Aging: Going the distance like Voyager 1, Termination Shock, and crossing the heliopause boundary into interstellar space and other adventures

If The Legend of Bagger Vance and the game of golf can be considered a metaphor for life, and it, along with such golf movies as Tin Cup and Seven Days in Utopia, surely can be, then perhaps the venerable Voyager 1 space probe can be considered as being somewhat analogous to aging.

On Sept. 5, 1977, the Voyager 1 space probe launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida aboard a Titan-Centaur rocket. A 12-inch gold-plated copper disc stored aboard the probe contains greetings in 60 languages, samples of music from different cultures and eras, and natural and man-made sounds from Earth. They also contain electronic information that an advanced technological civilization could convert into diagrams and photographs.

Voyager 1’s primary mission was completed 12 years later in 1989 when it completed its planned close flybys of the Jupiter and Saturn planetary systems. Its extended Voyager Interstellar Mission objective is to extend the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) exploration of the solar system beyond the neighborhood of the outer planets to the outer limits of the Sun’s sphere of influence, and possibly beyond.

In August 2012, Voyager 1 flew beyond Termination Shock, the point where the solar wind becomes slower than the speed of sound, and crossing the heliopause boundary, and finally entering interstellar space, making it the first human-made object to explore this new territory. Its Mission Elapsed Time is now 45 years, seven months, and 22 days.

The existential point of Voyager 1 is it keeps on going. Aging is similar to that. In some ways, you move beyond the playbook but keep, by the grace of God, and genes, on going. That can be both liberating and terrifying. In a post last July (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2022/07/05/character-courage-redemption-and-some-thoughts-on-aging-gracefully-aging-well-hint-mellow-isnt-just-for-coffee-and-gratitude-really-is-an-attitude/), I wrote about aging gracefully, aging well.

“My own thoughts on aging gracefully, aging well, might be summarized thusly: Be mellow, be grateful,” I wrote two days before I knew I was going to have a cystoscopy for kidney stones at Health Sciences Centre (HSC) in Winnipeg. Perhaps it was meant as much as a 48-hour countdown clock pep talk to myself as anything. Because after the cystoscopy most of the grace I felt for the remainder of the day was fentanyl-fueled by my merciful urology surgeon, who discharged me from day surgery with an admonition to my medical escort that I not be allowed to sign any legal documents or venture into a casino for at least 24 hours. He also cautioned my medical escort that my memory would be on a five-minute fentanyl-inspired repeating question loop for the rest of the day. All in all, I’d say, doc was pretty close to the mark. On the good side, I sat obediently on a curb outside HSC in the wonderful, warm Winnipeg July sunshine, while Jeanette retrieved the vehicle from a nearby parkade. And I did this even though a beckoning lunch-hour hot dog cart was mere feet away. Later, minutes before closing time, we made our first trip together to the Polo Park shopping centre since long before the COVID-19 pandemic began. Jeanette says I raced along both the lower and upper levels of the mall at record race walking speed, compared to my often spine-challenged limp.

On the not-so-good side, I asked detailed questions of my medical escort about my urology procedure on the HSC elevator down to the ground floor. When I wasn’t satisfied with the answers I was getting, I helpfully suggested that perhaps the answers I was receiving were not adequate. Once we arrived at Grand Medicine Health Sciences Pharmacy to get a couple of prescriptions filled, I had a pleasant, albeit apparently rather loud, telephone conversation with an agent of Manitoba Blue Cross  about the summer status of my plan coverage. Later, we had a lovely dinner with Jeanette’s son, Robin, and his wife, Chelsie, on the patio of Damecca Lounge on Madison Street in Winnipeg. As the meal ended, I wandered inside without a word to anyone, leaving them to assume that I had just had to use the washroom, but instead I picked up the tab (good) but only initially inadvertently left a $0.26 tip for our more-than-competent waiter on the point-of-sale terminal he had handed to me (bad). Fortunately, I realized my faux pas (perhaps the look on his face?), and fortuitously had some paper fiat currency in my wallet to hand over also. Needless to say, I didn’t visit any casinos.

As it turned out, the summer would be much more difficult than the initial July 7 trip. Between the end of July and mid-September, I would be make six trips the Emergency Department of Thompson General Hospital – more than my previous combined total in 15 years of living in Thompson – as well as making two more road trips to Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre for more related day surgeries on July 20 and Sept. 16. In that short space of time, I had gone from being triaged as a patient to be seen sooner-than-later to the top of the provincial urology surgery list.

My trusty medical escort assures me that my loud and repeated use of the f-word all down the corridor, as I painfully walked back to our hotel room at 6 a.m. Saturday morning Sept. 17 at the Quality Inn & Suites on Pembina Highway, would have sufficed to have me tossing the guest out if I had been working the the front of desk of my own Quality Inn & Suites Thompson. The same could no doubt be attested to by three older ladies whom I shared an observation room with overnight at HSC in the preceding hours. One told a nurse making her rounds “the gentleman seems to be in quite a bit of pain,” as I stood beside my bed all night, as it was the most comfortable position of a bad lot of choices. The nurse replied, “We’ll be giving him something for the pain in a minute,” saying it with a tone suggesting a bit of silence would be a bonus for everyone, along with pain relief. 

By the end of September, I would feel fine. 

In the Knights of Columbus, our fraternal Latin motto is “tempus fugit, memento mori,” which translates in English to “time flies, remember death.” If I’m tempted to think myself above some tedious task, I usually catch myself and instead think something to the effect of,  “Thank God that I am still blessed with the physical ability and and cognitive skills to perform  do it.”

The late Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, who died in January 2022, at the age of 95, had many useful things to say over many decades of teaching on mindfulness and seemingly ordinary and mundane tasks. And while I may not know many of today’s stars who make up what passes for celebrity culture in the present zeitgeist, I am not apparently a complete Luddite, as I am activating a JK hand-me-down digital iPhone 7 Apple smartphone, after about a 15-year hiatus from my old classic black Motorola 120c analog cell phone (which went through a full wash-and-dry cycle once, maybe twice, in a side pocket of some green khaki cargo shorts.)

I haven’t subscribed to 81-year-old Moses Znaimer’s Zoomer magazine yet, but it is only April and the year is still young.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus, but beware the Ghost of Christmas Eve newsroom Baileys Irish Cream liqueur

 In response to a query, I wrote here yesterday about my usual Christmastime traditions over the years, and how some of my traditions date back many years, while others are of much more recent vintage, and are perhaps best described as being on the road to becoming tradition, although exactly where that demarcation line is drawn, is not completely clear to me. Christmas traditions are important, but not immutable, I think. To some extent, they seem to me to be dependent on where we are both in life, as it were, and geography, which even in a very virtual world, still matters.

