Two direct flights leave Vancouver for Fort McMurray every day, and I’m on one of them. Back in Creston, my stalwart former comrades are finishing up the last few days of the summer planting season. I’ve been offered a spot on an erosion control crew working in the tar sands for a few weeks, and hungry for more of the money that can be made during the summer labour season, I’ve left planting a little early and signed on to the oil patch. This won’t be the first time I’ve worked in the Fort Mac area, starting in 1999 I worked for three summers planting trees from remote camps run by Coast Range. This will be the first time I’ve worked directly in the oil industry, either in the Fort McMurray oil patch or anywhere else (unless you count pumping gas at the Squamish Chevron for 2 months).

YVR radar and outbuilding.

Working for questionable industries is a re-occuring theme in my life. Despite self-identifying as an ecologist and enviromentalist, I’ve been involved with 2 different oil multinationals, the U.S. military and countless logging companies, either working for contractors hired by those dubious entities, or working on grant money from them, or working on their property, or all of the above. This will be the closest I’ve come to directly supporting the damaging operations of an industry I dislike — usually I’ve been taking grant money to do environmental projects on their behalf, and at least with treeplanting I could take some solace that I was planting trees rather than cutting them. This time I will be preventing erosion on the dam walls of the mining tailing ponds of what I assume is the single largest source of carbon-altering emissions in the world. I guess I can still claim that I’m preventing run-off instead of directly extracting oil, but I think the excuses are getting a little thin here. I will be directly labouring on the infrastructure of the Alberta tar sands.

I’m doing it for the money. Since I graduated I’ve been freelancing, doing what I have decided to call “community and ecosystem informatics”, which has mostly meant web development and a little cartography for socially and environmentally oriented clients. I like the freelance life, I like tracking down jobs and taking on unexpected tasks for interesting people and I’m optimistic about the direction that work is going. But summer manual labour has the benefit of being consistent and, in some cases, well paid. A friend of mine who I know from the treeplanting community emailed me to ask if was interested in joining this erosion control crew, and somehow I overcame my ethical objections in the amount of time it took me to operate my calculator and my calendar. So here I am with the rockies floating by below me, bound for Fort McMurray.

Western Albertan oil leases under the wing.

I have to admit, I’m also curious to see Fort Mac again. Not that we’ll be seeing much of town, I’ll be living an hour north in one of the satellite industrial lodges which I’m told collectively house as many as 10 000 men and a dozen women. Fort McMurray has always had something of a trainwreck fascination for me. I’m curious for a glimpse of the changes in 8 years of oil industry acceleration, and curious what it’s like to live in an industrial lodge. It will be a switch from my be-porched and be-gardened small-town lifestyle in Creston, that’s for sure. I won’t even get to cook for myself. What am I going to do in the evening?

Highway 63 north towards the tar sands.

I’m told it’s a good company to work for, and they’re making it too easy for me, paying my flight and rental car and all accomodation and expeneses. This is considered normal in the oil industry, and it’s much different than the co-op culture of treeplanting, where most people pay daily camp-costs for the privilege of pitching a tent. Whatever it’s like, it will come and go quickly enough, I’m told there will be between 15 and 25 days of work. And then I’ll be back on the coast, and can enjoy some summer and get back into the freelancing lifestyle.

Here is a video of John Hodgman’s remarks following the presidents own speech to the Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner last night:

You will note that there is a significant cross-circuit hum, and that the audio is de-synced from the video. And yet, I have to admit that they didn’t screw up the recording of Hodgman as much as I did.

The early cut and thrust in the Obama administration’s push for public health care — or “socialized medicine”, as they adorably call it down there — has so far been pretty discouraging. Even the democratic congress is lining up to show how thoughtful they are by opposing what would admittedly be pretty radical change in the context of the U.S.A. But it appears that one of the fundamental perceived wisdoms that back up America’s idiosyncratic retro cling to private health care may no longer be true: U.S. citizens have lost their terror of publicizing health.

“But the Times/CBS poll found 85 percent of respondents wanted major healthcare reforms and most would be willing to pay higher taxes to ensure everyone had health insurance.”

