 90% of their tech work.

But in the meantime, I'm getting photos shopped and uploaded, so here're the latest. I'm only putting up one or two from each batch -- follow the links to see the full photostream.

Duckies

Ducklings at Ashbridges Bay. You know, I'm not really that keen on birds, but I end up taking quite a few photos of them. Elephants are the same way.

High Park

There's an awful lot of High Park between the paths and roads that everyone takes. Whenever I'm there, I try to follow a trail I'd never walked on before. The path on the left runs down from Colborne Lodge to the pond. The tree on the right was on another path running back up from the pond to the main road.

Bluffer's Park

We went to Bluffer's Park for a walk one evening. Unfortuantely, Lori ended up on a work-related crisis Blackberry call through about 90% of the walk.

Why's it called Bluffer's Park? Mainly because of the bluffs.

If you look closely, there's a sign at the top of the right-hand photo. I believe it says something like "Dead End" or "No Thru Traffic". The photo on the right is a bit of a trick: the original exposure wasn't great since the bluff itself was in shadow. The image is a composite of two versions of the same shot, one with the exposure corrected for the sky, the other corrected for the bluffs themselves.

The water was pretty calm, so we took some reflection shots.

And some more of those bird shots I mentioned...

Not My Dog

I took these photos almost a year ago, but I only got them uploaded this past week. Not My Dog is a restaurant and bar at 1510 Queen St. West run by some of my brother's friends. My brother designed the signage and lamps in the place.

For some reason I uploaded the lamps separately from the restaurant photos, so they aren't adjacent in the photostream.

Toronto At Night

I don't do a lot of shooting at night, but sometimes I end up out with the camera.

Old City Hall is always fun to shoot, especially with that nice shiny mirror behind it.

Sometimes unrelated things just end up next to each other and it looks right.

This is all done now -- the Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts, as it was last Christmas.

There's more that I've uploaded, but I'll get to that tomorrow. Read more!

Stuff: Unemployed

I suddenly find myself out of a job, now that my employer has trimmed its workforce by 25%. While that theoretically leaves more time to post, more likely it will just make me less inclined to -- not that I'm posting all that faithfully now. So don't expect much here for the next while... Read more!

Photos: Another Hawk

A while ago I posted photos of a hawk that lives on our block. We've seen him several times since then, sometimes quite close (he flew past our faces as we left for work one day, about 20m away). But I didn't mention at the time (because I didn't know) that there's a hawk living where I work, as well.

I work in a building on John Street with a view over Grange Park and OCAD. We discovered recently that a hawk has taken up residence in the park, scaring the pigeons and perching on a green drainspout on the side of the old St. George Church tower.

It's easy to tell when the hawk's out -- all the park pigeons start flapping around in a panicked group, circling and circling from building to building. The hawk usually parks himself on his favourite downspout, but can occasionally be seen soaring back and forth. One time we spotted him taking off from his tower and turning back, aimed straight for the wall. He seemed to crash into it and fall, but a moment later he righted himself and sailed off to a tree with something in his claws -- a squirrel, as near as we could tell.

Last Friday I spotted the usual pigeon panic, but this time I had my camera with me, and shot off dozens of photos of him on his perch -- he wouldn't oblige me by flying around, though. Unfortunately, the windows in the office are covered in a thin film to keep out excessive sunlight, which ruined the sharpness of the photos. I had to go outside to ground level to get these photos. He stuck around for quite a while, mostly ignoring me, though a couple of times he looked me over.

Read more!

Books (Science): Voodoo Science

Voodoo science is bad science for fun and profit -- mostly profit. Bob Park's Voodoo Science: The Road from Foolishness to Fraud is one of the best books on the subject, a great introduction to various kinds of bad science and, more importantly, the harm bad science does.

Voodoo science includes traditional pseudoscience like ESP or UFOs, but Park spends relatively little time on those subjects. These are the most blatant examples of bad science that you'll see, but not the most insidious. Park is more interested in other kinds of voodoo science -- junk science twisted to suit ideological ends, incompetent science used to prop up pet theories or sell shares in inventions, and so on.

