Bus to the Stars: Reading sci-fi in the 1970s down the highway

While I don’t read as much science fiction today as I once did, recalling what I did read more than 40 years ago reminded me today how much of it at the time was read on intercity buses.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction, I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi).

Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then. I have become a fan in more recent years of perhaps more post-apocalyptic dystopian sci-fi, such as New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s 2014 post-apocalyptic Station Eleven, centered around the fictional but not so implausible in the-world-after-SARS (severe acute respiratory syndrome) in 2003 and the H1N1 influenza pandemic of 2009 “Georgia Flu,” a flu pandemic so lethal and named after the former Soviet republic that, within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed. Station Eleven, which was a finalist for a National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award, won the 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for best science fiction novel of the year for the British Columbia-born writer. It all begins when the character of 51-year-old Arthur Leander has a fatal heart attack while on stage performing the role of King Lear at Toronto’s Elgin Theatre.

As the novel picks up some 20 years later, “there is no more Toronto,” Sigrid Nunezsept noted in the Sept. 12, 2104 New York Times book review “Shakespeare for Survivors.” In fact, “There is no Canada, no United States. All countries and borders have vanished. There remain only scattered small towns.”

Airplanes are permanently grounded and used as cold storage facilities. There are no hospitals or clinics.

But there is the “Travelling Symphony” made up of “20 or so musicians and actors in horse-drawn wagons who roam from town to town in an area around the shores of Lakes Huron and Michigan,” Nunezsept writes. “At each stop the Symphony entertains the public with concerts and theatrical performances – mostly Shakespeare because, as the troupe has learned, this is what audiences prefer.”

There are limits, however, to my fandom for post-apocalyptic dystopian science fiction in popular culture, whether it is in a visual or written context. When Black Mirror was first aired on Netflix, I found it dark but cleverly well written. Now, I find virtually everything on Netflix dystopian, and not all of it well written. For that matter, I find much of CNN and even The Guardian real-life dystopian. Thanks for that Donald John Trump and the global COVID-19 pandemic rapidly closing in on the three-year mark.

I read Lucifer’s Hammer by Jerry Pournrelle and Larry Niven in a paperback edition much like the one shown here is shortly after it was published in 1977, while I was a student at Trent University on a late fall three-hour one-way trip on an old Voyageur Colonial Bus down Highway 7 and back from Peterborough to Ottawa and back to Peterborough weekend trip. It was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1978.

Wikipedia summarizes the plot this way:

“When wealthy amateur astronomer Tim Hamner co-discovers a new comet, named Hamner-Brown for its discoverers, documentary producer Harvey Randall persuades Hamner to have his soap company sponsor a television documentary series on the comet. Political lobbying by California Senator Arthur Jellison eventually gets a joint Apollo-Soyuz (docking with Skylab B) mission approved to study the comet, dubbed “The Hammer” by the media, which is expected to pass close to the Earth.

‘The scientific community assures the public that a collision with Earth is extremely unlikely, but the comet’s nucleus breaks apart and the pieces strike parts of Europe, Africa, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. These result in volcano eruptions, earthquakes and tsunamis, destroying major coastal cities around the world, killing billions and initiating a new ice because of the massive quantities of water and debris flung into the atmosphere.

‘Immediately after the strike, China, anticipating that the Soviet Union become too cold for its people and must therefore invade its neighbor, launches a preemptive nuclear attack on its neighbor. The Soviets retaliate with their own nuclear missiles, reassuring the United States that it is not the target.”

So, a 1977 plot, not so far from today’s real-life headlines.

After 10 months flying in space, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) – the world’s first planetary defense technology demonstration – successfully impacted its asteroid target less than a month ago on Sept. 26, the agency’s first attempt to move an asteroid in space.

Mission control at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, announced the successful impact at 7:14 p.m. EDT.

“As a part of NASA’s overall planetary defense strategy, DART’s impact with the asteroid Dimorphos demonstrates a viable mitigation technique for protecting the planet from an Earth-bound asteroid or comet, if one were discovered,” the agency said.

Pournelle, who died in 2017, was born in Shreveport in Caddo Parish, Louisiana. He was a polymath: a scientist in the area of operations research and human factors research, science fiction writer, essayist, journalist, and one of the first bloggers. While Pournelle was great at writing or co-writing page-turners like Lucifer’s Hammer, he is also known as the first writer to sit and compose at a typewriter connected to a television screen, forerunner of today’s desktop computer, to compose, edit, and revise there, and then to send copy to his publisher. Jerry was an early adopter.

Sometimes science and science fiction mingle easily enough in my mind.