Poll finds wide support for healthcare changes — Reuters

Why, hello comrade! I know that “major reforms” isn’t necessarily the same thing as public health care, but surely that’s what we’re talking about, right? Right? Furthermore, polls are dubious creatures as a species, and I’m afraid to pay too much attention to this one, but lord, 85 is a big number. Maybe the next time I work down there I won’t be paying a substantial portion of what would be my rent money to a dodgy insurance corporation, and getting a creepy walmart vibe every time I work up the financial nerve to go to my doctor’s office.

Update June 22nd: And this.

Somebody needs to make a movie set in Bleeding Kansas. Or maybe Winston County. Either one would make a nicely scaled proxy stage for the grand themes of the American civil war. And Bleeding Kansas is a great title.

U.S.A has seven uniformed services. That includes the army, navy, air force, marines, and also the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Commissioned Corps. According to wikipedia:

The NOAA Commissioned Corps, established in 1917 as the Coast and Geodetic Survey Corps, and then as the Environmental Science Services Administration (ESSA) Corps from 1965-1970, traces its roots back to the former U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey, which dates to 1807 under President Thomas Jefferson. Coast and Geodetic Survey officers were commissioned so that under the laws of war, they could not be executed as spies if they were serving as surveyors on a battlefield.

Ranks go as high as Vice Admiral, although no one at NOAA currently holds that rank. Perhaps if we finally go to war on climate change?

Other U.S. uniformed services: the Coast Guard and… United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, hence the position of Surgeon General (who is actually a Vice Admiral).

“Miss Stein has an outsize bathtub that was especially made for her. A staircase had to be taken out to install it. After her bath she puts on a huge wool bathrobe and writes for a while, but she prefers to write outdoors, after she gets dressed. Especially in the Ain country, because there are rocks and cows there. Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing. The two ladies drive around in their Ford till they come to a good spot. Then Miss Stein gets out and sits on a campstool with pencil and pad, and Miss Toklas fearlessly switches a cow into her line of vision. If the cow doesn’t seem to fit in with Miss Stein’s mood, the ladies get into the car and drive on to another cow. When the great lady has an inspiration, she writes quickly, for about fifteen minutes. But often she just sits there, looking at cows and not turning a wheel.”

– Janet Flanner, James Thurber, and Harold Ross, The New Yorker, October 13, 1934

via Daily Routines

I’m feeling a little sheepish after posting dramatically about that steep clearcut, and then not actually getting sent there the next day. So I thought I would defend my honour by pointing out that last spring we worked a near-vertical high-lead block that was frankly worse than the one currently in play. Here is proof:

Instead of the high-lead block, I ended the shift on a little crew tasked with some fill planting. It was good fill: a 10 year old plantation with big trees and clear sandy substrate in between, which makes for some of my favourite work; swooping from spot to spot, lining up likely microsites while you work through the maze of existing trees, heads-up spatially-aware cardiovascular planting. We were also getting $0.25 a tree, which is pretty damn good. I will stoop for quarters.

Our spring trees are all planted, and we’re currently prorogued, waiting for the summer trees the mill has on order to get going again. Something tells me some of those trees may yet be going into that big steep block.

Today our crew’s block faced across the Nelson pass at the block we’ll be planting tomorrow.

The other crew was already working on it when I took this picture through a break in the rain, so you can just make out their truck parked at a landing on top of the block. It’s deep, I would estimate 120 trees from road to farthest treeline. It’s a high-lead cable block, so it’s likely well over 60 degrees steep, just as steep as it looks. Access is only from the top, it’s wider at the bottom than the top, it’s too steep for an ATV, and last I heard the guy we normally hire to hike trees into the remote corners of our hilly clearcuts has a hole in his foot from ill-fitting shoes.

Today was a good day. Tomorrow should be interesting.

Well hi Internet, how have you been?

I’ve been treeplanting. I missed writing the traditional “I’m going treeplanting” post, mostly because my idle thoughts about planting became serious thoughts and then a bus journey over the space of just a few days. But here I am now, back in beautiful Creston BC, daily plunging my shovel into the clearcuts borne by the Selkirks and the Purcells. The Kootenay valley is as summerish and splendored and cross-lit as ever. Last year we stayed at the Valley View Motel, which represented a major upgrade from my usual tent-bound treeplanting existence; this year I’ve upped the ante again and I’m rooming in Ilana Cameron’s beautiful Victorian home with a valley-facing porch and groomed gardens that a Buddhist nun visits each day on her morning walk. Or so I’m told, I haven’t seen the nun, but I have seen the porch and the mountains.

