The article by Ken Gray in today’s Citizen is absolutely bang on - and gave me a new name for this type of wrong thinking - “extremification” - and his discussion summarized exactly why I think this direction is wrong.

Here is Ken Gray column [Forget Intensification, Ottawa favours extremification]

For some while now, I have been meaning to write to my local city representative about a similar situation starting at the corner of Meadowlands and Woodroffe, similar to the Baseline and Greenbank development referred to by Ken Gray in today’s Citizen article - but on a slightly smaller scale.  A large sign went up a short while ago signalling a developer was applying for a zoning change so he could rip down 4 single family houses he bought, and put up a four story condo.  

My wife attended a recent neighbourhood community meeting called by Rick Chiarelli on this development, at which residents were quite negative to this development.  Some of the points she walked away with are the following:

1) It’s a done deal! - No point in complaining - but we might have some ability to influence the designer on small design details. No matter what we suggest it will go ahead blessed by city council.  Intensification is the objective - and single family homes can be sacrificed to achieve that objective.

2) It is the city’s plan to “intensify” housing in a 800M radius around rapid transit stations

3) This type of development is “good” for home owners since our property values will increase

4) The target audience for the condo’s are NOT Algonquin College students - which is only a short walk away.

— Now here’s my 2 bits on this situation and those  4 points:

Oh, oh - Am I hearing cries of NIMBY, NIMBY from the councillors? 

I assure you, I am against what is happening - anywhere - not just in my backyard. So exactly what is it I am against?

Once you allow a developer a zoning change to rip down single family homes at one location in the city (especially inside that special radius around a rapid transit station), then how can you logically refuse any other developer who wants to do the same thing in that same area. I don’t think you can - a precedent has been made, and others will eagerly follow hoping to make substantial profits.  I am not against profit making - but I am opposed to others making it on my back - especially when they do so by destroying the successful neighbourhood I live in.

Using myself as an example, I live in Ryan Farm beside Algonquin College and across Woodroffe from the new rapid transit station under construction.  I have lived here for 40 years, raised a family and now welcome a crowd of grandchildren back to visit and enjoy my home.

Ryan Farm is (and always was) a single family development (with one exception - see below) with approximately 330 families living there.  We are now seeing older owners move out and new families moving in with their children.  It is a delight to us older families to watch these new families move in and grow.

Now why would they move here?  Why wouldn’t they simply move into some intensified dwelling with their box homes stacked one upon another.  Indeed, why would families move further and further out of the city to get a single family home.  I can’t speak for others, but a single family home is very important to me.  

I have lived in a single family home all my life except for a period between graduation and marriage when I was forced (reluctantly) to live in apartments.  I longed for a place where I could go outdoors simply by opening the door and walking out. I wanted a place where I could grow vegetables and flowers.  I wanted some space where there was greenery and space to play with my children and their pets.  I needed space for my myriad interests and hobbies.  All this is forbidden to me in an apartment.

Yet the city sees my objectives as a problem.  My desires and aspirations are something to be completely ignored as irrelevant.

I have spent 40 years of my 70 years on this planet investing in my current home -Improvements, upkeep, taxes, community involvement, volunteering - you name it. However, all my objectives count for nothing against a developer who wants to erect a multi story condo or apartment to make a multi-million dollar profit.

I said previously that there was one exception in our neighbourhood.  A developer bought one of the largest single family houses on the Algonquin College side of our area, gutted the insides and turned it onto a high end multi-unit boarding house for students with money.  From the outside it looks like a normal house - but given it’s current state will probably never revert to a single family dwelling again.  The community went up in arms to try to stop this development - to no avail. 

So what’s the problem?  It’s hard to lay any blame on that boarding house for “changes” that seemed to start occurring in the neighbourhood, and it could have been coincidence - but, suddenly there were drug deals going down in the park and street, fist fights broke out around my neighbour walking her dog, a special police officer is assigned to our area with special permissions to enter that facility, I am forced to walk through clouds of marijuana smoke in the children’s park and my daughter remarks on the “creepy people” in the neighbourhood when she visited home a short while ago. Not totally fair I’m sure - but there was something that struck her as very “different” in our neighbourhood from when she lived here.

If the zoning can be changed to erect a multi-story building at Woodroffe and Meadowlands, there is probably nothing stopping the same thing happening to the entire row of houses that adjoins the Algonquin College property in Ryan Farm on Parkglen, or anywhere in Ryan Farm that developers can buy out the owner.

