Category: Travel

My actual travels, those I aspire to, and those of others

Ottawa visit

I took a short but lovely comms off vacation to see my dear friends Andrea and Mehrzad in Ottawa. Having left my phone turned off in a box at home along with the token I need to login to GMail and pretty much all other online services was de-stressing and liberating, though I spent most of the weekend playing with their funny dogs and their extreme cute tornado-haired baby.

The one significant block of time I spent alone was a 15 km walk past familiar Ottawa sights: the Chaudière falls with their newly expanded hydroelectric facility; the TLC complex with its new cages to protect people from falling brick fragments; my old favourite depanneur in Gatineau; the Alexandra bridge; official buildings along Sussex Avenue; a circumnavigation of the Rideau Hall grounds; and then a walk back west past the University of Ottawa.

As ever my friends were exceptionally kind to me, plying me with excellent food and sharing the amusing company of their young son, who I learned enjoys having me jump beside him and make velociraptor snarling noises.

Greyhound shutting down outside Ontario and Quebec

I got an email from Greyhound which confirmed recent headlines:

We are permanently cancelling all Greyhound Canada services in the provinces of Alberta, Manitoba and Saskatchewan.

In British Columbia, we are cancelling all services as well.

This is a shame both for me personally and in general.

It means the train is now the only available low-carbon travel option from Toronto or Ottawa to Vancouver, making a repeat of my bus-based Low Carbon Cross Country (LC^3T) trip impossible after the end of October.

It also makes remote communities and their inhabitants more isolated and vulnerable, especially for people who lack the credentials or vehicle access to drive. It also seems to represent a breakdown in the idea that Canada ought to be connected as an entity, especially alongside the high cost and low frequency of rail services.

What3Words

In an illustration of combinatorial mathematics, what3words.com will represent any location on Earth as a set of three simple English words.

It’s intended to help in cities that lack formal maps and street names.

The points it distinguishes are close enough together that for a building of any size you get various choices.

The Toronto Reference Library could be journals.nuggets.nipped.

Toronto’s best kite-flying spot: agree.rewarded.lasts.

High Park’s labyrinth? hatched.alarm.riding or drainage.draining.kitchen or playing.training.achieving.

Nearly eight years away from Vancouver

It has been 7 years, 11 months since I was last in Vancouver, having made the trip out and back by Greyhound to visit my family and friends and spend time with Emily.

The last time I flew was also to Vancouver, back in 2007/08.

I had hoped to go back by bus this summer, not only to see Vancouver and dispose of the boxes with all my possessions which I put in a closet before moving to England in 2005, but also to take a trip to the Haida Gwaii to make up for the one that was cancelled when I dropped the Northern Gateway Pipeline as a PhD research subject. That proved impossible because of the urgent need to find a new supervisor by the end of August.

It’s not clear when I might find my way back. I need to go at least once over the rest of my life since there are materials (like all my old photo negatives) which are stored and which I really need to deal with myself. Perhaps when the PhD is done (target: fall 2019) there will be an opportunity for an overland trip. I doubt there will be a chance before then. During the times when I am not working every available extra TA job to stay comparatively solvent I will need to be working on research and writing up.

Mitchell on “Carbon Democracy”

A surprising oversight in Timothy Mitchell’s generally-insightful Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil is how he gives relatively little consideration to static versus mobile forms of fossil fuel consumption. He strongly emphasizes the production and transportation logistics of coal versus oil, but gives little consideration to special needs for fuels with high energy density (and sometimes low freezing points) in transport applications from cars and trucks to aircraft and rockets. People sometimes assume that oil demand and electricity production are more related than they really are, especially in jurisdictions where oil is mostly used as transport fuel and for heating (both areas where little electricity is generally used).

At a minimum, I think it’s important to give some special consideration to the needs of the aerospace and aviation industries, especially when pondering biofuel alternatives. Also, we need to try to project things like the deployment rate of electric ground vehicles in various applications, when trying to project how the forms of energy production and use in the future affect politics and low-carbon policy choices.

To Ottawa and back

I had a marvellous time in Ottawa, getting spoiled by my friends Andrea and Mehrzad, getting to know their newborn son, and getting some portraits for the growing family.

A few things are happening in the next week or so, but job #1 is to persist with my recruitment campaign for a new supervisor. A friend recently suggested that I should downplay the conventional metrics (similarity of research interests and methodological approach) in favour of looking into who has the best record of getting people through their dissertation quickly and reliably.