Friends once known

In the late 1980's, returning home to Ottawa from a business trip to Edmonton, I suddenly paused, in the rush of people leaving arrivals at the Ottawa International Airport.  Coming towards me was a white-bearded gentleman maybe twenty years older than I. Our eyes met and his lit up with recognition before he was swept forward by the crush pushing towards departures. That was the last time I saw Don Heap, member of parliament for the Toronto riding of Spadina. He was most likely leaving his weekday parliamentary office and heading home to his family in Toronto for the weekend. My life has frequently been touched by people like Don (who went by the first name of "Dan" in public office). I was in his home in Toronto in 1965 when the telephone rang. It was Don phoning from Selma, Alabama where he had gone to join a civil rights march. I was in the house alone and had a difficult time trying to make out what the operator in Alabama was trying to tell me, her accent being so thick.

If you check out Don's Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Heap there is a sentence that reads from the 1960's to 1980's "as many as a dozen young people stay[ed] with the Heap family at one time.^" I was one of those young people, though during the six months I bunked at the Heaps' home, I was the only one not a member of the immediate family. It was a period of transition in my life--from being a lost high school dropout to getting myself geared up to enter university in a few years, thus taking the steps that led from a life of low-paying entry-level casual jobs to a professional deplaning from a week-long business trip to the other side of the country.  

The first time I met the Heaps I was at a peace camp located not far from La Macaza, Quebec where American Bomarc missiles were stationed at the Canadian Forces Base. This would have been in the summer of 1964. At the time the previous government of John Diefenbaker had refused to allow the Americans to arm the missiles with nuclear warheads, but the new government under Lester Pearson (ironically winner of the 1957 Nobel Peace Prize) elected in April 1963 agreed to accept them. I was one of a small group who prevented access to the base for 24 hours in order to draw attention to the issue. Well, we did make the cover of MacLean's Magazine and Pierre Trudeau ordered the dismantling of the base in 1972. (Two highly negative outcomes of the original decision to accept the missiles in the first place: Canada had to cede control of the launch of the missiles to the American military even though the missiles were on a Canadian forces base on Canadian territory and, secondly, Diefenbaker scrapped Canada's outstanding Avro Arrow program arguing it was redundant in light of the acquisition of American missiles. This effectively killed the Canadian aviation industry and to this day the Avro Arrow could have outperformed many of the standard military aircraft available. In other words, we could have avoided all these Eh-101 military helicopter and F-35 military aircraft scandals and political quagmires.) But, who was going to listen to an 18-year-old kid at the time? I was right then and subsequent events have bourn that out.

Back to the story: a cry went up at camp when a beat-up old white panel truck arrived, "The Heaps are here! The Heaps are here!" It seemed like dozens of blond-haired kids spilled out of the truck and scattered throughout the camp, greeting everyone. Don and Alice were received as leaders of the protest group. Back in Toronto I stayed with a group of University of Toronto students in an old house on Huron Avenue. Alice Heap was at the time secretary of the Student Christian Movement, a nation-wide campus-situated social activist organization and many members of my household were active supporters. (Yes, I know some will find it hard to believe, but the original hippy movement began as a religious organization. It organized "peace camps" across the country every summer to that students could live and work together while studying the social issues of the day. Nothing like working in a garment factory in Ville LaSalle while living in Point Charles  to learn to appreciate just what poverty was about. Even better: try it now: the garment factories are all closed.)

Alice Heap (2012). Don is in the background.

 

So, I met Alice frequently and Don occasionally lead communion services (he was/is an ordained Anglican priest.) When for various reasons I could not continue to live in the student house, Alice invited me to use an empty bedroom in their home. I paid room and board and did my share of family chores (Alice ran the home as a cooperative enterprise where everyone had a role and contributions to make. One of mine was to keep the kitchen floor clean. Every second night after everyone was in bed, I washed then waxed the floor.) I was working as a night security guard then: every second night I worked 5:00 pm until 8:00 am walking the campus of Connaught Labs in northern Toronto. Between rounds I wrote. Mostly poetry, filling notebook after notebook, struggling to figure out my place in the scheme of things. By the fall, I joined another student co-op group and started taking night courses. It didn't work out, but it led me to a job at the University of Toronto in the chemistry department where I stayed for two years before I was accepted as a university student in Montreal.

During those years the Heaps were very much a part of my social landscape. Gatherings at the Heap's were common. Don and I never spoke much, as I recall, but he was there at the party my girlfriend threw for me a day before I left for Montreal and an entirely new life. Even though I was established in Montreal, I still visited the Heap household from time to time over the years and followed Don's career in politics, first as a municipal counsellor  in Toronto and then as a Member of Parliament. In 1973 one night (2:00 am) I saw their eldest daughter riding a bicycle through the streets of Montreal. I phoned her and learned she was working in a factory in order to study the issues of the working poor. Google "Danny Heap" (professor at the University of Toronto) and "David Heap" (professor at University of Western Ontario) if you want to find out about two of Don and Alice's sons and the international stirs they have caused over the years.

Today Don suffers from Alzheimer's and lives in a nursing home. Alice died this past March. As for their home, they gave it away so it could be used to house refugees. I miss having people like Don and Alice in my life.

A Christmas Carol

This is the last work I wrote for a church choir--a local all-male group. Though the conductor was enthusiastic, too many of the members had problems with a Christmas carol that included references to homeless children, prostitutes, abused run-aways, those dying in alley-ways, and lost rich men and so it was never performed. Too bad because I thought it had a lot more to do with the Christmas message than fat elves dressed in red, dancing snowmen, and a celebration of excessive-consumption.

Children Sleeping Under Bridges

A Christmas Carol by Ronald J Brown

 

 Children sleeping under bridges

dark December rain

Woman begging at the curbside

coughing deep in pain.

Hopeless, fearing, desperate, daring

headlights shining through the darkness:

They hear a baby cry.

Baby in the chaffing straw

crying just for them;

Wrapped in rags, he knows their pain

crying just for them.

 

Young girl standing under streetlight

waiting for a ride.

Suffocating in a fever,

never had much pride.

Bruised, abandoned, no one caring;

she cries her father's name:

And hears a baby cry.

Baby in the darkest night

crying just for her;

Baby takes her pain and calls her

calling only her.

Old man, cardboard house collapsing,

this his only home;
Gasps and struggles, snow encrusted,
dying all alone.
Searching, needing, defeated, groping
curses his life and all he's known:
He hears a baby cry.
Baby in a cold dark cave
crying just for him;
Brought into this world to die
crying just for him.

Rich man inside glass and steel,

sees the scene below.
There are barriers, layers, shadows
he has never known.
Emptiness is his only guidance;
he lives inside a void:
Yet hears a baby cry.
Baby calling out his name
through all time and space;
reaching for him, reaching for us,
calling you and me.

 

Taxing Times: Part Two

My biggest failing as a tax preparer was that some clients interpreted my responses to them as my being rude. For example, one gentleman was very angry because I would not include his mortgage payments as a deduction. (Clarity: mortgage payments have never been a deductable personal expense in Canada; perhaps he was confused by the Americans who allow mortgage interest as a deduction). Result: a bitter complaint to my boss about how rude and uncooperative I was. I ran into many such cases during my six years of income tax return preparation.

Child care expenses sometimes caused some conflicts. It has been the case in Canadian tax laws for as long as I can remember that there are two kinds of private child care providers: those who provide receipts and those who don't. The idea is that if someone is going to claim child care as an expense, someone else is going to have to declare it as income. It all has to balance out. To support this position, the government insists that child care receipts contain either the name of a professional company or the social insurance number of a private individual providing this service. I don't make the rules, but, judging by the reactions of some clients, you'd think I was some sort of arbitrary tyrant. More than a half dozen clients expressed outrage when I told them that social insurance numbers of their providers are required; some insisting that they have been making the claim for years and no one every asked for this information before. It really didn't matter what my personal views were (my job was to prepare accurate returns in any case), but my software would not process the claim without a valid social insurance number. Result: a flurry of complaints to my boss about how rude and uncooperative I was.