Let’s examine those 4 points above in this light.

1) Done deal?  It seems so.  It is suggested to us homeowners that we might be able to influence the developer on minor design details but this is a complete waste of time. Trying to get the window frames painted one colour instead of another doesn’t address the key problem with the development - you shouldn’t trash existing successful single family neighbourhoods in favour of developers with their large building proposals.

2) 800M radius of intensification - when I bought into this single family home 40 years ago, most of the 330 homes didn’t exist, the rapid transit didn’t exist (the land was an empty field).  We were Nepean - not even part of the city of Ottawa. Algonquin College was not the huge complex it is now.  I should not be punished because we amalgamated and the city decided to put a transit station in that empty lot, and create this 800M circle of extremification after the fact.

What happens if this spreads?

I can potentially lose my sun.  A 4 story or higher building can rob an entire yard of sun. I would lose my gardens. I thought the city was for for locally grown food.

I would lose my privacy.  At 4 stories or more, I would have dozens of apartments with line of sight into my pool area.  My wife would not likely like to sit poolside anymore. We are no longer allowed quiet enjoyment of the home we have owned and occupied for over 40 years.

I bought into this development because it was zoned for single family homes.  I would not have bought it if it was zoned otherwise. There is no good reason to change it now.

3) Increased property values - nonsense!  When that boarding house went in, the immediate neighbours moved out.  Now that the city seems to be in favour of zoning changes to allow intensification - including ripping down single family homes - our neighbours have already started on planning to leave.  

They figure we have 5 years, maybe 10 at the outset, before the property value (as a single family property) bottom out.  Perhaps if they sell out early at high prices, they will get their investment back, but ones who wait will find the value of their single family home tumble as monster multi-story developments for students and others spring up.  So even before the decisions are final, the exodus has already begun - the destruction of my neighbourhood is underway and apparently all backed by city council at the feet of “intensification”.

I don’t want decisions made that ignores my 40 years of investment in my home and neighbourhood. I should not have to endure losses (especially this late in my life) to make profits for a developer who doesn’t live here and has done absolutely no investment other than buying up buildings.  It simply isn’t fair for the 330 home owners in Ryan Farm to have their investment trashed. It just isn’t fair for any of us who have put years of our life investing in our homes here.

It also isn’t fair to all the new families who made the decision to move into our neighbourhood with their young kids.  Ottawa needs single family developments within the city boundaries to meet the needs of young families, else they will move further and further out - and that is something that the city is supposedly trying to prevent.  

If the city wants to use our neighbourhood for intensification they should buy all of Ryan Farm out at current fair market price, perhaps even higher as incentive for everyone to move - then level the place all at once and sell it back to developers to erect a multi-story complex covering the entire footprint of Ryan Farm.  Now THAT would be real intensification! Councillors might take a look at the design work of Paolo Soleri - Architect that worked out designs for pedestrian city structures - intensification on a truly massive scale.

4) The Development is NOT for students - again nonsense.  If you have had children attend university out of town, you already know it is common practise for smart parents to invest in a property near the university for their child, while renting out spare space to others to cover the mortgage payments, then sell it after the child graduates. Smart deal for the parent - but the area typically changes into “party city”, and no one will live there except students.  Certainly not conducive to raising a family.

So what would I like to see happen?

I would like the city to realize that single family developments like Ryan Farm are an important, even a critical part of living inside the Ottawa limits - they are NOT a problem that has to be solved, with destruction.

They should declare Ryan Farm (and other developments like Ryan Farm) off-limits to developers. Ryan Farm should remain a single family development for the foreseeable future.  The infrastructure, including roads, water, sewer as well as nearby schools, businesses, shopping facilities, college and rapid transit already exist. The homes already exist as single family homes and for the most part are well maintained. The families are here and new families arrive every day.  

We aren’t the problem - we are a logical part of your solution.  

W. Hugh Chatfield - Resident in Ryan Farm

The Ottawa Citizen recently published two pieces on immortality.

We Shall Live Long and Prosper - by award winning Canadian SF author Robert J. Sawyer: 

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/opinion/op-ed/shall+live+long+prosper/5075902/story.html

 and

At What Price Immortality? - by Margaret Somerville, director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law:  

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/story_print.html?id=5081677&sponsor=

 Sawyer makes the case that longer life is an trait responsible for Homo Sapiens being evolutionary successful, while other species like the Neanderthals are extinct (although sometimes I see people on the street that make me wonder).  Our success was due to our increasing ability to share our accumulated base of knowledge with future generations.  Of significant interest to me though, is the strong connectivity between longevity and the ability to acquire and share information.  Acquiring information is strongly correlated to the length of time you live.

