Rethinking my Vegetarianism

So, it's been awhile since I've posted - I've written alot of half-posts actually, and maybe if I get ambitious I'll consolidate them into a collection of half-posts that is postable. Some of them were actually turning into short stories.

Since I've returned to Calgary, I've reverted back to my usual form of vegetarianism: no meat, no fish, but plenty of the dairy products we so nonchalantly steal from animals. It would be very hard to be a pure vegan living at home, and since I've actually been taking this semester seriously (and have to commute to school,) I'm finding myself short on type for cooking good food.

I'm not happy with this arrangement, in general. The ethical arguments about factory farming and the environmental damage caused by livestock production are very sound arguments to avoid [most] dairy products. And I don't think I'm eating so healthily either. We barbeque alot and I've been eating too many veggie burgers (although I have turned these into artpieces: with havarti, avocado, sauteed mushrooms/onions,) and leaning too heavily on empty carbohydrates and eggs, which I'm sure is putting my cholesterol through the roof. Aside: You're never too young to start worrying about cholesterol. All this without getting enough high-quality protein.

So I've been wondering - what is a better arrangement? One idea I've come up with is "Pesco-veganism". Skip out on the dairy products, but start eating fish again. I'm not ethically concerned about fish, to be honest. I suspect, deep in my heart, that they have more in common with plants than mammals. Moreover, fish farming is less environmentally damaging than its land-based counterpart. It doesn't carry the official title of "Vegan", but maybe it's time to start saying, "I don't eat ______." rather than carrying around a title. Google only comes up with 379 hits for "Pesco-vegan", but 4.36 million for vegan and 11 million for vegetarian. Seems like there's not many of us.

Of course, I could liberalize this policy further. I could allow myself organic cheese and eggs and the like. It would make cooking simpler and more varied, while minimizing environmental/ethical impact.

So look for me eating fish (a greater variety of sushi, prawns, salmon steak?) in the coming weeks.

Singapore

So after things wrapped up in Indonesia, I was supposed to come to Singapore for a few days to ship some things and wrap up some customs formalities. I was later asked by the operations department to stay with our airplane, though, until it left Singapore, so this has drawn out into more than two weeks. There isn't much involved with that, other than talking to the mechanic everyday and writing up a daily report, which is leaving me with alot of free time to wander Singapore.

This is far superior to Indonesia, though. For starters, no earthquakes! There was an earthquake in Java while I was there that measured 7.5 on the Richter scale. What prevented it from being a terrible calamity was its depth underneath the Earth's surface. Whereas most earthquakes tend to occur 25-30 km under the crust, this one occured well over 300 km. I later found out that it that as a result, it was felt effectively as a 4.5 or 5 in Jakarta. That alone was enough to put a massive crack in the wall of one of our pilot's rooms. I shiver a little bit thinking of how our hotel might have fared under the full shock of a 7.5, which because it is a logarithmic scale (base 10?) is 400-500 times more powerful than a 5.

Singapore is the Switzerland of Asia, and it's nice to walk around a cleaner city than Jakarta. It's a heavily controlled city, too, which may have its advantages. For instance, Singapore has gone a long way towards eliminating mosquitoes. How did it do this? It banned having water in people's yards, and fined people who let puddles form. While we're suspicious of top-down measures in the West, they seem to work very well here.

I'm having a good time here, too. For starters, my friend Irena is studying at the National University of Singapore on exchange. We've been having good nightlife adventures - many clubs are open until 4 in the morning. Even the baristas at Starbucks are friendly and all know me by name now (and chat with me on their breaks,) so I spend alot of afternoons sitting in Starbucks working through my LSAT practice book. I'm not sure if I want to go into law, but it might be useful to take the test.

Besides gearing up for the LSATs, I've been reading Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse. Jared Diamond wrote Guns, Germs, and Steel - which I read in India, and it gave non-racist, scientific explanations as to why Eurasian civilizations became more advanced than North American, African or Australasian societies. He explained alot of the gap as being due to differences in plant/animal varieties and the beneficial east/west axis of Eurasia. I like his biological, scientific reasoning, and am pleased to see it in his latest book. Diamond makes the point that it is quite possible for societies to collapse under environmental stress, and pounds out example after example of societies that collapsed primarily due to it. Easter Islanders, the Anazasi, the Maya, the Norse in Greenland. The second half of the book, which I'm working through right now, draws the same parallels for alot of modern societies, like China and Australia. It's just incredible how multidisciplinary he is. Reading the wikipedia article on Jared Diamond, I smiled agreeingly to hear the quote describing Diamond as "not actually a man, but a committee"