I learned to hate preparing returns for restaurant and bar servers. It never ceased to amaze how few of them actually made any tips and those who did made miniscule amounts. That didn't jive with my personal experience as a patron of such places—and I don't think I am the only person in North America to actually leave a tip for my server. But, it certainly appeared that way according to the stories that such employees told me at tax time. One young lady had worked for a short time as a dancer in an Ottawa strip joint and told me with a straight face that she earned only minimum wage and no tips whatsoever.  I couldn't help but think that not only must she been a terrible dancer, but she must have hideous and terrifying scars revealed when she takes off her clothes. In any case, I would tell my tip-less victims of the Quebec tax situation: the Quebec government decides how much such employees earned in tips  based on a percentage of their paid wages and the classification of the establishment. The rates ranged between 100% and 400% of their stated earnings. And I was facing people who insisted that they could not possibly have earned more than 10% of their hourly wage in tips. I could not accuse a client of lying and I was required to accept whatever they told me in such situations at face value, but I did feel obliged to give them a warning. The government could examine credit card and cash register receipts to get a more accurate assessment of someone's tips. When audited they'd be sure to try to lay the blame on me as the tax preparer, so I did try to get the message across that it was on them, not me. Results: many calls to my boss to complain about how rude and uncooperative I was.

Rent receipts! I could write a chapter in a book about the problems I encountered with rent receipts, but let's stick to one situation I ran into fairly frequently: parents issuing rent receipts to their teenage children. It can be a grey area, but, as with child care, if someone is making the deduction, then someone else has to declare the income. I'd usually run into this with teenage boys making their first tax return. They'd give me a piece of paper saying that their mother told them to give me this.  I'd see it was a receipt for rent and ask if their mother was planning to declare it as income. I'd usually get a stumbling muttered reply, mixed with surprise and an admission that no, she wasn't. I would then tell them that they couldn't claim it. They were usually too shy and confused to argue. But, I ran into one very ugly case. Older tax preparers had been playing fast and loose with tax rules for years because they were paid on a commission basis—the higher the refund the more they'd be paid. By the time I entered the scene, commissions were a thing of the past, so there was no more incentive to stretch a point in order to make a few more dollars. However, older tax preparers found change difficult to accept.

I was working alone in the office during the summer when faced with an angry set of parents accompanied by their thirteen year old daughter. The government had just rejected the daughter's submission of rent receipts on the grounds that the parents had not declared the resulting income and, besides, parents cannot charge a 13-year-old rent. The girl was handicapped and had a small disability income, which was the basis of the refund that the government now wanted returned to them. The mother was particularly incensed, accusing me of being some sort of monster for trying to take money from a handicapped thirteen-year-old (a number of clients could not distinguish between me, a tax preparer  and go-between, and the government, who set the rules and collected the money). I tried to explain that the daughter should not have been given the refund in the first place and that the government simply wanted back the money that she was not entitled to. My argument had no effect. The original return had been prepared by someone with many more years experience than I and so I must be wrong (even though I had nothing to do with the government's ruling and was simply trying to explain it to them).  The struggle went on for weeks until my boss asked me to write a summary of the case and the tax laws behind it. She then presented my write-up to another senior tax preparer who told her that my analysis was correct and that the original tax preparer and the parents were wrong. The parents had often complained loudly during this exercise that I was rude and uncooperative.

 I had an soft spot for single moms. (One was even relaxed enough with me to pop out a breast and feed her baby while we worked on her return.) Despite many people's perceptions, most of the ones I encountered were struggling in very difficult circumstances to protect and to raise their children as best they could. How or why they were in the situation they were in was irrelevant: they were living in a reality of here and now, not in the fantasies of some self-righteous and moralizing person who never had to make a difficult decision in their life. The problem, though, that some presented me with, was the involvement of a spouse—common law or otherwise. The thing is, under tax law, one is allowed to claim one dependent with a deduction equivalent to the personal deduction (the amount the government determines that you are allowed to earn tax free before any other deductions are considered. It is currently set at about $11,000.) Normally, the "dependent" is one's spouse—and anything that they earn is deducted from the spousal deduction. So, a spouse earning more than $11,000 is neutral as far as your own taxable income is concerned.

 Now, in the situation where there is no spouse, the dependent can be anyone else in your immediate family (the law is quite specific about the ages and relationships allowed). In most cases this is a child—and usually a child with no income. For a single parent, then, this is a considerable tax saving. The $11,000 deduction usually translates into a refund of about $2,000.  So, when faced with a young couple and child who would tell me with a straight face that they were "just friends"—even when the child was referring to the male as "Daddy"—I would have to question fairly closely and give them a subtle warning about the government cross-checking their addresses, which is something is does fairly often. I hated that part because I was treading on very sensitive ground. The question really boiled down to the sexual relationship between the couple—and I did not want to know. It meant so much money to them that they probably thought the "white lie" was worth it; while my job was to protect them from possible prosecution.

I was much happier when the mother and child were alone so that I didn't have to ask anything more personal than "Are you living with anyone?" For the most part I was happy that the mother received a healthy cheque to buy her child some warm clothing or purchase some other form of relief from the daily indignities of poverty. I was not happy when a mother would remark to her friend, "Good, now I can buy that I-pod." (I made it a habit, when doing returns for couples, to always hand any refund cheques to the woman. If they asked why, my standard answer was: "A woman knows what her family needs; a man just knows what he wants." Sometimes the male would get angry—and there'd be another call to my boss about how rude and uncooperative I was. Almost every women smiled knowingly at my remark.)

 One busy night a man arrived with his 16-year-old daughter, newborn on her lap. I prepared the girl's return while the father beamed happily. Her refund was only a token $150 sales tax credit for her and the baby. After all, she was not, and never had been, employed, and so there was nothing to base any other tax credits or deductions on. An hour or so after they left the father phoned to complain that I had cheated them out of a couple of thousand dollars. He said he had checked around and found out that there was an automatic tax refund for women with children and every woman he knew had received it. What kind of con game was I trying to pull? I tried to politely explain that there was no "automatic tax refund" and, in any case, his daughter had no income to base any refunds on. Sigh! Another complaint about how rude and uncooperative I was.

 And yes, I got more than my share of complaints about how someone's friend, in precisely the same income tax situation, had received a refund of a couple of thousand dollars from some other tax preparer, yet I had given her only a hundred or so. There is no answer for that one because it would violate client confidentiality to check out someone else's return to confirm or deny the claim. I could review the client's return and confirm that it had been prepared correctly and I could suggest they take it to some other tax preparer for review, but such situations usually meant another note about how rude and uncooperative I was in my boss's notebook.

 I had more than one client inform me indignantly that "the client is always right." In most cases, nothing could be further from the truth. The reason they were paying me to prepare their returns, instead of doing them themselves, was that I knew what needed to be done,  and what was acceptable and what wasn't. Seems a bit counterproductive to argue with the guy you are paying about whether or not you can deduct the cost of off-the-shelf medications. If you could, I would be the first to point it out as I always tried to give my clients the largest refund allowable under the law. After all, it was their money to begin with and they were entitled to every dime I could get for them. That was also part of my job description. But, telling people that they could not deduct $10 for a bottle of aspirin, even though they really needed it and their doctor said it was a good idea, was grounds for a call about how rude and uncooperative I was.

 But, what do you do when the client is insisting that you are dead? Seriously. That really happened to me. A senior tax preparer I had admired died suddenly the season before. A couple stared at me after they sat down in my cubicle and told me that they had heard I was dead. I denied it, but they persisted, "No. We heard it. People said that the old guy died." I told them that there was more than one old guy and that they were thinking of someone else. No, it was you, they insisted. Well, I'm pretty sure that I didn't die. They stayed to prepare their returns, but did not seem convinced. I really don't know, but, I would not be surprised to learn that another call about how rude and uncooperative I was made that evening.