One of the most interesting chapters in Voodoo Science is the one on the EMF scare of the 90s. In 1989 the New Yorker ran a series of articles by Paul Brodeur about how high-tension lines cause cancer. The entire premise of Brodeur's articles (and later book, Currents Of Death) was a basic piece of biased observation and mixing correlation with causation. Study after study showed that there was no connection, and Brodeur dismissed every negative study as part of a conspiracy to cover up the truth. Park reports an estimate that dealing with the fallout of Brodeur's book cost the US about twenty-five billion dollars, and nothing ever came of it. However, the mythology that Brodeur created around EMF still persists, almost 20 years later, with some new variations (the cell phone/brain cancer scare being very similar).

Another favourite target of Park's are the free-energy inventors, such as Joe Newman. Twenty years ago, Newman created an "Energy Machine" based on a basic misunderstanding of how motors and generators work, and sold "shares" in his company, which he claimed would revolutionize the energy business "very soon".

(Note another great example of how voodoo science infiltrates public consciousness: the Wiki page that "Joe Newman" links to above says that "a perpetual motion machine is regarded as (probably) physically impossible within mainstream physics". The "probably" is completely spurious: any competent physicist regards violations of conservation of energy as impossible.)

Again, even though Newman is old news, the example is relevant. Another free-energy inventor was Yull Brown, who claimed that "Brown's Gas" was the fuel of the future. It turns out that "Brown's Gas" was just electrolyzed water (water split into hydrogen and oxygen) that was then recombined to produce power. There's nothing special about this, except that Brown claimed that it was free energy: he never mentioned (maybe didn't realize) that it takes more energy to electrolyze the water than you get by burning the hydrogen.

Just this year, various news sources (especially Fox) have been running stories about "HHO Gas", a new miracle fuel. But a quick skim of the articles shows that it's just "Brown's Gas" come back to haunt us.

If you have any interest in pathological science, but don't want to read yet another debunking of Uri Geller (who's still out there, making money by scamming gullible people), Voodoo Science is a good place to start. Also check out Park's What's New column, and his interview in the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast. Read more!

Photos: Swallows

Photographing swallows isn't easy. You rarely see them sitting still -- they're usually zipping around eating bugs. But on a recent walk, Lori (my wife) and I came across a very cooperative fellow who let us get within a couple of meters of him.

We were walking around Hydro Marsh in Pickering, near the nuclear power plant, when we came across him sitting on a fence rail. He was rather talkative, and would occasionally dart off to fly around a bit, but always came back to the rail to pose.

Lori caught this great shot of him taking off. After this, he didn't bother coming back, but flew off over the marsh, where we caught a glimpse of a blue heron leaving.

If you look closely at the take-off shot, you can see that his feathers are a little damp.

Afterwards, wandering through the park north of the power plant, Lori caught these photos of other swallows flying over the grass.

Read more!

Photos: Waterwebs

This coming Sunday I'll be participating in the Becel Heart & Stroke Foundation Ride for Heart (feel free to sponsor me if you like -- all money goes to the Heart & Stroke foundation). I'll be doing the 50km route.

Last Sunday, as a warm-up, I attempted a 73km tour of Scarborough -- up the Don Valley to Lawrence, through parks and hydro corridors to Highland Creek, along the Creek to the lakesore, and then back on Kingston Road.

Unfortunately, I ran out of energy at around 60km -- I had skimped on breakfast and ended up paying for it at Kingston & Markham Rd.

Still, it was a good run, and I did get a chance to take some fun photographs at the mouth of Highland Creek. As you can see from the photo at left, the trail I was following crosses a footbridge that runs under a rail bridge. When I got there, there was a heavy fog coming off the lake.

The footbridge rails were covered with spiderwebs, dozens of them, and each one was catching water from the fog. Droplets would condense around the web strands, growing until they were too heavy and dropped off.

I'd grabbed the small camera as a last minute, "just in case I see something interesting" thing, and I'm glad I did.

Read more!

