Playing it safe in space?

Sir Edmund Hillary, the New Zealander who first conquered Mt. Everest alongside Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, died a couple of weeks ago at the age of 88.

The New York Times ran a good obituary of Hillary, not excluding Tenzing's contribution like many accounts do. I was most struck by this passage:

The imperial explorer is now an anomaly. Much energy has been expended in recent decades showing just how closely many adventurers have been associated with the more venal aspects of the past, how claims to territory and control have turned triumph into cruelty. In contrast, a new explorer is imagined. The postmodern pioneer is not heroic, but deferential, putting little at risk, desiring safety above adventure, consideration above assertion, breaking new ground by giving the old a different shape.

This has also affected notions of risk and safety. This is most evident in the once thriving United States space program, which, unlike almost every exploratory project in world history, is intensely sensitive to loss of life and mission failure, focused on a kind of hygienic pioneering. In "The Right Stuff," Tom Wolfe showed how early astronauts were seen by traditional test pilots not as heroes, but as capsule-enclosed, passive creatures, padded and protected and stripped of initiative.

...

Is it that we have become spoiled by so much being easy and safe that we believe everything must be? Is this also why lovers of extreme sport seek such bizarre thrills (snowboarding down Everest!)? Otherwise "danger" is reserved for contestants on reality shows like "Survivor" and expunged from reality itself, which we believe should be subject to rational control.

I discussed this in my review of Matt Hern's Watch Yourself, where I postulated that progress requires risk. The space program (by which I mean the combined human endeavour to explore space, not any specific nation's efforts) has resulted in 22 deaths among astronauts/cosmonauts, or five percent of all people who've been in space.

Considering the high human cost that was involved in exploring this planet (which still occurs), is the human cost of space travel too high? This is a notion explored by Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran in their excellent graphic novel, Orbiter. The space program is dead, the last nail in the coffin being the disappearance of a space shuttle. Years later, the shuttle returns, and a group of out-of-work space scientists are brought together to learn its mysteries...

The cynic in me wonders if the "human cost" of space exploration is the factor, or if the monetary cost is as much to blame. Does our trepidation of space travel have as much to do with the failure of Pathfinder as with the Columbia explosion? Is the instant disintegration of hundreds of millions of dollars and years of research too expensive a blow to our immediate gratification, consumerist, rate-of-return culture?

Marian the Librarian

Just 'cause:



Just 'cause, The Music Man is on the schedule for the Stratford Festival this summer!

I'm kind of partial to the finale, "Seventy-Six Trombones", as I used to play it in a marching band with my father:

Reading on a Dream...

Just what we've been waiting for--a library musical!



Supposedly the rest of the library patrons were unsuspecting but I personally think it was staged. How else did they set up all those cameras?

There and Back Again...

Squeal with delight, fanboys and fangirls! Peter Jackson has signed up to direct the film version of The Hobbit:

December 18, 2007

ACADEMY AWARD-WINNER PETER JACKSON AND NEW LINE CINEMA JOIN WITH MGM TO PRODUCE “THE HOBBIT,” EAGERLY-ANTICIPATED FANTASY ADVENTURE EPIC

NEW LINE AND MGM TO CO-PRODUCE AND SHARE WORLDWIDE DISTRIBUTION RIGHTS

PETER JACKSON AND FRAN WALSH TO EXECUTIVE PRODUCE TWO FILMS BASED ON “THE HOBBIT”

Looks like Jackson and New Line sorted out their legal differences.

Thriller--Bollywood style!

This was quite amusing:

Sorry about that, old chums...

The British government has gone and done something absolutely dreadful:

British PM Brown 'profoundly' regrets data security breach

Last Updated: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 | 11:44 AM ET
CBC News

Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized Wednesday for the "inconvenience and worries" caused by the British government's accidental loss of computer discs containing detailed personal information of 25 million citizens.

