Colin Ellard - You Are Here

Science and politics

When Arthur Carty left my university in 1994 to head the NRC, the only good thing about the move from the perspective of the locals was that while we were losing an eminently sensible person, a remarkably intelligent scientist, and a clearly gifted administrator, Canada was gaining a strong voice of science advocacy.  When Carty was later made the national science advisor by Paul Martin's government, I rejoiced.  I couldn't imagine a better choice for such a role.  Now that Carty is retiring, we learn that the shoes of science advisor, already considerably diminished by a move from Privy Council to Industry Canada, are not to be re-filled. 

We live in a time when all of our futures are more dependent than they ever have been on the interpretation of scientific findings.  Decisions that will influence the lives of every member of this country should be made based on clear-eyed assessment of scientific evidence rather than on wishful thinking, denial, the skill of lobbyists, or our own deep insecurities about what the future might hold.  In such times, the office of national science advisor is being phased out.

It's a curious and unsettling development.

Psychogeography of new year's resolutions

The past 18 months have been pretty rough on my body.  Beginning with my attempt to market a book proposal, passing through the bowel-churning highs and lows of initial feedback from editors and the signing of a contract (the day I sat in that HarperCollins boardroom is etched in my memory forever -- a room full of people who knew the book business, all of whom seemed as excited about my project as I was) and then of course the long, lonely winter of actually writing the darned thing (two or three times by last count), physical health was something that fell somewhat to the wayside.  My skin dried out.  I gained about 25 pounds.  According to my wife, I've even been a little moody (hard to believe, really).

Like most of the rest of the planet, I passed the first few days of January filled with resolve to do things a little differently.  To never let a piece of paper pass through my hands twice (deal with it first time around).  To avoid writing novel-length emails (I suspect my editor would throw up a cheer if he knew this).  To improve my fitness.  As a long-time runner, it's slightly embarrassing, and a sign of just how far I've fallen, that my running program now consists of, well, walking. 

It's just getting nicely underway, as they say in hockey, but my nightly walks are becoming somewhat ingrained and, predictably, they're leading to some work-like thoughts.  Most of my favourite routes take me through the inner quarters of urban Kitchener, among narrow streets of houses, most of which look to be roughly 100 years old, perhaps give or take a decade.  The houses are mixed in among an old industrial core that these days has become somewhat moribund.  Everything is made overseas now, it seems, so there's less call for locally made stuff (as energy costs soar, this will change a bit -- but this is a subject for another blog, perhaps someone else's).

Last night, because of some other kid-related errands I had to run, I embarked on a different route, a little farther from the core, in a younger neighbourhood.  Houses here looked as though they had been built in the 1970s perhaps.  The walk was much less pleasant and engaging.  I found that I spent most of it with my head bent forward, lost in my thoughts, oblivious to my surroundings, just wanting to get through the number of minutes of movement that I had contracted with myself so that I could get back home and back to work.

Tonight, back in more familiar haunts, the streets near my house, I was  immediately struck by the contrast.  I was surrounded by mixed architecture so interesting that every time I became lost in thoughts my head was jerked upward by some new and interesting sight -- a stately corner house with multiple balconies, perhaps even a tower of sorts on one side, beautiful leaded glass panels on the front windows.  Not only were the houses more interesting, but I had a much stronger sense of actually being in a neighbourhood with such a palpable feeling of intimacy that I  felt slightly awkward being there, as if I'd inadvertently just plodded into someone's living room.

The main contributor to this nice sense of intimacy and presence was, I think, the scale of the street and the houses.  Unlike the newer neighbourhoods (and now this would include very modern 'burbs), the frontage of the houses was very narrow.  With porches so close to the sidewalk that I could almost reach out and touch them, I was not only able to see inside rooms, but my other senses were engaged as well.  I could sometimes hear music coming from inside the houses.  Often, I could smell dinners cooking, or the inviting aroma of wood smoke from crackling fireplaces.  In a way that is just not true of modern suburbia, I was there, in a real place.

