TORONTO, ONTARIO - Regular users of my personal home page may have noticed that I changed the color scheme this week. Considering that the style sheet (which defines various aspects of the appearance) used on my personal site was more than ten years old, I had been contemplating a change for some time and decided to finally do it.
The old scheme (see the Internet Wayback Machine for a 2007 rendition) was actually based on the corporate colors of US Genomics, my employer at the time. As I served as the webmaster for the company in that era, I had a variety of software widgets and tools set up to work with compatible colors, so it was simply easier for me to use the same set of colors for my personal web page. At the time, Cascading Style Sheets were a relatively new method for establishing the basics of a page's appearance, and I actually used them on my personal site before they ever appeared on the company web site.
One of the ideas of the Cascading Style Sheet was that they made it quite easy to change the look of multiple web pages without having to modify any of the pages individually. Thus, it is remarkable that I didn't even bother to take advantage of that capability for more than a decade, which is certainly an eternity on the Internet.
When I first started thinking about changing the appearance of the page long ago, I was just going to change the background color to a nice shade of gray instead of green, change the logo at the top of the page, and keep the rest of the color scheme the same. However, for some time I have been looking for ways to incorporate the "monad" or "yin-yang" symbol into more of my work.
The "monad" is significant to me as it was used as the corporate symbol of the Northern Pacific Railway which employed my recently-deceased paternal grandfather for nearly four decades. However, its origins actually lay in 11th century China, where philosopher Chow Lien Ki used it to demonstrate the concept of yin and yang in balance. The traditional Chinese version included a dark dot in the light area and a light dot in the dark area, to show that not only were yin and yang parts of the same thing, but parts of one were in the other. The embodiment of this concept of balance, which I find to be almost completely lacking in modern North American society, has made the monad very attractive to me as a personal symbol. The Northern Pacific Railway Historical Society has put on the web a pamphlet published by the railway explaining more of the history and meaning, and the story of how it came to be used as a corporate logo.
When I sat down to change my web page, it was clear to me that I wanted the top graphic to incorporate the NP "monad" logo. The easiest way to make that work was to adopt the diesel locomotive paint scheme used for freight service by the Northern Pacific, which was mostly black with yellow stripes and white and red highlights. That is the color scheme that appears today on my web page.
The actual monad appearing on my home page right now is derived from a picture of the Northern Pacific logo taken at the Northern Pacific Museum in Toppenish, Washington. In the future, I may switch to a more stylized version incorporating the center dots--but the red and black colors used by the Northern Pacific will remain in any event. It's my way to call for understanding of the concept of yin and yang in today's society, and to honor the memory of my grandfather.
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
Monday, October 5, 2009
Culture: Real Best Place for Muslims to Live?
TORONTO, ONTARIO - In a recent opinion piece in the Christian Science Monitor, George Washington University lecturer Dr. Merve Kavakci made the case that the United States may be the best place in the world for Muslims to live. Kavakci pointed out that Muslims are able to exercise their religion more freely in the United States than many Muslim countries. As he put it:
The callers were revealing. Even in an area regarded as one of the most progressive in the United States, nobody questioned the premise of the question--it was accepted that Muslims were feared. Some callers demonstrated gross misunderstanding of the faith that Walter tried to address, most significantly the idea of the "infidel." Christians and Jews, as "people of the book," are not "infidels" to the Muslim. The underlying theme brought out many times over the course of the broadcast was that radical leaders were defining many faiths--not just Islam--inappropriately in the media, leading to broad misunderstandings.
The discussion rang true to me. There were Muslims in several of my dorms during my undergraduate years at Stanford University. It was clear to me that they had to constantly fight to be understood. Even as someone sensitive to their struggles, I sometimes contributed to the problem. As the editor of a weekly news summary that was fairly widely distributed on several college campuses, I would sometimes (usually very late on my Saturday night deadline) use "Muslim" when "Islamist" or a non-religious term like "radical" would have been the appropriate term, and there were multiple times I needed to send out a correction. The culture was so strong that I had to be on constant alert to not repeat mistakes made by other media organizations.