During a heated question period in the House of Commons, Brown tried to reassure the country that people's personal details gathered by Britain's tax and customs service were safe following one of the biggest security breaches in the country's history.

Two computer discs that went missing while being sent from one government department to another contained names, addresses, birth dates, national insurance numbers and — in some cases — banking details for nearly half the country's population.

"I profoundly regret and apologize for the inconvenience and worries that have been caused to millions of families that receive child benefits," Brown said. "We have a duty to do everything that we can to protect the public."

Treasury chief Alistair Darling said the discs contained details of the 7.25 million families in Britain claiming the child benefit — a tax-free monthly payment available to everyone with children.

He said the delivery was not being tracked and was missing for three weeks before any alarm was raised.

The discs were password protected but the information on them was not encrypted, officials said.

I always find it interesting that our governments collect ever-increasing amounts of personal information on their citizens--on us. It's all for our own good, for our safety and protection, they tell us. When they demonstrate they aren't even capable of keeping this supposedly critical information safe, what sort of confidence are we supposed to have in their ability to protect us from more concrete and salient threats?

Which brings us to my next book review, Watch Yourself: Why Safer Isn't Always Better by Matt Hern. Hern runs an independent school in East Vancouver and is a scholar of Urban Studies. With Watch Yourself, he discusses our society's increasing obsession with safety and protection before openly wondering if we're actually safer as a result. Not to mention, as the subtitle indicates, if safety is always the preferred option.

Hern notes the obsession with safety in all aspects, often accompanied by the mantra "for the sake of the children". He shares an anecdote about two girls who died during a high school skiing trip. They slipped under a safety fence that had been clearly plastered with warning signs, and fell to their deaths. Despite these precautions, their families still felt that "more could have been done" to prevent the deaths of their daughters.

Fear is among the most potent of marketing tools, and this does not escape Hern's notice. His discussion on SUVs, summarized in this interview states that SUVs were originally a ploy by automobile manufacturers to sell cars as trucks, skirting around certain emission and safety requirements. Owners became convinced that the size of an SUV compared to other passenger vehicles made them safer, when in fact the opposite is true: top-heavy SUVs are more likely to roll over during a quick manouevre, say when trying to avoid a crash.

Hern does not speak from some cloistered, upper-middle class bubble or ivory tower of academe. He runs an alternative school, the Purple Thistle Centre, in Vancouver's infamous East Side. He and his family have been the victims of property crime, and he knows that drug dealers operate in his neighbourhood. This gives his narrative an authenticity other books of this type often lack. For example, he notes that a park in his neighbourhood known for the presence of drug dealers and their clients, was granted a beefed-up police presence. All this did was move the drug dealers to another park several blocks away, whereupon the residents of that neighbourhood began to demand more police. Hern notes that calls to deal with crime and safety typically mean spending more money on policing, and not on the root causes of crime. This is treating the symptoms while letting the disease fester.

Heresy is Hern's agenda: to spread the idea that safety is not always the most desirable goal. And he has a point: how much progress has been achieved in our society because some people were willing to take risks? I would say damn near all of it.

More on the Writers' Strike

A Daily Show writer covers the strike in Daily Show style:

Future Sound of London

Radiohead releases their latest album for download on a "pay what you want" model.

The Eagles decide to cut major recording labels out of the distribution of their newest album.

Trent Reznor, the man behind Nine Inch Nails, happily confesses to downloading music from peer-to-peer and torrent sites (would that Lars Ulrich, Metallica drummer and notorious foe of internet downloaders be as candid about his tape copying past).

Are we seeing the decline and fall of the recording companies?

Ask not for whom the modem tolls...

J'accuse!

So, law enforcement in Canada has more important priorities than hunting people who download music from the internet.

I wish the recording industry would stop looking a gift horse in the mouth.

Caught in a web

MadJenny posted this video from the Writers Guild of America explaining the reasons for the Hollywood writers' strike. It succinctly explains their side of the issue:



Go to her site for more.