What Canada's Conservatives can teach America's Republicans

The Republicans in the US could learn a thing or two from Canada’s Stephan Harper’s Conservatives. Early on in the emergence of Canada’s new Conservative Party from the wreckage of the Progressive Conservative and Reform Parties, the leadership recognized that if they were going to win elections they’d have to drop divisive policies and shut their most extremist members up. In 2004 they voted to accept that Canada is a bilingual country (a reality that conservatives had long denied) and not to bring up the subject of abortion and other equally emotional issues, like same sex marriage. They also seem to have recognized that to bring up the subject of capital punishment would only cost them votes despite the fact that a majority of voters appear to support state executions.

This is something they had to do if they expected to ever form a government. That many Canadians suspected that Harper’s Conservatives had a “hidden agenda” and would act to criminalize abortion, bring back capital punishment, ban same-sex marriage, etc. played a large part in their managing to achieve only minority status in two federal elections. However, the few extremists in the party who did make headlines were very quickly and effectively shut down. It was only after voters had relaxed enough to realize that it was highly unlikely that Harper would allow such divisive issues to come to the fore that he was given a majority mandate (the fact that the federal Liberal party had self-destructed also helped).

In other words, the American Republican Party needs to work to rid itself of the image that it is a party of wing nuts. It is gratifying to see that the senate candidates who expressed views that are repugnant to any thinking person (legitimate rape—whatever the H that is—can’t cause pregnancy and rape is part of God’s plan) were defeated. But, there are a lot of members remaining in the Republican Party who can’t seem to grasp basic science and reason. Instead of denying the reality of global climate change, for example, and dismissing scientists with pejorative comments, they could present their plan for dealing with the issues. Instead of focusing on whether the current president is an American citizen or a secret Muslim, they could tell voters how they would deal with the issues in other than vague and meaningless slogans. They should distance themselves from radio commentators who characterize female university students who want access to birth control as “sluts.”

Harper’s Conservatives appear to have realized that all citizens have a vote and need to be convinced to support them in elections. To that end, government ministers have made an effort to reach out to minorities. They speak at ethnic community centres, eat dim sum, and work with ethnic community leaders. Compare that to the dismissive and condescending attitude many Republicans appear to have towards minority groups, especially those of recent immigrants. There were some interesting comments made on Fox news about how the white middle class male is becoming a minority in the USA. Instead of lamenting that fact, political parties who ignore it are hitching themselves to a dwindling block of voters.

While I oppose many Conservative policies I still feel that communication is possible and that I can debate the issues with them. I have no idea how I could ever hold any sort of conversation with someone who seems to think that God is going to unleash Armageddon unless I vote the way they think I ought to—and someone who suggests that anyone who holds views that differ from theirs are not “true” Americans—or that the world outside America’s borders is filled with envious and resentful enemies seeking the destruction and subversion of their country. I think a lot of Americans would be stunned to learn that most of the world’s population has absolutely no desire to become American citizens and harbours no feelings one way or the other towards the United States except to wish that they’d stop meddling in the affairs of other countries.

In any case...Canada’s Conservative Party has one huge advantage over their American counterparts: Canada has no television network devoted to 24 hour coverage of lies, misinformation, disinformation, and the promotion of nut-case viewpoints. Yes, I'm saying that FOX News Network is the American Republican Party’s single largest handicap. FOX helps spread the image that the Republican Party is completely divorced from reality. For example, it does not matter what President Obama does: FOX will characterize it in the most negative light it can, even if some Republicans have earlier supported the same policies and actions as the president, and, even if they have to lie to support their opinions. They would gain some credulity if they could occasionally give credit where it is due instead of digging so hard to convince their viewers that the opposite of what the “lame stream media” reported had occurred. It is FOX news that is creating the illusion that America is a deeply divided country.

Frankly, I don’t think that America is divided at all—at least not in the way the pundits would have us believe. I suspect that Americans, like most humans on this planet, are more concerned with loving their families and friends, gaining in self-respect, contributing to their societies, and just getting along than they are with the opinions of the political classes and their minions and apologists. Any political party that can’t “get” that is doomed to failure.

And that’s my two cents on the election this week.

I'm no teacher's pet.

As a teacher, and then a parent with children going through our school system, I was often appalled by the level of education of teachers I met and worked with. We encountered teachers who sent home notes with basic spelling and grammar errors; teachers who taught our children about American Thanksgiving traditions but had never heard of Canadian ones; teachers who could not spell Shakespeare or were obsessed with what colour dividers our son used in his notebook; a science teacher who insisted that a computer had a hard disk drive because he “could tell by the size of the case;” an ethics teacher who told his class that homosexuals were condemned to hell;  English teachers who could not name a single Canadian author; a history teacher who had not heard of  the Upper and Lower Canada Rebellions of 1837; a teacher who told me that ect was French for etc. When questioned about these basic elements of their jobs we encountered defensiveness and a dismissive attitude suggested that they were the experts and we were mere parents who couldn't possibly have the expertise to question them.

We have been taught to “respect” teachers as authorities on their subject areas and, to a fair extent, that is a valid position. However, this does not take into account the reality of our educational world. Despite what we would like to believe, it is possible to work as a teacher in our schools with no training or certification. True, that is most often an exceptional case when someone with the necessary qualifications cannot be located—such as an auto shop teacher with a university degree and teacher certification—but, as recently as 1973 I was hired as a regular full-time teacher of general subjects even though I had not received any training as a teacher, nor did I have any qualification other than a bachelor’s degree. Later in the 1970’s and early ‘80’s (after I had become fully trained and certified) I worked with teachers hired on a similar basis.

Historically there were no special requirements for assuming the role of a teacher other than a willingness to spend one’s days with children and to conform to the political and social expectations of the community. In other words, teachers were often young women, teenagers themselves, passing time in the neither world between completing their schooling and marriage. It was not uncommon for someone with a grade eight education to teach grade seven, for example. “Finishing schools,” which developed to educate young women in the ways of marriage and etiquette, became, for many, the de facto teacher-training schools. Teaching, until very recently, was geared towards creating obedient future citizens with the rudimentary skills needed to support their communities.  

Today a university degree and being certified by the state does not ensure that a teacher is competent nor does it mean that anyone without those qualifications cannot be a good teacher. First of all, what kind of degrees do most teachers possess? Generally speaking, unless we are talking of a very specialized subject area, a teacher will hold a general arts bachelor’s degree. What this means is that they have taken an introductory-level course in literature, general science, a second language, a social science course (sociology or psychology), and a “philosophy” course—which these days could mean anything from studying Aristotle to living in a commune for a term. After that, they've taken an additional 10 or so courses to broaden their study of one or more of those general subject areas, but with a smattering of other subjects thrown in. After graduation if they want to become teachers they can take a one-year diploma course on general education topics like education law, classroom management, using media in the classroom, etc.  The other route, generally speaking, is to pursue a bachelor’s degree in education. This degree is virtually identical to a general BA, except that the student takes a few more education-related courses.

Have you spotted the flaw in the system yet? Nowhere, in any of a teacher’s training, is he or she required to study anything in depth. A student can receive a degree without taking anything other than a single entry-level literature course and be fully qualified to teach secondary school English literature. The situation is even more marked when you consider that this person can now teach history in our schools—without ever taking a history course themselves past the high school level. In fact, many of the history and geography teachers I encountered over the years had no training at all in those subject areas and their level of knowledge was about on par with the average senior primary school student—in other words, a mixture of myth and parroted material with no understanding or questioning of the basic assumptions of what they had been presented with by teachers with no special knowledge or training themselves.

Here is a little quiz for secondary level teachers. Any teacher comfortable with his subject area should be able to breeze through such questions without having to stop to stammer. If they are evasive, vague, or dismissive in their attitude, then you might want to look a little more closely at what, exactly, they are presenting to your children each day in the classroom.

Ask your child’s history teacher to name a well-known Canadian historian. After all, if the teacher is not familiar with historians, then where is he or she getting their course material and background understanding from? I would be happy if one of my children’s teachers could name just one from the following list; ecstatic if they could name three or more.