Books (Math): Chance

I've been reading David Whitehouse's The Sun: A Biography, but on Friday I forgot to bring it to work. Stuck without anything to read, I dropped by the book store and picked up Chance: A Guide to Gambling, Love, The Stock Market, & Just About Everything else.

Chance is a rather slim book -- which was what I was after, something to tide me over until I got back to my copy of The Sun -- that covers a lot of the same ground as Struck By Lightning, though more it covers that ground more lightly (the chapter on game theory is all of one page long!).

The book is so slim, in fact, that each chapter feels like it's ending about halfway through. It's hard for me to tell if it actually has enough material to be a good introduction for someone unfamiliar with statistics -- it seems too thin to me. But it is well-written and accessible, so it may well be a good starting point for the subject.

My biggest problem with the book is actually with the typesetting -- specifically, the typesetting of equations. There are some serious gaffes. When talking about the Gambler's Ruin, the book presents this formula:

1 - (q/p)m

P = 1 - (q/p)m+n

Of course, what they actually mean is:

P =	1 - (q/p)m
	1 - (q/p)m+n

It's not so bad in this example, but in some cases it gets very hard to figure out just what's supposed to be equal to what.

Another example is in the chapter on statistical sampling. The formula for the standard deviation of the normal distribution is:

√(sample proportion) × (-1 sample proportion)

sample size

Of course, the correct formula is:

√(sample proportion) × (1 - sample proportion)

sample size

There's a big difference between (-1 sample proportion) and (1 - sample proportion)!

This isn't Aczel's fault (on the next page, when values for sample proportion and sample size are substituted in, the formula is correct), but it should have been caught before the book went to print.

In spite of the book's lightness and the typographic problems, it's still an enjoyable book. There was even a nice coincidence in the chapter on coincidences. Aczel mentions his friend Scott Petrack who, when flying from Paris to Boston, discovered that the person he'd been sitting beside had sung in the same choir in Tanglewood (the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra) about twenty years before. A week later, Scott got a business call from a stranger, and discovered that that person had sung in the same Tanglewood choir.

As it turns out, my father was also a member of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus about twenty years ago. There's a good chance he sang with Scott Petrack and the other two people, and that I heard them all. Not bad for an example of coincidence. Read more!

Books (Science): Trying to catch up

The problem with posting here is that I end up burning an hour or two on each post. So, when I don't have an hour or two to spare, I put off the posting -- and then it never gets posted. Of course, I also don't know if anyone's actually reading any of this, so it ends up not feeling that urgent. I never put off reading, though. I can't function properly if I don't have something to read during quiet moments.

As a result, I'm now several books behind in posting. So I'm going to short-change the books with an attempt at being brief, so I can catch up.

Jared Diamond: Collapse

Collapse is Diamond's follow-up to his first two books, The Third Chimpanzee and Guns, Germs, and Steel. I haven't read The Third Chimpanzee yet, but I found Guns, Germs, and Steel fascinating.

Collapse deals with the collapse of civilizations -- both past and future. Diamond examines how various past cultures have failed due to environmental problems (often self-inflicted), attacks by hostile neighbours, the loss of friendly trade partners that provided essential resources, and so on. He draws examples from all over the globe: Easter Island and various other South Pacific cultures, the Anasasazi and Maya in the Americas, the Viking settlements in Newfoundland and Greenland, and so on.

Collapse also examines current crises, comparing them to the past ones: the genocide in Rawanda, the economic collapse of Haiti (contrasted with the more successful, but still troubled, Dominican Republic next door), the environmental problems caused by irresponsible logging, mining, oil drilling, fishing, and so on. Diamond's also careful to point out examples of how responsible logging, drilling, and so on can be enormously helpful, not only to the environment, but to the economies affected.

Robert Kandel, Water from Heaven

Water from Heaven: The Story of Water From the Big Bang to the Rise of Civilization, and Beyond is just what its subtitle says: a very wide-ranging examination of water from a number of perspectives: cosmological, astronomical, physical, chemical, meteorological, environmental, sociological, and so on. The subject matter is fascinating from many perspectives, but the writing is rather dry, nowhere near as engaging as Diamond's.