Otherwise, I'm playing with some ideas on these lazy afternoons, trying to exercise my little gray cells. Philosphically, I've been wondering - what kind of thing is the free market? There are a couple philosophical issues that come into play here - the first is the scientific question of where and how much determinism applies, and the second is an ontological question.
I've also been playing with a strange idea I call a "first calamity restriction," which might help defeat astronomically rising costs for health care and auto insurance. I think every person should reasonably expect to suffer one calamity causing injury in their life. For the first calamity they suffer, they shouldn't be able to seek punitive damages in court (assuming the calamity wasn't caused intentionally by another person,) only recouping health care costs and maybe lost wages. It seems like a person who suffers two or three calamities in their life has suffered disproportionately, but we shouldn't seek too much compensation for something that will probably happen to us, statistically. The money we would receive for such a calamity gets cycled wastefully through insurance companies, anyways, and it'd be better to leave it in everyone's hands to begin with.

Anyways, I should stop drinking tea at 11:30 at night. Happy trailings everybody.

Not that I take many photos, but....

The most kickass purchase of the trip - my brand new teapot.


The sea over Balikpapan - the dots on the horizon are oil platforms


Same view as above, but overlooking the swimming pool and town square.


Dazzling nightlife in Clarke Quay, Singapore - open until 4, 5 in the morning!


The coolest themed bar ever - a "clinic" where you drink on wheelchairs, with the option of drinking from an IV!


A practical means of emptying the sea of pesky critters. My piece of tofu is in the SE corner.


You'd think after two months in Indonesia, I'd have a few more photos, but there was too much time in airports, in hotels, and on the roads connecting them. I'll take more photos when I'm back as a tourist.

I'm still here, don't you worry

So, I've been busy at work, although it's starting to ease up. It looks like my time in Singapore is going to be partly work-related, which rocks because I'll be paid, hoteled and expensed for a little bit of work there. I wasn't even sure I'd know how to completely fill up the days anyways. To top it off, my dad might be in Kuala Lampur around the same time, so there's a fractional chance I might be able to skip over and visit with him for a day or two.

As for work here, It's strange, I have to get up at least once in the middle of the night everyday to put a new tape in the transcribing computer, so I'm getting spooky, vivid dreams from entering REM a second time.

I'm seeing alot of hotels and aeroports in Indonesia, but it's whetting my taste for real travel. I'm hoping to visit Papua and explore Kalimantan the next time I come through here. Actually, I'm channelling my wanderlust by staring at digital world maps and drawing dots and lines on them and making promises for 2008. I get more and more ambitious everytime I look at it. I'll need to get more pages for my passport.

What have I been thinking about lately?

I'm wondering alot about symmetry of opinion. Take any given question, and you can find rational people passionate about one side or the other. Do these kinds of questions, questions that appear defensible from both sides, have any definitive answer? It used to make sense to hold left-wing positions on things, but is it necessary to identify this way? It might be better to simply resolve to handle questions one by one as they arise and try to resolve them in as rational and pragmatic a way as possible. I think there's a place for me in the world doing that.

On the other hand, I miss the days where I could feel idealistic about things. I remember the G8 protests back in June 2002, when I was 16, and lugging boxes around for a Socialist Party display. A year later I was protesting the Iraq War with a big sign that read "No More War for Oil!" with little black cardboard cutouts of oil barrels for effect. The world seemed unspeakably vast, its problems enormous, but it seemed like a correctable place. "If only the government would listen to our collective voices!" we were singing. Those were exciting times. But now the world is small and transversable, its problems seem smaller and more fundamentally engrained, and the corrections often as harmful as the problems. And it's incredible the kinds of things I could defend when I felt so idealistic, for instance "well, it was Stalin who subverted the Soviet Union.. really Leninism might well have led to a worker's paradise..." Watch "The Last King of Scotland" to see where I'm now coming from.

Not all idealism is lost, though. There might not be a single "right way" for the whole world, but you look at some individual problems and there appears to be clear right and wrong. Not everything has to be backed up rationally. One thing I do feel increasingly passionate about is human rights. If you want to improve the lot of the human race, you don't start with the majority. You start with the minority, the minority for whom things suck the most. The people locked up in prisons and trapped in torture chambers. It's a rejection of utilitarianism - even if there are millions in poverty, I increasingly think the place to start is at the bottom. I think I'll try to get reinvolved with Amnesty International when I get back home.

I'm also developing a curious side interest in the War in the Pacific, partly from some of the war sites around here. Everyone knows bits and pieces about Germany and the Third Reich, but the war in the Pacific Theater is terra incognita. It was different than the war in Europe, in part because the Japanese were different from any people in the world. The war itself was a mysterious, dream-like hop from tropical island to tropical island against a martial foe that worshipped a living emperor. Lush islands occupied by cannibals and Stone Age peoples. It was a war of eerie silence punctuated by sudden bursts of violence. It's strange too how the Japanese "woke up" from their nightmare after the atomic bombs landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and promptly became one of the most peaceful peoples on Earth.