Everything that I'm saying here will be old hat to anyone expert in urban development.  We know that narrow streets with neighbours within shouting distance of one another, and houses whose contents almost spill out onto sidewalks make for great communities.  So given this, how is it that we've let these principles get so thoroughly swept aside in our shiny new outer suburbs with streets wide enough to park Sherman tanks on both sides and front lawns deep enough to serve as soccer pitches? 

Could it just be that those great flat swaths of empty land look so darned good, especially as you go flying past them in a fast car?  Is our aesthetic of space so completely out of whack that we have become so confused about the difference between what appeals in a quick glimpse and what makes for a good life that we just don't know where or how to live anymore?

Short answer: yes.

space and culture

I just had a charming young student come to interview me for a small campus publication, which was great fun (who doesn't want to talk about themselves?  Not me!), but she knocked me off balance slightly when, in the middle of my usual long explanation of the importance of considering the connections between cognition and architecture, she asked:

"What about culture?"

This must have been a set-up.  Someone must have let her inside my head a few moments before she walked through the door in order for her to know that it had just been filled with interactions between space and culture.

We're in the middle of designing a few very detailed virtual versions of some fine looking houses (and by 'we' I mean mostly the gifted people from our School of Architecture who labour over the code while I find the money to pay them, and then put on the virtual reality headset and go "Ooh" and "Ahh") that we'll eventually stick into the heads of a group of active housebuyers whom we hope to recruit from realtors' offices.  They'll wander around, get a bit lost from time to time, marvel over the little details on the cabinets, the hardwood floors, the fireplaces.  We'll watch where they go, ask them what they like, and try to get them to imagine that they're actually in these interesting little spaces.  And in a very real sense, they will be in these spaces in a way that is hard for anyone to imagine who has not put on one of these devices.  It's a wonder of the human mind, this facility we have for transportability from one place to another at the drop of a switch.

One of our longer term goals is to look at questions of culture.  Once they stop shivering, what do people who move to Canada from Iran or Somalia make of our built spaces?  I've written about some of the more dramatic effects of jarring mismatches between culture and space -- the Paris riots of 2004, even perhaps 9/11 -- but what about the subtle effects of living in a house that rubs one's cultural predilection for privacy, for example, the wrong way? 

I've been going through a fabulous new edition of Hermann Muthesius' classic three volume book The English House, where he tries to explain much of the revered English way of life in terms related to architecture and design.  Muthesius seems to have genuinely believed that much of the economic and social advantages of the English in comparison with Continental Europe early in the 20th century was connected with the ways that the English arranged space.  Could where we put hallways, doors and chairs in our houses, the ways that the shapes of rooms allow us to place our furnishings really have such a profound effect on how we feel and what we think? 

Moral instincts and the environment

I've just finished reading Stephen Pinker's feature article in the New York Times Magazine on the evolution and cognitive science of morality.  As is often the case, I find myself reading with a mixture of admiration and envy.  Pinker's science writing is clear, persuasive, and interesting and he exercises his usual knack for connecting his ideas to important current events. 

I hate to quibble with what is generally a great piece if not for the grenade that he lobs at us in the penultimate paragraph:

"The threat of human-induced climate change has become the occasion for a moralistic revival meeting. In many discussions, the cause of climate change is overindulgence (too many S.U.V.’s) and defilement (sullying the atmosphere), and the solution is temperance (conservation) and expiation (buying carbon offset coupons). Yet the experts agree that these numbers don’t add up: even if every last American became conscientious about his or her carbon emissions, the effects on climate change would be trifling, if for no other reason than that two billion Indians and Chinese are unlikely to copy our born-again abstemiousness."