 Sawyer presents an interesting statistic, that our lives (statistically speaking) are increasing ‘n’ months for every year that passes and increasing, where ‘n’ is currently 3.  The natural question is then what happens when ‘n’ reaches 12 (or higher).  Is that even possible?  

 Ray Kurzweil in his book “The Singularity is Near”¹ observes that our rate of increase in knowledge and technology is rising exponentially, and the rate of change of this exponential curve is itself exponential.  Double exponential curves always arrive at a point of singularity -  a point where the curve rapidly approaches infinity asymptotically.  He predicts 2045 as the year of our human singularity.

 Kurzweil is also very interested in research for life extension.  He is currently personally engaged in a program for himself to “live long enough to live forever”.  Has he had any success?  He claims that he has.  At age 40, his biological age was around 38. At age 56, his biological age is 40.  Biologically he has only aged 2 years over the 16 year period.  In addition his life should have been extended 3 x 16 = 48 months or 4 years if Sawyer’s statistic holds.  As Kurzweil points out in his documentary “The Transcendent Man”, he is still in a body that inherited genes from his father that gave him a congenital heart valve problem, that could terminate his life early.  We still have to deal with natural physical processes in the body that could terminate our lives early. Or do we?

 Kurzweil refers to Aubrey de Grey from Cambridge University, who is engaged in a program whose goal is “engineered negligible senescence”² (i.e. stopping the body and brain from becoming more frail and disease prone as it ages.  He currently experiments on and has some success with mice who share some 99% of our genetic material.  The technology behind all this is biotechnology - one of the sciences currently experiencing the double exponential curve, with predicted results for Homo Sapiens coming well before the 2045 singularity.

 Kurzweil also refers to University of Michigan’s anthropologist Rachel Caspari, and University of California at Riverside’s San-Hee Lee who support the thesis in Sawyer’s article.  They talk about a ‘grandma hypothesis’³, where the survival of human societies was aided by grandmothers who assisted the raising of extended families and passed on the accumulated wisdom of their people (sort of a biological predecessor of the Gutenberg printing press). Interestingly enough, their hypothesis does not challenge the notion that life extension was gene based and selected for by nature, but certainly the hypothesis has a societal effect.

 If a female wants to pass on knowledge to her grandchildren, then this is only possible if she lives long enough to do so.  If a_L is the age for an average female lifetime, and a_B is the average age for birth of first child, then she can pass on her knowledge to grandchildren only  if a_L = 2 a_B + a_G where a_G is a range of years that the grandchild may be best receptive to instruction from grandma (say ages 5 - 15).

 If a_B were 15 for instance, a_L would have to be 35-45.  It wasn’t very long ago where life expectancy was only about 37.   Increasing a_L would be required to instruct the grandchild. If a_B increased to 25, then a_L would have to be 55-65, which is quite normal today.

 Margaret Somerville approaches the notion of life extension from other angles and talks about “transhumanists” or “H+” ⁴.  Kurzweil probably falls into this category.  Kurzweil and the transhumanists believe that we can use technology to re-engineer the human body and mind, first achieving life prolongation and finally immortality.  Somerville argues for ethical use of the technology as it applies to humans.   She believes there is a line in the sand beyond which, we should not go. If we try to fix some failure of nature, that is probably ethical, whereas if we implement something that is impossible in nature, it is potentially unethical.    Somerville describes another distinction to separate ethical from unethical - whether our intervention affects the essence of a person, their self awareness and consciousness.  An interesting question then is whether “death” is a failure of nature, or a critical part of being human.  Death does have a tendency to terminate the very essence of a person, their self awareness and consciousness.

 I think I tend to agree with her somewhat on this point.  I wouldn’t want anyone messing around ”remaking me” in some form that they think is “better”.  I’ll decide what is better thank you.  I would however, support anything that could extend my capabilities by orders of magnitude, including my lifeline.