While I touched on food, be it sausage meat dressing or stuffing for Jeanette’s perfectly cooked juicy Christmas turkey, Land O’Lakes sour cream cornbread, Christmas fruitcake, whether it be from the monks of Le Magasin de l’Abbayea Val Notre-Dame in Saint-Jean-de-Matha, Quebec, or my local Safeway’s honey and ground almond marzipan-icing topped offerings; as well as the classic Christmas movie genre, I might well have added a few more traditions I developed over the years that festively often blended the personal and professional, private and public.

Ecclesiastes (hello Qoheleth, hello King Solomon?) had it about right, I think, when whosoever he was wrote, “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven.” In terms of the Christmas season for many that means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do. In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of our saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick. The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope-emeritus Benedict XVI, in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, published in November 2012, wrote Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth-century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and it is Christmas 1996. I am working as the managing editor of The Kingston Net-Times, during the pioneering days of Canadian online journalism. From day one, we published no print edition and our local stories in that groundbreaking digital newspaper were updated on the fly throughout the day, but there were few bells and whistles, as very, very few of our online readers had cable broadband internet in 1996. Who remembers dial-up?

On Christmas Day 1996, I was called at home by a father who read us online and wondered if we could take a few minutes to put up the famous “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” letter to the editor and the editorial response for his young daughter.

The letter and editorial had long been in the public domain. So we did. On Christmas Day. Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote the long-ago letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial.

The following year at Christmas 1997, I was back in Peterborough, Ontario at the Peterborough Examiner, a print-only daily newspaper back in those days, where I had worked previously from 1985 to 1989. During my first stint, I was the court beat reporter. Now, I was the city hall reporter. The Examiner, of course, was the paper Robertson Davies edited between 1942 and 1955. It was while editing the Peterborough Examiner that Davies, considered by townspeople as an eccentric bearded figure in the small-town world of Peterborough in the 1940s, would establish himself as one of Canada’s most important 20th century literary figures with the creation and development of his Samuel Marchbanks character, mining his daily newspaper experiences in the Queen of the Kawarthas for many of the characters and situations, which would appear in his novels and plays.

On Dec. 23, 1997, I was at a dinner party hosted by the late playwright Rhonda Payne at her home on Parkhill Road East in Peterborough. I had met Rhonda, author of the play “Stars in the Sky Morning,” a tale of the hardships of women on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland, a month earlier at Karen Hicks – at another dinner party. The National Post described Rhonda in 1999 as a “national treasure” and if ever there was a bon vivant, it was Rhonda, which is why the evening was so convivial and is perhaps what induced me to have more red wine at dinner than I might normally during the work week. You see, the Examiner had a long tradition of its own of granting employees what was quaintly termed “early leaving” at noon on both Christmas Eve and New Years Eve. What’s an extra glass, or maybe even two, of red, I thought to myself? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and really, how hard can it be? All I have to do is more or less physically show up in the newsroom for the half-day morning.

When I got home from Rhonda’s dinner party that night, the red light was flashing repeatedly and rapidly on my old General Electric answering machine (I think voicemail existed, but was still in its early years). It seemed odd to have so many messages awaiting receipt, but I went ahead and pushed the play button. Lo and behold it was Jim Hendry, then city editor of the Examiner, telling me that there was going to be a press conference at 8 a.m. Dec. 24 at the Peterborough County courthouse with City of Peterborough and County of Peterborough officials on hand to answer questions about the province seizing welfare files earlier in the day on Dec. 23. Many of the details are blurry after 22 years, but I believe welfare was perhaps a shared city-county municipal responsibility in those days, and the province was intent on upsetting that apple cart through shifting responsibilities and financial obligations between the two entities in what was called “downloading” in the days of the Harris government.

I barely survived the press conference. Once back in the second-floor newsroom of the old Peterborough Examiner building at Hunter and Water streets, I quickly picked up the telephone on my desk, across from Jack Marchen, then the court reporter, to give the late Ron Chittick, then chief administrative officer of the City of Peterborough, a quick call before he vanished for Christmas, as I realized back in the office I had a couple of unanswered questions still. Jack Marchen had been sitting across the desk from me in the newsroom when I left in August 1989 and he was still sitting across the desk from me when I returned. Phil Tyson, who sat beside me when I left, was also sitting beside me when I returned.

Time elapsed had foolishly led me to forget one of Jack’s Christmas traditions, which I should have remembered from the 1980s. But eight years had passed since then and there had been the dinner party the previous evening. Jack, unofficially, of course, and off-the-record, if anyone asks, traditionally would walk around the newsroom the morning of Christmas Eve, a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream liqueur and white Styrofoam coffee cups in hand, to pass out some Christmas cheer to his friends and colleagues.

I’m not sure what I was thinking, or even if I was thinking, but I happily accepted my coffee cup full of Baileys, as Jack handed it to me, which in all fairness kind of looked like a cup of coffee for those like myself, who go heavy on the cream. I slugged it back in one gulp, which does in retrospect seem kind of odd if I actually thought it might be hot coffee, and my brain froze instantaneously – mid-sentence, mid-question to Ron. For a thirty-second eternity, or so it seemed, there was dead air on the phone line as I failed to articulate the remainder of the question I was posing to Ron.

That, friends, was tradition and Christmas Eve 1997.

A decade later, editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News weekly newspapers here in Northern Manitoba, I resumed publishing the “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” letter to the editor from 2007 to 2013, below a bold-faced and italicized introduction, which read:

“Editor’s note: Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The response of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial. We, at the Thompson Citizen, are pleased to be part of that tradition and republishing it at Christmas has become an annual hallmark of the festive season for us here as well since Dec. 19, 2007. Merry Christmas, one and all.

John Barker.”

You can read it in full here at: https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/editorial/yes-virginia-there-is-a-santa-claus-1.1367424

While at the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I also much enjoyed re-printing Garwood Robb’s “A special gift from years ago” as a guest “Soundings” column on the editorial page around Christmas. It opens: “My first teaching assignment was in Thompson in 1968. Mary was a student of mine. She was from an extremely poor and dysfunctional family who lived on the edge of town about a quarter mile from the town’s railway station.

“On the last day of school before Christmas holidays many of the students brought me gifts….”

The column was first published in the Grandview Exponent, which serves the communities of Grandview and Gilbert Plains in the Parkland region of Manitoba, on Dec. 20, 2005, and later republished in Garwood Robb’s blog, “In My Own Words,” which can be found online at either: http://garwood2009.blogspot.ca/2009/12/memory-from-long-agorevisited.html or https://www.thompsoncitizen.net/opinion/columnists/soundings-1.1360060

Garwood lived on Centennial Drive East in Thompson and taught at Westwood Elementary School from September 1968 to June 1972 when he moved to Winnipeg.