Looking at images from the James Webb Space Telescope capturing highly detailed snapshots of the iconic Pillars of Creation within the Eagle Nebula, about 6,500 light-years from Earth, which show a vista of three looming towers made of interstellar dust and gas that’s speckled with newly formed stars, is remarkable, but the name Pillars of Creation immediately took me back in my mind to a another intercity bus ride; this one a Greyhound bus ride out of Blaine, Washington in the United States’ Pacific Northwest in the Summer of 1979, where I was reading Arthur C. Clarke’s brilliant 1953 science fiction novel Childhood’s End where Rashaverak, an Overlord, refers to “Sideneus 4 and the Pillars of the Dawn.”

Aside from reading Childhood’s End on that bus trip, I remember having to changes buses in Spokane, Washington and being awoke in the middle of the night, with my body draped rather uncomfortably across several very hard plastic seats on the second floor of the bus terminal, as Washington State troopers made a gunpoint arrest of a man opening a rental locker on the mezzanine below.

While I’m not sure how much of Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 science fiction novel The Lathe of Heaven was read on a bus (perhaps some of it was on the old Trent Express run from downtown Peterborough to Trent’s Nassau Campus), the book left a big impression on me in the late 1970s.

I still remember reading, “Dr. William Haber’s office did not have a view of Mount Hood. It was an interior Efficiency Suite on the sixty-third floor of Willamette East Tower in Portland, Oregon and didn’t have a view of anything. But on one of the windowless walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood, and at this Dr. Haber gazed while intercommunicating with his receptionist.

“That doesn’t last long. Mount Hood is the very first thing that we see transformed by George’s power: it gets changed into a horse. And that’s just the first of its transformations.

“Later, when he’s become more powerful and famous, Haber gets a beautiful view of Mount Hood through a fancy window instead of just a picture. When the alien invasion begins, Mt. Hood wakes up and spouts fire that burns the surrounding forest. It’s not until George stops Dr. Haber’s dream that the mountain goes to sleep again.”

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Sci-Fi time travel: Where the popular imagination meets theoretical science and pseudoscience

Applied research often has the clarifying effect of disabusing one of preconceived notions. Except perhaps for debates about religion where all bets are off for everyone on all sides at all times. But that’s another story.

Every now and then I will post an article or a link to one on social media from some at least marginally reputable science site on some new wrinkle in theoretical time travel. I have three friends, in particular, located in British Columbia, Nunavut and Manitoba, who are sci-fi fans, but also science rationalists, who can be quickly counted on to let me know two things: what a fun idea the new theory is; how completely implausible it is on the science. Thanks, guys.

As a kid, while I enjoyed reading some science fiction – Ursula K. Le Guin‘s Lathe of Heaven from 1971, and Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 book Childhood’s End, come immediately to mind – I was also fond of other genres, including Greek mythology (I remember taking a mighty tome home on the subject from my school library and reading it from start to finish one Sunday in Oshawa, where I learned a bit about the Hippoi Athanatoi). Time travel was just one topic within one genre of my reading interests back then.

But aside from my reading interests, in terms of my later popular culture viewing, on both the big and small screens, as well as my own writing from time-to-time, time has never been too far from my remote view, if I think broadly about it.

Both The Time Tunnel on ABC and Star Trek on NBC television series originally debuted within a day of each other in September 1966. I was nine. The Time Tunnel (https://www.tvyesteryear.com/shows/the-time-tunnel/), largely forgotten today, was about Project Tic-Toc, a top-secret U.S. government effort to build an experimental time machine, known as “The Time Tunnel” due to its appearance as a cylindrical hallway. The base for Project Tic-Toc is a huge, hidden underground complex in Arizona, 800 floors deep and employing more than 12,000 specialized personnel. Star Trek made its debut on Sept. 8, 1966, one day earlier then The Time Tunnel, and is far from forgotten.

Manu Saadia, a contributor for The New Yorker, wrote back in 2016 in “The Enduring Lessons of ‘Star Trek,”‘ a 50th anniversary piece to mark the debut of the franchise, that “the original series was at its best when its cast engaged in good, old-fashioned time travel. ‘The City on the Edge of Forever,’ penned by Harlan Ellison, threw the dynamic trio of Kirk, Bones, and Spock into nineteen-thirties New York. They were familiar characters dropped into a familiar setting, tasked with a familiar, if daunting, mission: save the world. (By a series of unlucky coincidences, their arrival in New York had altered the future, leading to Nazi Germany winning the Second World War. This had to be corrected.)” Joseph Walter of Screen Rant in his piece today, “Star Trek: The 10 All Time Best (And 10 Worst) Episodes, Officially Ranked” rates “The City on the Edge of Forever” as the sixth-best Star Trek episode from the entire franchise, which includes all the series that followed the original, which aired on NBC from September 1966 to June 1969.