At the time, other than the individual efforts of the Muslims I knew, there seemed to be little organized effort to promote mutual understanding. That came out as a theme in the God Talk show on Sunday as well--Walters himself was trying to educate his audience, but he could point to few other places in the media where that was taking place. If I were a Muslim in the United States, the fact that the majority population feared my faith and efforts to promote mutual understanding were so few and far between, that would disquiet me, if not downright scare me.
There is at least one high-profile effort to promote mutual understanding in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation runs a situation comedy entitled Little Mosque on the Prairie. The premise of the show is the struggle of Muslims to live a substantially non-Muslim world in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. While the show is fundamentally a comedy, and rarely delves deeply into the cultural struggles, that's rather the point. The show is showing a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim characters interacting and learning about each other, showing that everyone's struggles are fundamentally similar. That probably does more to reduce fear of Muslims in Canada than anything other than interacting with Muslim neighbors could do.
Thus, I would take Kavakci's thesis and extend it one point further. The best place for Muslims to live just might be Canada--where they have the same civil rights they also enjoy in the United States, but there are at least some efforts to ensure that they will not be feared and might be better understood by the population at large.
Think about it: In Turkey, where the vast majority of the population is Muslim, you will not find a lawyer with a beard or a student at a university wearing a head scarf, but you can find plenty in New York City. In Tunisia, you won't see a religiously dressed physician at university hospitals – but you can in Alabama.Most of Kavakci's arguments focused on the legal rights that Muslims--and everyone else--has in the United States. Yet, I'm not so certain that I'd really want to be a Muslim in the United States. Last Sunday, God Talk with Brent Walters from KGO Newstalk 810 in San Francisco spent three hours discussing Islam. Following up on an idea that had come up many times previously on his weekly show, he opened with the question "Why is it that people are afraid of Muslims in the United States?"
The callers were revealing. Even in an area regarded as one of the most progressive in the United States, nobody questioned the premise of the question--it was accepted that Muslims were feared. Some callers demonstrated gross misunderstanding of the faith that Walter tried to address, most significantly the idea of the "infidel." Christians and Jews, as "people of the book," are not "infidels" to the Muslim. The underlying theme brought out many times over the course of the broadcast was that radical leaders were defining many faiths--not just Islam--inappropriately in the media, leading to broad misunderstandings.
The discussion rang true to me. There were Muslims in several of my dorms during my undergraduate years at Stanford University. It was clear to me that they had to constantly fight to be understood. Even as someone sensitive to their struggles, I sometimes contributed to the problem. As the editor of a weekly news summary that was fairly widely distributed on several college campuses, I would sometimes (usually very late on my Saturday night deadline) use "Muslim" when "Islamist" or a non-religious term like "radical" would have been the appropriate term, and there were multiple times I needed to send out a correction. The culture was so strong that I had to be on constant alert to not repeat mistakes made by other media organizations.
At the time, other than the individual efforts of the Muslims I knew, there seemed to be little organized effort to promote mutual understanding. That came out as a theme in the God Talk show on Sunday as well--Walters himself was trying to educate his audience, but he could point to few other places in the media where that was taking place. If I were a Muslim in the United States, the fact that the majority population feared my faith and efforts to promote mutual understanding were so few and far between, that would disquiet me, if not downright scare me.
There is at least one high-profile effort to promote mutual understanding in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation runs a situation comedy entitled Little Mosque on the Prairie. The premise of the show is the struggle of Muslims to live a substantially non-Muslim world in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. While the show is fundamentally a comedy, and rarely delves deeply into the cultural struggles, that's rather the point. The show is showing a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim characters interacting and learning about each other, showing that everyone's struggles are fundamentally similar. That probably does more to reduce fear of Muslims in Canada than anything other than interacting with Muslim neighbors could do.
Thus, I would take Kavakci's thesis and extend it one point further. The best place for Muslims to live just might be Canada--where they have the same civil rights they also enjoy in the United States, but there are at least some efforts to ensure that they will not be feared and might be better understood by the population at large.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Photos: The Humber River
The marshes of the Humber River were observed during the Simcoe Walk on 26-September-2009
TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's update to my photo site features the tenth anniversary of the designation of the Humber River as a Canadian Heritage River, celebrated by a variety of events this year. Pictures from the Simcoe Walk on 26-September-2009, the Heritage Toronto Bâby Point walk on 30-August-2009, a festival across from the Old Mill on 19-September-2009, and the Heritage Toronto Weston walk on 19-September-2009 combined with many individual visits to capture the Humber River and the parallel Toronto Carrying Place from the river's marshes to nearly the north city limits in Toronto.
