The Point

Friday, May 30, 2008

Primed

Admit it. You've been wondering what this sub-prime mortgage crisis thing is really all about. I have too - in fact, I've been looking for a new place myself, and was kind of wondering... how does this affect me? Fortunately, Ira Glass and the rest of the crew at This American Life have summed it up in less than an hour: it's all about a giant pool of money.

You can listen to the program here.

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posted by Christopher at 4:29 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Monday, May 26, 2008

Undelicate interplay

I was biking to school today and caught a mouthful of insect. There's pollen everywhere. I haven't breathed normally in a month. Oh my god, spring is so erotic.

B Tristan Denyer

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posted by Christopher at 9:53 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Sunday, May 25, 2008

Emergent behaviour






















Fractal origami

You know when you get a word that just sort of sticks in your head and you can't figure out where it came from or what it means? I had this the other day with the word 'tesseract.' I could not figure out why it had wormed its way into my brain or what it meant, but my friend Adam and I speculated that it probably had something to do with tessellation, the kind of repeating of part of an object over and over to make a pattern.

When I got home I wikipediaed the word and got even more confused. The way it explained it is this: if you have a line and you want to make it into a square, you move out at perpendicular angles from it until you make a closed object. Right angles. And if you want to make a cube, you move out at perpendicular angles from the vertices of the square until you make another closed object, which is now in three dimensions. Okay, so apparently a tesseract is what you get if you make the same movement out from a cube. It can look like a cube inside a cube... or sometimes not. Confused? So was I. But it got me thinking about this very basic idea that extraordinarily (and sometimes mystifyingly) complex things can arise from the extension of very simple principles in a system.

Which is kind of the basic idea between a field of science I've been sort of captivated at a distance by for years: emergence. Emergence is the study of the complex behaviours of systems arising from the simple, sometimes even stupid behaviours of individuals making up the system as a whole. A good example is the way a colony of ants behave.

On their own, ants can be pretty dumb. Out foraging for food (and I've never studied ants, but this is my understanding of this thing), ants put their little antennae up to smell for anything of interest, but they're just kind of running around every which way, back and forth, in a way that looks pretty random to an observer. And then, it turns out, when they run into something good, they lay down a pheromone trail that lets other ants know which way to go to find it.

And when a a second ant bumps into this pheromone trail, catches that tasty tasty scent and follows it, it lays down its own chemical trail, amplifying the effect for the next ant and the next ant and the next ant. Before you know it, these little hiking trails become big ant super highways. This is the kind of thing I've heard described as 'architecture through error.' It's not planned, it's not coordinated by some director, and if you looked at each individual ant to try to extrapolate some picture of what this pheromone gland might be used for, a food superhighway wouldn't necessarily be intuitively obvious. But it works.

This is the same kind of thing that's going on in your brain. You can't look at a neuron and see a memory. Just holding up one cell, it'd be impossible to find where love is located, or a fear of sea urchins. But when you get an eight and a half pound ball of neurons all firing together, you get emergent properties that are pretty incredible. Emergent behaviour is behind the exponentially more accurate guesses a crowd makes the more people there are guessing, behind the surprising accuracy of articles written by thousands of amateurs on Wikipedia... it's everywhere.

If you want to learn more about it, I recommend:
  1. This episode about emergence from Radiolab, a show out of WNYC in New York. It's brilliant. You'll get a kick out of it, and who wouldn't love a co-host with a name like Jad Abumrad?
  2. This website called Exploring Emergence, where you can play around with little games that show how simple rules like 'pixel on,' 'pixel off' can make some craaazy crazy things.
The picture of the crazy origami above is a Creative Commons licensed photo from a user named polyscene. Don't you just love CC? Incidentally, I'm still trying to find a biologist who can explain to me the connection between emergent behaviour and entropy. Just putting it out there. Thanks.

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posted by Christopher at 10:21 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Friday, May 23, 2008

The stars

Stuart Mclean, that wonderful wordsmith who hosts the Vinyl Café on CBC, had a story once about, as he so eloquently put it, 'the people you meet when you're small and without much gravity of your own.' People who, by the force of their personality or their actions, change who you want to be and your understanding of yourself. George Takei, mysteriously, was one of those people for me.

I'd imagine I'm among one of a very small number of people who's actually read his autobiography (the website I found this picture on was selling a copy of the hardcover for ten bucks). If I hadn't been as big of a Star Trek geek as I was when I was younger, I probably wouldn't have picked it up either. But back when I was watching Deep Space Nine and Voyager religiously, I read any Star Trek crap I could get my hands on. Naturally, this book found its way into my reading. But I got a lot more than I was expecting.