And while it is likely too soon to call it a tradition, I’ve become rather fond in recent years of re-posting on Facebook at least two YouTube videos: “Mog’s Christmas Calamity,” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kuRn2S7iPNU&feature=share) based on author and illustrator Judith Kerr’s Mog, who first appeared in the book “Mog the Forgetful Cat,” in 1970, and who falls asleep on Christmas Eve, and unwittingly creates unimaginable chaos, leading the Thomas family to fear that Christmas will have to be cancelled, and Igniter Media’s “A Social Network Christmas,” an artistic take on how the story of the nativity might have read had a social network existed at the time of Jesus’s birth, which you will find here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sghwe4TYY18

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

The Internet of Things … things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing

 

 

A few weeks ago, I happened to capture from television for my PVR, an airing of the 1983 movie War Games, starring Matthew Broderick, Dabney Coleman, John Woods and Ally Sheedy. War Games is a delightful, campy end-of-the-Cold War Ronald Reagan-era science fiction film, which didn’t seem quite so campy when I first saw it at a movie theatre in Cornwall, Ontario, the year the Soviets shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on a scheduled flight from New York City to Seoul, after the flight deviated from its approved route and flew through prohibited airspace near Sakhalin Island at the far eastern extreme of the Soviet Union.

Perestroika and Glasnost, as it turned out, were just around the corner, but not quite yet arrived. Broderick plays David Lightman, a young computer hacker who unwittingly accesses WOPR (War Operation Plan Response), a United States military supercomputer originally programmed to predict possible outcomes of nuclear war. Lightman gets WOPR to run a nuclear war simulation, originally believing it to be a computer game. The computer, now tied into the nuclear weapons control system and unable to tell the difference between simulation and reality, attempts to start World War III.

Flash-forward 34 years from War Games to WannaCry.

WannaCry?

Yes. Not because I am one of the unfortunates with a computer infected May 12 with WannaCry, which appears a dozen years after the first documented ransomware attack happened in the United States in 2005.

Rather cry because of the State of the Internet itself in 2017. That should make anyone, Bitcoin pirates excepted, want to cry. If ever their was a swamp needing to be drained, it’s the Internet (so ubiquitous The Associated Press stopped capitalizing it last year), a tangled network that more or less runs the world from up in the Cloud somewhere, while making cyberwar on us down below through a deluge of ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing targeting our computer vulnerabilities; with the words ransomware, malware, spam and phishing so common now in the public lexicon, they no longer challenge my spellchecker and I no longer need to define them.

WannaCry, also known as Wanna Decryptor, WanaCryptor, or wcry, is a specific self-replicating multilingual ransomware type of viral worm malware program that prevents or limits users from accessing their system by encrypting all their data except for two files: instructions on what to do next and the Wanna Decryptor program itself.

It is believed to exploit a vulnerability in older and unpatched Microsoft Windows operating systems to invisibly move from computer-to-computer. And unlike many other forms of malware, it can spread on its own: it doesn’t need a human to click on a fake e-mail attachment. WannaCry uses a hacking tool called the Eternal Blue exploit, believed to have been developed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) to give American intelligence operative access to computers used by terrorists and enemy states. But a mysterious organization called Shadow Brokers, which first came to public attention last year, claimed last month it had stolen a “cyber weapon” of that description from an American spy agency, and dumped it on the Internet for all and sundry to use.

Once installed and the software is locked, WannaCry demands a US$300 ransom to be paid within six hours in Bitcoins, a digital computer cryptocurrency created in 2009 by an unknown person or persons using the alias Satoshi Nakamoto, to decrypt the files.

The ransom note indicates that the payment amount will be doubled after three days. If payment is not made after seven days, the encrypted files will be deleted. Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at the Helsinki-based cybersecurity company F-Secure, called the May 12 global attack, which has affected hundreds of thousands of files in more than 100 countries by early counts, “the biggest ransomware outbreak in history.” Bitcoins are encrypted to regulate the generation of units of currency and verify the transfer of funds in a decentralized way, operating independently of a central bank, and placing Bitcoin over the last eight years usually beyond the reach of regulatory restriction and confiscation. A single Bitcoin is worth about US$1,734, which is about $500 more than a troy ounce of gold will set you back at around US$1,230.

A decade ago, if you weren’t trolling sketchy sites, knowingly or unknowingly, and had a half-decent firewall and anti-virus program, odds were you could manoeuvre around the Internet OK, plagued by little more than some annoying, but hardly crippling, e-mail spam. Today, for this WordPress blog, I use Akismet,which bills itself as “an advanced hosted anti-spam service aimed at thwarting the underbelly of the web. It efficiently processes and analyzes masses of data from millions of sites and communities in real time. To fight the latest and dirtiest tactics embraced by the world’s most proficient spammers, it learns and evolves every single second of every single day. Because you have better things to do.” Akismet heitpfully tells me it has “protected your site from 11,379 spam comments already.”

If you were an Apple loyalist, working on a Mac, viruses were almost unheard of a decade ago, especially when compared to Microsoft Windows, first released in 1995. Apple Macintosh computer users still are less likely to be infected with a virus than Microsoft Windows users, but as Apple gains market share and Macs are used by more people, virus infections are becoming more common than they used to be.

I can almost tell you to the day in retrospect when I think the Internet “arrived.”

When I arrived at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario as a history graduate student in September 1993, the main library was still Douglas Library on University Avenue, but across the street kitty-corner to it was a massive construction project where they were building the brand-new Stauffer Library on Union Street. This was the end of the brief five-year NDP Bob Rae era in Ontario and while the economy wasn’t strictly speaking in recession, it was far from booming, so projects of such scale in places like Kingston were rare.

I remember using an Internet station in the just opened Stauffer Library the next year on one of my first visits in October 1994. The Netscape Navigator browser had just been released that same month, but Queen’s was using the NCSA Mosaic browser, released in 1993, almost the first graphical web browser ever invented. The computer services and library folks at Queen’s got it from day one to their credit. They knew this was going to be so popular with students instantly, the work stations (and there weren’t many) were designed for standing only. How many places in a university library is their no seating? Not many. But they wanted to keep people moving because there would be lineups to use the stations.

I remember reading the San Jose Mercury News online because it was in Silicon Valley and one of the very first papers in North America online. The funny thing is, the San Jose Mercury News recognized its brief moment in history and for a few years anyway punched well above its weight, doing fine investigative work, both in print and online; a small regional paper no one had ever heard of before the early 1990s unless they lived in Southern California.

But in 1994, we all knew intuitively the world had changed with the Internet and graphical web browsers. I had sent my first e-mail from Trent University in Peterborough more than three years earlier in the spring of 1991 from the Thomas J. Bata Library on their “Ivory”  server (someone in computer services seemingly had a sense of humour), and was also sitting down as I recall. That was neat, but this was on a whole other scale entirely.

