Barkerburgh

Spent 5 days/4 nights in the Wasagas, at Vala’s Villa, the Tolkien themed ancestral summer cottage of the Ellis-Perrella family of Guildwood.

Just about here:

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It was taken by Reid, total serendipity. I get hit in the head repeatedly (every time somebody watches the damn thing) and I still think it’s funny. Maybe that’s why…

I had a great, relaxing time, with frisbees, thunderstorms, standing in the lake up to my neck for an hour at a time, and an engineering project at the mouth of the Saint David’s River, which flows mightily into Nottawasaga Bay somewhat north of the villa.

After returning from the Wasagas, Anneli took me, as a somewhat belated birthday present to see the “Facing Mars” exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre. While I had some issues with the interface for some of the exhibits, and some just didn’t work, it was still highly cool. Then we went to see the IMAX film “Roving Mars“, which was so kick ass I can’t tell you. It was basically about the Spirit and Opportunity rovers and their missions on Mars, a combination of live shots and splendid CG. One hypothetical shot showed an ancient Martian desert of rolling dunes dotted with saline lakes, and was quite spectacular, stirring in fact.

We had lunch, wandered around the other exhibits a bit and then we went to the tiny planetarium to see a show about Toronto’s night sky, although we also went out into intergalactic space for a quick peek. Beside the line-up, there was a sign telling us that if we were past it, we might not get in because space was limited. I pointed out that space was in fact infinite, got a general laugh except from a snotty 10 year old girl who said “I think they mean that seating in the planetarium is limited.” I couldn’t let her get away with that so I kidnapped her and sold to the greys from Zeta Reticuli for scientific experiments said “I don’t think so!”

Yes sirree, had me some fun.

Leslie and Peter (and Simon)  invited me to join them for a Sunday afternoon on the Oak Ridges Moraine at the former Koffler estate known as Jokers Hill, now a U of T biological reserve.  It was a horse farm once and the outbuildings still stand.  There’s an overgrown race-track overlooking the Holland Marsh on one side of Dufferin and hectares and hectares of beautiful forest on the other

As you all probably know, Peter is an Indiana Jones biologist, (the Tibetan Plateau, the California coast, Western Australia…but just let him loose in Pellucidar or on Skull Island) and he’s worked a lot at Jokers Hill so he knows the ecology and biodiversity of the area.  And where to find newts, one of which Simon found fascinating.

(I have a picture of the newt he found that Wordpress won’t let me upload…)

What I got was an amazing natural history tour of the area, from the bedrock up, the moraine being about 100 metres of glacial sediment topped with that beautiful forest.

The day was warm but neither hot nor humid.  There was a light breeze even in the forest and, lots of sand.

We saw many patches of white trilliums ranging from one or two in number to a dozen or fifteen or more.  There were several lone red trilliums, patches of different kinds of violets, of little blue wildflowers, of yellow ones, a patch of dog-tooth violets (leaves only, no flowers) in a shaft of sunlight, small streams, swampy seeps, a lovely stand of quaking aspens demonstrating the reason for their name in a mild breeze, the scent of sun-warmed hay off a small feral meadow, a low stone wall made from glacial erratic boulders (probably from back in the olden days when settlers tried to farm the moraine), an old-fashioned stubby beer bottle which I snagged, many cool rocks which Simon found and carried around until we found a pond or a stream, and only one (that I noticed) patch of good old jack-in-the-pulpits, one of my favourites when I was a kid in Georgetown nearly forty years ago.

We must have walked about fifty kilometers - or like three or four

We had a nice French farmyard lunch of baguettes, cheeses, sausage, pate, oranges, and water - not local, from a water-cooler

When I got home, I napped like crazy.
 

It’s okay.  It’s Science.

Late the other night/early the other morning on TVO, I saw this National Geographic produced show about Greece’s Rion-Antirion bridge, the longest cable-stayed bridge in the world. And it crosses a fault line beneath the sea.

It links the two towns across the Gulf of Corinth, replacing an old ferry.

The construction techniques to earthquake-proof the bridge (as far as that’s ever possible) are fascinating and the progress of the construction is amazing to watch.

One of the coolest aspects of the whole plan is that the foundations of the piers on the bottom of the Gulf are not secured in bedrock (or even to bedrock) at all. They sit on many meters of sediment stabilized with huge steel posts driven deep into the muck, and then topped with several meters of gravel.