Mario Livio, The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved

Mario Livio's previous book, The Golden Ratio, did a great job of prsenting the history of the famous "Divine Proportion" while cutting through a lot of the mythology around the number. The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry is another engaging book of math history, this time dealing with the development of group theory and the mathematics of symmetry.

The book follows the quest for a formulaic solution (or a proof of the absence of one) for general polynomial equations. High school algebra covers the solution to the quadratic: for ax² + bx + c = 0, the solutions for x are x = (-b + √(b² - 4ac))/2 and x = (-b - √(b² - 4ac))/2. Cubics and quartics have formulaic solutions as well. But what about quintic and higher-order polynomials? It turns out that, while particular subsets of higher-order polynomials can be solved with formulas, there is no general solution.

Livio centers the story of the quest for the solution (and the proof that there is none) around biographies of two contemporary tragic mathematical figures -- Niels Abel, who died at 27 from tuberculosis resulting from his poverty-stricken living situation, and Evariste Galois, who died at 21 in an idiotic duel. Abel provided the basis for Galois's great breakthrough, group theory, which forms the foundation of modern mathematics, and has provided valuable insight into the other sciences, especially physics but even anthropology.

Like Diamond, Livio's an excellent writer, providing deep social and historical context for the mathematics he describes.

Alexei Sossinsky, Knots

Knot theory is not something you hear about a lot in popular writing about mathematics. I'd been curious about how one would go about creating a mathematical model of knots long before I found Knots: Mathematics with a Twist.

A mathematical knot is slightly different from an everyday knot. Mathematicians close knotted strings into loops, so that there's no way to slide the knot off the end. Mathematical knots are more like Celtic knots than anything you'd find on a sneaker.

The big trick in the mathematics of knots is figuring out how to tell if two knots are essentially the same or different. If you take a trefoil knot (the simplest kind of knot) and, say, pull one of the loops through another, you haven't changed the essential nature of the knot -- you can restore it to its basic shape without cutting it anywhere. So the plain trefoil and the distorted one are essentially the same. But if you had a mirror image of the first trefoil, there'd be no way to change it into the original without cutting it.

The basic story of Knots is the story of the hunt for a perfect knot invariant -- a value you can assign to a knot which will be the same for all equivalent knots and different for all non-equivalent ones.

The problem is, the hunt hasn't really been successful yet. Each invariant presented has a fatal flaw -- there are some differing knots it can't distinguish, for example. Each one's better than the previous, but each one has a flaw.

Or, at least, I think that's where we end up, because there's one big problem with Sossinsky's book: it looses me for a while in the middle.

In the first half of the book, you get very used to seeing the phrase, "the proof is too complicated to present here". This isn't a big book -- 119 pages with lots of pictures on 5"x7" pages -- so it makes sense that you couldn't get too deep into elaborate proofs.

Unfortunately, when the book gets to the point of Vassiliev invariants, Sossinsky decides to go into detail about how Vassiliev invariants came about but never seems to quite explain what, in the end, they mean.

According to MathWorld, we still don't know if Vassiliev invariants are actually able to discriminate knots properly. The advantage they have over previous invariants is that they haven't yet been shown to fail.

Which basically boils down to, knot theory is so new that no-one's figured out it's "fundamental theorem" yet. Which helps explain why you don't see a lot of popular books on the subject.

Steven Squyres: Roving Mars

In 1999, Donna Shirley, who managed the Mars Pathfinder mission that put the Sojourner rover on Mars, published a great book on the mission called Managing Martians. That mission paved the way for the enormously successful Mars Exploration Rover (MER) mission that put the Spirit and Opportunity rovers on Mars in 2004 for a mission which was supposed to last 90 Martian days, or sols -- about three months -- but is still going even now.

Roving Mars covers the story of the MER mission from the point of view of Steven Squyres, the principle investigator who developed and ran the mission. The book starts with almost a decade's worth of failed attempts to get a mission accepted by NASA, and the string of failed missions which put NASA (and JPL) on the spot for a sure-fire success.

