/travel/canada/Toronto to Halifax and Back
I'm sitting in a Greyhound bus, soon to depart for St. Catherines. It's much cooler than the train I was just on, for the Montreal-Toronto leg, and much warmer than the train I was on from Halifax to Toronto. In fact, it's just right.
There were no unseemly events on the rest of the train journey there, or back. I finished "Blink" and it was pretty crap, but not as crap as Tipping Point. Or maybe I was just braced for it. It had interesting stories and anecdotes and studies, but it was desparately trying to be rigorous when it wasn't. And, unless my recollection of Aeron chairs is incorrect, the author doesn't seem to know the difference between "dependent" and "independent". His word-choice is frustratingly lax, and the way he draws parallels if often dubious. I guess that's why it's called Pop Psychology, and not Psychology literature, but I wish he'd find a slightly more rigorous middle ground.
On the way there, I met an Irish girl from Galway, but who now lives and teaches in Dublin. We chatted about our various countries and their stereotypes, pros, and cons. I was surprised to find someone like that on the train. In fact, I'm surprised to find a lot of people on the train. There were single people, high-school aged couples, old couples, families. Most of the way I was sitting solo, but for the last leg of the journey, I spoke at length with a Kuwaiti-born of Indian descent studying in Canada. He had interesting -- if somewhat pessimistic -- views on the Middle East Conflict, and seemed to strongly concur when I mused about my utter lack of understanding the strategy of provocation involved in the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. We talked about oil, Iraq, Canada, I gave him a brief overview of the (largely defunct) Northern Ireland conflict, and the current status quo. There was also a fellow who could only be described as a pimp; he wore matching bright sports top and bottoms, two big gold chains with pendants, and some kind of brass knuckles with what appeared to be lion head engravings. He talked quietly on the cell phone, admonishing the other participant not to share news of his arrival. At least one other person was taking the train for environmental reasons -- her Nalgene bottle announced that "environmentalists do it for future generations."
This bus driver is doing the semi-standard announcments. He seems a bit eccentric: he's talked about the weather, the fact that we can't chat with him about the World Cup since it's over, and the interior temperature -- "Which is set to 22 degrees Celsius, for you Canadians you know what that means," he said with a light brogue, "for you Americans, that's...'nice'." Apparently 22 is the guideline from the Ontario Ministry of Transport. And traffic is light. And you can use the washroom in an emergency, but you're better off to wait until we get to St. Catherines.
I had a good time in Halifax, saw all my family, hung out on a nearby beach, each day building a more grandiose sand castle with my nieces and nephews, each day hoping the tide was coming in to provide a classic struggle of Man vs. Nature, each day being disappointed by the tide heading out. On my last evening, we went back to the beach hoping the tide would be coming up, to watch the destruction of all our efforts. We were greeted, instead, with a lively lightning storm, and eventually with rain, which probably won the race to destroy the rock-reinforced castle, and the nearby forest of sand-trees.
I played Scrabble, Boggle, and Trivial Pursuit aplenty. Two years of reading the economist have helped my history immensely, which my Econ 102 prof ("The history of economics is the history of society.") would no doubt be delighted by. I was also bested by my 8 year old neice at Boggle. Just once, mind you, but beaten nonetheless!
Tonight I'm visiting my aunt on my mother's side, and hopefully tomorrow my aunt, uncle, and cousins on my dad's side. The future beyond that is fuzzy. I fly back Wednesday night, arrive Thursday morning, and proceed directly to a wedding. Do not pass go, do not collect $100. (I played Monopoly, too, and was beaten by my sister, as expected.)
/travel/canada/Morbid Delays
The Via Rail train #60 from Toronto to Montreal is stopped. The view from my window hasn't changed for nearly two hours, and it will apparently be another 45 minutes before we're on our way.
Just after Brockville, I was roused from my sleepy reading to the train slowing, then to the smells of overheated engines. I cursed, remembering the time a bad engine made us creep into Ottawa, past whizzing cars and busses, at about 8km/h.
A minute or two passed before one of the train's flight attendants announced that she didn't know why we were stopped, but that she'd keep us apprised. A few minutes later, she kept her promise, vaguely mentioning a railway accident "ahead of us", and that the engineers would need to be relieved. It was all very underspecified, but it was going to take between two and three hours to get things sorted out.
I kept reading for a while, and then eventually started walking the length of the train, heading backwards first. When I reached the back, the vagueness became clear -- about 300m back, there was a crossing, with a couple of cars and some pilons. A few others gathered around the window filled me in on the rumour mill: we'd hit someone, maybe two, it might have been a child, they threw themselves in front of the train, that red car has been there since before anyone else got there. Why were we waiting at all; they're already dead? Why would someone do that? Why does it take so long to get going again? I put in my two cents -- procedures, trauma to the engineers, waiting for the coroner, and replacement conductors. Most people seemed pretty understanding about the whole thing. Some lamented that they continued to charge for the coffee and tea. The capitalist in me knew that was the best way to distribute what was no doubt an inadequate supply, though it did seem rather cutthroat.
I paced my way through to the front of the train, squeezing by the emptying snack carts, chatting with people as I passed. Each car seemed to have a different personality. Some had people up, standing, chatting, others had a good few glasses of wine going around. Several were quiet, some had children playing games, or irritating their impatient parents.