Margin Notes: Parking, Smoots, Cactus
Look carefully--this track car's wheelsets had been borrowed for other purposes on 3-October-2009
TORONTO, ONTARIO - You can't park anywhere anymore. The Toronto Railway Historical Association's track car for use on its miniature railway was locked to the tracks inside a fenced-off area of Roundhouse Park, but I found it without wheels on Saturday. It turned out not to be a crime; the switch construction team had borrowed the wheelsets to test new switches under construction.
* * * * * *
There was a crime of sorts on the subway that day. As I was riding the Bloor-Danforth subway eastbound into High Park station, the train abruptly stopped with most of the train still off the platform, and soon the train was evacuated through the front cars off the emergency exits from that platform instead of the main entrance to the station. It was never announced, but put together those observations, the fact that the power was turned off between Keele and Jane stations, and the number of paramedics arriving on scene, and it's not hard to piece together that there was a suicide jumper in front of our train.
* * * * * *
I have no pictures of that incident or really any others to share in these notes this week, but a picture on the Spacing web site caught my eye this week. When I saw this article's opening picture, I immediately thought "that isn't Toronto--it looks like Winnipeg." I'm not sure what is more amazing--that Winnipeg has such a distinctive identifying look, or that I so immediately identified it.
* * * * * *
Boston is another urban area with which I am quite familiar. If you've ever walked across the Harvard Bridge (which like many mis-named things around there goes from Boston to MIT, not Harvard) to Cambridge, you know that the bridge is marked in Smoots, or the length of one Oliver R. Smoot whose body was used to measure the structure in 1958. I had read before that Smoot had since become the president of the International Organization for Standardization (appropriate for someone that is a standard himself), but what I didn't realize until this week is that a smoot is a recognized unit in Google--take this conversion, for example.
* * * * * *
It wasn't the Charles River crossed by the Harvard Bridge but the Hudson River that US Airways flight 1427 landed in on 15-January-2009, making a hero of Captain Chesley Sullenberger for landing in a fashion that allowed everyone to survive. One irrelevant detail that caught my attention in coverage of Sullenberger's first flight (again, flight 1427 from New York LaGuardia to Charlotte) on 1-October-2009 was that the flight was identified by Air Traffic Control as "Cactus 1427." The airline may be called "US Airways," but it is the result of the merger of the old US Airways and America West, which used the "Cactus" call sign as a result of its headquarters in cactus-laden Phoenix, Arizona. "Cactus" may not be as cool as "Speedbird" (used by British Airways) or "Shamrock" (used by Aer Lingus), but it is distinctive. America West may be a fallen flag airline, but its call sign now is heard all over the world as the call sign of successor US Airways.
Saturday, October 3, 2009
Radio Pick: Orphan Patients on WCBA
TORONTO, ONTARIO - This week's radio pick comes from CBC Radio One's White Coat, Black Art. The medical show returned to the network schedule this fall, and this week, host Dr. Brian Goldman returned to the first topic ever explored on the show, patients without a doctor serving as their general practioner, and looked at the solution of using Nurse Practioners in the role. Throw in some stories about practicing medicine on oneself, and it turns into a 27-minute model of what a specialty show can bring to a general audience.
Listen to MP3 of White Coat Black Art "Orphan Patients"
Listen to MP3 of White Coat Black Art "Orphan Patients"
Friday, October 2, 2009
Heritage: Simcoe Walk 2009
Walk leader Madeleine McDowell (at left) and a local resident portraying Lieutenant Governor John Graves Simcoe (at right) introduced the re-enactment of the first day of Simcoe's 1793 walk up the Toronto Carrying Place on 26-September-2009
TORONTO, ONTARIO - On 25-September-1793, the Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada, John Graves Simcoe, started a trip up the Toronto Carrying Place, the main route from Lake Ontario northward to the Georgian Bay and a longtime aboriginal trading roue. On 26-September-2009, more than two hundred years later, a re-enactment of that first day, following as closely as possible to the original, was led by historian Madeleine McDowell. McDowell grew up and currently lives right on the route of the Toronto Carrying Place.