Here are some examples of well-known Canadian historians: Jack Granatstein, Donald Creighton, Jean Provencher, Lionel-Adolphe Groulx, William Lewis Morton, George Ramsay Cook, Pierre Berton, Helmut Kallmann, Peter C Newman.

I would expect a secondary school geography teacher to be able to describe where and what is notable about the following places in Canada: Burgess Shale, Taiga Shield, Qu'Appelle Valley, Ivvavik National Park. They should also be able to name and locate at least ten significant Canadian rivers and I would also expect them to be able to name the capital cities of all Canadian provinces and territories (as my children could by the time they were five years old) as well as be able to distinguish between St. John and St. John’s. 

A teacher of secondary school English literature should be familiar with the works of many of Canada’s authors and poets. Canada is, after all, world-renown for its writers and poetry and I would expect all of the names of the following novelists and poets to be, at a minimum, instantly recognizable to a specialist in literature in a Canadian school.

Novelists: Margaret Atwood, Morley Callaghan, Robertson Davies, William Gibson, Anne Hébert, Margaret Laurence, Gabrielle Roy, Stephen Leacock, Ann-Marie MacDonald, Hugh MacLennan, Yann Martel, W.O. Mitchell, Alice Munro, Michael Ondaatje, Mordecai Richler, Carol Shields. Poets: Milton Acorn,  F. R. O. Scott, George Bowering,  Louis Dudek, Irving Layton, Dennis Lee, Dorothy Livesay, Susan Musgrave, Alden Nowlan, P.K. Page, Al Purdy, Raymond Souster.

Math teachers should have no trouble describing the meanings of the following types of numbers: natural, integers, rational, real, and complex. I expect the teacher to be able to give me an example of several prime numbers and an example of a Fibonacci sequence. I would also expect that the teacher could, without aid of calculator or having to think very hard, tell me the binary and hexadecimal representations of the decimal number 10 (ans: binary: 1010; hexadecimal: a.)

If you think any of these questions are “too difficult” for your teacher, then I would not want that teacher in my child’s classroom. Nothing, in any of the above, is anything that someone with a passing interest in the subject should have any difficulty with—and I want my teachers to have a bit more than a passing interest.

Etc.

I've been assisting with the editing of numerous research studies lately. In scientific research papers the “references” sections lists studies that the author referenced when writing his paper. Each publication has its standard format, but, some elements are common. For example, it is general policy that words in the title and author’s names be spelled correctly. It is a good idea to supply accurate information about what publication and in what issue and page range the referenced article originally appeared. The formats spell out the order of the elements presented in a reference, how they are punctuated, and how many author names should be listed. That last is important. Some research papers could have fifteen or twenty authors. Sometimes the first six authors are listed in a reference, sometimes only the first three, but, in any case, when the list of authors has been truncated, the expression et al. is added to the list.

One would assume that anyone familiar with any kind of research paper, medical or otherwise, would be familiar with the expression et al. and know what it means. After all, it appears in any list of publications and articles. Apparently, though, it is not always the case that a paper’s author knows what he is doing when he encounters it. I have seen it written as eta,  e.t.a.l.,  e tal,  et la,  and other very odd-looking variants. Of course, Latin is not taught as part of the general curriculum any more, so I can understand anyone younger than I am not being aware of the original Latin expression that is abbreviated here. Et alia is a neuter plural expression meaning “and all the remainder (of those people).” Or, in plain English: “and the rest of those guys.” Knowing that, the abbreviation immediately makes sense and should stick in one’s memory like glue.

 Another common Latin abbreviation frequently seen (perhaps too frequently) is etc. It is a lazy man’s way of ending a list when he has run out of examples. The complete original Latin is et cetera meaning (similar to et alia) “and all the other similar items.” Again, knowing that the abbreviation is taken from the first three letters of the expression should help make it unforgettable. However, when I was teaching English I frequently encountered this odd variant: ect. It didn't seem to matter how often I corrected it in student essays; it was ubiquitous. One day I remarked on this to a fellow teacher who explained to me that ect was the French form of etc. I don’t recall what I said, but it most likely was something very rude about ignoramuses being allowed to teach in our school system. Since when does the Latin language change depending on the native language of the speaker? French Latin, English Latin, Russia Latin? Come on; let’s get real here. And, as for abbreviations, one letter does not arbitrarily jump from one location in the series to another.

While I am on the subject, please take note that the et in the expressions in not pronounced the same way as it is in French—with a silent t. The t in Latin is very much pronounced. In fact, the e is not pronounced the same in both languages either. In Latin, it is a short e while in French it is more like a long a sound. Be that as it may, I grow weary of Caesar electing to speak in French when uttering the three words: et tu, Brute from his final speech. He more likely would have used his native language of Latin with a short initial e and both T’s distinctly articulated.

No, I do no think we should go back to mandatory Latin instruction in our schools. But, I would like to see better-educated teachers who are familiar with the structures, reasoning, and history behind our language in classrooms. The teacher who tried to tell me that Latin is a different language to French speakers than it is to English speakers was not an isolated example of the appalling and outrageous ignorance that I have encountered in my more than 60 years of interaction with the public school system (as a student, teacher, and parent). And, this ignorance was not limited to our language: it permeates all school subject material. The myths being presented to students as though they were facts are enough to make anyone despair that we have actually made any progress in knowledge and understanding since the middle ages.

Fifty Years Ago and Now

1962. Fifty years ago. I was 16. Like any fortunate 16-year-old I was madly in love with a girl my age who let me kiss and fondle her for hours every day after school—being kissable and fondlable are sufficient grounds for any 16-year-old male to fall madly in love. Before the year was out, our relationship was over and I was working through that other primary adolescent experience: heartbreak.

Unbeknownst to me a British rock group had just released its first single. Love Me Do didn't do particularly well, but it was enough to set the Beatles on their way. It was probably about another six months before I heard a Beatles tune—and a few years away from my awakening to their awakening with works like Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and Strawberry Fields. In the meantime I had Bob Dylan and Masters of War as an anthem coming down the pipes. But, in 1962 there was nothing except meaningless studio-manufactured tripe on the radio. Like a rubber ball, I come bouncing back to you—a who, who, who, a who! (Bouncy-bouncy; bouncy-bouncy—oh, oh, oh!)

Also in the fall of 1962 we experienced the Cuban Missile Crisis. Young folks today think they know all about despair and what an awful mess the older generation has made of the world. They don’t know anything. Those who of who were conscious and aware in 1962 have already been through the Apocalypse—and survived. We were literally hours away from a world-wide catastrophe from which there would be no recovery. How we reacted spoke volumes. Our elder generation told us to hide in basements with our arms over our heads. To this day I can’t believe that they really believed that protecting our heads with our forearms would do anything to prevent us from being vaporized, but, then, they had survived a major world war by following just such advice. My response was to wear a “Ban the Bomb” pin to school which threw my girlfriend into a rage because it marked me as a coward. When I refused to leave my seat when the time came to be herded into the school basement (I figured I might as well be dead at my desk than in a hole in the ground), the school principal turned red in the face and threatened to suspend me. Fellow students (who, in later years tried to convince me that they were closet hippies at the time) called me a communist-lover and traitor. I recall one who was so angry at my apparent insubordination that he slammed me into a locker and screamed invectives. I just simply stopped going to school after a while.

Yes, I know it is hard to believe today, but, seriously, in the early 1960’s anyone who objected to being fried by nuclear weapons was called a coward, spat upon, and sometimes beaten by police officers. (I got pushed hard a few times, but never actually beaten—though friends were.)

In the fall in 1962, Dr. No was in the theatres, though it would be another year before Dr. Who made his first television appearance. Both James Bond and the Good Doctor are still around, James in his 6^th incarnation and the Doctor in his 11th. Though I was still infatuated with Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee vampire movies at the time, it would not be long before I became a fan of European movies from Russia, Sweden, and Italy (Eisenstein, Bergman, and Fellini). Interestingly, it was about that time that I discovered the great twentieth century Russian composers (Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich) to which I've remained attached all my life.