In the stuffy section between two cars, a fellow from Toronto had his guitar, and was strumming away quietly. He had gelled up hair, and a guitar that was well-worn, with a bit of stuff stuck to the body. Marshmallows from a recent campfire singalong, he explained without sheepishness. Just a part of his guitar's character. I encouraged him to play for one of the cars, but he declined. A young man whose seat was across the aisle from mine came into the compartment. The guitarist asked him if he knew how to sing, and the young, freckled, fluently bilingual Quebecker suggested "You Are My Sunshine," and upped the ante: He wanted to sing it to his girlfriend. Strike that, fianceé; not being romantic, he'd proposed to her last year, in a parking lot. The musician said that this was "the good stuff", true love, and all that, in that mellow, sincere way only an artist can.
I went and sat back down, to the last dregs of work that needed to be done before my vacation can begin in ernest. A few minutes later, the freckled Quebecker surreptitiously handed me his camera, and asked me to take a few photos. He and the guitarist returned a couple minutes later, and I ducked behind to take some photos. The car joined in a little, with a few claps, but not as much as I sorta hoped.
After this interlude, I started pacing back and forth, visiting the back of the train. Eventually, the morbid interest got the best of me: I had been refusing to take photos, but when some police officers were walking back towards the accident, I used it as an excuse to take a photo of the scene.
It's physically the closest I've ever been to death, and no doubt it was a fairly gruesome one as these things go. There were certainly a lot of disrupted plans, my own included, but perspective must be maintained on those lives were interrupted, or halted, far more than ours: the conductors, the victim, and their friends and family.
We're moving again now, full tilt toward Cornwall.
/travel/freighter/Canadian Waters
Thursday, 07:50
Our clocks are now as retarded as they'll get; sometime early this morning, we came around Newfoundland. And the sun came out. It's been foggy for most of the trip, coccooning me such that not only can I only walk around in basically an eight story corridor and a few rooms, but I could only see a little more than that. There were times when the front of the ship -- 190m from the decks -- was shrouded. It was like that Star Trek episode where Crusher's in some kind of temporal vortex warp light anomaly thingy, and her universe is shrinking.
Unfortunately, by the time I went up to the bridge, we were out of sight of land again. The sun is a welcome change, and will hopefully mean I can go wandering about on the deck, to see the cargo up close.
I caught my finger -- just barely -- in a door this morning. It could have been a lot worse, since that door wasn't stopping, but it just squeezed my finger out of the way a bit.
I've mostly been reading, not writing as I was hoping. The writing often hasn't sat well with my inner ear, or something, but it seems okay now. The upshot of the reading is:
Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood: Good. Entertaining, interesting ideas, well written. Lacked "point", but that's okay, it's fiction. :-)
Tipping Point, Malcom Gladwell: I can only remark on the first half, which was sufficiently bad to stop reading. Full of applications of the Law of Egregious Capitization the Power of Naming Things. Unscientific. Amusingly, directly contradicted things in Freakonomics, of Gladwell said "prepare to be dazzled." The most charitable explanation I can give this book is that the only interesting things it has to say have since entered pop culture, and so all the interesting bits were already in my head. I don't think that's the case, though.
Undercover Economist, Tim Hartford: Very good. Interesting applications of economics. Piqued my interest in Microeconomics. Mostly rigorous and well-explained. Some diagrams and charts would have helped make some of the explanations shorter.
Freakonomics, Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner: Fine. A bunch of interesting stories about "teasing" information from some serendipitous sources of data. Not always convincing, often proposed random explanations. Good stuff about how often-wrong "conventional wisdom" is, though not many tools to tackle that.
I'm onto Mythical Man Month, but just started. I'm not actually
Comments
SK wrote
So I guess its to late to tell you to drop MMM. I found the only interesting bits to have already leaked out into society.
Rob Ewaschuk wrote
Yeah, same deal. I dropped it pretty quickly. About as fast as I dropped the last sentece of that entry.
/travel/freighter/Belly of the Beast
Since an hour or two before I woke up to in Liverpool to watch was we left bridge, there has been a steady, slow rumble. It's quieter, and lower frequency than the background noise on an airplane. Down in the base of the ship is a fearsome engine. It has sixteen cylinders, each perhaps 16 feet tall.
She burns 65 to 70 metric tonnes of fuel oil per day. The fuel has to be heated to about 100degC before it is sufficiently liquid to go into the engine. Unfortunately, between the accent and the noise, I didn't catch many of the explanations of the Chief Engineer about what various bits were.
This ship has about 2200 containers on it, and (IIRC, ICBW) 24000 tonnes of cargo. The total journey (Montreal to Antwerp to Liverpool to Montreal) is about 5000 nautical miles, or about 9000 kilometers, and they use 900 tonnes of fuel. So we have one tonne of fuel for every 10 kilometers. Which gives 22,000 container-kilometers, or 240,000 tonne-kilometers per tonne of fuel. Or 240 tonne-kilometers per kilogram of fuel. If you prefer.
I asked the Captain about whether there was pressure to save fuel, since he had mentioned that if the ship is even a little off-keel, the fuel usage goes way up. "No, not at all, it is always about speed," was the jist of his reply. Full tilt. The engine is running at 19.5 knots, but the roundtrip average is a little higher than that. He said even a small slow-down got big fuel gains. I'm hoping I can see the curve of fuel usage/km at various speeds, but not sure yet.
The whole engine thing is story told better by pictures.