 As the H+ people point out - deciding what is not natural (i.e. impossible in nature) is pretty tricky.  Certainly artifacts like eye glasses, hearing aids, artificial limbs and organs, and other inventions merely correct what has failed in your body.  How about drugs like Ritalin, that seem to alter your brain, allowing for intense focus and concentration?  Students have discovered this off label use of the drug when they must study and try for high marks on exams.  This does not fix a failure of nature, but does seem to augment what we do have, so it might not be impossible in nature. 

 In their text “Total Recall” ⁵, Bell and Gemmell discuss the notion of how you might record your entire life (much like the Neanderthals have in Sawyer’s Neanderthal Parallel Trilogy ⁶).  If it were a device you wore, then Sommerville would probably say that was ethical.  It gets cloudy though if we have a method of embedding this as part of your body.  At this point we have arrived at something impossible in nature for the human body.  Yet Sawyer shows how such a technology could completely eliminate crime - since the entire record of your life is stored in a central storage.  Playback of your life would show you either committed the crime or not.  I think in this particular case, it seems far more ethical to have such a technology than not, as long as strict access laws were applied.  This technology is also quite passive, and does not impact the essence of a person, even if we have the technology implanted in the body.  

 Interestingly enough, this appears to extend the “grandma hypothesis” effect to infinity.  Any future person could conceivably access the cumulative knowledge and life experiences of any human that had ever lived after the invention of this recording device¹⁰.

 Being trained in Physics I found the July 2011 Scientific American quite interesting, especially the article “The Limits of Intelligence” ⁷ that concludes that “the laws of physics may well prevent the human brain from evolving into an ever more powerful thinking machine”.  The author Douglas Fox argues that nature may not be able to evolve the human intelligence much beyond what it is now.  All the parameters of the human brain that could conceivably increase intelligence all seems to be optimized by nature as far as they can go.  As Fox points out, modifying any of the possible parameters involving intelligence such as brain size, interconnectedness, signaling speed and increased neurons results in a less optimized brain. Humans may be at an evolutionary standstill as far as intelligence goes.

 Personally I think the next big evolutionary step for Homo Sapiens is some sort of symbiotic relationship between humans and a non-biological intelligence.  You might view this as extending human intelligence via a device, much like we can extend human vision with eyeglasses or the Hubble and Chandra telescopes.  Note that I didn’t say relationships with a “machine”.  The non-biological intelligence might indeed be viewed as a machine, just as we could be viewed as hunks of meat, but it is the essence that Somerville is talking about, around which the relationship will be formed.

 Many years ago I read an article in the Futurist magazine.  I have lost track of my copy of the article, but basically it was discussing similarities between brains and computers.  The article pointed out that the brain was essentially a very large number of highly interconnected neurons and other biological material that gives rise to “mind”, self awareness and the property we call consciousness. 

 The internet was emerging at the time as a very large number of highly interconnected human/computer nodes.  The question is asked whether some form of mind, self awareness and even consciousness could be an emergent property of this network as the number of nodes increased? 

 It’s hard to imagine even the most technologically advanced of today’s computers being able to make this happen.  However, Kurzweil predicts that by 2045 we will have reverse engineered the brain sufficiently to be able to do something unprecedented in our history.  He says, “I set the date for the Singularity - representing a profound and disruptive transformation in human capability - as 2045.  The nonbiological intelligence created in that year will be one billion times more powerful than all human intelligence today”.   

 This would indeed be transformative.  If we hadn’t figured out how to be immortal by then, certainly an intelligence such as this could assist us in this direction very quickly.

 Of course the opposing view, much like is portrayed in the Terminator movies, is that there may no particular reason why such an intelligence might elect to be friendly to humans once awakened.  Asimov dealt with this a great deal with his robotic novels, where their brains have wired into them the 3 laws of robotics that would prevent harm to humans.

 These new intelligences would of course be immortal, assuming there was no “off switch”. In Sawyers latest WWW trilogy (Watch, Wake, Wonder)⁸, a conscious intelligence (Webmind) is an emergent property of the web, so can only be “terminated” by shutting down the entire web.  In the trilogy, Caitlin, a young girl blind since birth, receives an implant in her optic nerve that allow her to see both the “real world” and accidentally the “web world” and is the first human to encounter and interact with this new emergent intelligence.  Although the optic nerve implant is a fix for a failure in nature, it also unexpectedly enables something that is impossible in nature, a direct link between a human and the first non biological intelligence.   So the implant would have been considered ethical, but the link to Webmind might be considered unethical on the grounds that it can’t occur naturally. I think there will be a lot of these unexpected serendipitous events as new technologies are introduced.