I’m working once again for Caliburn Contracting (not to be confused with Caliburn Siliviculture, which is a different company also run out of Creston, although C.S. owner Kent did very kindly let me stay in his Vistaliner for a week). Caliburn Contracting is now run by Susan White, since Jim White’s passing last year, and Daryl Fyodorivich is handling daily operations. Caliburn remains very much a townie operation, really the antithesis of the deet- and testosterone-soaked summer camp planting experience I grew up with. Not that we don’t plant trees, but we’re also focused on getting our grumbling pickups back down the mountain in time to get the squash planted in the garden and getting ourselves into the bank or the post office or the liqour store before they close so we can have a beer on the porch with our cheques cashed and our mail mailed and watch the squashes grow in the evening sun. During the working day we’re also concerned about not having too many pieces open, or too large of pieces open, and not having too many blocks open, and all that together means that we necessarily plant less trees than we would if we were as gung-ho about production as a squad of early-20s university kids and quebecois ex-fruit-pickers yearning for cash as much as glory. But they’re good trees and paid well.

The work itself is the same Kootenay Coastal mix of good weather and steep blocks that I remember from last year. Some mosquitoes appeared yesterday when we got high enough for it to be cool enough for them — 1700m — and they didn’t make me nostalgic for working in the Athabascan muskeg at all. It’s been much hotter in the valley this year, but most days are tolerable in the mountains. The blocks seem to be shrinking and shrinking and getting higher and higher. I’m told this is a result of the local mills questing after the more remote prime wood in the hopes of scraping a little profit margin out of the tight markets, and it’s sad to think of the biggest trees getting cut for not even much money. It also makes block access and management tricky. But tree prices somehow remain high here at Caliburn, even as the stories come in of them melting away around the province. So I’m still making a little cash. It sounds like Caliburn Contracting may not be making bids next year, although personnel from both of the Caliburns will likely still be in the market.

For now I’m fine. We’re already entering the very last few shifts of the short season. The weather is cooling off in the valley, and there was a concert and a jam last night, and tomorrow is another planting day, and then we’ll see what happens, and then I’ll be back on the coast with my calluses and my pay.

Jerry working up a little ridge somewhere around here.

In 4 days BC votes on the provincial government, and more importantly on whether to become the first major jurisdiction in North America to bring in a proportional representation voting system.

I have the same worries about proportional representation that I’ve always had — de-localizing politics, reducing the transparency and hence accountability of the voting mechanism. The Single Transferable Vote system proposed mitigates the de-localization concern substantially, but definitely makes my head hurt when I try to imagine how exactly a given set of marks on a ballot would translate into somebody getting elected or not.

That said, I still have the same hopes for a proportional representation system: the de-dumbing-down of politics, eliminating the lowest common denominator and forcing us to actively and openly negotiate multiple, openly expressed values to reach workable political compromise. Enfranchisement of non-centrist views, maybe even a general re-engagement with politics. First-past-the-post is just a ridiculous way to vote.

So I’ll be voting for STV with bells on. I’m looking forward to it. If you’re still on the fence, you could go to the pro-STV people and watch their videos, or the anti-STV campaign and watch theirs. But what I really recommend is to watch the video that first got me interested in proportional representation. Here it is: John Cleese on why 1980s Britain should really consider proportional representation.

Basically the same system, basically the same conversation, 20 years later. But I think this time we’re going to do it.

Search Engine, possibly the best show on the CBC, is not on the CBC any more. It’s on TV Ontario.

First Search Engine became hugely popular on the CBC radio. Then somebody decided that was a bad idea, so they cut back it’s resources and switched it to a weekly podcast and occasional contribution to some other shows. So it became hugely popular as a podcast, in fact the single most popular CBC podcast, also ranking highly on itune’s list of all news podcasts. So somebody decided that was a bad idea, so they cut it entirely. As of today.