In a way, he's right that any real solution to the problem of climate change must take into account the actions of people in both East and South Asia, but to suggest that these people are incapable of reining in their production of carbon or unwilling to do so is to ignore the basic fact that on a per capita basis, North Americans are at the top of the carbon consumption pyramid.  Though the gap is closing, the US and Canada together consume more energy than East Asia in spite of having about one-sixth the population.  So the problem with the Asias is not the consumption of energy by individuals (individual consumption in India is miniscule compared to that in North America) but the number of individuals.  Admittedly still a big problem, but one of numbers in this case rather than behaviour.

But back to behaviour.  After all, Pinker and I are both psychologists.  I've heard this argument before that our own changes in attitude and behaviour won't amount to a hill of beans until things change overseas, but there's another basic fact that gets ignored in this argument, and that is that a good deal of the production of carbon overseas is taking place at our own behest.  China, for example, has a massive export number (1.2 trillion US dollars) and one of the largest trade surpluses of any country.  Much of the overseas industrial production that is responsible for emission of carbon is taking place because of demand from North American consumers.  If we didn't want the stuff that's being made in China, India, Vietnam, Bangladesh, then there would be less carbon in the air.  I'm not pretending that if that demand suddenly evaporated, that it wouldn't spell some disastrous times for those who are ekeing out a living making our computers, cellphones, big screen televisions and Barbie dolls, but if we're trying to imagine that we're not complicit in the loop whereby the production of such things causes massive carbon outputs then we're not being completely honest with ourselves.  In more ways than we might like to admit, the levers that control how much carbon China, India, and the rest of Asia put into the air are firmly within our own grasp every time we go to the store to buy something we might not need.

There are no easy answers to any of this.  In the short term, it's becoming abundantly clear that we will need some draconian measures both to curb carbon outputs and to deal with the carbon that is already in the air.  In the longer term, though, what's needed is a set of changes in our behaviour that perhaps begin with the recognition that we're connected to remote regions of the planet.  If we're going to eat up lots of energy to expand our geographic footprint, spread economic tentacles across the globe in order to prop up a certain standard of living, then we need to find ways to clear the veil from our eyes that prevents us from seeing all of the consequences of such a lifestyle. 

The unique nature of our own minds makes it altogether too easy for us to forget the real size and shape of the planet and how each of us is connected to it.  Our predominantly visual minds deal with our lives one vista at a time.  "Out of sight, out of mind" is the mantra by which we live.  I doubt we can change this in any substantial way no matter how much clever psychology we might try to use, but understanding such matters might help us to think of ways to harness the strange and clever shape of our own mentation to help us find a way out of the mess we've made for ourselves.

It isn't too late, but we'll need all shoulders to the wheel, especially those belonging to clever public intellectuals like Pinker.

A trickle of oil

The news outlets are slightly atwitter today with a report that suggests that there's about a 50% rise in the consumer cost of gasoline in the short-term offing.  The part of me that can blithely ignore the short-term pain, poverty, hunger, discomfort and suffering that something like this would cause says "bring it on".  I'm not a huge fan of doomsday scenario-mongers who make us feel as though we're all beyond hope now and about to be smitten back into the Stone Age, but there's no question that fossil fuels will eventually be depleted and much rides on how they're depleted.  If we suddenly ride off of a cliff edge into a world with oil priced beyond the reach of all but a tiny few, then I can see much of society unraveling quickly and catastrophically.  If we receive a series of substantial jolts over a series of years then maybe this will be the tonic we need to look into, and figure out, a future without such excessive fear and panic that we can't think straight. 

I'm no economist, but $1.50/litre seems like a sharp needle in the ribs but not a catastrophe. It might be enough to help apply some braking force to our tendency to live beyond our geographic footprint.  The expense of long commutes to work will begin to encourage people to think of ways to populate space differently.  The cost of importing goods from afar, whether they be oranges from California or  plastic toys from Guangzhou might take a little nip out of our tendency to luxuriate in a life beyond our spatial means.  Many of us will discover that we have feet attached to the ends of our legs and we'll remember what they're for.  Many of us will eventually rediscover the simple joy of measuring space one quiet, soulful step at a time.  We'll all be pretty stressed--we'll need that calm comfort to help us think through all of the brilliant ways that we'll eventually re-connect with the real dimensions of the planet.  For all of the consequences of our oversized brains, both ridiculous and wondrous, I for one still think we're a species worth preserving.