The marshes of the Humber River, which was named by Simcoe, was observed near the beginning of the Toronto Carrying Place in what is now the Swansea neighbourhood of Toronto, Ontario on 26-September-2009
The walk began at the "Rousseaux site," which is the surprisingly little-known location of the 1750 French Fort Toronto and the also site of the first permanent settlement in what is today Toronto, built by Jean-Baptiste Rousseaux in the late 1780's. Located not far from Lake Ontario and overlooking the Humber River in what today is the Swansea neighbourhood of Toronto, it marked the southern end of the Toronto Carrying Place, which headed up the eastern side of the river.
A private monument to the poet Robert Burns was found along the route of the Toronto Carrying Place in the Swansea neighbourhood of Toronto on 26-September-2009
I had never traveled the Toronto Carrying Place before, and did not know exactly where it had been in most locations. While the path starts out along the Humber River, it pretty rapidly takes to the highlands above the ravine farther to the east, crossing Bloor Street (for example) at what today is Armadale Avenue. Quite a number of interesting sights--most of them not there in 1793--exist today along the route, including the former home of author Lucy Maud Montgomery, a private monument to poet Robert Burns, a street named after hockey star Phil Esposito, and many oak trees that were standing when Simcoe took his walk. Small detours led to historical locations like the Iroquian village of Teiaiagon or modern overlooks of the Humber River.
During a small detour, the Simcoe walk visited the former site of the Iroquian village of Teiaiagon on 26-September-2009
The location where Simcoe stopped for lunch is today in Smythe Park north of St. Clair Avenue west, right along Black Creek. From there, it was a surprisingly short walk to where the party stopped for the day, near what today is Eglinton Avenue. By the time we arrived there, only five of us remained to contemplate the exact location of the campground and discuss the relative imbalance of Simcoe's day.
The most dedicated participants in the Simcoe walk discussed the location of the first camp site near the Humber River at Eglinton Avenue in Toronto, Ontario on 26-September-2009
The Simcoe Walk re-enactment took about five hours to re-trace what had taken Simcoe a day, easily the longest organized walk I had taken in Toronto this year. Connecting most of the historical locations within walking distance of my residence, it was a learning experience that really meant something to me.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
Economics: Not a Fast Recovery
TORONTO, ONTARIO - Nearly a year ago, buried near the bottom of this post, I presented Canadian economist Hugh Mackenzie's view that recovery from the 1991 recession was slower than from the deeper 1980 recession because factories were actually dismantled in the later recession, whereas workers could simply be called back in the earlier case. He predicted that because the 2008 recession was deep and factories were being dismantled and moved to China that recovery would be even slower than during the 1991 recession.
Place that view in the context of a recent article in Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN; this article is not available on-line). In the piece entitled "Vanishing Plants," staff writer Michael McCoy describes how various sectors, from manufacturers of auto hoses to safety gloves to pond liners, are no longer able to get needed component chemicals in North America because they are no longer made here. Plants closed because of the recession have ended the production of such basic chemicals as formic acid and such specialized ones as chlorosulfonated polyethylene (CSPE).
The bottom line for the affected manufacturers is that without a local source of these chemicals, they are placed at a disadvantage to competitors located closer to remaining chemical suppliers in the Middle East, Asia, or even Europe. Rather than being able to return to business as usual as the economy recovers, their costs will rise and they will recover more slowly, if they can compete with their overseas competitors at all. In some cases, as the article points out, the burden is even heavier, as changing suppliers means re-validating products if they are produced for regulated industries such as the safety gloves.
Why are the plants closing permanently? McCoy's C&EN article presents a lot of opinions similar to this one expressed by Stephen Fitzpatrick: "U.S. managers look at a declining market as something they don't want to be involved with. They tend to turn tail an run." Change the "U.S." to "western" and "managers" to "managers of publicly-traded companies" and I couldn't agree more with this view, based on what I've observed. In some cases, the "declining market" may even still be profitable, but the profits aren't as large as other sectors and hence the decision is made to stop production to avoid exposure to any further declines.