In his final podcast installment Jesse Brown was as diplomatic as usual, suggesting that the loss of the show was symptomatic of the overall loss of programming resources going on at the CBC. He sounded sincere. That’s nice, but the notion that the CBC doesn’t have the resources to keep up a forward-thinking weekly podcast when they keep powering out daily multi-host time filler across the national radio tower network is ridiculous. Search Engine was an example of what the CBC could be, timely and engaged with it’s audience, both reflective and assertive in it’s reporting, and forthright in taking on topics that were actually important, not just those that fit within well-worn journalistic categories. It was also doing it on a budget which I imagine was next-to-nothing and generating huge listener response. That response was presumably particularly strong in the potential next generation of CBC core audience. From a value-for-taxes perspective, it could hardly have much competition among existing CBC programming. With respect to Mr. Brown, that fact that Search Engine was cut suggests that someone at the CBC either doesn’t get it or does and doesn’t like it.

But! TV Ontario, the public station I grew up watching, has picked it up! Bi-weekly podcasts starting within a couple of weeks (at this url, update your podcatcher), going to weekly in September. Nice to know that someone in public journalism does, in fact, get it. Nice to know that Jesse will continue to help me get it.

Stephen Wolfram, post-boy-genius egomaniac and author of the book that received the best bad review ever, is making a search engine. Except it’s not a “search” engine exactly, because it doesn’t look for websites that have the answer to your question on them, it figures out the answer to your question.

How? If the descriptions of the engine I’ve read are accurate, and they can’t be, it essentially runs a model of the world, constructed of all the theoretical constructs which Wolfram an co. have been able to represent in some kind of Mathematica-based ur-language and a massive pile of curated raw data on everything. So I suppose if you ask it “how long would it take for me to fall from 30 000 feet”, it determines semantically that you are asking a question about gravitic physics, calculates distances, speeds, resistances, and masses, and tells you a number. And if you ask it, “will it hurt?”, it fires up it’s nueron-emergent model of the brain and says, “yes”.

Or something. I don’t know. Look, it’s possible Wolfram really is a genius and not just a strong technician, and consequently could be building a revolutionary search engine which commensurates knowledge from diverse conceptual domains into a meaningfully live intelligence grower. I’m certainly curious to find out.

Yesterday there was 2 hour webcast demoing the engine. I’m not curious enough to watch it. But they’re promising it will go public in May. What questions do you have?

Not so long ago Google signed a deal to end a lawsuit launched against them by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers. The Google Book program has been scanning books from a few major libraries since 2005–University of Michigan was one of the first–and making the text searchable online, and displaying snippets of them in the search dialogue. There was an assumption that Google would make money from this process, either by posting their ubiquitous text ads on the interface, or just by the inexorable process of making the internet more useful and thus bringing more folks into Google’s path, or something. The Authors organizations were convinced, reasonably, that Google must have seen a way to make money from it, or they wouldn’t be doing it. And they figured that since it’s their job to represent authors, and the product of authors was making money somehow, they wanted a taste. When Google pointed out that making book discovery easier might just be the single biggest thing that anyone could do to drive up declining book sales and make back-catalogs profitable, they didn’t care or weren’t convinced. They wanted money up front, directly, from Google.

So they opened up a public relations front, and opened up a lawsuit alleging infringement.

In the meantime, some other folks got concerned that Google was the only entity scanning books. They figured book discovery was indeed an important public good, and one that probably shouldn’t be the domain of a single for-profit. Google wasn’t talking about giving away their databases, and in fact seemed to be re-negotiating the terms of their agreements with the contributing libraries such that access to the data was becoming increasingly centralized. So the non-profit Open Content Alliance (with cash and tech from Microsoft and Yahoo, among others) fired up their scanners, with the intent of creating a commonly available pool of data on what was in all those books that are sitting on all those shelves.

I give huge props to Google for starting the book scanning movement. Before them, nobody thought it could be done technically, and nobody much seemed to realize that it should be done. In the time since, librarians at participating universities say they’ve seen an enormous uptick in book check-outs. It’s a great program, broadly speaking.

But the data shouldn’t only belong to Google. If the libraries had been collectively smart, once the Open Content Alliance came along offering to scan the books into a shared database they should have switched exclusively over to them, and suggested that Google join to the alliance too. If the author’s associations were smart, they should have supported the initiative whole-heartedly, made what-can-you-do gestures when the databases were leaked and started showing up on Kindles (or alternatively, struck a deal with Amazon), and watched the royalties on sale of physical copies of their back-catalogs skyrocket.