Squyres goes through the development of the rovers (on an extremely tight schedule), which adopted some of the innovations from the earlier Pathfinder mission. The new rovers were bigger and heavier, which meant that even though they were using an earlier design, it had to be adapted and expanded, leading to all sorts of testing nightmares.

Throughout the book it feels like the mission is on the verge of collapse. I can't imagine how stressful it must have been for everyone invovled -- no-one wants to be known for blowing the $250 million mission that shut down JPL!

The book ends at around Sol 250, when the mission had already run almost three times its original length. Anything accomplished after Sol 90 was bonus as far as NASA was concerned, but everyone expected the rovers to die by around Sol 150, most likely due to dust build-up on their solar arrays.

It is now almost Sol 850. Spirit has a lame wheel and Opportunity's arm-stowing motor is stalling, but both are still functioning and still collecting scientific data. After the catastrophic failures of three missions before the MER, Squyers's project has revitalized Mars exploration. Read more!

Photos: The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal

Note: the image may look a little chunky because it's scaled down in your browser. Click on it to see it at a proper size

When I wrote about the Sharp Centre at OCAD a couple of days ago, I mentioned the Royal Ontario Museum Crystal, the new expansion to the ROM.

The structure's proper name is The Michael Lee-Chin Crystal. The Crystal was designed by Daniel Libeskind to replace the previous ROM expansion, which had been build a few decades ago between the two north wings of the H-shaped ROM building.

The old expansion was function, though a little dull -- a terraced structure set back from Bloor Street with tan walls and dark windows. The Crystal is certainly a major departure -- instead of sloping back from the road, it will stick out over it, looming over pedestrians. No-one's quite sure what to make of it yet -- it's completely different in style from the building it's expanding (a serious Victorian structure, very academic-ivy in flavour). Some people hate it already, though personally I'm hopeful. I think it could work quite well, though I'm a little worried about the final effect the mix of aluminum sheathing and windows is going to have -- I would have preferred all-glass.

Unfortunately, there's been no talk of reviving the planetarium. I wonder what they'll end up doing with it.

The Crystal's supposed to open this fall. I'm looking forward to seeing it finished -- I'll be posting more photos of it as it gets closer to completion. Read more!

Books (Science): Struck By Lightning

I haven't posted much about books lately, except for the bit on Tezuka's Buddha. Recently my reading has been rather scattered -- until yesterday I had four books on the go, jumping between them, not really able to stay focused on any one for long.

But yesterday I finished the most recent of the four, Struck by Lightning: The Curious World of Probabilities by Jeffrey Rosenthal, a University of Toronto professor of statistics. It's a plain-language guide to common sense about probabilities (what Rosenthal calls "the Probability Perspective"), something that is often lacking in the general public, written in a light-hearted tone. It doesn't go as deep into the math as, say, Larry Gonick's Cartoon Guide to Statistics (which is not damning with faint praise: the Cartoon Guide gets right into the details!), but it covers its material in an accessible and friendly manner that makes it very approachable, with lots of examples from everyday life and popular entertainment (including The Simpsons and Monty Python).

Sometimes Rosenthal goes a little overboard. His sidebar examples get a little too cutesy at times, especially the "Ace Space, Probability Perspective Investigator" interlude chapter in the middle. Colin Bruce did that schtick better in Conned Again, Watson!, another common-sense guide to stats presented as Sherlock Holmes stories. Though, to be fair, Rosenthal does warn you at the beginning of the Ace Diamond story that "Serious, sober-minded readers may wish to skip this chapter".

Probably the biggest gripe I have about the book is in the first section of the chapter "Evolution, Genes, and Viruses". Rosenthal's explanation of evolution has a serious flaw:

The process [of natural selection] ensures that less fit offspring do not survive and reproduce. Thus, surviving offspring are weighted towards being more fit, more advanced, better able to live and flourish. In practical terms, this means that surviving offspring are weighted towards being more intelligent, more adaptable, and more cunning -- in short, more like humans.

