A Bit More Detail

Livejournaler dewline has posted on the nature of S.H.I.E.L.D., the paramilitary agency of great power in the Avengers universe that’s of uncertain constitutional status. He favours the idea of the agency as a paramilitary first-response team.

This post at The Economist‘s Game Theory blog, wondering why the NHL continues to invest in failing Sunbelt teams despite economic and sporting rationales to the contrary, is worth reading.

Although this year marks an unusual low, Canada has been in decline since the 1990s, when teams were lured to America by the promise of bigger audiences and a more lucrative television market. To the dismay of Canadians, it has been almost 20 years since one of their teams won the Stanley Cup (the Montreal Canadiens in 1993). Yet hockey has failed to capture the public imagination in America in the same way as baseball, basketball and American football, or to attract the support it enjoys in Canada. With Canada’s economy now in better shape than America’s, a few teams may be considering a move in the other direction.

The Phoenix Coyotes are the most likely to uproot themselves. Although the Coyotes have advanced to the conference finals in the Stanley Cup playoffs, turning in their best performance since making Arizona their home in 1996, they have been struggling financially. After declaring bankruptcy in 2009, they were taken over by the NHL. This year, they are expected to report annual operating losses of about $30m, despite receiving $25m in aid from Glendale, the suburban Phoenix community that owns their rink. Quebecois hope the Coyotes’ recent travails will persuade them to relocate to Quebec City, where Quebecor, the province’s largest media company, says it will support the construction of a C$400m ($400m) arena. Since losing the Quebec Nordiques to Denver, Colorado in 1995, locals have been desperate to acquire a new NHL side.

Even so, Gary Bettman, the NHL commissioner, wants to keep the team in Phoenix and may finally have found a buyer pledging to do so for another ten years. Although the NHL has denied those rumours, its resistance to a move north of the border would not come as a surprise. For a start, Glendale might object to any deal that would let the Coyotes depart Phoenix and leave the community with an empty arena. The NHL may also be unwilling to sell the team at the price suggested by prospective buyers, having sunk a lot of money into the Coyotes since 2009. Ultimately, the NHL may still believe that Phoenix is potentially a more profitable market than smaller Canadian cities. Mr Bettman was also the main force behind the strategy to relocate to America in the first place. He may think a retreat is tantamount to an embarrassing admission of a mistake.

Nevertheless, the NHL’s continuing enthusiasm for the Sun Belt is hard to fathom. Even before the sub-prime mortgage mess demolished the economies of many southern cities, hockey had struggled to win over the region’s sports fans. Back in the 1990s, the Canadian dollar was worth just 72–73 American cents, and its value had fallen to 63–64 cents by 2001–2, making it impossible for Canadian teams to match salaries paid in American dollars. But the loonie is now worth the same as the greenback. Bringing teams back to Canada would strengthen the league and make economic sense.

The latest incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets already provides some encouragement. Having moved from Atlanta last summer, the Jets just missed this season’s playoffs. But they won 37 games over the course of the season, three more than their seasonal average over their last four years in Atlanta, and were much better defensively, conceding 246 goals compared to the Atlanta average of 270. Could the difference have been down to the level of support they received at the MTS Centre in Winnipeg, compared with attendance at Atlanta’s Philips Arena? Within minutes of tickets going on sale, the Jets had sold out for the season. Average attendance per game in Atlanta was just 73% of seating capacity (although this still meant 13,469 fans per game, compared with 15,004 for each sold-out game in Winnipeg).

I think that the NHL only has a limited amount of time. A January 2011 History and Futility post I made argued that, slowly, as a result of ffactors including the high cost of equipment, the emergence of other sports, and immigration from hockey-lacking countries, the sport of hockey is on a slow decline in Canada. There’s still a huge fan base–Quebec City is still trying to echo Winnipeg’s achievement in getting its NHL team back–but will it last indefinitely? I fear not.

linked to journalist Catherine Solyom’s interview in the National Post with fugitive hacker Christopher Doyon. Doyon, allegedly one of the coordinators of the Anonymous movement of cyber-hackers, here in this article claims to have global reach and access to everything.