How not to use your GPS

Ok.  This is altogether too easy, so my inclination is to just offer this snippet without comment.  But it's like I've been trying to say for some time now.  Wayfinding in the suburbs isn't easy....

What is a real human?

Just before the new year, Stephen Strauss wrote an interesting piece for the  CBC website on the subject of virtual crime.  The issue is not a new one, but it is one that I predict will continue to heat up in the coming year.  How do we apply human laws in virtual realms?  How do we deal with everything from property theft to slander, assault, and rape?  I don't spend much time in Second Life anymore (too busy writing at the moment) but I've hung around there long enough, especially late at night, to experience some of its seamy underside.  I've never been battered with a virtual penis, but I have been chased mercilessly by a small cube emitting a loud and obnoxious sound file.  I've seen people trapped in cages, and I'm pretty sure I came close to being shut in one myself at one time (I teleported away before things got too ugly).

In the end, Strauss takes the common sense line that when it comes to defining virtual crime, if there is property theft then virtual property is as real as bricks and mortar, provided that there is real money at stake somewhere.  But other kinds of crimes--crimes against the person--seem to him much less clear cut.  He says that you have to let thoughts be free "if there are no real humans involved."

And for me, there's the rub.  I'm far from alone in wondering whether a real human needs a real body.  I've written here before about Stelarc, the Australian performance artist whose mission is to extend our range of thought and imagination about what it means to be embodied.  If I'm attached to wires, or bluetoothed to some device that I can control with my mind, do those wires and devices constitute a part of my body?  If not, then can I use the connection to punch someone in the jaw with a robotic arm?  Surely not, even by Strauss' standard, but then what of a virtual jaw?  What if it hurts, or even just stresses me out a bit?  Neuroscientists have found clever ways to convince people that a rubber hand that they can see in front of them is actually a part of their own body.  Having induced this kind of otherworldly feeling of possession, not only do we flinch when we see the rubber hand hit with a hammer, but we feel significant (and measurable) physiological stress.

Many years ago, the brilliant sociologist Edward Hall defined a new field of study that he called proxemics.  We all know something of the laws of proxemics because they deal with things like territory and personal distance.  It's common intuition that we carry bubbles of personal space around with us whose size and shape can vary depending on the context.  We have one size of bubble for close friends and lovers, another for strangers and bosses.  One range of distances works well between two women and another operates between two men.  Now here's the modern virtual twist.  Research out of Jeremy Bailenson's lab at Stanford University suggests that those same laws of proxemics apply in virtual worlds like Second Life.  So I may know that my avatar is not a "real" body, but I still invest enough reality in it that I know where to stand and how to (or not to) make eye contact with other avatars.  This suggests that I'm embodying my avatar with some part of myself.  Enough so that if I'm jumped by someone in a dark virtual alley then the assault is a real world crime?

The problems involved in working out the psychological, sociological and legal issues are not to be underestimated.  Virtual technologies are incredibly freeing, filled with real promise, and potentially life-affirming, but the kind of life they affirm will not look too familiar to those with too strong attachments to the sacredness of the handful of cells we call our bodies.

Touring the crystal

I took my family to the Royal Ontario Museum over the holidays to, of course, check out the dino-crystal.  If the mark of good architecture is that it gets people talking, then the Libeskind monster, jutting out onto Bloor Street, certainly fills the bill.  Those who live in Toronto, or who have frequent chances to haunt the city have watched this thing form on the stately walls of the older original museum and everyone, it seems, has an opinion.  Like others, I wondered what would happen when the weather caused ice to form on the oblique exterior walls.  Would it slide off in great sheets, bringing no end of peril to those wandering past on the sidewalk?  So far, I've not heard of any unexpected deaths in the paleontological community, or dinosaur-loving children with missing limbs, so we may yet be safe on that score.