That said, I’m  bit of a contrarian, and just as I was finishing up writing America’s symbolic ‘Cordon sanitaire?’ Ideas, aliens and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 in the age of Reagan for my master’s thesis in 20th century American history on the admission of nonimmigrants to the United States, emigration and immigration policy, and foreign relations in Latin America between 1981 and 1989, I decided I need a bit of a break from writing at odd hours in the always-chilly-even-in-summer math computer lab in the basement of Jeffery Hall, which has three floors underground and opened at Queen’s in 1969, housing the Department of Mathematics and Statistics, and is named after Ralph L. Jeffery, head of Mathematics and chair of graduate studies from 1943 to 1960.

So what did I do? Well, I made a few trips that summer to nearby Sandbanks Provincial Park in Prince Edward County, Ontario’s only island county (alas now long linked across the Bay of Quinte on Lake Ontario to the mainland at Belleville by a bridge) but I also took along Clifford Stoll’s just published Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway, where he discussed his ambivalence regarding the future of how the Internet will be used and suggests even then the promise of the Internet was vastly over-hyped by those with vested interests to do so. An American astronomer by trade, Stoll is best known for his pursuit of hacker Markus Hess, who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in 1986, which led to Stoll’s 1989 book called The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, which I have also read. But I must confess I have not even attempted to tackle his 1980 PhD dissertation from the University of Arizona titled Polarimetry of Jupiter at Large Phase Angles, which I gather looked at cloud models and “Jupiter’s solar flux deposition profile.” Whatever that might mean.

While Stoll was wildly wrong in Silicon Snake Oil in underestimating the future of e-commerce and online news publishing, more than 20 years later the book still stands the test of time, I think, as a general cautionary tale about over-hyping the Internet and getting too carried away in our virtual enthusiasms.

Which is why the following year in 1996, as the managing editor of the pioneering Kingston Net-Times, I was, as I recall, urging my readers to follow Stoll’s suggestion to log-off the old dial-up modem mainly back then from time-to-time to bake some chocolate chip cookies (at least that’s what my memory recalls him writing) and to take in a kids’ hockey game at the local arena (my idea).

The publisher, who in all fairness, gave me great editorial latitude was a bit less holistic in his considered view. In fact, he was, truth be told, incredulous. He used the old-fashioned telephone to call me, rather than send an e-mail, and asked, “Did you really suggest people log-off?” It is possible several expletives followed in the next sentence when I assured him I had indeed. Fortunately, our online (is that irony?) readers loved the column, albeit a novel idea to most of them, and sent us e-mails to say so.

While the so-called “Internet of Things” is usually taken to mean the interconnection via the Internet of computing devices embedded in everyday objects, enabling them to send and receive data, perhaps the definition should be broadened to encompass things like ransomware and other malware, spam and phishing.

The only solution, at least how I see it, to virtual phishing may be to pull the plug and go fishing in real life.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Phil Plait, The Bad Astronomer, versus young earth creationist Ken Ham, with some cautionary words of advice from St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine

Phil Plait, who likes to be known as The Bad Astronomer, is a 51-year-old Boulder, Colorado writer, popular science blogger and a leading promoter of scientific skepticism. His PhD in astronomy from the University of Virginia in 1994 included a dissertation on SN 1987A, a supernova in the outskirts of the Tarantula Nebula in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a nearby dwarf galaxy. Plait has worked as part of the Hubble Space Telescope team and is a very bright guy. But he’s also the kind of science zealot that puzzles me, such as here on Slate May 12 in a post headlined “Ken Ham Really Doesn’t Understand Science”
(http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2016/05/12/creationist_ken_ham_tweeted_a_series_of_very_bad_claims_meant_to_be_scientific.html) when he takes on Ham, the young earth creationist behind the Answers in Genesis ministry, the $27-million Creation Museum in Petersburg, Kentucky, which opened  on May 28, 2007, and the “Ark Encounter,” which opens July 7, and bills itself as a “one-of-a-kind, historically themed attraction” and at 510 feet in length, “the largest timber-frame structure in the United States.”

Plait accuses Ham of refusing to listen to “anything science has to say” and propagating falsehoods.

Writes Plait: “And I know this for a fact. That’s because Ham took to Twitter recently, posting a series of tweets that are not just wrong, but completely wrong, again demonstrating not just a misunderstanding of the topic, but a deep – I daresay fundamental – lack of understanding of even the most basic facts about the science he’s trying to deny.”

OK.

As a Catholic, I don’t really have a dog in this race or fight, as the idiom goes.

As Pope Francis noted, speaking to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences in October 2014, theories such as the Big Bang and evolution are not contrary to Catholic beliefs. Nothing Plait writes here is beyond the pale theologically for Catholics. But at the same time, as fashionable as it is intellectually to do so, we don’t dismiss creationism and folks like Ken Ham out of hand either. Why is that? Could have something to so with the fact professing Christians subscribe to a religion whose origin rests on accepting on faith the truth claim the founder rose from the dead after three days. The resurrection is the lynchpin of Christianity. In Chapter 15, Verses 14 to 19, of the Apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Church at Corinth, he writes of the resurrection of Jesus as being the central doctrine in Christianity: “If Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain,” Paul observed. And if Christ has not been raised, he added, God is being misrepresented because “we testified of God that he raised Christ.” Therefore, if Christ has not been raised, “your faith is futile: “If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men.”

The entire Christian faith hinges upon the centrality of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day, and the hope for a life after our own death.

“Credo in Deum – ‘I believe in God’ the opening words of the Apostle’s Creed.” Managing director Margo Smith, and her sister-in-law, Kathie Smith, who in 1996 purchased Hull’s Family Bookstores in Winnipeg, which has been in business since 1919, from the Hull family, suggested on their website in 2014: “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! should include the fact that all two billion members of the 30,000-plus Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the Christian church today, can agree on one statement of faith: The Apostles’ Creed. If it’s been a sufficient statement for the church for nearly 19 centuries, then it’s a sufficient statement to describe what we believe at Hull’s Family Bookstores.”

If you profess to be a Christian, with the Apostles’ Creed, this is what you are assenting to:

I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and earth; and in Jesus Christ, His only Son Our Lord, Who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into Hell; the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into Heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the living and the dead.   I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. Amen.

While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975.

If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection.

Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence. In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tennessee, with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defense lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Catholics think in terms of cosmological evolution, biological evolution and human evolution. One’s opinion concerning one of these areas does not dictate what one believes concerning others.

People usually take three basic positions on the origins of the cosmos, life and humans: special or instantaneous creation; developmental creation or theistic evolution; and non-theistic or random forces evolution.