The problem here is that there is no necessary weighting towards being "more intelligent", "more advanced", "more cunning", or "more like humans" in evolution. The only weighting is towards being "better able to reproduce in the current environment". Amoebas today are evolutionary descendants of amoebas from three billion years ago. Their evolution has not made them "more like humans" -- they're perfectly capable of reproducing in their modern environment.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about evolution in the general public -- that it's goal-oriented, and that we are the goal. Rosenthal hedges a little with a parenthetical "or some other sophisticated, intelligent life form", but even that isn't the case. Sure, intelligence seems to be a pretty good survival trait, so if there's a chance for it to show up, it'll probably flourish. But if there were to turn out to be microscopic life on Mars, for instance, it will be the end-product of billions of years of evolution that never even got close to a "sophisticated, intelligent life form".

That's more of a pet peeve than a real problem with the book, though these days, with the creationist scientist-wannabes of the Intelligent Design movement muddying the waters in the US, it's something of a disservice to the public to muddy the waters about evolution. Or, more accurately, to fail to help clear the waters -- this is an already well-established misunderstanding. Rosenthal isn't making anything worse, he's just missing an opportunity to help make things better.

With luck, I'll soon get a chance to post about the last two Miles Verkosigan books I've finished (I'm a little bogged down in the latest I've started -- I'll explain later) and the most recent popular book about a very narrow aspect of science book I've started.

I'll also be doing more photo posts like the Sharp Sentre For Design one yesterday between book posts. Read more!

Photos: The Sharp Centre for Design

Toronto's undergoing a building boom. Well, it has been for a while, with just about every old warehouse and vacant lot being turned into loft condos, but most recently there have been a lot of new "non-standard" building project: unique structures, as opposed to the usual apartment towers and loft reconstructions.

At the moment, the Art Gallery of Ontario is undergoing renovations designed by Frank Gehry (and is hosting a show of Gehry's designs); the Royal Ontario Museum is being radically overhauled, its old extention being completely replaced with a "crystal" designed by Daniel Libeskind; even the Gardiner Ceramics Museum is undergoing renovation and expansion.

Before any of these started, though, the Ontario College of Art (OCAD) underwent its own notable expansion with the Sharp Centre for Design. The Sharp Centre is a large, two storey tall white box covered in black squares, supported about ten stories above the ground on multicoloured stilts, and connected to the original OCAD building by a diagonal red staircase and a black elevator shaft. (Some of the silts and the staircase are visible in the panoramic photo above.)

I have a view of the place out of my window at work. The overall effect is striking and I really like the idea, but I can't look at it without wishing that they'd stuck something a little more interesting on top of those stilts. The overall effect is of a very big shoe box. The corrugated steel they clad the white box in doesn't help, either -- it reminds me of the siding on an old Quonset-hut style warehouse. I have similar concerns about the cladding of the ROM Crystal -- I think an all-glass enclosure would have been preferable, though that was probably not desirable for the exhibits.

Still, the Sharp Centre can make for some fun photos. The first photo above was made using Autostitch. I set the camera up on a tripod in the centre of the concrete circle under the Centre and took 118 photos: 24 in a circle with the camera level, then again aimed up 15°, then 30°, then 45°. At 60° I only took 12 photos, 8 at 75°, and 2 at 90° (perpendicular to each other).

These were probably more than necessary, but the Autostitch program had to trouble ensuring that they all overlapped properly, so it was worth the effort.

I didn't really realize at the time that I was catching the Sun just barely peeking around the edge of the building, but the effect does living up the shot a little.

The other shots in this post are just attempts to get a nice abstract expressionist feel from the building -- which is probably how it works best. The black-and-white checks aren't that attractive for a building, but they work as background in a geometric image. I particularly like the first of them, where I got one of the pillars to look like a rectangle instead of a cylinder.

The pillars are tapered at each end, and some OCAD-alumni friends of mine have suggested that someone really ought to sneak up to the place one night and stencil "LAURENTIEN" down each of them, after the famous Canadian pencil crayons. No-one's done it yet, though. Read more!

Music: The Rock Pile Legacy

I should have written this up last weekend... I've just helped Canadian musician Nash the Slash put a new addition on his website: The Rock Pile Legacy.