In 1962 I discovered the club sandwich and western omelette. I was still about five years away from my first pizza and lasagne. Spaghetti was something that came out of a can. Cherry coke was a novelty. Everyone, but everyone, smoked tobacco constantly and wore their shoes all day—in house and out. In 1962 I stopped putting grease in my hair and spending inordinate amounts of time trying to place each hair just so. First I adopted the “Caesar cut”—short hair simply brushed forward. It wasn’t long before I gave up on hair styles altogether and let it grow where it wanted to. Standard clothing switched from “dress pants” for school to blue jeans. It just happened as part of a seeming natural evolution. In 1962 I drank my first espresso coffee and read Thomas Pynchon’s V. (I still have that original copy of the book. I’ll have to re-read it some time.)

In 1962 I befriended the first open homosexuals I had knowingly encountered. They were worried about being entrapped by police officers and sent to prison. I knew people who risked seven year prison terms by smoking marijuana, but, I was still a few years away from toking up with the rest of my generation. On the subject of… in 1962 Dr. Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (later called Ram Dass) were experimenting with LSD at Harvard University. Dr. Ewen Cameron was playing with the lives and mental health of patients at Montreal’s Allan Memorial Institute on behest of the CIA, testing out Chinese brainwashing techniques coupled with doses of LSD and sleep deprivation. Two men, Arthur Lucas and Ronald Turpin, were hanged in Toronto’s Don Jail in 1962, the last to be executed by the state in Canada.

Not much was going on in Vietnam in 1962 that was of note to the outside world.  The number of American advisors supporting the corrupt and unpopular Diem regime had risen to about 15,000 by the end of 1962, but it was still a couple of years before American teenagers and young men were fighting a war both in South East Asia and on American university campuses. In the late 60’s I met so many American deserters in Montreal that they appeared to form a major immigration group on their own. I later figured that the later amazing progress of Canadian research in the sciences and medicine had a lot to do with our acceptance of so many bright, educated, and thinking young people during the late 60’s and early 70’s.  (BTW, Canada is still a leader in world research in many areas, though we’re starting to slip.)

Right now I am sitting at a desk in my home office, using a computer that is magnitudes more powerful than the largest of the mainframes available fifty years ago—and it is my personal machine. No, I am not able to afford the millions of dollars for some crude circuit boards, vacuum tubes, and miles of thick wires and toggle switches that were required to do some basic mathematical calculations; just an average retiree able to purchase engineering so advanced that a computer scientist in 1962 would have it thought impossible—not just for private individuals, but for any government or huge company to afford. The thinking processes and approaches have underground major revolutions in the past fifty years. What was once unthinkable is now common-place. And…perhaps more significantly, what was once common-place is now unthinkable.

Capital Solutions

That there are some seriously damaged and dangerous persons alive in the world is a given. That we need to be protected from them is also a no-brainer. But, where we differ is on how we deal with them and how we protect ourselves from their destructiveness. I have met many intelligent people during my lifetime who say that there are cases when capital punishment is the appropriate response when we encounter the monsters in our midst. My initial emotional response is to agree, on a purely theoretical level.  After all, it is easy to list recent serial killers who are, beyond a doubt, guilty of the crimes they have been convicted of.

But...then I stop and think of the many people (mostly men) who have been convicted by a legal system that, presumably, was absolutely convinced of their guilt, and yet they have been found, later—sometimes very many years later—to have been demonstrably and convincingly not guilty of committing the crimes of which they were convicted. It is a very difficult situation all round when this occurs: how do you give someone back twenty or thirty years of their life? Even worse: how do you even begin to rectify things if the party has been put to death?

That, to me, has always been the central objection to capital punishment that I hold highest. It recognizes that we can be absolutely convinced that something has occurred and yet discover later that we were absolutely wrong. It happens all the time, though usually involving less momentous events.

My second-highest objection has always been that the commission of an evil act can never justify an equally evil response. If the purpose of capital punishment is to prevent someone from repeating a criminal act then there are other routes that can be followed to achieve the same end without crossing an absolute line from which there is no return or redress. If the purpose of capital punishment is to seek revenge, then, in what way does that make us in any sense morally superior to the criminal? What about victim’s rights? many say. Well, what of victim’s rights? I respond. I would not feel any better about my death by murder knowing that my murderer will be put to death. My rights were violently and finally ripped away from me when I was murdered—and no subsequent action on anyone’s part can ever undo that violation and set things to right.

 I think that many support the concept of capital punishment because it is something that will never touch their lives. Let’s just get rid of all the bad guys and be done with it; no further thought on the subject is required. That’s an understandable response. But, whatever power we give to the state can be misused and directed against us. So, it does matter whether or not we grant the state power over the life and death of its citizens. Also, whatever the state does it does, presumably, is in the name of all of us. Frankly, I do not trust a state that can recognize people such as Dr. Charles Smith, formerly Ontario’s top forensic child pathologist, as being qualified to pass judgement on me, or anyone I know—or don’t know—if a child in my care dies. Chances are pretty good that Dr. Smith would find evidence that you had shaken the child to death—as he did in so many cases where the condemned were eventually found to have been innocent.

People who support the death penalty would be advised to read something on the subject. I just finished reading a book by David R. Dow called The Autobiography of an Execution (New York, Grand Central Publishing, 2010). Mr Dow is a lawyer practising in Texas who specializes in defending death penalty cases. Oh sure, another liberal softy, right? Not quite: Mr Dow was, for many years, in favour of the death penalty and freely admits that there are those whose crimes are so aberrant, so disgusting, so cruel, so evil that it would seem that even putting them to death was letting them off easy.

But…of the approximately 200 cases Mr Dow was involved with, seven of the men put to death by the state were clearly innocent. The jury agree they were innocent, the judge agreed they were innocent, the guards and prison warders all agreed they were innocent…but, they were put to death anyway. Why? Well, there’s a process in place…and what that process does is relieve anyone involved in that process of personal responsibility. The book is centred around the case of such a man whose only “crime”—ultimately—was to be appointed an incompetent lawyer at his trial. For that “failure” on his part, he was put to death.

As Mr. Dow points out, the police are not accountable: they simply turn over whatever evidence they have to the state attorney’s office. The state attorney is not accountable because all he does is present the evidence that someone else collected to a court that makes the decision. The jurors are not responsible because they weigh the evidence that was presented to them and must make a decision based only on that. The judge can’t help anything: it was the jurors’ decision. The appeal courts have no responsibility in the matter because they rule only on legal issues. Texas takes the process a step further: though, technically, the state governor makes the final decision on whether to grant clemency or insist that the death penalty process proceed, he, in fact, does not. The Texas governor has a panel comprised of political friends that he has appointed to the position that reviews all death penalty appeals and makes it recommendations to the governor, who, subsequently, stands before the television cameras and says he has no choice in the matter: he must abide by the panel’s recommendation.

Chances are pretty good that if you are black or Latino and have been arrested and charged with murder in Texas that, no matter how flimsy the evidence or how lackadaisical the defence, you will wind up on death row. Is that a price we are prepared to pay?

I know that some people say well, that’s tough. Yes, we make mistakes, but, so what? It is worth it if it keeps a few more monsters off our streets. Yes, killing some insanely evil people after they have created their pain and mayhem will mean that they will not ever repeat their acts. But, does killing them prevent any other lunatic from committing his outrageous offences? Not very likely. Unfortunately, even the most sane and well-balanced criminals do not include the likelihood of their capture and punishment when they set out on their paths—and that is even more so for the truly unbalanced who commit the worst acts imaginable.

Capital punishment does not, in the end, protect anyone. In fact, the inverse appears to be true: a society that makes liberal application of capital punishment is far more likely to have higher murder and violence rates than states that put their resources into prevention rather than after-the-fact punishment.

Taxing Times

I worked for a tax preparation firm for six years preparing personal income tax returns. As we often pointed out to ourselves, preparing a tax return is the most complicated job the average person faces every year; for me, it was easy. Plug a few facts and numbers into a software program, et voilà, one return ready for filing.

