Philip Greenspun’s Weblog

In http://philip.greenspun.com/materialism/house-design/ (commentable) I put forth some ideas for building houses that are designed for single people.  The document asks the questions “Why have more than one room if you live alone?”, “What about creative space if you don’t have an office or studio?”, and “Is it feasible to build an industrial loft in the middle of the woods or suburbs?”

Comments appreciated, especially from folks with some experience in architecture or construction.

I’m back in New England as of this evening, at a secure non-disclosed location safe from the security goons of the DNC.  Here are some highlights and statistics from the little airplane excursions.

Approximate route:  Up to Quebec City, northeast up the St. Lawrence River to the northern tip of Newfoundland, down the west coast of Newfoundland to Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia then over to Prince Edward Island before returning via Bangor, Maine.   About 3000 miles traveled during 20 hours of flight time.

Most Interesting Place:  L’Anse aux Meadows in St. Anthony’s, Newfoundland, the first European settlement in the Americas circa 1000 AD.  The Vikings came, they saw, they loved it, but they left because they didn’t have sufficient military power to hold out against the local Indian tribes.

Best Aerial Scenery:  Whales (100+) in the St. Lawrence, icebergs on the east coast of Newfoundland, the mountains of Gros Morne National Park from 1000-2000′ above the waves on the west coast of Newfoundland.

Favorite Modern Art Observed:  International Garden Festival at the Grand Metis (Reford) gardens near Mont Joli, Quebec (6000′ runway) on the Gaspe Peninsula.  The range of ideas in this Extreme Gardening event was inspiring and included an Asphalt Garden by Se Busca, a team from Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Favorite book read:  Skinny Dip by Carl Hiaasen.  A woman gets rich after her casino-owning parents are killed in a Gulfstream that crashes while transporting a performing bear.  Her biologist husband subsequently tosses her off the back of a cruise ship in an attempted murder but she survives by clutching a floating bale of marijuana.  Not exactly thought-provoking but fun.

Favorite newspaper article read:  “Woman’s whale phobia justified…  [headline] Behemoth Slaps Boater in Head with Tail [subhead] Labrador woman with a lifelong whale phobia was badly injured after an unidentified whale slapped her with its tail on the maiden voyage of her husband’s new boat.” (from the National Post, subscription only; also see this CBC story).  Runner up is this Guardian story about a French book about being lazy at work, “an elegantly written call to arms to the neo-slaves of middle management and the damned of the service industry, condemned to dress up as clowns all week and waste their lives in pointless meetings.”

Favorite radio show heard:  Senior citizen’s call-in hour on CBC where a woman requested Dory Previn’s song “Twenty Mile Zone”.

I’m planning on renting a car in Tokyo around August 5 and heading north to Hokkaido and tourist sights along the way.  My only previous trips to Japan have been via public transit and/or getting rides from locals.  Is there any hope of navigating around rural Japan if one (a) does not speak Japanese, and (b) cannot read Japanese characters?  I was hoping that perhaps there are GPS units that have all of their user interface in English.  So, for example, I could type in the name of a temple in Nikko and have the GPS guide me there with English voice prompts.  The fact that www.hertz.com won’t let you book a car at Narita and www.orbitz.com says “we’re sorry; an error has occurred” is worrisome.   Is a Japanese road trip not a good idea for a stupid white man?

Flying up the St. Lawrence River from Quebec City to Labrador and Newfoundland I saw about 100 whales in the water.  This at the same time that the newspapers were covering a debate about whether to allow renewed commercial whaling.  It is so easy to find whales from a plane, especially when the water is flat like the upstream portion of the river where the whales swim to find the richest food.  You just look for streaks of bubbles like a dotted line and the whale will be at the front.  What chance do these animals have against modern technology?  None, obviously.  Yet must we ban whaling?  Perhaps a compromise would be to allow whaling but only with the technology described in the book Moby Dick.  The whales had more of a chance back then and not infrequently managed to kill their hunters.

But maybe as the world population becomes ever more obese people will feel a greater kinship to these multi-ton creatures.  Once we’re all incredibly fat and easy to spot from an airplane we will have enough sympathy for whales to leave them alone.

[If you are looking for a summer trip and wish to see a lot of whales without getting seasick, you can see Belugas, Humpbacks, Blues(!), et al., at the confluence of the Saguenay and St. Lawrence rivers (tourism site).  Sadly there is no airport right near the town of Tadoussac (Charlevoix is closest) but it is only about a 2.5-hour drive from Quebec City, right along the lake shore with a beautiful cathedral and then a big casino on the way.]