As I watched the crystal take shape, I have to say that I was never a fan of the idea.  At times, I thought that I 'got' it.  A crystal is a kind of endlessly repeating fractal design in the same way that one could consider the biosphere as being composed of a series of endlessly repeating patterns of DNA where small deviations have dramatic impacts on form.  I thought the building was clever in the same way that a ridiculously impractical piece of haute couture -- say a 6 foot high hat filled with fruit, barbed wire, and monkeys -- might be clever.  I had more difficulty understanding how this building exemplifies the motif of post-Holocaust pain and suffering that some have said characterizes all of Libeskind's work.  But on the whole, it seemed a tad silly and impractical.  A hugely expensive and difficult to maintain structure that, in the end, seems to add much less space to the museum than one might like (are there really 40,000 new square feet here?  Do the tilting walls create an illusion of closed-in crampiness?).

Now that I've been inside the crystal, I have to say that my opinion hasn't changed as much as I wanted it to.  I wanted to be blown away.  I wanted to be proven wrong.  I love great architecture, and I love surprises, and I wanted to find a bit of both.  I'm still suspending some judgment because on the day in question (December 27) there was a huge crowd in the halls.  Lovely to see such levels of interest in the exhibits, but it did make it harder for me to form judgments about my feelings while having to  make sure I didn't lose my 3 year old son among the pterodactyls.

What I did notice, though, was that there was nary an orthogonal angle in the place.  At times I felt like Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock's "Vertigo".  As every film-maker and visual artist knows, oblique angles are not known for their ability to soothe us and fill us with positive feelings.   Still, there's nothing to say that we're supposed to sit in quiet, happy repose in a museum space.  There's nothing wrong with being jarred into alertness, a slight feeling of edgy disorientation, while we look at gigantic sets of fossilized bones and contemplate our own origins.   Again, it was hard to assess this completely given the massive crowds -- I need to go back on a quieter day -- but there was no escaping the fact that the oblique angles where wall meets floor are not coping well with the current trend to Humvee-sized baby strollers.  The trim work is already badly scuffed and scraped and it's hard to imagine that there won't be enormous maintenance bills here if the museum intends to keep things looking not too seedy and cheap.

Also, the light seemed not so great.  It's true that we did visit on a fairly dull day, but it didn't seem to me that we were getting full value for the enormous amounts of glass that are visible from the outside of the building.  It was a bit murky in there.   I'd like to go back on a blue sky day.

The space was small enough that wayfinding did not pose huge problems, though I did notice a tendency to some right-left confusions.  The sloping walls mean that most exhibits have to run through the centre of the halls, leaving passageways on either side.  This tends to make the space a bit directionally undefined.  The density of the crowds seemed even everywhere, which is either a very good sign or it just means there were so many people that the place was saturated.  Another visit or two will sort this out for me, but the main positive was that even on a heavy traffic day, there were few unnavigable clumps of people.  Somebody has done some good thinking to ensure this part of the space works properly.

I liked the basement gallery space.  It was the only part of the crystal that seemed both impressively large and also filled with potential for interesting uses of the space.  The exhibition of interesting Canadian artefacts was poorly attended (which was great for me--I got to spend some personal time with Pierre Trudeau's famous canoe) but beautifully laid out.  It's a part of the building I'd really look forward to revisiting without children afoot.  I could do some serious time-traveling there.

So does the crystal work?  In the sense that it captures street and city attention, I suppose that it does its job.  The museum and the city wanted a Libeskind and now they have one.  Toronto is collecting some interesting and mature public spaces that will provoke discussion and debate. This has to be a good thing.  As a museum space, I'm less convinced.  It wasn't as bad as I had feared, nor as good as I had hoped, but unlike the crystals my kids like to collect in interesting little boxes in their bedrooms, this one didn't quite shine for me.