Q: Anonymous started out as online pranksters but has gotten a whole lot more serious in the last two years. What happened?
A: I believe Egypt was really a turning point for us emotionally in Anonymous. Obviously there was always that sort of prankster edge to us. But people often ask me, “Why are you so mean nowadays?” It started in Egypt – when you work for days to set up live video feeds and the first thing you watch through those feeds is people killing your friends with machine guns – that becomes personal. And then it’s not just Egypt, it’s Libya, Tunisia, over and over again these Freedom Ops are really what gave us a sort of take-no prisoners attitude. We get to know these people. It may not be the same as you and I sitting here, but when you Skype with people and spend hours and hours talking with them on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and they share their hopes and their dreams with you for their country, their future, when they tell you how they’re risking their lives so their children can have a better future in some far-off land, you bond with those people and they become your friends and family.

Q. What’s next for Anonymous?
A: Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems. The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defence who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that. The fact he had the 250,000 cables that were released effectively cut the power of the U.S. State Department in half. The Afghan war diaries and the Iran war diaries effectively cut the political clout of the U.S. Department of Defence in half. All because of one guy who had enough balls to slip a CD in an envelope and mail it to somebody.

Now people are leaking to Anonymous and they’re not coming to us with this document or that document or a CD, they’re coming to us with keys to the kingdom, they’re giving us the passwords and usernames to whole secure databases that we now have free reign over. … The world needs to be concerned.

Is this last sentence really true? Or is this just bragging?

What Andrew Barton said at Acts of Minor Treason. Building fiction universes which make sense, and which–when they diverge from the world we know–do so in ways that are readily comprehensible, is something that’s not only important for science fiction, either. Plausible characters and settings and plots count everywhere.

Sometimes it’s difficult to really wrap one’s head about why this is important. Recently I came across an article on Gizmodo regarding the Pentagon’s withdrawal of support from the movie The Avengers. As author Spencer Ackerman put it, their reason was that “the Defense Department didn’t think a movie about superheroes, Norse Gods and intergalactic invasions was sufficiently realistic in its treatment of military bureaucracy.” Presumably, the implied conclusion we’re supposed to draw is that this is ridiculous, hair-splitting stuff, and that the Pentagon is just being a bunch of jerks who want to cramp the movie’s style.

You know what, though? The military is right. According to the Defense Department, their main problem is that they couldn’t figure out where the US military stood in relation to S.H.I.E.L.D., which Wikipedia describes as an “espionage and secret military law-enforcement agency,” which really narrows it down – and, hell, I imagine it’s easy as hell to maintain secrecy over something like a giant flying aircraft carrier. S.H.I.E.L.D. has, from what I understand, been the subject of fan debates over just what it is for a good chunk of the last fifty years.

Answering questions like this is important. They define what you can and cannot do in a story, and as such reduce the unmanageability of everything being possible into more restricted channels that can guide the flow of a narrative. Something that is shadowy, nebulous, and ill-defined even to the people writing it does not lend itself well to the best writing. Creators need to know how their creations work, even if that information never filters down to the audience.

One of the Andrews I know on Facebook linked to Canadian science journalist Bob McDonald‘s post describing why the Canadian and Québec science writers’ organizations received a press freedom award. He’s right to note that we really shouldn’t be proud of the reasons why.

Posted in its entirety, due to its importance.

This past week, the Canadian Science Writers Association, and its Quebec equivalent, received the Press Freedom Award from the Canadian Committee for World Press Freedom and Canadian Commission for UNESCO for their efforts to stop the muzzling of Canadian federal scientists. The award was given on May 3, World Press Freedom Day.

The award is given to a Canadian person or group who has defended or advanced the cause of freedom of expression. The science writers collectively wrote an open letter to the prime minister last February, asking to free federal scientists from restrictions imposed on them when speaking to the press about their own work, especially those in environmental science.

This type of award is usually given to reporters working in countries where oppressive governments or dictatorships attempt to control the press and threaten the lives of journalists pursuing the truth. It’s not the type of issue we normally associate with Canada.

Every year, another organization, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, honours journalists, usually from a war-torn or oppressed country, who have risked their lives just doing their job – seeking the truth and informing the public. The huge gala evening, which I have had the privilege to witness, is attended by hundreds of journalists in all media from across the country who support our international colleagues.

The event is a highly emotional one, as we listen to the tragic and heroic stories of journalists who have had their families threatened, been shot at or even killed by governments that do not want the media’s message to be heard.

Hearing about the difficulties journalists in other countries face underlines how privileged we are in Canada to uphold the principles of journalistic integrity.

But this award to the Canadian Science Writers Association is a sign that the tip of that oppressive iceberg is showing here.