Good night, and Good Luck, as an influential newscaster used to say.

Musing

Was the little boy in the Osama Bin Laden shirt smiling or leering at me?

Working in Indonesia

So, in a fortunate turn of events, three short weeks after returning home from India, I'm working in Indonesia. This blog is becoming a de facto travel blog.

Naturally, when I came home, I was looking for work. The threat of having to go build tennis courts again loomed uneasily over my head. Dad made some enquiries with the field staff in his mapping company, which I've worked for before, and found that there they (urgently) needed someone in the field, preferably someone who had worked with the same applications before. Done and done. I'm a lucky bastard.

I find that I'm always curious about what exactly other people do on their jobs, so I will spare no detail in my description. Basically my job is the following:

My company does aerial mapping to make height maps of terrain. We "shine" a radar beam at the ground, figure out the phase difference using interferometry, and using this - generate height maps of very large areas. To do this, we also need good GPS data to know exactly where in space our aircraft is, and the mere GPS data abroad our aircraft isn't sufficient. In normal operation, the aircraft does two flights a day and maps a few stripes of the Earth on lines. After each flight I check the GPS and system data to make sure it is sufficient and does not indicate an amplifier or something is burnt out in the radar (in three days of work there have already been problems to spot). Then I check the navigation data for indications of motion, since too much aircraft motion can also harm our data quality. If the aircraft bumps, I figure out if I can save the particular line (I check on Google Earth, and if as we bump we're passing over a volcano or water or something that doesn't matter, I can ignore it,) or split up the line and save the remaining segments of the line. If we've flown the same line more than once, sometimes I can stitch the good segments into a complete line and save another pass. Then I feed this information to the flight planner, who then knows what lines we we need to fly the following evening or morning, and s/he can draw up a flight plan to present to air traffic control.

So basically, in the past week or so, I've spent three nights in Denver, Colorado getting some brush-up training, two nights in Singapore getting the work permit, three nights in Jakarta, and now I'm in Balikpapan, Indonesia (on Borneo) settled in for the next couple weeks. Singapore was a really nice place - however truly it holds up to William Gibsons' description as "Disneyland with the Death Penalty" or another's "The World's Only Shopping Mall with a Seat at the United Nations". Just a really pleasant, cosmopolitian city. Everything gave me a favourable impression, and my friend Irena is going to have a wonderful time there on exchange come August. Indonesia it self is strange. The obvious comparisons I draw are with India - and comparing Jakarta with Delhi, Jakarta must be ten years ahead. For one thing, Jakarta has skyscrapers. With the fluctuating power supply in Delhi, they don't trust elevators - so the height of skyscrapers is limited by how high you can walk. It must be all the natural resource wealth. It feels reasonably safe, but there are constant reminders of how terrorism hangs over the place - for instance, going into our hotels there is a security clearance and they check the trunks of cars about one hundred meters from the hotel entrances. It's strange to think that there are people who want to kill me without meeting me somewhere out there, but in a country of 200 million people, it's reassuring to remember that they're submerged in a flood of otherwise friendly people. We've had a long history of working in Indonesia, and alot of the field staff have stayed here months and months and married Indonesian wives.

I finally read Bukowski's Ham on Rye, and as it turns out, the book made the rounds around the field crew a couple months ago so everyone had a word in on how "twisted" it was. I like how brutal his honesty is, I suppose it's a beatnik era thing (even if he wasn't a beatnik) He catches alot of the foibles of childhood with precision. But, God, how Bukowski was a slave to his body - a typical fighting, ill-sociable, boozing hound. Yet somehow he managed to find his way to a typewriter and pound out a string of books.

Anyways, in typical Indonesian form, our military escort didn't get his tasking orders on Friday afternoon. So, we get the weekend off (normally it's a 12 hour day, 7 days a week!), and I'm going to go down to the gym and work out. Hopefully I'll write a more entertaining sounding entry later.

June 18th's Macleans ...by the Numbers

The June 18 edition of Macleans has 68 pages. This includes:

• 2 pages of news clips
• 16 pages of advertisements
• 1 page of a pinup girl
• 2 pages of letters
• 2 pages of table of contents
• 29 pages of popular culture

Which leaves a whopping total of 16 pages for actual news or news opinion, which includes such gems as a two-page article devoted to whether Harper is "too mean". Macleans has competent, politically entrenched writers like Paul Wells and Peter C. Newman on staff. In spite of this, Macleans is clearly taking a new direction. It is no longer a news magazine, but instead a celebration of celebrity fascination, style and partisanship. It is like a current events edition of Readers' Digest.

Recommendation: Subscribe to the Economist instead.