It’s a beautiful structure, too and looks very good and fitting in this, the Future.

I warned you about Google and Skynet, didn’t I?

Didn’t I?

Remember how, when you were a kid, back in the old country, and you were cleaning and chopping fresh jalapenos to blanch for chili and tomato sauce, your mama would tell you (and I won’t do the accent) “Now don’t go rubbing your eyes while you’re watching TV until you’ve washed your hands really good with soap and water, okay? Okay?” Here is where mama would whack you across the back of the head or on the knuckles with her wooden spoon. “Alright? Okay!”

Well, she was right.

And thank you, Peter, Leslie and Simon.

They invited me to join them on Thanksgiving Day.

First we went to the ancient and mysterious ‘Crawford Lake‘ , on the Niagara Escarpment near Milton, where I partly grew up. Crawford Lake is a scientific marvel because it is meromictic. This means that the water layers within the small, deep lake never mix, or ‘turn over’; there are few if any currents within the lake and sediments are laid down in predictable, datable and unmixed sequences that can be dated, analyzed and have data extrapolated from them. Apparently, sedimentary analysis predicted the existence (and probable location, too, I think) of a local pre-Columbian aboriginal village, which has been reconstructed on its original site. Very interesting.

The lake is surrounded by a railed boardwalk which, while allowing people near the lake to see it or observe it, nevertheless keeps them away from it; swimming, drinking or any kind of interference or pollution is forbidden, so delicate is the lake and so important is it scientifically and historically. Very cool.

Then, for dinner, we went down to Burlington to Joan’s (Peter’s mother) 10th floor apartment overlooking Burlington Bay / Hamilton Harbour. What a view!

Dinner was a spread! Ham, garlic mashed potatoes, carrots, squash, brussel sprouts, cabbage, corn relish, hot mustard, wine, water, I don’t remember what else, but there was more. I ate like a mediaeval guest. Who hadn’t eaten all day, practically.

Leslie and Peter were, as usual, fine company. Joan is always interesting, and but for a brief fit of the crunkles, Simon was his usual well-behaved sensible self. So was I.

All in all, a day to be thankful for.

Last night was hot TV at my place.

First off was the one hour season premiere of Family Guy, which was an abso-totally-lutely hilarious take-off on the original Star Wars - no, Nerdapalooza, not Episode 1; the original movie, later subtitled ‘A New Hope’ to fit into Lucas’s diabolical - ahem - plot.

Stewie as Darth Vader, Peter as Han Solo! Chris as Luke, rescuing his mom, as Princess Leia, from the cell on Death Star - his mom! Get it? Get it? At one point,when the laughs lulled out for a minute, I felt sad. Then the laughs started again, and kept coming.

Good for the soul.

Then at midnight was Discovery’s repeat of Episode 1 of ‘Race to Mars’ (premiered earlier that evening). As I’m sure many of you know, I am of the opinion that we (as a species, but me personally especially) should have been living on Mars by now. Instead, NASA has concentrated on growing Space Tomatoes on the shuttle and trying to see if ants can be trained to manipulate small screws in zero gravity. Bollocks.

So when the fictional team made orbit successfully around Mars after some Earthside supplier/contractor-caused technical glitches, I nearly cried. ‘God speed, John Glenn’s spiritual descendants!’ I thought. Okay, I didn’t, but I’m thinking it now. Episode 2 is next Sunday.

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In Non-TV-TMSL news, I’m discovering more and more cool stuff to do with MediaWiki. The latest trip is that, using a very simple block of code, you can create a list that is dynamically sortable by the viewer, or just by default. I had been inputting and/or rearranging Glossary/Encyclopaedia/Dictionary entries in alphabetical order just to keep them easily browsable later, but now I don’t even have to do that.

Usually, of course, with these sorts of things, the highly nerdal documentation sucks syphilitic donkey ass - it’s unclear to start with (often overly technical - like the cartoons in <i>Scientific American</i> - or obscure, like the cartoons in the <i>New York Review of Books</i>) and if you do exactly what it says in the example - <i>exactly</i> - it doesn’t work. Then it takes five hours of experimentation to get it to work. And if you forgot to document your own progress in figuring it out, then you do it all again next time. “I” have to do it all again next time.However, with the sorting of lists (and tables!) it was fairly clear and straightforward. My Sandbox test worked almost immediately and then I applied it to a ‘real’ page - viola!