The first theory holds that a given thing did not develop, but was instantaneously and directly created by God. The second position holds that a given thing did develop from a previous state or form, but that this process was under God’s guidance. The third claims that a thing developed due to random forces alone.

Related to the question of how the universe, life, and man arose is the question of when they arose? Those who attribute the origin of all three to special creation often hold that they arose at about the same time, perhaps 6,000- to-10,000 years ago. Those who attribute all three to non-theistic evolution have a much longer time scale. They generally hold the universe to be 10 billion to 20 billion years old, life on earth to be about four billion years old, and modern man –homo sapiens – to be about 30,000  years old.

Those who believe in varieties of developmental creation hold dates used by either or both of the other two positions. Around 13.82 billion years is the current best estimate for the age of the universe by those in the non-theistic camp. “Until recently,” says the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “astronomers estimated that the Big Bang occurred between 12 and 14 billion years ago. To put this in perspective, the solar system is thought to be 4.5 billion years old and humans have existed as a genus for only a few million years. Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: by looking for the oldest stars; and by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang; just as crime detectives can trace the origin of a bullet from the holes in a wall.”

While there are definite parameters to the Catholic position on the origins of the cosmos, life and humans, much also concerning the belief or unbelief in evolution remains unsettled.

“Concerning cosmological evolution,” a tract from Catholic Answers, the El Cajon, California apostolate started in 1979 by attorney Karl Keating says, “the Church has infallibly defined that the universe was specially created out of nothing [ex nihlo]. Vatican I solemnly defined that everyone must ‘confess the world and all things which are contained in it, both spiritual and material, as regards their whole substance, have been produced by God from nothing’ (Canons on God the Creator of All Things, canon 5).  “The Church does not have an official position on whether the stars, nebulae, and planets we see today were created at that time or whether they developed over time (for example, in the aftermath of the Big Bang that modern cosmologists discuss). However, the Church would maintain that, if the stars and planets did develop over time, this still ultimately must be attributed to God and his plan, for scripture records: ‘By the word of the Lord the heavens were made, and all their host [stars, nebulae, planets] by the breath of his mouth’ (Psalm 33:6).

“Concerning biological evolution, the Church does not have an official position on whether various life forms developed over the course of time. However, it says that, if they did develop, then they did so under the impetus and guidance of God, and their ultimate creation must be ascribed to him.

“Concerning human evolution, the Church has a more definite teaching. It allows for the possibility that man’s body developed from previous biological forms, under God’s guidance, but it insists on the special creation of his soul. Pope Pius XII declared that ‘the teaching authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions … take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter – [but] the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God’ (Pius XII, Humani Generis 36), a papal encyclical promulgated on Aug. 12, 1950. “So whether the human body was specially created or developed, we are required to hold as a matter of Catholic faith that the human soul is specially created; it did not evolve, and it is not inherited from our parents, as our bodies are.

“While the Church permits belief in either special creation or developmental creation on certain questions, it in no circumstances permits belief in atheistic evolution,” says Catholic Answers, which received the nihil obstat (no objection) imprimatur for setting out the position of the Church “free of doctrinal or moral errors” from Bernadeane Carr, the director of the San Diego Diocesan Institute in Chula Vista, California, and the censor librorum of the Diocese of San Diego, and the imprimatur in accord with the 1983 Code of Canon Law (CIC) 827, which is where the Church’s norms on the authorization of books and other written materials is primarily found, and where permission to publish the work by now Bishop emeritus Robert Brom of the Diocese of San Diego was given in August 2004.

“Much less has been defined as to when the universe, life, and man appeared,” notes Catholic Answers. “The Church has infallibly determined that the universe is of finite age – that it has not existed from all eternity – but it has not infallibly defined whether the world was created only a few thousand years ago or whether it was created several billion years ago.

“Catholics should weigh the evidence for the universe’s age by examining biblical and scientific evidence. “Though faith is above reason, there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason. Since the same God who reveals mysteries and infuses faith has bestowed the light of reason on the human mind, God cannot deny himself, nor can truth ever contradict truth (Catechism of the Catholic Church 159).

“The contribution made by the physical sciences to examining these questions is stressed by the Catechism, which states, ‘The question about the origins of the world and of man has been the object of many scientific studies which have splendidly enriched our knowledge of the age and dimensions of the cosmos, the development of life-forms and the appearance of man. These discoveries invite us to even greater admiration for the greatness of the Creator, prompting us to give him thanks for all his works and for the understanding and wisdom he gives to scholars and researchers (CCC 283).

“It is outside the scope of this tract to look at the scientific evidence, but a few words need to be said about the interpretation of Genesis and its six days of creation. While there are many interpretations of these six days, they can be grouped into two basic methods of reading the account – a chronological reading and a topical reading.

“According to the chronological reading, the six days of creation should be understood to have followed each other in strict chronological order. This view is often coupled with the claim that the six days were standard 24-hour days.

“Some have denied that they were standard days on the basis that the Hebrew word used in this passage for day (yom) can sometimes mean a longer-than-24-hour period (as it does in Genesis 2:4). However, it seems clear that Genesis 1 presents the days to us as standard days. At the end of each one is a formula like, ‘And there was evening and there was morning, one day’ (Genesis. 1:5). Evening and morning are, of course, the transition points between day and night (this is the meaning of the Hebrew terms here), but periods of time longer than 24 hours are not composed of a day and a night. Genesis is presenting these days to us as 24-hour, solar days. If we are not meant to understand them as 24-hour days, it would most likely be because Genesis 1 is not meant to be understood as a literal chronological account.

“That is a possibility.” Pope Pius XII warned us, ’What is the literal sense of a passage is not always as obvious in the speeches and writings of the ancient authors of the East, as it is in the works of our own time. For what they wished to express is not to be determined by the rules of grammar and philology alone, nor solely by the context; the interpreter must, as it were, go back wholly in spirit to those remote centuries of the East and with the aid of history, archaeology, ethnology, and other sciences, accurately determine what modes of writing, so to speak, the authors of that ancient period would be likely to use, and in fact did use. For the ancient peoples of the East, in order to express their ideas, did not always employ those forms or kinds of speech which we use today; but rather those used by the men of their times and countries. What those exactly were the commentator cannot determine as it were in advance, but only after a careful examination of the ancient literature of the East’ (Divino Afflante Spiritu 35–36).

“This leads us to the possibility that Genesis 1 is to be given a non-chronological, topical reading. Advocates of this view point out that, in ancient literature, it was common to sequence historical material by topic, rather than in strict chronological order.

“The argument for a topical ordering notes that at the time the world was created, it had two problems – it was “formless and empty’ (Genesis 1:2). In the first three days of creation, God solves the formlessness problem by structuring different aspects of the environment.