Young people want to be powerful and imitate those whom they read about in the newspaper.  During George W. Bush’s presidency, whom have they read about in the paper?  Osama bin-Laden, Saddam Hussein, Zacarias Moussaoui, Abu Musab Zarqawi, Muqtada al-Sadr, and the list goes on.  Nearly all of these guys are powerful take-charge ass-kickers.  Unlike the Gangsta Rappers whom kids were imitating in the 1990s, the Muslims in Western newspapers don’t merely wave 9mm pistols out the windows of their SUVs.  These guys actually do manage to kill the people they hate, often by the thousands.

If George W. Bush had delegated the pushing aside of Saddam to an underling in the State Department or Defense Department and never mentioned the words “Iraq” or “Saddam” in any speech he might not have glorified being a pissed-off Muslim to such an extent.  But as it happens W. has given center stage to angry Muslims for the last three years.  This might encourage older folks with a lot of property to protect to become fearful, vote Republican, and give up their civil liberties in exchange for security.  But for young punks without much to lose one would think that the sight of all of these Arab bad-asses on TV would encourage them to convert to Islam and at least talk the talk if not actually walk the walk.  (According to this International Herald Tribune article, it is already happening in France, especially in the prisons where more than 50% of the inmates are Muslim.)

While I’ve been “oot and aboot” (as the Canadians say) with N505WT the natives seem to have become restless and angry with the Philippines.  From what I read the Filipinos were in Iraq on a “humanitarian” mission.  One of their guys was kidnapped so they went home.  So now we Americans are pissed off that they caved into the demands of the kidnappers/beheaders.  None of the newspaper articles that I saw, however, questioned the original purpose.  Though some Iraqis appear on CNN to complain that they don’t have air-conditioning and 24/7 running water it is hard to see them as a hardship case in a world where many people have never had A/C or running water.  Shouldn’t “humanitarian” missions go to places where either (a) folks are really doing badly, (b) folks are genuinely grateful for assistance, (c) folks are living right next door to us (charity begins at home), or (d) all of the above?

Quebec City, despite its proximity to the U.S. and confederation with Anglophone Canada, is in many ways more authentically French than France.  Our global village of cheap jet transport and liberal immigration policies has resulted in many of the world’s cities drawing their inhabitants from whatever countries are most populous and/or whichever countries have the most poverty, crime, and government oppression.  This results in enough similarity of one big city to another that some folks don’t bother traveling anymore.

Quebec, by contrast, has stubbornly resisted immigration for centuries.  After the British took over in 1760 they tried desperately to get English speakers to move here to dilute the French language, culture, and loyalty.  In the 19th-century the Quebecois themselves began leaving for various New England states in which high-paying mill jobs were to be had.  Instead of the hoped-for immigration this was an outflow of roughly 1 million people.  Today Canada brings in nearly 250,000 immigrants per year but most of them want to go to Toronto, Vancouver, and other English-speaking cities.  Quebec, with 24 percent of Canada’s population, is the choice of only 15 percent of immigrants and most go to Montreal where it is possible to get by with only English (Montreal was where Ahmed Ressam started his life in the New World).  Some combination of cold weather, a persistently moribund economy (they’ve tried everything here:  big government, small government, agriculture, heavy industry, high tech, etc.), and the terror of having to learn French keeps folks from wanting to pile into Quebec City and, to an even larger extent, the small Francophone towns of Quebec.

All of the folks who work basic service jobs seem to be native-born Quebecois.  Any signs in English are directed at tourists.  McDonald’s has a section “reserved for smokers”.  Can this island of pure French culture survive?  A schoolteacher told me “I know that the day will come when I can’t speak French here anymore.” At the inception of the language wars in the 18th-century the French language was holding its own quite nicely in the worlds of literature, science, and day-to-day use.  Today, however, the results of England imperialism have spread the English language far beyond what could have been foreseen 250 years ago.  The huge number of countries and people that use Spanish and Chinese have further reduced the French language to obscurity.

I’m currently at the Loews Le Concorde hotel in Quebec City, a 424-room business hotel recommended by some guys at the airport.  Nearly every aspect of the hotel operation reflects enormous management attention to detail.  Yet when it comes to Internet access they’ve outsourced it to a company called DataValet, “a trademark of TravelNet Technologies.”  When it works you’re supposed to pay $20/day for a 100Kbps link but their authentication server was dead.  So I called the 800-number to talk to a tech support guy.  After about 30 minutes of flailing about I was finally able to connect.