Back in 1968, before becoming a rock musician himself, Nash would catch the shows at the Toronto concert hall, The Rock Pile (now the MTV Canada building).

He photographed the various acts, on stage and back stage. A few months ago he was cleaning his basement and found his old photos -- dozens of pictures of Rock legends that no-one has ever seen. Acts like Chuck Berry, The Mothers of Invention, The Who, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Jimi Hendrix, The Nice, Alice Cooper, The Kinks, Cream, Led Zeppelin, and more. Over a hundred photos in all.

This photo is one of his: Keith Emerson of The Nice, attacking his keyboard with his trademark knife. He went on to found the prog-rock band Emerson, Lake, and Palmer. Read more!

Books (Manga): Buddha

I'm not a religious person. I don't have a lot of time or patience for organized religion or supernaturalism. But I am fascinated by the history of religion and religiousness. You can't properly comprehend human history without knowing something of human religion, after all.

The three Abrahamic religions make the most news around here, of course. Western history makes no sense without taking those three into account. Since the 60s, though, there has also been a fascination with "Eastern religions" (though often in bastardized forms). The Beatles were a major source of that interest, with their involvement with the shyster Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his Trancendental Meditation movement.

Naturally, the "Eastern religions" fad involved Buddhism as well (think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, for example). As with many religious fads, there's a lot of confusion and over-simplification of the Buddhism in the general public -- no doubt this makes it easier to convey through TV. Buddha's this serene-looking (or fat and jolly) guy with big earlobes who talked about one-handed clapping a lot, and so on.

Well, what better way to clear up popular cultural misconceptions about an ancient religious figure than a comic book?

Actually, it turns out that a comic book is a good way of doing this -- provided you do the book right. Which, among other things, means letting it run almost 3000 pages.

A year or two ago, I was browsing through Pages, an excellent book store in Toronto, when I came across the first volume of a new edition of Osamu Tezuka's magnum opus, Buddha. This weekend, I finally finished Volume 8. Originally written between 1974 and 1984, it has now been translated into English and released as a gorgeous series of hard-cover books, in eight volumes of about 350 pages each.

Osamu Tezuka is best known in North America as the creator of Astro Boy. Among general animation fans, he's also known for creating Kimba the White Lion, which is widely believed to have been a major influence on (or ripped off by, depending on how you look at it) Disney's The Lion King. (This lead to a great gag in the Simpsons episode Round Springfield, in which Bleeding Gums Murphy dies. He appears to Lisa in a cloud, and is joined by other characters voiced by James Earl Jones, including Mustafa from The Lion King, who says, "You must avenge my death, Kimba... I mean, Simba.")

Fans of Japanese animation and comics (anime and manga) know Tezuka as the father of manga. Influenced by early US animation (including Disney), Tezuka almost single-handedly created the Japanese animation and comics genres.

Tezuka's Buddha starts with the birth of Prince Siddartha Gautama -- the man who would become the first Buddha -- and follows him through his entire life, from his growing up as a sickly but pampered prince, to the shock he received the first time he witnessed sickness and death, his departure to become an ascetic monk, his rejection of ascetism and his enlightenment, his teaching as the Buddha, and his death at the age of eighty.

The subject matter is pretty profound (the nature of human suffering, etc -- not exactly Saturday Morning Cartoon stuff!). Odd as it already seems that someone would write a comic book about it, it's even odder that that someone would be Tezuka. Tezuka's style (especially in his works known in North America) is very cartoony. Not to mention that 3000 pages of deep Buddhist sermonizing would get pretty tedious!

Tezuka, though, is a master of his craft. He tells the stories though an incredibly deft mixture of storytelling ranging from cartoonish slapstick to the profound. Scott McCloud, in his wonderful book Understanding Comics, uses several examples from Buddha to demonstrate some characteristically Japanese forms of graphic story telling.