“On day one he separates day from night; on day two he separates the waters below (oceans) from the waters above (clouds), with the sky in between; and on day three he separates the waters below from each other, creating dry land. Thus the world has been given form.

“But it is still empty, so on the second three days God solves the world’s emptiness problem by giving occupants to each of the three realms he ordered on the previous three days. Thus, having solved the problems of formlessness and emptiness, the task he set for himself, God’s work is complete and he rests on the seventh day.

“The argument is that all of this is real history, it is simply ordered topically rather than chronologically, and the ancient audience of Genesis, it is argued, would have understood it as such.

“Even if Genesis 1 records God’s work in a topical fashion, it still records God’s work – things God really did.

“The Catechism explains that “scripture presents the work of the Creator symbolically as a succession of six days of divine ‘work,’ concluded by the ‘rest’ of the seventh day” (CCC 337), but “nothing exists that does not owe its existence to God the Creator. The world began when God’s word drew it out of nothingness; all existent beings, all of nature, and all human history is rooted in this primordial event, the very genesis by which the world was constituted and time begun (CCC 338).

“It is impossible to dismiss the events of Genesis 1 as a mere legend. They are accounts of real history, even if they are told in a style of historical writing that Westerners do not typically use.

“It is equally impermissible to dismiss the story of Adam and Eve and the fall (Genesis. 2–3) as a fiction. A question often raised in this context is whether the human race descended from an original pair of two human beings (a teaching known as monogenism) or a pool of early human couples (a teaching known as polygenism).

“In this regard, Pope Pius XII stated: ‘When, however, there is question of another conjectural opinion, namely polygenism, the children of the Church by no means enjoy such liberty. For the faithful cannot embrace that opinion which maintains either that after Adam there existed on this earth true men who did not take their origin through natural generation from him as from the first parents of all, or that Adam represents a certain number of first parents. Now, it is in no way apparent how such an opinion can be reconciled that which the sources of revealed truth and the documents of the teaching authority of the Church proposed with regard to original sin which proceeds from a sin actually committed by an individual Adam in which through generation is passed onto all and is in everyone as his own’ (Humani Generis 37).

“The story of the creation and fall of man is a true one, even if not written entirely according to modern literary techniques. The Catechism states ‘The account of the fall in Genesis 3 uses figurative language, but affirms a primeval event, a deed that took place at the beginning of the history of man. Revelation gives us the certainty of faith that the whole of human history is marked by the original fault freely committed by our first parents” (CCC 390).

“The Catholic Church has always taught that ‘no real disagreement can exist between the theologian and the scientist provided each keeps within his own limits … If nevertheless there is a disagreement … it should be remembered that the sacred writers, or more truly ‘the Spirit of God who spoke through them, did not wish to teach men such truths (as the inner structure of visible objects) which do not help anyone to salvation’; and that, for this reason, rather than trying to provide a scientific exposition of nature, they sometimes describe and treat these matters either in a somewhat figurative language or as the common manner of speech those times required, and indeed still requires nowadays in everyday life, even amongst most learned people’ (Providentissimus Deus 18), Pope Leo XIII’s papal encyclical on the study of holy scripture, promulgated on Nov. 18, 1893.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church, approved in June 1992 by now St. Pope John Paul II puts it, “Methodical research in all branches of knowledge, provided it is carried out in a truly scientific manner and does not override moral laws, can never conflict with the faith, because the things of the world and the things the of the faith derive from the same God. The humble and persevering investigator of the secrets of nature is being led, as it were, by the hand of God in spite of himself, for it is God, the conserver of all things, who made them what they are” (CCC 159). The Catholic Church has no fear of science or scientific discovery.”

So while I have no problem with Plait’s criticism of Ham here, I think his promotion of scientific skepticism unfortunately shades into stereotypically characterizing creationists such as Ham as nothing more than no-nothing, redneck Hillbillies. Ham, 64, a former high school science teacher, who lives in Kentucky, was born in Australia, and first rejected what he termed “molecules-to-man evolution” during high school, and became influenced by American young earth creationists John Clement Whitcomb, Jr. and Henry Madison Morris’ 1961 book The Genesis Flood, while studying in college in 1974. Ham holds a Bachelor of Applied Science undergraduate degree from Queensland Institute of Technology, and a diploma in education from the University of Queensland, which allowed him to teach high school science for five years in Australia during the mid-to-late 1970s. He left his position in 1979 and co-founded what was to be later known as the Creation Science Foundation (CSF).

Then there is a guy like Jim Mason, a Lakefield, Ontario area retired nuclear physicist, who lectures on the evangelical church circuit as a young earth creationist with Creation Ministries International (CMI)-Canada. I’ve written a couple of newspaper stories and bog posts about Mason since April 2012, including most recently “Bear witness: The faith journey of electronic warfare experimental nuclear physicist Jim Mason to born-again Christian and young earth creationist” in April 2015 at: https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/04/18/bear-witness-the-faith-journey-of-electronic-warfare-experimental-nuclear-physicist-jim-mason-to-born-again-christian-and-young-earth-creationist/

I’ve heard Mason, who has a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and who spent 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems, speak twice in the last several years, and he just doesn’t fit the no-nothing country bumpkin rube stereotype Plait seems so ready to buy into when it comes to young earth creationists. For the first 20 years of his career, Mason developed passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason grew up in a mainline Protestant church but left Christianity behind after taking Geology 101 in the first year of his bachelor of science engineering physics undergraduate program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. He resumed his faith journey in mainstream Protestantism in his late 30s, mainly because he and his wife, Rosemary, thought it would be good for their two young girls.

He was almost 40 when he attended an evangelical church in response to the invitation of a friend and neighbour and subsequently became a born-again Christian.

Interestingly, even as an evangelical at first, Mason continued to believe in the theory of evolution, including the evolutionary account of origins and the Big Bang theory, the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution, which posits that the universe was in a very high density state and then expanded. If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they are valid there is a singularity, the theory’s proponents argue, with modern measurements placing this moment at approximately 13.82 billion years ago, which they thus consider the age of the universe.

It wasn’t until he attended a weekend seminar conducted by young earth creation scientists that Mason came to believe that science and scripture were completely coherent and soon became concerned about how evolution is used as a means to avoid confronting the claims of Jesus, he said.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection. Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence.

Mason’s field of expertise, according to a July 2011 interview he did for Creation Ministries International with Jonathan Sarfati, an Australian physical chemist and spectroscopist, who is a fellow CMI scientist and co-editor of the quarterly Creation magazine, which can be found online at http://creation.com/jim-mason-nuclear-physicist, includes radiometric dating techniques, which measure the ratio of the radioactive parent element to the stable daughter element in, say, a sample of rock today, inferring the age through calculations that typically give wildly erroneous ages, Mason argues, saying carbon dating, properly understood, supports young earth creationism.