Curious to see how this obviously very effective management, which would not tolerate a burned-out light bulb or a rubbed-off number on an elevator button, was able to tolerate this kind of incompetence, I called the manager.  Although a very nice and competent executive, she was undisturbed by the fact that it was so painful to connect to the Internet at her hotel.  She had even stayed at Hilton Garden Inns where Internet is free and therefore reliable (you just plug in and because they don’t try to charge anyone they can use $50 routers; it is also about 15X the speed of “DataValet”).  But as far as she was concerned it was something that they’d outsourced to a contractor and if it wasn’t working it wouldn’t reflect badly on her management.

I would submit that Internet is the only thing that she would have tolerated sucking in her hotel.  If she’d outsourced room service and the contractor told customers to call tech support and then walk down to the McDonald’s next door, she would change contractors.  If the telephones in the rooms were flaky she would put in new lines, instruments, and switches.

Just as Web sites are an area where companies feel that they can lag leagues behind their competitors (who even bothers to try to do as good as job as Google?), Internet access seems to be one where an enterprise will cheerfully tolerate being 60X worse that its competition in terms of time to connect and then 15X worse in terms of bandwidth.  I infer from this experience that tech companies are in for another few very bad years in which customers won’t want to pay attention to or invest in improved computer hardware and software.

Here in the capital of a former jewel in the French imperial crown (Quebec City), I just finished a rather dry academic biography of Napoleon by Steven Englund.  It is easy for to forget that France was once an important military power, just like us.  Rather than exploiting and/or pillaging, Napoleon tried to liberate the people in the territories that he conquered, just like George W. Bush.  And just like George W. Bush, Napoleon suffered his first defeat in a multi-ethnic Middle Eastern country:

“The Turkish Empire, which nominally ruled [Egypt], was regarded as an immoral and declining power, so the French saw an opportunity to revive civilization …

“The effective goverment of Egypt at this time was in the hands of the Mamelukes, an equestrian feudal order of slave origin that had long held power over a disparate population of Moslem Arabs, Coptic Christians, and Sephardic Jews. …

“To the [French] expedition’s stunned disillusionment, the land of the pharoahs turned out to be a filthy backwater of flies, mud huts, disease, howling dogs, and superstition.  Alexandria offered nothing worthy of its grand name. …

“The most controversial [decision by Bonaparte] in this campaign was his decision to execute three thousand Turkish prisoners … [who] had surrendered on a promise of quarter …

“[The French] intention to bring ‘enlightenment’ and ‘development’ to blend ‘the rights of man’ with ‘the law of the Koran.’  From Egypt’s perspective, the Europeans dropped suddenly onto their scene as an alien, hostile force majeure. …

“What eluded Napoleon’s anticipation was the degree and persistence of Moslem mistrust of the French, coupled with their comparative indifference to Western notions of reform.  …  The preponderance of Egypt’s populace sincerely believed that anything worth knowing was already explicit or clearly implicit in the Koran.  More seriously, many Napoleonic measures outraged people.  … Decrees on behalf of women, Jews, and Coptic Christians … went down almost as badly as the imposition of high taxes to support the French army. …

“The French hold on Egypt thus remained what it started out as: force operating behind a facade of hypocrisy…

“For the mass of the populace, the French could not get out from under the burden of being seen as ‘the Christian enemy,’ the crusaders returned.  In that perspective, the Ottomans and even the Mamelukes were preferable because at least they were not infidels.”

The good news for W. is that Napoleon bounced back from that 1799 defeat and several others, managing to return to power even after exile to Elba, for example.  So if his obsession with Iraq results in the loss of the White House he might still manage to come back in 2008.

[Nouvelle France and Quebec prefigure to some extent conflicts and controversies today.  The French came to live in a reasonable amount of harmony with the Indians, whom they saw as valuable economic allies in such endeavors as the fur trade.  The early French immigrants learned Indian languages and many married Algonquin women.  They expected some sort of ethnic and cultural fusion to be the end result.  The English, by contrast, came to displace the Indians.  They also did not shy from the ethnic cleansing of Nova Scotia, deporting 10,000 French-speaking Acadians between 1755 and 1762.]

Now that I’m 40 years old most of my friends are in their riper years.  The women who are trying to have children in their late 30s and early 40s are going through torture.  Hormones, needles, in-vitro fertilization, miscarriages, etc.  Maybe teenage pregnancy isn’t such a bad idea after all.  I wonder if in pre-industrial societies it wasn’t the case that the grandparents did most of the child-rearing that required judgement and experience.  The teenage girl did the child-bearing but was still living surrounded by extended family so that her 30-35-year-old mom and mother-in-law could provide adult guidance for the baby.  Perhaps we believe that teenage pregnancy is bad only because our family structures have been broken up.