Of course I cannot reveal anything about any individuals’ return—not even the fact that we prepared their tax return—but I can talk in general terms without giving away identifiable information.

When I think back on my years as a tax preparer there are certain events that stand out in my memory. One such event occurred during my first season. It was April 30ieth, the final date for filing personal returns, and as expected, the waiting room was crammed with folks who had waited until the very last minute. All you can do in that situation is put your head down and take the clients one at a time, acting as though you had all the time in the world to deal with the person sitting on the other side of the desk.

Late in the evening, as the crowd was starting to thin, I noticed a very thin young man, shabbily dressed, with dried blood on his upper lip, head into the cubicle of a colleague—an older woman who generally did not have much empathy with the many welfare recipients we dealt with. A few moments later I saw the young man leaving the cubicle looking downcast. Definitely not enough time to have prepared his return.

After the madness of April 30ieth, May 1^st is generally a very quiet day. All the regular tax preparers left at the end of the last shift, not to return until late fall, early winter. I was fortunate enough to be one of the very few kept on staff during the off season. So, later in the afternoon the young man I had seen the night before came into the office. I invited him into my cubicle. The blood on his upper lip was gone. After we settled into our chairs he said in a quiet voice, “Help me straighten out my life.” It turned out that he had not filed a return in five years, having spent most of that time addicted to an illegal drug. However, he had just come out of rehabilitation and was determined to get back on track.

The ideal way to work through that kind of situation is to prepare the oldest tax return first, then ask the client to pay for it after he receives the refund for that year. Then we’d go onto the second eldest and work our way forwards. It took a long time, but it was the best way to help someone with no or very little income to catch up. It was win-win: he’d get his taxes caught up without a financial blow and we’d be paid for preparing five years worth of returns.  It was one of those procedures management disapproved of, as they wanted the returns to be paid for before we filed them, but, when you are on the front lines you have to adjust to the real circumstances you face every day. The company would not go bankrupt if someone neglected to pay for one tax return after we had filed it.

As I worked with the young man that summer, I was impressed by his progress. Every time I saw him he was a bit cleaner and a bit healthier looking. I was quite proud of myself for having taking the time and steps to help him out—and was annoyed with and felt superior to—the tax preparer who had turned him away on April 30ieth. But now, from the perspective of someone older and—hopefully—less judgmental I have come to realize why she had turned him away that night.  First there was no rush to get his returns prepared—they were already very late. Secondly, if she had prepared five years worth of returns that night he would have been unable to pay for them. And, thirdly, it would take a long time to prepare those five returns and we had a lot of people waiting who did have to meet the filing deadline.

So, in summary, I had judged someone for judging someone else, when, in fact, she hadn’t. She was being practical and I was being the smug idealist. And, when I think of it, if it had been my cubicle he was in on the evening of April 30ieth, would I have gone ahead and prepared his delinquent returns right then? I don’t know; it was my first year and I was fairly naïve. I know that I would have acted the same way as my colleague had if I had been in that situation a few years later once I had had some experience.

How to do well on any course

I was a lousy high school student. I did the opposite of everything I am going to suggest here. However, when I started university I made a promise to myself: 1) I would attend every class unless I was really sick; and 2) I would do every assignment to the best of my ability.

That worked pretty well. I can’t honestly say I was a straight A student, but I was considered for a medal awarded to the graduates with the best overall record. I breezed through the post graduate courses because I already had a firm foundation on which to build.

Since university I taught for many years. Secondary school for eight years and many one or two-day mini-courses and seminars over the years. I have also taken a lot of courses, from assembler code for computer operating systems to advanced income tax to music composition. Doesn’t matter what the subject of a course is. If I take it, I will do well. The reason is that, in addition to the two promises in the first paragraph that I made and kept, I have developed some insights over the years from both a teacher’s and a student’s perspective  that I’m going to share with you.

First, every classroom has a sweet-spot that is worth a few marks to whoever sits there. If the instructor is right handed, the sweet-spot is in the second or third row (depending on the size of the classroom), about the mid-right of the room. (If there are ten rows of seats it would be the third seat from the right.) If the teacher is left-handed, then sit in the complimentary seat on the left side of the room. The reason is simple: when writing on a marker board or flip-sheet, that is the direction the teacher will be facing most often. And, you want the instructor to notice you (for the right reasons, not the wrong ones).

You should also volunteer to answer questions. Even if you are wrong, the fact that you are responding to the teacher gives the teacher a more favourable impression of you (everyone likes to know that he is being listened to). But, do not volunteer too often. You don’t want to become one of those students who dominate the class; even the instructor will become annoyed with you after a time; the other students long before that. My rule of thumb is: I will pause before raising my hand long enough to see if there are others volunteering answers. If no one else responds, I will raise my hand. The occasional funny remark is okay, but, don’t overdo it—and don’t become perceived as a “smart-ass;” no one likes them.

When it comes to assignments, it should not be necessary to tell you to do all of them as best and as neatly as you can. Even if the teacher does not “check homework,” she will know who is putting in the effort and who isn’t. Also, doing the assignments is a way of reinforcing what the instructor was trying to get across to you. If given a choice of assignments or questions, pick the most difficult. The reason? Almost all of the other students will pick the easy route—and you don’t want to be perceived as “just another student.” Even if you mess up while attempting the hardest assignment, the teacher will appreciate that you took the time and effort and is likely to spend some extra time with you showing you where you went wrong.

Everyone hates exams. But, they are less stressful if you review your class notes and materials regularly throughout the course. Repetition makes the memory stronger. And, most importantly, the night before the exam put your books away. Relax and get a good night’s sleep. Cramming at the last minute will not make up for the time you should have spent in the days and weeks before; and, you will do better on the exam if you are relaxed and well-rested.

Take at least three pens with you into the exam. You do not want to be caught without a reliable writing instrument mid-exam. Bring whatever accessories you are permitted: like calculators or dictionaries. Relax. Read the entire exam over before starting to write down answers (your brain will be working on some of the questions in the background while you are focused on the one at hand). Estimate how much time you will need for each section of the exam, and plan accordingly. If the exam is two-hours long and there are four equally-sized sections spend twenty minutes on each section (you will need time for review later). If you don’t complete a section within your time limit, go on to the next section and return later if you have time remaining. Read your answers over before handing in your paper; read them twice if you have time. Ask yourself: Do they make sense? Do they address the questions?

If you finish an exam in less than two-thirds of the allocated time, then you possibly have not answered in the detail required or you could have missed part of a question. The earlier you finish, the more time you should spend reviewing.

Let me give you an example of what a simple oversight can cost. One year I was writing an exam on business income tax returns. The questions were generally true-false, but explanations for the answers were required and the explanations were to be written in complete sentences with references to the particular tax law or ruling. Simple enough, right? However, though the explanatory part of my answer clearly answered the question correctly I did not specifically state whether the answer was “yes” or “no” as asked. The result: instead of a perfect grade, I got 97%. Perfect grades are a rare species that should be sought after with care and preparation—and cherished when you get one.

What I have been reading lately.

For my last birthday, 6 December 2011, my wife Ann gave me a Kobo e-reader. It has radically changed my reading habits. Previously, I rarely read a book that I did not own—and, when I could not afford to buy new books, I re-read the old ones. However, the Internet, through my Kobo connection, has opened up an entirely new world of reading. Below is a list of the books that I have read in the past 7 months. Only one of them is fiction. Most of them I downloaded for free.  Many of them are outstanding books that I highly recommend; the others are all worth the read.

Some day, when I am brave enough, I will tackle Plato’s “The Republic” and Machiavelli’s “The Prince” (both available for free).

Though there are many such sites, the ones that have the most books that I am interested in available at no charge are the University of Chicago Press and the Gutenberg Project.

Collections of Nothing; William Davis King; University of Chicago Press; 2008.

French Lessons, A Memoir; Alice Kaplan; University of Chicago Press; 1993.

Pilgrimage to the End of the World: The Road to Santiago de Compostela ; Conrad Rudolph; University of Chicago Press;  2004.