Tezuka tells the stories not only of Buddha but of those who surround him: Tatta the theif, his first disciple; Ananda the murderer, whom he redeemed; Devadatta, the monk who wanted to follow Buddha as leader of the sect, who eventually tried to murder Buddha; and so on. Some of the characters (such as, I think, Tatta) are Tezuka's invention, but many are from the established Buddhist traditions. Tezuka also spends a lot of time on the political situation in India during Buddha's lifetime, as this affected Buddha strongly. His own people, the Shakya, were conquered by a neighbouring king after he left on his quest for enlightenment.

Tezuka's not afraid to mix humour, slaptstick, and anachronisms into his storytelling, either, which helps lighten the mood at times. Characters often make reference modern events, television, and even other Tezuka works. In one of the scenes in which Buddha heals someone, he suddenly transforms into Tezuka's fugitive-surgeon character, Black Jack for a couple of panels. Tezuka himself even appears for a couple of fouth-wall-breaking moments. Which is not to say that everything is fun and games -- many of the stories around Buddha are violent as well.

There are a number of example pages from the first two volumes at this Scandanavian review.

Tezuka also demonstrates that his drawing skill extends far beyond well-known cartoony style. His drawings of the mountains of northern India are breathtaking, incredibly detailed and beautifully rendered, while still meshing well with the much simpler character renderings.

Getting the complete set is expensive: each volume is around $22 CDN, which means that the whole Buddha set is even pricier than The Complete Calvin & Hobbes. But if you have an interest in the history behind Buddha, it's definitely worthwhile. Of course, I collected the eight volumes over a period of several months, rather than buying them all at once! Read more!

Stuff: News of Fresh Disasters

So, where have I been? I've been banging my head against various aspects of real life, and not finishing as many books as I'd like -- though I have several going at once right now. I must post soon about Jared Diamond's excellent Collapse, which I finished recently. I also intend to do more photoblogging as well.

For the moment, though, I have some News of a Fresh Disaster*.

You'll remember the rat adventure we had at Christmas. After that expensive experience, we stopped up all the rat holes we could find with steel wool and flooded the garage with mothballs. (We didn't want to put down poison, as many people in our neighbourhood let their cats out at night).

Unfortunately, we missed a rat hole that was behind some garage clutter. So a week ago Thursday we get into the car, turn the key, and GRRND GRRND GRRND GRRND -- that same not-good sound from Christmas Eve hits our ears again. It's quite a memorable sound, like walnuts in a blender.

So, we backed the car out and popped the hood. The first thing I spotted was a quarter of a bagel. Sliced, with cream cheese. On top of the engine. There was no doubt about it being rats again.

There was insulation missing from the battery cables again, but no other damage was visible. No blood on the floor this time, either. So we called CAA again, to get the car to the (now closed) dealership. I biked down to drop the keys off and fill out the problem form.

The car was ready the next day. Fortunately, the repairs were only about 10% as expensive as the Christmas ones, about $130. The invoice told the story quite well, we thought:



So we are now rat-proofing the garage. Whoever did the current landscaping in our backyard was not too bright -- they piled the soil in some raised gardens right up against the wooden siding, leading to serious rot. The rats didn't have to chew their way into the garage, they could just push the rotten wood out of the way.

We've razed the raised gardens and pulled out all the junk (rat-eaten or otherwise) out of the garage ($766 to get it hauled away by 1-800-Got-Junk). We've filled all the spaces between the studs in the garage walls with cement and sheet metal. After two weekends of work, we can finally put the car back where it belongs.

Interesting discoveries included a well-tunneled painting drop-cloth (the tunneling was interesting, the stench was not), and many bones -- too big to be rat bones. I think they're chicken bones, stolen from our garbage.

In the process of doing all this, we've also discovered that the somewhat shaky fences in our yard are shake because most of the fence posts have rotted away at ground level. They're basically supported by the garage at one end and the house at the other. Anyone know how much 25 metres of privacy fence costs to install?

* The "Tales of Fresh Disasters" line comes from an old Beyond the Fringe routine called "The Aftermyth of War", about life during WWII. "Every night the BBC would bring us news of fresh disasters." -- cut to BBC voice -- "This is Alvar Liddel with news of fresh disasters." Read more!