Aside from the excitement of the Paramount Lot in the 60's and the crackle in the air being on a show that was breaking ground in many ways - the inter-racial kiss between Kirk and Uhura, the chintzy sci-fi fantasy soap opera narrative, the post-commie, post-capitalist Americans and Russians sharing a bridge together - aside from all that, and the story I'd heard a thousand times about how Trek was brought back from the brink by a fan letter campaign, Takei wrote about his childhood. And about a period of American history I'd never heard about before.

Being a Japanese-American during the Second World War, you can imagine a bit of what his family went through. Sent to an internment camp. Treated like criminals. Hard stuff for a family trying to raise a kid with dignity, conviction, pride. It interrupted my narrative of what the war had been like for people living on this side of the world. Hadn't I been taught that the Americans were with the good guys?

Anyway. I finished the book with a feeling that with all he'd been through, Takei had worked hard and built solid, respectful relationships through some seriously tough times with the people around him. I admired him for it. When I found out not too long ago that he'd come out, I wondered: Why didn't he write about that too? Why not include that little extra bit of himself in that book too? As a wide-eyed Trekker who didn't even know what I was looking for, I know it would have given me pause for thought to see that someone who wasn't straight could be courageous, a role model, a ground-breaker.

I don't have a satisfying answer but I do have some good news. He's getting married. The same week some friends of ours flew up from Houston to get married on the Canadian side of the Rockies where they could get a friggin' marriage license, California announced it too was going the holy homo union way. And among the first in line are George Takei and his partner Brad Altman. He was quoted this week as saying: 'I would like to think that Californians have changed and now know that we are not the stereotypes, but we are everybody we are your neighbors, your family, your co-workers.' Incidentally he came out in 2005 in part to oppose Governor Schwarzenneger's attempts to veto a law allowing same-sex marriages. I'll probably never get a satisfying answer about that biography. But how could I not be happy for someone whose life story meant so much to me?

Thanks to TrekMovie.com for the link. For all your geeky news about the new movie and other stuff from the 23rd century and beyond.

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posted by Christopher at 11:58 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Friday, May 16, 2008

Kind words and hard work

Relief efforts in Sichuan after this week's earthquake

To all of you who wrote in asking how everyone back in Sichuan is, thank you for your kind words. I've gotten a hold of or heard news from most of the people I know back there, and so far everyone is okay. Chengdu, the city I was living in, escaped relatively unscathed from the earthquake. It looks like the government is working extremely diligently to get in as quickly as possible to help to people in worse-affected areas like Mianyang.

I'm genuinely impressed with how hard the army has been working, though of course there are still towns and villages that remain blocked off from relief efforts, and the most critical 72-hour window of survival has now passed. As Danwei explains, the government should be commended for its response to this disaster, which stands in stark contrast to the refusal to accept outside help and complete media lockdown of the city of Tangshan in 1976, after the earthquake there killed over 200 000 people.

I strongly encourage you to donate generously to relief efforts over there. I can't find an English section of the Chinese Red Cross site and the site has (obviously) been extremely busy, but the Canadian Red Cross is setting aside a special fund for the earthquake relief
here. If you live in Toronto, you can also donate to an account set up for victims in Sichuan through the Bank of China.

Less positive has been the insane, jealous behaviour of the military regime in Burma since the cyclone hit. Aid workers are still having an incredibly difficult time getting access to people in crisis in the country. Much of the problem is the goverment's reluctance to allow outside help in out of fear of foreign aid workers and journalists stirring up already-brewing civil unrest in the midst of a rigged referendum on a draft constitution. I have an article in Vue Weekly this week about a new community of people in Edmonton who originally come from a part of Burma called Karen State. You can read it here.

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posted by Christopher at 1:00 a.m. | link | 3 comments

iTunes is not the devil

Just taking a look at how the episodes of the podcast are being downloaded, I noticed most people are just downloading the mp3 directly from the blog here. This might be because I haven't dropped a link yet to the iTunes subcription.

So, if you were looking for it, that link is here.

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posted by Christopher at 12:39 a.m. | link | 0 comments

Monday, May 12, 2008

Soliciting any and all news

I was pulling a granola bar out of my backpack or something equally meaningless this morning in class when I heard somebody say the word 'Chengdu.' And then the word '7.8.' And, having long since claimed ownership of all issues Sichuanese for myself, I asked what they were talking about. If you haven't heard about the earthquake yet, that's how I heard the news. The price I pay for sleeping through my the news on the radio this morning, I guess.