A Planet of Viruses; Carl Zimmer; University of Chicago Press; 2011.

The Unobservable Universe: A Paradox-Free Framework for Understanding the Universe; Scott M. Tyson; Galaxia Way; 2011.

The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood. James Gleik; Pantheon Books; 2011.

The Worst Journey in the World; Apsley Cherry-Garrad; Duke Classics; Carroll & Graft Publishers; 2003 (originally published by Constable; 1922)

Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover The Deepest Places On Earth; James M. Tabor; Random House; 2010.

Quantum Enigma: Physics Encounters Consciousness; Bruce Rosenblum, Fred Kuttner;  Oxford University Press; 2006.

In One Person; John Irving; Alfred A. Knopf Publishing; 2012,

The Grand Design; Stephen Hawking, Leonard Mlodinow; Bantam Books; 2010.

God’s Hotel: A Doctor, A Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine ; Victoria Sweet; Riverhead Books; 2012.

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern; Stephen Greenblatt; W. W. Norton & Company; 2011.

A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather than Nothing; Lawrence M. Krauss; Simon & Schuster, Inc.; 2012.

Illegal Harmonies: Music in the Modern Age; Andrew Ford; Black Inc.; 1997.

Life in the Backwoods; Susanna Moodie; Gutenberg Project; 2006 (Orignally published: 1852).

The Mysteries of Montreal: Being Recollections of a Female Physician;  Charlotte Fuhrer; Gutenberg Project;   (Originally published 1881)

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival; John Vaillant; Alfred A. Knopf;  2010.

A History of the World in 100 Objects; Neil MacGregor; Penguin;  2010.

Heart of Darkness; Joseph Conrad; Gutenberg Project; (Originally published 1902).

Wild: from lost to found on the Pacific Crest trail; Cheryl Strayed; Alfred A. Knopf; 2012.

The Declaration of Independence of the United States of America; Thomas Jefferson; Gutenberg Project; (Originally published 1776).

The Communist Manifesto; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; Gutenberg Project   (Originally published 1888).

Prufrock and Other Observations; T. S. Eliot; Gutenberg Project; (Originally published 1920).

80 million Americans can't be wrong...or can they?

I read one of those “filler” stories in the paper today (you know: the kind they use when they have an awkward space to fill).  The headline: “80 million Americans believe in UFOs.” Wow! That’s more than twice the population of Canada. The story matched the headline (not always the case.)

That left me scratching my head (metaphorically). What the heck do the words believe in and the abbreviation UFO mean?  The second one is fairly easy: Unidentified Flying Object. That means, if I interpret Modern American correctly: there are things in the sky (deduced from “flying”) that we can’t identify. Fair enough. I can’t always immediately identify everything I see either. And, just because I can’t immediately identify it does not mean it is involved with an alien planet. I mean, that is the last conclusion I would draw if I was baffled by something. Occam's razor aside, we rarely accept the most complicated and convoluted explanation when there is a simpler explanation at hand. Well, I guess, to many people (80 million Americans at least) the easiest solution is to assume an alien presence.

This approach was popularized by Erich von Däniken in his 1968 misinterpretation of anthropology called Chariots of the Gods? Unsolved Mysteries of the Past. It really is a fun read if you can stand the supermarket tabloid leaps of logic (it’s a mystery, so it must be the work of alien visitors). (I once saw one of these publications on a newsstand with the headline Scientists Photograph Heaven over a photo of a spiral galaxy seen edge-on.)  von Däniken was especially entranced by halos in medieval art. This standard symbol of sainthood absolutely must be a drawing of a Plexiglas space helmet. He finds unknown shapes around the heads of many Aztec bas relief and there you have it: the final proof that earth has been visited by creatures from another planet. Crop circles just underscore the evidence and are proof that they are still around watching over us.

Okay, enough fun at Herr von Däniken’s expense. He isn’t the only one: just one of the first mass popularizers of the blame it on aliens school of thought. One thing that many members of that school cite as evidence is the pyramids of Egypt. Humans simply could not have built them; heck, we couldn’t even do it now with all our modern technology. The trouble is that those who are inspired by facile drawings of slaves dragging stones while men with whips stand over them, are missing a vital piece of information. Why assume that slaves dragged these monstrous building blocks? Why not assume, if you are going on assumptions, that the Egyptians were smart enough to figure out the (relatively) easy way to move a large block? It’s really very simple—and you may kick yourself if you never thought of it. Lash logs lengthwise to each of the four faces of the stone. Build the logs up until you have about as close to a circular shape (as seen from either end) as you can get. Now push the stone just enough that it passes the point of equilibrium at an edge (remember, that you can now “rock” the stone thanks to the cleverly placed logs)—and the stone will complete the rest of the journey to its next face. Rock and roll, as they say.  (If you are lucky enough to be going down-hill, the stone might just keep on going on its own once you get it started.)

You still need a lot of slaves and a system of pulleys and levers (which were not beyond the capabilities of our ancient ancestors), and lots of time, but there you have it: no alien energy rays or anti-gravity devices required.

Sorry folks, but using aliens to explain away things that you don’t understand just doesn’t wash. I might as well say that my car runs with alien technology because I certainly can’t understand all the technology that goes into making my car move when I want it to.

Now, back to the sky. When I was about 10 years old the kids in the neighbourhood all saw what they called a “flying saucer.” Well, there certainly was an unusual-looking something overhead. An older kid got out his binoculars and informed us solemnly that he could see mice on the saucer. Now this was getting too weird for me, even in my 10-year-old naivety.  Of course it turned out that the strange object was a weather balloon. The “mice” were probably the blurry “circles of confusion” you see when something is not quite in focus.

Well, if you lean to the “conspiracy” side of interpreting events, you could always blame anything you see in the sky that you don’t understand on secret military weapons research. I’m not even going to go near the “testimony” of those who have been abducted and sodomized by aliens. I am fairly certain that rare meteorological events can be readily misunderstood. Imagine what the first persons to see the aurora borealis must have concluded.

However, in the end, I will admit that there are some things that people experience that just can’t be explained away—yet.

Now, in case you forgot, I italicized the words believe in in my second paragraph. I’ve always had trouble understanding questions like: Do you believe in love at first sight? Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe that God is going to strike dead everyone you disapprove of? Speaking of that last point, I once attended a religious service where the church was between ministers, so a lay person took over the services. Unfortunately, the chosen lay-person in this case was senile; she couldn’t read a passage from the Bible without getting it backwards; and, generally, her “sermons” made no sense and were completely disconnected from the Scripture readings. This particular Sunday she informed us that she had a very sad story to tell.

Apparently, a life-long friend of hers was dying. The friend confessed that she could never quite “believe” no matter how hard she tried. Our pseudo-minister then clucked her tongue and told us it was unfortunate that her friend had to go to Hell because she hadn’t tried hard enough to “believe.”

Seemed to me that the friend was putting a lot more effort into it than the preacher who, apparently, never had experienced a moment’s doubt—ever.

So, anyhow, was does this believe in actually mean?

Do I believe in love at first sight? Well, I know that sometimes a couple will experience a strong attraction to each other on first meeting. But, I ask, how many of those “instant-infatuations” evolve into a deeper and more committed relationship? I mean, I think that love means a deep commitment that survives more than one evening.

Do I believe in evolution? How can one mix “belief” and “knowledge?” I know that many think that the phrase “scientific theory” means that it is just a casual opinion that some scientists hold, making any  “theory,” no matter how far removed from reality, equally valid and worthy of consideration.  However, the word “theory” in this context has a very specific meaning that has nothing to do with opinions; its meaning in science is that it is a hypothesis that has been tested many times in many different situations and is yet to be proven incorrect. It verges on being a “scientific law,” but still leaves an opening for an exceptional case.  It’s a long ways from that to “I believe the universe was created in six days.” (And, by the way, speaking of universal scientific laws, Newton’s “laws of motion” have turned out to not be so universal after all.) As for evolution, there are millions, if not hundreds of millions, of pieces of evidence that all support this “theory” that has yet to be proven to be incorrect in any meaningful way. (Other than by misunderstanding and misapplying some random quotations from ancient books.)