Of course, no science writers are being threatened, but there have been numerous incidents where journalists, including us at Quirks & Quarks, have requested interviews with federal scientists about their own work and have either been refused or delayed access until after our deadlines by government media relations.

The scientific perspective on the world is an important one because science is the pursuit of truth. Most of the universe is still unknown to us, whether it be the dynamics of our atmosphere and how it interacts with the oceans, land and life, or the dark matter hidden between the stars.

We know that human activity has had a negative impact on our planet and we need to make some hard decisions about ways to reduce that impact without destroying the economy or our way of life. Those decisions need the scientific point of view. Science is the voice of reason that is often overshadowed by political, social or economic priorities.

This is not to say that science has all the answers, nor should decisions be made for purely scientific reasons. But that perspective needs to be part of the mix, and for that reason, the scientists need to be heard.

So, congratulations to the Canadian Science Writers Association for the award – but it’s really a bit of a sad day for Canada.

Me, my guilty pleasure is Star Trek tie-in novels, most specifically the ones that have been written in a shared continuity over the past fifteen or so years.

What can I say? Well, not only do I like reading but I am a Star Trek fan. I do like revisiting many of the characters and settings of the television series and movies in print. The novels written in a shared continuity explore, with an enjoyable degree of consistency and at least a minimal level of skill, a universe that’s fleshed out, and in many cases given considerably greater and more plausible detail than any of the canonical productions ever have or are likely to go into. There’s even an active online community: I know at least four people on my Livejournal friends list through Trek literature, either as readers or (in at least one case) as a writer. (The TrekBBS Trek literature forum can be a fun place to hang out.)

Is this high literature? No, but I don’t think everything I read has to be high literature. Is it the only literature I read? No. (The only fiction? No.) So, what’s the harm?

And you?

Bruce Sterling linked to this interesting post at Library of Congress digital preservation blog The Signal by Bill LeFurgy about the dubious prospects facing floppy disks. This storage medium, it turns out, is quite fragile.

Damn. Are the disks at home all pointless? (The same goes, only more so, for my Commodore 64 disks: older and using defunct formats.)

Floppy disks are both a bane and a blessing to digital preservationists. The blessing part centers on their potential for providing digital details from the past, especially from the period before widespread use of the internet to disseminate information. Depending on who used them for what they might contain significant literary manuscripts, rare data sets, revealing presentations or perhaps important family information. In any event, it’s quite possible that whatever is on a floppy is unique.

Bane comes into the picture for just about everything else. Disks may not, for example, have labels or any other clear way to identify their origin or their content. A box of unidentified disks is about as human understandable as a box of rocks. Determining what is on the disks requires very specific computer hardware that likely went obsolete years ago. You’ll need a specialty disk drive with a specialty controller that may or may not work with a modern computer. For that purpose you may need to acquire something like a Catweasel (the computer device, as distinct from the children’s TV show or the pro-wrestler). Or you might have to buy some vintage computer hardware and hope it still works.

The crux of the matter comes down to how good a job a disk has done in retaining the bits entrusted to it. Often the results are unhappy. As one writer notes, “if you still have boxes of floppies sitting in your attic or basement or grandparents’ place or wherever else, I’m telling you the days of it being a semi-dependable storehouse are over.” That’s because the disks are fragile constructions that were never designed for permanence. The Florida Division of Library and Information Services describes how the binder glue that is used to hold magnetic particles on a disk can be easily damaged from high levels of heat and humidity. “It can become soft and sticky, or it can become quite brittle… brittle binder flakes off the plastic base, taking the magnetic particles (and thus the information recorded on the particles) with it.” In other words, disks can and do fail with alarming regularity.

In the comments to yesterday’s post regarding a guest on the brothers Ford’s radio show who launched into all sorts of homophobic speech without getting a reprimand, Livejournaler suitablyemoname alerted me to what’s probably the definitive word on whether or not Rob Ford is a homophobe. In his words?

All he has to do–literally–is read a two-minute proclamation, get his photo taken shaking a few hands, and he can move on with his life. He won’t even do that. He doesn’t even have to touch a gay person: this is PFLAG, so if he only wants to be photographed with heterosexual grandmothers, that’s entirely possible to arrange. But this is evidently still a bridge too far.

He’s a homophobe.

The Globe and Mail‘s article is below.

Mayor Rob Ford is passing up another opportunity to support the gay and lesbian community, this time opting to skip a flag-raising outside his office that will be attended by Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Brian Burke.