After completing his PhD studies at McMaster University, Mason spent a year teaching in the faculty of the physics department at the University of Windsor in southwestern Ontario.

He then spent the next 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems. The first 20 years he spent developing passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason argues for a literal interpretation of the 50-chapter Book of Genesis, saying the first 11 chapters are “foundational.” According to Mason, the so-called “long ages” and Big Bang theory, which explains the origin and evolution of the universe using the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmological concordance model, estimating the age of the universe as being 12 to 14 billion years old, cannot be reconciled with the Bible as “Adam and Eve disappear, original sin disappears, death through sin disappears, the need for a Saviour disappears and indeed, in the end, salvation and eternal life disappear.”

As I said earlier, as a Catholic, I don’t really have a dog in this race or fight. Much concerning the belief or unbelief in evolution remains unsettled. Catholics are free to believe in creationism and a young earth; they are also equally free to believe in an old earth, keeping in mind, one would hope, the centuries-old cautions of two doctors of the Church, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine.

“One should not try to defend the Christian faith with arguments that are so patently opposed to reason that the faith is made to look ridiculous… irrisio infidelium [which translates to the mockery of the infidels], the scorn of the unbelievers,“ said St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th century. Likewise, in the 4^th and 5^th centuries, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote in A Commentary on Genesis: Two Books against the Manichees, unfinished works he wrote between 388 and 418 Anno Domini (AD):

“Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience.

“Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.

“The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of the faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of our Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men … Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by these who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion.”

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Earth faces sixth extinction-level event, scientists say, while the mass media, as we know it, faces its first, according to the fossil record compiled by today’s advertisers and readers/viewers

A research article published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science last June 19 by scientists Gerardo Ceballos, Paul R. Ehrlich, Anthony D. Barnosky, Andrés García, Robert M. Pringle and Todd M. Palmer from Stanford, Princeton and Berkeley universities in the United States suggests that the world has begun a sixth extinction-level event, this one driven primarily by humankind. Mind you Ehrlich’s 1968 best-seller, The Population Bomb, should have had us pretty much extinct by now anyway, had it come to pass, so who knows?

Meanwhile, as scientists pronounce on the likelihood of a sixth mass extinction for the Earth  – to wit, the Holocene extinction, advertisers and readers are delivering a similar message, or so it seems, to what’s left of the incredibly shrinking mass media manufacturers, which are in some ways today’s equivalent to yesterday’s buggy whip, typewriter and video store retailers. Blockbuster, we hardly knew you.

As for so-called “digital disruption,” well, it’s not just digital disrupting the heirs of Gutenberg these days, and it’s no longer just a disruption. Can you say ad blockers and mobile platform-of-the day?

Back around the dawn of the 21st century, when newspapers still had a few new millennium choices or even just good bets that might have ensured their survival on some sizeable scale, there was talk about the theory of disruptive innovation invented by Clayton Christensen, of Harvard Business School.

The “innovator’s dilemma” for print media newspapers was the difficult choice they faced sometime between the mid-1990s and the 2000 Millennium (it really was in retrospect, with the benefit now of uncorrected 20/20 hindsight, a much narrower window of about five years, give or take, than publishers realized before they were left behind forever) in choosing between trying to hold onto readers in their existing market by doing the same thing a bit better (the Glacier Media-owned Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, for instance, went online with the same content only slightly repackaged from their print editions in June 2009, about a dozen or more years after most larger Canadian daily newspapers did pretty much the same thing) or capturing new markets by embracing and adapting to new technologies and adopting new business models.

Where are we today, 16 years post-millennium?

Consider these three exhibits, if you will.

Exhibit 1: Jeff Gaulin graduated from journalism school at the University of Western Ontario in 1995. He started Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board that same year as an online employment service to help his classmates find work after graduation. His job board quickly became the go-to online job board for new journalism graduates across Canada looking for their first job and to a lesser but not insignificant extent also became an important resource for even experienced journalists looking to switch jobs. I landed four newspaper jobs off it myself in a six-year period between 2001 and 2007.

Before Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board came on the scene, aspiring journalism job applicants, believe it or not, often sent out resumes hit-or-miss over the transom in 9 x 12 brown envelopes, which also contained their “clips.” As terribly inefficient and labour intensive as that was, it actually worked. At least sometimes. I landed at least a couple of my early daily newspaper jobs in the 1980s that way.

I also interviewed a fair number of job candidates between 2004 and 2013, as a result of Jeff’s job board, and was involved in hiring a number of them as reporters. As recently as several years ago, it wasn’t unusual to see 60 to 70 print jobs advertised on any given day, although the number fluctuated, and dropped briefly but dramatically in 2008-09, during the Great Recession, before rebounding.

As of noon today, there were just eight print media jobs from coast-to-coast listed on Jeff Gaulin’s Journalism Job Board. Eight. And if you think things might be better on the digital side in Jeff’s “new media” section, think again. It has four – half as many – jobs advertised as the “print” section.

Exhibit 2? RBC Dominion Securities just cut its price target on Postmedia Network Canada Corp., publisher of the National Post and proprietor of Canada’s largest newspaper chain and various digital media properties, to zero from $0.50.

Zero. As in zero-sum game.

Exhibit 3:

Mass extinction, niche survival.

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Tough times for bookstores as Argosy Books and Brittons in Ottawa have already closed this month but in Winnipeg it is a different story as Hull’s Family Bookstores has re-opened

Tough times in the bookstore industry, especially for independents, is far from a new headline or story in Canada. Indeed, the description quite accurately dates back to at least the mid-1990s. The only difference is that 20 years ago it was the twin threats of the birth of bricks-and-mortar  book chain retailing superstores such as Chapters in 1995, followed by Indigo Books & Music in 1996 (they merged in 2001) and online book virtual retailers such as Seattle-based Amazon.com, which started selling books over the Internet in 1995.

I well remember being at the Amherst Centre in northern Nova Scotia in July 2000 when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter book series, was published. My sister, who is the co-owner of an independent bookstore in Bathurst, New Brunswick, and me made a quick stop at Zellers in the mall (another defunct Canadian retailer, but another story) so she could take a trunk load of the new Harry Potter books back to Bathurst to sell from her  bookstore. Given that she could buy them for her own inventory both cheaper and more quickly from Zellers at their retail price than she could obtain them from her book wholesaler suggested to me something was fundamentally askew in the book business.

Almost 15 years later, the threat to independent bookstores isn’t just coming from book chain retailing superstores or Amazon.com. Digital technology and “document-on-demand” are changing the book publishing industry as much or more at the production end.  There are almost a million digital books published annually in North America, with roughly 800,000 being self-published efforts that sell fewer than 250 actual hard copies.