 Several years back, there was an Apple video that showed the future of computing.  A man enters his den and has a conversation with a computer based assistant who can assist him with all sort of mundane office tasks.  The IBM Watson machine on Jeopardy illustrated  that even todays computers can understand natural human language and answer quite complex questions using a large bank of data.  Now imagine one of Kurzweil’s hugely intelligent non-biological devices in the place of this computer assistant, with access to the collected knowledge base of humanity.  You could in fact work with the intelligence on virtually any question, and move ahead at light speed.  The singularity would move towards infinity even faster. 

 If longer life allowed Homo Sapiens to develop knowledge feedback systems allowing the species to more successfully survive, what would even longer life and efficient feedback of the accumulated knowledge of all Homo Sapiens do for us as a species?  

 There seems to be several ways humans might achieve immortality.  We could re-engineer the human body so that it never dies, or we could move our “essence” to another platform.  I believe it was in Hofstadter’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach” that I first read the question - are we “hardware” or are we “software”?  If we were “software” i.e. not necessarily dependent on the platform we were running on, then it should be possible to  transport “us” to a new platform.  If this new platform were robust enough, we could be immortal.

 How would Somerville view this type of transition?  Have we altered our essence if we have merely moved it from a meat to a silicon platform?  It is difficult to imagine that our “essence” has improved, if we are merely a “brain in a jar”.  The Matrix movies illustrate a form of this, where humans actually live immersed in a gel inside a plastic cell to generate electricity for some foreign species, but what they experience is the life we are all used to living on this planet.  They live in a “virtual reality” and are unable to distinguish that this is so.  It seems in this case that self awareness and consciousness is not impacted, but looking in from the outside, the Matrix existence strikes most of us as quite unethical. 

 In Physics, the question of the existence of an objective reality is a hot philosophical question.  Niels Bohr once pointed out that when you say that you see a red chair in a room, that chair exists only as a pattern inside your brain. Photons scattering off the chair are focussed by your eye onto a retina, converted to electrical signals which are then interpreted in the back of your brain, and you learn to declare you see a red chair in the room.  

 Even more fundamental is a current view, that even a single photon or electron has no particular physical existence until observed.  Until then all we can know is that there is a probability that it can exist at a point when observed.  Wheeler in his book “Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam:A Life in Physics  describes his notion of “It from Bit” - where everything is merely information (bit) until observed, at which time it becomes real (It).

 At the beginning of this article, the hypothesis was that the increase in the length of a life led to more highly evolved humans through the act of information sharing.  As we become infinitely more adept at sharing and processing more and more information, and in addition are able to significantly increase our lifetimes through means other than evolution, and extend our intelligence through some symbiotic relationship with a non-biological intelligence - where will we evolve to?

 Arthur C. Clarke perhaps nicely described this in his final Space Odyssey novel, “3001”⁹. He describes a “brain cap” that people wear continuously.  This cap is their link to the entire network of people and information.  A person would feel quite “disconnected” without one, and would be at a serious disadvantage in his/her capabilities to interact with society.  Probably much like a child in the distant past would feel when grandma died and the flow of stories and information ceased.    

More Reading:

¹ The Singularity is Near - Ray Kurzweil - 

   http://www.singularity.com/

² Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence - Wikipedia -

   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategies_for_Engineered_Negligible_Senescence 

³ Older Age Becomes Common Late in HUman Evolution - Caspari & Lee - 

   http://www.pnas.org/content/101/30/10895.full.pdf

⁴ Humanity+ - 

   http://humanityplus.org/

⁵ Total Recall / Your Life Uploaded - Gordon Bell & Jim Gemmell - 

   http://totalrecallbook.com/

⁶ Quantum Computers in Fiction and the Reality of the Quantum World - Chatfield - http://blogidol.ca/2010/03/quantum-computers-in-fiction-and-the-reality-of-the-quantum-world/151

₇ How Physics Limits Intelligence [Podcast] - Douglas Fox - 

   http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=brain-web-exclusive

⁸ WWW : Wake, Watch, Wonder - Robert J. Sawyer

   http://www.wakewatchwonder.com/

   Robert J. Sawyer’s Facebook Page - http://www.facebook.com/robertjsawyer

⁹ A Day With Arthur C. Clarke - Popular Science 

   http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2004-08/archives-day-arthur-c-clarke

¹⁰ I’ll be Being You - Chatfield

   http://blogidol.ca/2010/03/ill-be-being-you/298

I spent a few days with my grandchildren in the Toronto area.  I encountered two items that struck me as “maybe having some relationship” between them?