Better and better!

“Oh, the wonderful things I shall know on the morning of the day of my death!”

Ever since the Future began in 2001 (January 1st, not September 11th, <i>pace</i> thousands), Reality has been catching up with Science Fiction, IMHO. But Reality’s also been fine-tuning Science Fiction as it goes along.

Face it, slidewalks, city-sized computers to <font title=”mmm, pi crunching…”>crunch pi</font>, or transfer booths might be cool plot devices, but Reality doesn’t have a plot (<i>pace</i> thousands of crazy-ass conspiracy theorists), the natural resources or the laws of physics (that we’re aware of so far…).

D’y'ever read David Brin’s ‘Earth‘? Published in 1985, it took place 50 years into that future, 2035. The title simply means that story action takes place everywhere in, on, and around Earth from the core to orbit. In terms of what he ‘predicted’ for the evolution of a shared global data network (and yes, I know, SF writers don’t predict; they’re storytellers first and foremost), almost everything he imagined (think of this kind of imagining as a type of private, subjective, storytelling-focussed prediction, spare and stripped down) is available now (1985+22) to some lesser or greater degree of sophistication, and then some.

‘So Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Dave. Where ya headed?’

The Wiki. Brin didn’t call it that, but it’s here already; Wikipedia is probably the most well known example.

For my many soon-to-be-famous SF&F stories, I need to do background development, and occasionally considerable research and development. A while back I had downloaded an interesting looking wiki setup from SourceForge, called Wikka, free and open. I figured it would complement FreeMind, an excellent, simple and easy to learn Java-based (and thus cross-platform) mindmapping application, (like a much easier to learn and use Visio; flowcharting and the like) again from SourceForge. Wikka was okay, but a little like 1985 email, if anyone remembers those anymore. Very Flintstones. MS Word-style GUI functionality is mostly missing for formatting and editing - most commands are things like two apostrophes before and after a text string to italicize it, or two equals signs before and after to bold it. To be fair, wikis are web-based and some Word type highlight-and-click functionality is present, but it’s rudimentary, and sometimes even warmly funny for its earnestness, like a nerd doing a box-step at the prom.

Then, God bless me, I found Mediawiki. It’s the wiki engine that Wikipedia uses, free to download and install. (I’m running an Apache/MySQL/PHP server and it slots right in.) Its back end is more sophisticated than Wikka (and one or two others that I tried) but it’s got a GUI (still a bit too fancy a term for what it is, but hey, we’re living in the Future, not the Future Perfect), and it takes no time to learn.

The ability to order and categorize information, research, ideas, and connections - all interlinked - is built in (that’s one big idea of a wiki, after all) and I can construct glossaries, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, with tables, images, and lists of all types to help me keep my ideas straight. Granted, one other big idea of a wiki is collaboration, but I like to think of this as a collaboration with myself over time.

MS Word is still the main tool to actually compose the oeuvres, but my beloved Mediawiki helps keep all my ideas straight.

What’s next? Well, I’ve always (insofar as a sentient adult creature with a limited lifespan can use the word) liked the idea of Geordi Laforge’s e-worktable in the engine room on the Enterprise, an IPhone-like touch-screen tabletop for whatever you need to do. Well, just this morning I saw on TV that Microsoft is introducing a prototype Surface Touch-Table, which they’re showing off at a downtown hotel today.

And next after that? The Lost In Space robot, a flying car, the space elevator and immortality.

C’mon, Future!!

For the first time in a jeezes long time, I watched three full hours of CBC last night.

First was that Japanese-Canadian sciencey guy whose first name I always forget, with an excellently beautiful hour of Canadian geology, the first of a series (Geologic Journey), focussing on the history and formation of the Great Lakes, with some great geology of the Niagara Escarpment. Cool shots, cool knowledge, cool host - you know the guy I mean, right?

Second was The John Chew Show - I mean, Test the Nation, during which, out of 70 questions, I answered 63 correctly. Seriously, John was there as part of a group of word-gamers and he got talked to by one of the hosts, Brent Bambury. There were teachers, puzzle guys, comics and ad-writers, too.