Argosy Books operated on Dalhousie Street in Ottawa for about 30 years until it closed Jan. 1. Brittons, which carried more newspapers and magazines than any other store in Ottawa, was on Bank Street in the Glebe neighborhood, just south of downtown, for almost 50 years until it closed its doors last weekend.

The closing of any independent new bookstore is sad news. Here in Western Canada, the announcement last February that Hull’s Family Bookstores, which had been in business since 1919, would soon close two of its three stores, including its downtown Winnipeg store on Graham Avenue, seemed like a very sad sign of the times ahead, as it also closed its Thunder Bay bookstore on Brodie Street in northwestern Ontario. The only consolation at the time was that its Reimer Avenue store in Steinbach, Manitoba, southeast of Winnipeg, would be remaining open.

“Bricks and mortar stores contend with showrooming,” said Hull’s last Jan. 29, describing the consumer practice of customers examining merchandise in a traditional retail store without purchasing it, but then shopping online to find a lower price for the same item, as online stores often offer lower prices than their brick and mortar counterparts, because they do not have the same overhead costs

“We simply cannot sell enough books to continue our operation as is. Sir Stanley Unwin, famous for publishing The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien nearly 80 years ago, could not have predicted the changes to come, and was perhaps ahead of his time, when he said with a twinkle in his eye ‘… the most difficult task of all that a mortal can embark upon is to sell a book.’ Please continue to shop at locally owned independent shops if you can. Support the few remaining bookstores. It is our hope that a newly ‘right-sized’ Hull’s Winnipeg location will open at some point in the future.”

Managing director Margo Smith, and her sister-in-law, Kathie Smith, who purchased the bookstore from the Hull family in 1996, also suggested on their Hull’s website last year: “Ripley’s Believe It or Not! should include the fact that all two billion members of the 30,000-plus Protestant, Orthodox and Catholic denominations of the Christian church today, can agree on one statement of faith: The Apostles’ Creed. If it’s been a sufficient statement for the church for nearly 19 centuries, then it’s a sufficient statement to describe what we believe at Hull’s Family Bookstores.”

Well, indeed, it seems the prayers of many, especially Hull’s loyal customers, have been answered.

Sheila Careless, former office manager of the Graham Avenue store in downtown Winnipeg, and her husband, Bruce, purchased the business, including its Steinbach location and the rights to re-open Hull’s in Winnipeg, and did just that on Dec. 13, unveiling their new Winnipeg location at 1317A Portage Ave.

A re-opened bricks-and-mortar bookstore in Winnipeg. Now that’s counterintuitive.

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223 voters turn out Oct. 13 for Thanksgiving holiday advance municipal and SDML election poll

A total of  223 voters turned out Oct. 13, either before of after their Thanksgiving holiday  turkey, to vote at the 12-hour advance poll from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. at City Hall on Mystery Lake Drive, senior election official Dave Turpie reports. Voters could choose one of two candidates for mayor; up to eight of 18 candidates for city council; and up to seven of 11 candidates for trustee spots for the School District of Mystery Lake.

A second and final advance poll is set for Oct. 17 at City Hall, again on the ground floor foyer. Voting time Friday is from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. For those unable to vote at either the advance poll or the general poll on election day Oct. 22, mail-in ballots are available from Turpie. He can be contacted by cell phone at: (204)  679-1000 or by e-mail at: canturp@mymts.net

Monday’s voting marked the debut of Dominion Voting Systems Inc. vote-counting machines in Thompson, intended to be much faster delivering results on election night than manual hand counting, although the advance poll ballots still won’t be tabulated electronically until the general poll closes at 8 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 22. Dominion Voting Systems is a privately owned Denver-based company, founded in Toronto in 2002 by John Poulos and James Hoover.

Dominion’s system  is a paper-based, optical scan voting system, mixing electronics and paper, by combining an analog paper trail of each person’s vote with quick digital tallying. The vote-counting machine rests atop a two-compartment ballot box, with one compartment used to hold ballots that have been tabulated and the other for the temporary storage of completed ballots in the event that the counting machine stops functioning. The machine alerts voters in the event that their votes could not be counted because they were blank or contained too many marks or were marked outside the voting area. Voters who make an error marking their ballots can request a new ballot from a poll clerk and have the original marked spoiled.

Turpie determined the name placement of candidates on the ballot by random lot Sept. 19 with the order being Coun. Dennis Fenske at the top of the mayoral ballot followed by Coun. Luke Robinson and for council the order of precedence as it appears on the ballot is: Kathy Valentino, followed by Coun. Judy Kolada, Julyda Lagimodiere, Blake Ellis, Paullette Simkins, Coun. Penny Byer, Lydia Blais, Malanie Bercier-Cutler, Erika McCarthy, Audrey Dufour, Coun. Brad Evenson, Robert Chuckrey, Colleen Smook, Dennis Foley, Ron Matechuk, David Erickson, Duncan Wong and Christa Herkert. On the school board ballot the order of names in  precedence in which names appear is  Sandra Fitzpatrick at the top of the ballot, followed by Clint Saulteaux, Doug Krokosz, Vince Nowlin, Janet Brady, Caroline Winship, Liz Lychuk, Leslie Tucker, Don MacDonald, Guido Oliveira and Ryan Land.

The City of Thompson and School District of Mystery Lake are splitting 50-50 the projected cost of approximately $62,500 – about 50  per cent more than the cost of the 2010 election – for the ImageCast hardware rental, software licence and service agreement for both this month’s election and the October 2018 municipal and school board elections.

The cost for the last manually hand-tabulated municipal 2010 general election, also split between the city and school district on a 50-50 basis, was just under $42,000, but it took more than fours hours after the polls closed   – until after midnight to determine some of the winners. The number of poll clerks hired for the 2014 election is expected to be around 25 compared to 60 in 2010.

The turnout for that election in 2010 was 41.1 per cent of the names on the eligible voters’ list showing up to vote. That figure equated to 3,638 Thompsonites – 3,536 with valid, accepted ballots, 26 voters who declined their ballots – which they can still do simply by writing “declined” on the back of the ballot and then inserting it into the vote-counting machine– and 76 spoiled ballots. Many voters did not vote for an entire slate of eight council candidates, with the average ballot featuring only 5.8 votes for members of council.

There were 433 votes cast in advance polls in 2010 compared to 250 in 2006.

On election day Oct. 22  there will polling stations set up from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. in the gymnasiums of  Juniper Elementary School; Ecole Riverside Elementary School; Wapanohk Community School;  Deerwood Elementary School; Burntwood Elementary School;  and Westwood Elementary School.  Additional polling stations have now been established also for Rotary Place (10.am. to 12 noon); Thompson General Hospital (1 p.m.  to 3 p.m.) and Northern Spirit Manor (3:30 p.m. to  5:30 p.m.)