In fact, it's not that different than what's happened in a completely different industry, radio. Rather than accepting "lackluster" profits, even before the recession the radio industry was being decimated by corporate parents that demanded double-digit growth in profits and slashed talent at their radio station to improve their margins, in many cases making their products unlistenable. If a station didn't look like it could give that kind of growth, virtually its entire local staff would be fired and it would start running a satellite-fed format with no local content. Newspapers are another classic example of an industry that in many cases was profitable, but not profitable enough to satisfy its investors, ending up in a downward spiral.
The pressure of today's capitalism is so strong that nobody can justify something that makes only a small profit anymore, or that might take some time to recover in a recession. Instead, those fundamentally riskier things just aren't done, resulting in everything from the loss of local radio to the inability to make innovative new pool liners--and jobs and quality of life go away as a result.
Fundamentally, the incentive structures are messed up here--short-term returns are trumping long-term investment and quality of life. The solutions are not unknown and can even come from relatively small interventions in the market--changing the time scale of executive compensation to force them to think in longer terms and even taxing short-term profits that aren't re-invested at higher rates are things people talk about all the time, but there just isn't enough of a groundswell to actually make these things happen politically, both in government and on boards of directors.
Meanwhile, the market realities make a recovery even tougher to occur, and Mackenzie comes off looking like an optimist.
Place that view in the context of a recent article in Chemical and Engineering News (C&EN; this article is not available on-line). In the piece entitled "Vanishing Plants," staff writer Michael McCoy describes how various sectors, from manufacturers of auto hoses to safety gloves to pond liners, are no longer able to get needed component chemicals in North America because they are no longer made here. Plants closed because of the recession have ended the production of such basic chemicals as formic acid and such specialized ones as chlorosulfonated polyethylene (CSPE).
The bottom line for the affected manufacturers is that without a local source of these chemicals, they are placed at a disadvantage to competitors located closer to remaining chemical suppliers in the Middle East, Asia, or even Europe. Rather than being able to return to business as usual as the economy recovers, their costs will rise and they will recover more slowly, if they can compete with their overseas competitors at all. In some cases, as the article points out, the burden is even heavier, as changing suppliers means re-validating products if they are produced for regulated industries such as the safety gloves.
Why are the plants closing permanently? McCoy's C&EN article presents a lot of opinions similar to this one expressed by Stephen Fitzpatrick: "U.S. managers look at a declining market as something they don't want to be involved with. They tend to turn tail an run." Change the "U.S." to "western" and "managers" to "managers of publicly-traded companies" and I couldn't agree more with this view, based on what I've observed. In some cases, the "declining market" may even still be profitable, but the profits aren't as large as other sectors and hence the decision is made to stop production to avoid exposure to any further declines.
In fact, it's not that different than what's happened in a completely different industry, radio. Rather than accepting "lackluster" profits, even before the recession the radio industry was being decimated by corporate parents that demanded double-digit growth in profits and slashed talent at their radio station to improve their margins, in many cases making their products unlistenable. If a station didn't look like it could give that kind of growth, virtually its entire local staff would be fired and it would start running a satellite-fed format with no local content. Newspapers are another classic example of an industry that in many cases was profitable, but not profitable enough to satisfy its investors, ending up in a downward spiral.
The pressure of today's capitalism is so strong that nobody can justify something that makes only a small profit anymore, or that might take some time to recover in a recession. Instead, those fundamentally riskier things just aren't done, resulting in everything from the loss of local radio to the inability to make innovative new pool liners--and jobs and quality of life go away as a result.
Fundamentally, the incentive structures are messed up here--short-term returns are trumping long-term investment and quality of life. The solutions are not unknown and can even come from relatively small interventions in the market--changing the time scale of executive compensation to force them to think in longer terms and even taxing short-term profits that aren't re-invested at higher rates are things people talk about all the time, but there just isn't enough of a groundswell to actually make these things happen politically, both in government and on boards of directors.
Meanwhile, the market realities make a recovery even tougher to occur, and Mackenzie comes off looking like an optimist.
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