 Do I believe that God is going to strike dead everyone you disapprove of? This one simply doesn’t make any sense to me. If God went about killing everyone anyone who was not approved of by someone who professed to be a “believer,” there wouldn’t be anyone left. Not only, if you do believe in a loving personal God who taught that we should forgive each other our grievances, then how can you reconcile that with God stepping in to kill those very people that he said you are supposed to forgive? Ah, the mysteries of fundamentalist theology!  What is a poor simple member of the “Holiest Church of the Only True Redeeming Saviour” to do when he encounters a practicing Hindu? Is he supposed to welcome him, feed him, make him feel at home, as the Bible that I read instructs? Or is he to kill him on the spot because he is a “sinner,” a “heathen,” and an “unbeliever?” Tough one, but fortunately the “believers” do not feel compelled to answer questions posed by “unbelievers,” so it is very unlikely that we will ever get a complete answer to that one. (Other than being quoted misunderstood and misapplied random phrases from some very old books.)

So, there you have it: yes, I believe that there are many things—even some things in the sky—that have yet to be explained in any sort of reasonable way. I guess we could call those events “Unidentified Flying Objects” for lack of a better name. But aliens?—whether obsessed with sodomy or with “universal peace” (some both at the same time)—no, not in my universe. Maybe in yours, but, that’s another story altogether. 

Time Travel on a Beautiful June Afternoon

It is late June—an absolutely glorious day. Low 20’s, a gentle breeze, a few fluffy clouds. I can hear only the wind in the trees, a bit of traffic noise, and the birds as I quietly paint the back deck. It reminds me of childhood days when no friends were around. I’d play with a toy truck or some such, all the while wondering about the big questions of life. What is “forever?” What is the “I” that observes everything? “How old and how big is the universe?” Those kinds of questions.

So, today, on a day very similar to such days when I was a child, I ruminate as I paint. Today my question to myself is “Is time travel possible?” I hate to break it to you…. After all, we have much enjoyed stories where time travel is a feature for a long time—both in literature and in movies.  But, the sad news is: time travel within the context of our universe is impossible. Doesn’t matter whether you are going forwards in time, or back—it just can’t be done.

There is one “sort-of” exception. According to relativity, the faster an object moves the slower time passes for that object. Actually, that is verifiable; apparently the satellites that control GPS have to be constantly adjusted to make up for the fact that time is slower on them than it is for a stationary object on earth. It is enough of a difference that unless these adjustments were made, positions would drift by about 10 km a day.  Look it up if you don’t believe me. So, if one travelled in a spaceship at very fast speeds for a few months (spaceship time), on the return to earth a hundred or so years might have passed. In a sense, forward time travel is possible—but there is absolutely no way back.

Oh, I know the old arguments: men have said we could never fly…travel to the moon…explore the deepest oceans…climb Everest…build machines that can perform billions of calculations in a second and potentially connect everyone in the world. All we need is the right technology.

Misunderstanding of the meaning of the space-time continuum that physicists and cosmologists describe leads to some false assumptions. It stand to reason that if we can freely travel in any of the other three dimensions—even all of them at the same time—we ought to be able to travel through the fourth dimension at will. We get confused because if we travel in any—or all—of the three basic directions, we will arrive at a location different than our present position; in other words: some place other than “here.” What we are doing is moving our three-dimensional selves from one coordinate to another. Some would say that if it takes us ten minutes to accomplish that readjustment of our coordinates then we have travelled through ten minutes of time as well.

No, we haven’t.

Whether we move our bodies from one location to another during that ten minute interval or we remain at rest makes no difference as far as the time dimension is concerned. Time marches on, as they say. Some scientists describe time as an arrow pointing in one direction. They complicate it by adding concepts like entropy (a word taken from thermodynamics), but, however they muddle the concept it still boils down to one directional travel—or something. Though many equations work just as well backwards as they do forwards, in our universe an egg dropped on the floor does not reassemble itself and hop back into our hand complete. We simply cannot treat time as if it were a film strip that we can play in reverse for our amusement.

Paradoxes exist only in our minds; they do not occur in nature. If we observe that a photon seems to be in two different places simultaneously that indicates that we haven’t quite grasped the concepts of space and coordinates yet. Then there’s the old chestnut of going back in time and murdering your grandfather before your father was conceived. If you do so, then you don’t exist; and, if you don’t exist, then you cannot go back in time and murder your grandfather….and around and around we go looking for clever ways to get out of our dilemma.

The fatal flaw in our thinking, when it comes to time travel, is in thinking that the past exists somewhere and the future exists somewhere else—and so what we are doing by passing time is moving from a “past place” towards a “future place.”  Okay, I ask, where are these “past places” and “future places”? If they have a concrete existence then, yes, it may be possible to move from one to the other and visa versa. But, do they? What, exactly, is the “past?” Or, better yet, where is it? I’ve read scientific descriptions of it as if time were a loaf of bread that contains all events—and that we can experience past and future events by cutting the slice of bread-time at an angle. I think it is a bit difficult to physically affect a metaphor by using another metaphor, but, that’s just in the world that I inhabit. I know there are many out these who treat metaphors, such as “the creator,” as if they were physical entities. Does thinking make it so?

Well, if you go along with respected philosophers like Emmanuel Kant (Critique of Pure Reason), and physicists like Werner Heisenberg (observation causes the collapse of probability) then you must realize that nothing has an existence independent of our experience of it—at least in any form that we can recognize.  “Reality” is the construct that our brain uses to reference and catalogue the bombardment of sensory signals that it is constantly receiving. Our brains frame our experience of time within the context of movement. But, does it really have an existence independent of our experience of it? If it does, then is the future thus preordained? Everything that can happen has happened? I sincerely have a lot of trouble with that concept. Where did free-will go then? Are we just automata following pathways that have been prepared ahead of time?

Some talk of alternate universes, where every possibility has fruition. That means that even the smallest action that I take creates a complete universe where I did not take that action. I have a bit of a problem accepting that. It seems to me that it is just another clever way of getting out of the paradox of murdering one’s grandfather before one’s father has been conceived. To suggest that both events happened—the murder and the later conception—even if in different universes (or space-time continuums to get fancy) is evading the question of what is time, really?

Do all “pasts” exist somewhere? Is there a definitive past? I’m sure that each of us likes to believe that our memories of past events represent a physical reality. But, where is this “past” located? Photos, journals, videos, artefacts, etc. do not prove that a past “exists” now. What we are looking at, when we look at such things, is in the present.

So, stripping away all wishful thinking, we are left with the proposition that neither the future nor the past has a “real” existence that we could, possibly, travel to. I think that the “past” goes “poof!” as soon as it stops being the “present.” It hasn’t “gone” anywhere—it just ceases being. Yes, we have recordings of things that happened in the past, but, when the recordings were made the “past” was really a “present.”   If I write a word “now,” that “now” cannot possibly be the same “now” when you read it. The “now” when I wrote the word is long gone. So, we can have records of “past” events, but, they were really “present” events when they happened.

Same as the future. It does not exist. Except, in the sense of potential. There is a good possibility that at some point in the future I will stop writing this paragraph. A pretty good possibility that I will eat a meal later in the day—and that I will go to sleep sometime during the night and that the sun will rise tomorrow. But, none of those things has an existence “now.” They might happen; they might not.  A chunk of ice could fall from an overhead airplane and knock my brains out so that I will not experience any of those events. But, in no case is there a physical place where a chunk of ice is falling towards my head or where I will wrap this up, eat a meal, go to sleep later, and then awake to a new day all having happened “already” just waiting for me to experience them.

The only “real” thing we can count on is the ever-present present and even that will no longer exist when we die.

Here’s the algorithm:

Future –>	Now –>	Past
Possible events –>	Occurrence of specific event –>	Done
Non-existent probabilities. (Potential)	Experience; expression. Potential collapses into existence.	Nothing. It’s all gone.