The Toronto chapter of Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays has confirmed that Mr. Ford turned down its invitation to a flag-raising to mark the International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia in Nathan Phillips Square on May 17.

The event was considered among the likeliest to draw the reluctant mayor – it’s low-key, conveniently located and not part of the formal Pride Week celebrations.

Irene Miller, the president of Toronto PFLAG, began sending the mayor’s office invitations in February.

In a letter she called warm and gracious, the mayor’s office replied in late April that Mr. Ford couldn’t fit the event into his schedule.

“We will continue to keep that door open in the hopes that … the mayor will one day come with us,” Ms. Miller said.

Councillor Kristyn Wong-Tam, whose ward includes the Gay Village, described the May 17 event as “gentle” and “welcoming.” Among the confirmed guests is Mr. Burke, whose late son was gay.

“It would have been wonderful to see the mayor there,” she said. “In many ways, it might have taken the question away about whether or not he supports the LGBT community.”

The mayor will sign the proclamation – as he does for every official day or week the city proclaims through its protocol office – but Councillor Gord Perks will read it in his stead.

When the right-wing National Post comes up with such a bitingly ironic headline for Natalie Alcoba’s article on Mayor Rob Ford, it’s a safe bet that it’s slipping. (And when, as here, the comments seem to be equally divided between supporters and opponents of the mayor, something’s up.)

Mayor Rob Ford joined members of Canada’s ethnic press at City Hall on Monday to emphasize “the need to respect press freedom.”

The occasion marked the United Nation’s World Press Freedom Day, which was May 3.

“The day serves as a reminder that violations of press freedom occur in countries around the world where journalists, editors, publishers are harassed, detained, attacked and killed,” said Mayor Ford, who has himself been embroiled in a public dispute with the Toronto Star after a confrontation with a reporter outside his home last week.

The Mayor has threatened not to take part in press conferences if a Star reporter is present. Mr. Ford accuses Star reporter Daniel Dale of spying on his house.

Mr. Dale denies the allegation, saying he was in the area last Wednesday to inspect a piece of parkland that the Mayor wants to purchase next to his house.

The Mayor did not take questions after he read the proclamation on Monday.

The extended interview of Alternet’s Joshua Holland with Charles Johnson, the blogger behind Little Green Footballs, makes for remarkable reading. The mechanics of the transition of Little Green Footballs from crazy right-wing blog to something altogether different is important, I think.

JH: You were always kind of an anachronistic right-wing blogger. You’re a highly accomplished jazz guitarist; you always seemed to care about the environment. What were your politics like on September 10 or during the Clinton years?

CJ: My politics in one sense didn’t change because even when I started to be more associated with right-wing blogs and that whole milieu I was still what you call a social liberal. I never went in for the religious right stuff. In fact the rising importance and power of those kind of people in the Republican Party is one of the reasons why I finally had to just go elsewhere.

[. . .]

JH: [. . .A]long the way, and correct me if I’m wrong because I was an outsider looking in, it seems the tipping point came in 2007 when you had this epic flame war with Pamela Geller, who remains one of the country’s biggest bigots to this day. Geller was behind this ridiculous Ground Zero mosque controversy and was an apparent inspiration for Anders Breivik, who murdered 70-plus Norwegians last year. Tell me about that incident. And what is Vlaams Belang?

CJ: So you’ve been googling around a bit. Actually the split between me and the far-right blogging scene had begun before that, but that was one of the big schism points. It wasn’t just Pamela Geller, but Robert Spencer and those who called themselves the “anti-Jihad bloggers.” They had gone to Belgium to have a meeting with a bunch of European like-minded bloggers and other personalities. When I discovered that one of the people there was Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang party, which actually is a successor to a party called Vlaams Blok, which was banned by the Belgian government for their neo-Nazi roots and extreme-right hate speech. What they did is basically reform the image of the party, but didn’t change much else.

When I discovered that this was one of the people they were making alliances with, I said I can’t. This is not for me. I started to criticize people like Pamela Geller. Geller in response started to lash out at me with incredible viciousness, which is kind of her standard mode of operation, and it went from there. Basically the more I looked into and really started to investigate the connections that were forming between these people and the American anti-Jihad blogging scene, the more I realized there’s something really wrong here. We’re talking about people who are fascists, who not only have neo-Nazi connections but also have connections to real, oldtime Nazis, the real Nazis from the Third Reich.

At that point I had a real gut check. It was a moment where things kind of changed — I began to look at things differently.