Some libraries did indeed join the OCA, for example University of California and U of Toronto. But the Author’s associations–as content trade groups tend to be–were stupid with greed. How stupid? In order to settle the deal, Google made them an offer: give us a license to scan the works of all the authors you represent, and we’ll give you some money. But only us! And the author’s association said, hey, money! That doesn’t seem like a good deal for the authors to me: book readership has been declining, and getting a few cheques cut from Google HQ isn’t going to change that, but making books relevant and discoverable certainly can. Centralizing that capacity in a single search-provider won’t facilitate relevancy and discoverability. And regardless of the financial benefit or loss to authors, it certainly seems like a bad thing for human knowledge.

And that looked to be that. Yet another centralization of a significant public good into that one single monolithic information infrastructure corporation, Google. Aided once again by Google’s vision, their engineering prowess and their strategic astuteness (I like the term “deep cleverness“). You have to hand it to Google, they are brilliant at what they do. The thing is, you might want it back some day. Google should flourish on their ability to compete in technology and business, not on their ability to end competition. So that deal made me very sad.

Which is why today is a happy day:

Justice Dept. Opens Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Books Deal — MIGUEL HELFT, New York Times (Registration required.)

“The Justice Department has begun an inquiry into the antitrust implications of Google’s settlement with authors and publishers over its Google Book Search service, two people briefed on the matter said Tuesday.

Lawyers for the Justice Department have been in conversations in recent weeks with various groups opposed to the settlement, including the Internet Archive and Consumer Watchdog. More recently, Justice Department lawyers notified the parties to the settlement, including Google, and representatives for the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild, that they were looking into various antitrust issues related to the far-reaching agreement.”

Also some reporting from the Wall Street Journal here, but it’ll cost ya.

My guess is that the search term “google antitrust” is going to get popular over the coming years. Google is like a government: they’re only as good as we make them. As far as books, personally, I’d rather have the Open Book Alliance, and if this investigation is a move towards breaking the weird little collusion between Google and the author’s associations, maybe open scanning and searchability of books still has a chance.

Some time back, Jason Scott — the computing documentarian who hughstimson.org readers may remember from King of Kong controversy — “got angry like a fire gets burning” because AOL hometown was shutting down and leaving its users without many options to save off their home pages. This is part of Jason’s abhorrence of “the cloud”, a general point of view I share. My way of doing something about that distrust is to soldier on operating a personally administered website and email account while even my own aging generation is consumed by Facebook. Jason’s way of doing something about it has been to get ever angrier and found the Archive Team, a loose affiliation of data wonks who are pledged to archiving all the nominally doomed data of the world. They take as their motto “We Are Going to Rescue Your Sh*t”.

So when the call went up that Geocities, perhaps the oldest and creakiest of the early-era personal website providers was being shut down by now-owner Yahoo, the eyes of the world swiveled suddenly to Jason. Could he and the Archive Team rescue two decades worth of websites on Yahoo Geocities? Literally millions of websites? Despite that Yahoo presumably had no interest in him doing so?

Well, Jason?

“And the answer, which I hope you would expect, is OF COURSE WE ARE.”

Good man. Go team. And yes I did. If you’ve spent much time around Geocities, you might now be asking, is it really worth saving? To which he offers this answer:

“Not because we love it. We hate it. But if you only save the things you love, your archive is a very poor reflection indeed.”

I suppose so. All of two days later, the Archive Team is now deep into the process, and offer an update, which I warn you is even more profane than some other Jason Scott discourses on computing and computing history. He reports that large swaths of the Cities appear to have simply been purged over the decades, and those may be forever gone, but many more chunks are there and are being consumed into posterity as we speak. In fact, he estimates that they now have on their harddrives every pre-1999 site that hadn’t already been deleted.

Which made me wonder, was the first website I ever made still there? After all, I stopped updating it back in 1997, which was well before archive.org was doing really comprehensive internet mining. And indeed, it looks like it must have disappeared in the subsequent purges.

But don’t worry world, and don’t worry Archive Team, I performed a search of my own system and discovered I do indeed have a full backup of Where Even Richard Nixon Still Has Soul, manifestos, poems, and correspondence with Richard Nixon buffs intact. He’s still got it. Soul.