1) Mayor Ford is thinking about saving money by shutting down libraries - there are just too many of these things he says.   He even got into a twitter kuffuffle with Margaret Atwood over this. 

2) I was watching the evening CBC Toronto local news on TV when the weatherman put a map of Toronto and surrounding area.  Nowhere on this map was the Capital of Canada (Ottawa).  Instead, at the Ottawa location was the word “Hull”.  Now correct me if I am wrong, but I believe the name of the place has been “Gatineau” since 2002, making their map about a decade out of day, if not colossally short sighted by leaving our Capital city off the map.

I wonder if there is some causal relationship here?

I think that the author Jane Jacobs, who lived in Toronto, may have been a little dismayed if she had saw these events.  In her book (available in many libraries in Toronto) “Dark Ages Ahead” - she explores the pillars of our civilization.  Erosion of any of these pillars could take us on the path to another dark age.  One of the pillars she labels “Credentialing vs Educating”…. where we pay more attention to generating people with credentials rather than actually educating them.  Creating an uneducated population is not the way into the future that I want to see happen.

A person needs to have access to “information” to become educated.  The Internet is a great connectivity device, but it fails right now in being able to provide free access to the populous at large to even a fraction of the information currently found in any major library.  Even then, as with books, much information has a price tag - it is not free - authors and publishers need to be paid for your access to that information.  A library spreads the cost of the information access across all users of the library.

Once we have all the current information digitized and available through the search engines, and have devices cheap enough so that all people have access to this information, then maybe, might we consider cutting back on monies invested in libraries.

Wait - hold on! - that is assuming that libraries are just “information stores” and librarians merely put books on a shelf… a popular viewpoint held by the uneducated. (Should have spent your youth visiting the library,  Mayor Ford.)

Take a look at this article - “The Librarian’s Role in the Electronic Information Environment” - Fytton Rowland, Department of Information and Library Studies, Loughbourough University, UK.

He observes the following:

“The traditional roles of the librarian in the era of print can be defined as follows.

Collection development and acquisition: to select and purchase material - printed journals, abstracts and indexes, monographs, etc.

Cataloguing and classification: to organise and provide access to information - physically and via lists and catalogues.

Circulation: to reserve materials for and lend materials to users, and recover materials from them.

Reference work: to advise library users and to provide and facilitate quick and easy access to information.

Preservation, conservation and archiving: to archive, preserve and conserve information in perpetuity.

Of these roles, it may be argued that only circulation is not applicable to the electronic medium, and that in the case of electronic materials another, and more intellectually demanding, role replaces it:  (my emphasis)

User education: to provide information skills training.”

So reducing the number of libraries in the future mere reduces the total number of people available to train the users of libraries in the skills required to research and acquire knowledge.  We are not born with these skills in our genes…. they have to be taught.

Well,  maybe we can automate the “User Education” function.  Is that even possible?

Ray Kerzweil predicts in “The Singularity is Near” that by 2045, our doubly exponentially expanding rate of acquiring information, will allow us to construct the first non-biological intelligence, many many more times intelligent than all humans combined today.  Now that intelligence might be quite useful in assisting a person acquire the skills required to access our ever expanding information base.  However, since that intelligence can do those skills a few billion times better than the human, it might be more appropriate to train the human in some other skill set - like how to most effectively use that non-biological intelligence to your best advantage.  Again not a skill we are born with - so who will teach those skills?  

Librarians?  

Just a thought…. and please -  let’s not start trashing libraries to “save money”.  I’d rather believe that there are no “Dark Ages” ahead.  As Jane Jacobs remarks:

“A vigorous culture of making corrective, stabilizing changes depends heavily on its educated people, and especially upon their critical capacities and depth of understanding.”

Follow me on Hugh’s World - http://hugh-chatfield.com

Michael Ostroff is the documentary maker behind “Winds of Heaven” - a documentary about Canadian Artist Emily Carr that is playing to  sell-out audiences across Canada.

He points out that the Documentary Production Industry is under Threat and if we aren’t careful, we will lose out ability to see documentaries like this in the future.

Check out this Globe and Mail Article. 

There were a couple of user comments there at the time I read the article.  I had also read comments like this before in other forums.  The gist is that “artists” should not exist if they can’t make money with their products, or that they need to use newer technology.