I called my friend Sun Im today - at about 3 in the morning Beijing time - to see if she was alright over there. It turned out she'd actually left the city to take a trip to Xi'an for the week. I think beyond being sort sort of bewildered about who would call at such an ungodly hour, she was a little surprised to hear a voice from halfway around the world that early (or late). I haven't been able to get a hold of anybody else in Chengdu yet. It makes something sink to the bottom of my stomach to think how many friends and loved ones are over there who I haven't spoken to for so long.

This picture's of a man in Dujiangyan, one of the towns that was hit by the earthquake. The title of this picture on my computer is "卖叶儿粑的 [Mai ye'erba de]," which roughly translates into 'dude selling the ye'er ba,' which are those delicious little greasy doughy things down there wrapped in... banana leaves, I think? He seemed bemused at being photographed - a pretty congenial guy, actually. My friend Jang Hu and I took a weekend trip to Dujiangyan as a sort of end of semester present to ourselves last July. It's kind of a weird town to take a trip to on a whim - its main attraction is the impressive ancient canal system, not exactly the sort of thrill you'd imagine would make for a wild weekend.

The Greyhoundesque bus we took that dropped us off literally in the middle of an intersection between two highways fifteen minutes away from anything recognisably town-like seemed like not a great omen. But once we got somebody to take us into the town proper in a tiny little autorickshaw, we spent the rest of the day taking pictures of each other making the Asian fingers in front of the roaring waterways - actually, stampeding would be more accurate than roaring, you could feel it going by just standing on the shore - and trying to make friends.

It didn't take long to find my favourite fixture of any town in Sichuan: teahouses. Side by side, they went on for blocks all along the side of the river. We stood and watched a group of people laughing and slamming their mah-jong tiles down on the table for a while. Eventually they invited us to play a round with them. Mah-jong over there, with a huge plastic thermos of hot water for your never-ending glass of tea beside you, is serious business. People love to gamble. What can I say. But they joked around with us and told us to sit down and play a hand with no buy-in, no expectations. They knew we were terrible at the game and spoke shoddy Mandarin, never mind more than a handful of words of Sichuanhua. We were just some random international students, not even from anywhere particularly exotic. But they let us play with them anyway. I broke even, thankfully.

I ran into my fair share of people who stared and shouted 'Hello!' when I walked down the street in Chengdu. But in every small town I went to in Sichuan, people seemed for some reason a hundred times more willing to accept me as I was. Tall, illiterate foreigner that I was, I met many a grandmother who would stop and talk with me and my friends about her life, about her village, about her work. Not too familiar, just a polite little country road chat and then we were on our way. I miss it. And I miss the ever-present whiff of hot chili and stomach-churning stinky tofu, of course.

Wenchuan, Anren, Dayi, Dujiangyan, Wolong... if you're thinking of Sichuan at all today, I hope some of these stories stick. With the riots in the Tibetan parts of the country, the Carrefour boycott, and now the Olympics coming up, this is kind of a historic year of mixed proportions over there. Here's to hoping everyone there makes it through okay, and to everyone who didn't, that their families get the peace and support they need.

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posted by Christopher at 6:03 p.m. | link | 0 comments

Podcast #2

Where on earth has he been, the masses cry. Calm down, my adoring fans. Your letters have filled my new mailbox (I moved across the street last week) to bursting, and I simply haven't the time to write back individually. I

've been working on episode 2 of the podcast, you see. It's quite a cracker. This episode features a riveting discussion about Paulo Freire and mixed martial arts. What's that I hear in the distance? Ah yes. The sound of
riveting. Ness.

In case you can't get enough of the music (and who could?), here's the track listing for your listening convenience:

00:28 La Ritournelle (Mr Dan's Magic Wand Mix) - Sebastien Tellier

03:47 World Town - M.I.A.

33:07 Possibly Maybe - Final Fantasy & Ed Droste (download this whole album for free at Stereogum here)

51:47 Making of a Cyborg - Kenji Kawai
56:19 The Shore - Basia Bulat


You can download it here, subscribe on iTunes now (yay! just search for The Subject Tonight) or listen to it steaming below. Questions and grave concerns are, as always, more than welcome. Kudos to last year's contest winner and all around lovely young woman Jenanne for the Basia Bulat track, taken from a CBC Radio 3 concert. I was searching for that song for a long long time.


Photo credit: Shiratski (published under a Creative Commons licence)

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posted by Christopher at 4:04 a.m. | link | 2 comments
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