I decided to add my two cents.  Curiously enought, the Globe and Mail forum didn’t allow me enough room to make my point in one comment - so I had to break it into two.  I follow up on this point in my comments.  Here is my comment all in one piece.

———————

I think the 2 comments so far miss the whole point.

The internet is only a distribution facility.  The real problem is where do you get the up front $ to make a $860,000 production like Michaels?

If I were to remove this silly notion of “mortgages” from banks at reasonable interest - i.e. if you can’t afford to buy your house outright - you should give up the idea of owning your own house - I think you might object.

So if we stop any ability of documentary makers from getting up front money - how does the documentary get made?  The $ that used to go to them - now go to owners of distribution networks - who make silly “reality shows” and pass them off as documentaries - because they are dirt cheap to produce - thus increasing their profits.

I like to view this up front money for documentaries as an early distribution system for the monies.  You have to hire a crew, who have to be fed and housed, you have to rent equipment and transportation to get to film sites, you need post production, and distribution, not to mention paying for the use of another artists work such as music.  So all these up front $ get distributed to other people for their services.  How much of this goes on??  A recent report calculated that the arts industry generates about 600,000 jobs in Canada and generates billions of revenue for Canadians - a significant % of Canada’s GDP.

So - who needs this stuff anyways?  Well, serious documentaries, like Ostroff’s documentary on Emily Carr are playing to sell out audiences across Canada - but they don’t contribute to the bottom line of the big guys - so they aren’t interested.  

Yes - there is a certain % of the Canadian population who aren’t interested in such products - but a good many of us would prefer something that makes us think - rather than be fed the pap of “reality” shows.

As for - why not use the internet?  The first trick here is how to generate revenue - not for the distributor - but for the creator of the product.  Contrary to popular opinion, most of the doc makers are not rolling in dough.  At age 68 I went back to school full time to get my certificate in Documentary Production at Algonquin College.  One of the very first things you learn is that if you are in the course to make money - you are in the wrong course. If you own your home or property (to get a line of credit) or have a spouse that make lots of $, then you can proceed.  Most who do proceed have a passion for making docs - but would like to avoid bankruptcy if they could.

You might wonder why we are in the situation we are in. As part of my course I made a short Doc - an excerpt of a longer Doc I hope to make called “The Last Poet Laureate of Ottawa?”.  It is a conversation with Patrick White - the last poet laureate of Ottawa.  He says, the people who control the symbols of the world - control the world.  So if I can have total control over what you see and hear -  I can control your world.  [If interested see ‘So - Who Needs Poets Anyways?’ ]  It is free to watch. ;-)

Secondly - the powers that be are trying to cap your use of the internet - charge you extra - limit your usage.  For those of us who might want to use the Internet to get our works to you - this is a huge barrier.  I just did a short 13 minute video piece.  It was too large to get into YouTube into one piece (just under 3 GB) and I’m sure you wouldn’t watch it if you were to be charged for all these “excess” bits coming down the pipe to you.  So again, even if I charged nothing - you would get whacked with a large fee just for downloads. Again - merely a way for large companies to improve their bottom line, and control what you can see.  [Oh yes - it is my first political piece that can be viewed from my blog at ‘Hugh’s World’ ]

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We somehow got ourselves stuck with the notions  that the “bottom line” of the profit and loss statement is the only reason for existence, and that hierarchical organizations are the only way to go, and that we are “free”. 

I submit the following blog article I wrote a while back after watching a TV show interviewing some high powered top level execs give their opinions on why North America is no longer productive.  I think they missed the key reason.

Read my blog here. - “Emily Carr, Carl Sagan, Bucky and CNN’s ‘Restoring the American Dream”.

Since I have not figured out how to embed videos in the TUMBLR site yet - I added one more blog entry to my old iWeb version of my blog.

I produced a documentary about the Nortel Pensioner Issue and whether or not YOUR pension is safe.  It is currently up as a 3-part doc on YouTube.

See:  The Nortel Pensioner Issue - Illustrated

I noticed the following on my face book page this morning.

http://youtu.be/FaSRHFQXaqk  - A techno track with the Fibonacci sequence. The miracle of 639 Hz

It is meant to show how something “mathematical” - like the Fibonacci sequence - shows up everywhere in the “real world”.

I was always amazed when I was taking my mathematical physics classes how one one could transform a real world problem into a mathematical statement, them manipulate that mathematics using known rules, and come up with predictions as to how the “real world ” operates, if only we look for it.

Perhaps a classical example of this is Einstein predicting from his mathematics that light would bend in a large gravitational field… followed by Eddington in 1919 going to observe a total eclipse of the sun to measure if light from a known star would appear to be a different place in the heavens, because it’s light path would bend around around the sun.  See http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0102462.

This one to one correspondence between the mathematics and the real world is almost magical (and not totally understood as to why this should be).  Unfortunately, the vast majority of the world’s people don’t get the play with the mathematics since it requires at least an undergraduate degree to even begin to understand the mathematics.  

The above video though, even if you don’t get all the references to mathematical concepts, should give you an idea of the “magic” that I am talking about.  Mathematics is everywhere in our real world.

The Last Poet Laureate of Ottawa - Patrick White:

When my wife and I ran a store in Perth, Ontario for 12 years (ok, ok - it was mainly my wife - but I helped) - I got introduced to someone who turned out to be the last Poet Laureate of Ottawa.

I had never met or chatted with a poet before - so it turned out to be very interesting to chat with someone who really knew language.

Through him I actually got to meet and photograph the late Charles Fisher [ the last surviving member of the welsh group of poets and intellectuals that included Dylan Thomas and Vernon Watkins].

I created a web page for Patrick in my “All About Perth” website, and I produced a short documentary ( “So, Who Needs Poets Anyways?) as part of my assignments for the Documentary Production Program I graduated from at Algonquin College in Ottawa.

My wife sold a few of his paintings to collectors in our store “UrbanMarket Perth” on Gore Street.

Now I notice Patrick has a number of older and current paintings for sale again, and I thought I might mention this in my circles…. to support the arts in Canada so to speak.

• Wolves at Sunset:   
• Untitled:
• Last of the Waterstars:
• Spaced Out:
• Canabis Fairy:
• Home for the Night:
• Untitled (wolves in the woods)
• Picture - Music with Bubble
• Exstasis:

Now if you like any of these - and want to purchase - contact Patrick via his Facebook page or email.

   email:  blackwaterstar@yahoo.ca

Interested in Patrick’s poetry - see Patrick’s web page.

It’s Election time.  The direction that Canada takes to establish a digital economic strategy is key to the -future of this country.  Leaders/readers are invited to share their opinion.

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The Intelligent Communities Movement is resonating with companies and communities across Canada. Over 100 Canadian organizations and companies so far have formally voiced their support in recognizing digital infrastructure as Canada’s key to future economic development.

Just as the coast-to-coast National Railroad was a nation-builder for the industrial age (steam engines riding on rails of steel), a national coast-to-coast-to coast gigabyte speed Internet will be a nation builder for the information age (connection machines running on rails of light). See: 

Bills on privacy, copyright, and Internet surveillance died on the order paper and will have to start from scratch when a new government is elected in May. Moreover, the much-anticipated digital economy strategy, set for release this spring, has likely been delayed until the fall at the very earliest.

Canada ranks almost at the bottom of the list of countries with superior internet service.  We almost have the slowest, most expensive internet service in the world… trailed only by Poland and Mexico.  Recent moves by internet providers seem to be focussed only on corporate profits  by limiting and throttling Canadian’s access to high speed internet service.

Questions:

What is your parties position on building an intelligent Canada?  How does your current policies address the digital economy strategy?  What is your plan to move Canada back up to the number one position with respect to our internet service?

24 March 2011

All my previous blogs can be found here.

One complaint I had received was no one could respond to any of my posts - so I kept on the lookout for some blogging software that would allow a conversation.

This is an experiment to see if tumblr is what I was looking for.

Now - if I could only find out how you might comment on each blog ???  Stay tuned.

Got the opportunity to do a short film interview with Anita Vandenbeld - the Federal Liberal candidate in the Ottawa West-Nepean riding - about the issues related to the Nortel Pensioner Issues.

Basically, the laws of Canada allow a company to declare bankruptcy and walk away from any of the their pension obligations.

The 1400 Nortel Pensioners in Anita’s riding will have perhaps over half of their pensions taken away.  Thos on disability Pension lost their benefits already in January.

This was timely becuase it is almost certain there will be Federal election call today.  Anita is running against the Harper Government “bulldog” - John Baird.  I wihh her success.

Stay tuned to see the results of the shoot.