Star Trek, and its many successors, both television series and movies, not surprisingly have continued to explore the idea of time travel and alternate timelines in all kinds of manifestations. I like many of them, but have a particular fondness for Dr. Beverly Picard, who in a briefly existing alternate timeline in “All Good Things,” the aptly-named May 23, 1994 final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, is the captain of the U.S.S. Pasteur (NCC-58925), as her ex-husband, Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, inexplicably finds his mind jumping between the present stardate 47988 and the past just prior to the U.S.S. Enterprise-D‘s first mission seven years earlier at Farpoint Station and then flash-forward 25 years into the future, where he has retired to the Picard family vineyard in Labarre, France.

In The Man in the High Castle, an alternate history novel by American writer Philip K. Dick, published and set in 1962, events takes place 15 years after a different end to the Second World War, and depict intrigues between the victorious Axis Powers – primarily, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany – as they rule over the former United States, as well as daily life under totalitarian rule. A television series was loosely adapted from the book and ran for four seasons from January 2015 until last November.

In a similar vein, The Plot Against America is a novel by Philip Roth published in 2004. It is an alternate history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. Adapted for television as a six-part miniseries that aired in March and April, The Plot Against America imagined an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist.

Wormholes and parallel universes are pretty much de rigueur for this genre, and Sliders, a television series which aired between 1995 and 2000, understood that, as it was premised on a group of travelers, led by Quinn Mallory, using a wormhole to “slide” between different parallel universes. Alternate timelines are altered versions of our timeline. Unlike parallel universes, alternate timelines do not seem to diverge from the universe, but instead rewrite history to the point of wiping out the original timeline.

For its first two seasons, Sliders was produced in Vancouver. It was filmed primarily in Los Angeles in the last three seasons.

In Quantum Leap, which aired on NBC for five seasons from March 1989 through May 1993, Scott Bakula stars as Dr. Sam Beckett, a physicist who leaps through spacetime during an experiment in time travel, by temporarily taking the place of other people to correct historical mistakes. Dean Stockwell co-stars as Admiral Al Calavicci, Sam’s womanizing, cigar-smoking companion and best friend, who appears to him as a hologram.

Time Changer is an independent science fiction Christian seriocomic film written and directed by Rich Christiano, and released by Five & Two Pictures in 2002. The screenplay concerns Dr. Norris Anderson (Gavin MacLeod), who uses his late father’s time machine to send his colleague, Bible professor Russell Carlisle (D. David Morin), from 1890 into the early 21st century.

The fascination with alternate timelines is not limited to science fiction writers. Historians have been known to wonder if the 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in ending Camelot, changed the course of history for the worse? It’s a popular, if not almost universal view, that it did. But historian David Hackett Fischer, in his 1970 book, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought, warns of the dangers of counterfactual historiography, which extrapolates a timeline in which a key historical event did not happen or had an outcome which was different from that which did in fact occur. Had Kennedy lived would the United States have exited Vietnam closer to 1964 than 1975? Would Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 have passed so soon under JFK? We can only wonder.

In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book which talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sandford Fleming’s worldwide Standard Time – and an onrush of technics, including telephone, electric lighting, steamships, skyscrapers, bicycles, cinema, airplanes, X-rays, machine guns, as well as cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914, leading to the outbreak of the First World War the following month.

In physics, according to Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity (SR), motion in space alters the flow of time, creating a time dilation, speeding up or slowing down time, because as you move through space, time itself is measured differently for the moving object than the unmoving object. This, in theory, would allow time travel within the known laws of physics into the future, not into the past (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2016/03/12/time-dilation-daylight-saving-time-and-other-mysteries-of-time/).

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sandford Fleming, who conveniently divided time into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/03/07/just-remember-you-are-about-to-pass-briefly-through-the-twilight-zone-nothing-can-happen-tomorrow-between-201-a-m-and-259-a-m-because-those-59-minutes-do-not-exist-on-march-8/). Like many things, there are, of course, exceptions. Samoa uses Coordinated Universal Time (UTC+13:00) as standard time and UTC+14:00 as daylight saving time, which it observes during summer in the southern hemisphere. The U.S. territory of American Samoa, as well as the Midway Islands and the uninhabited islands of Jarvis, Palmyra, and Kingman Reef, use the Samoa Time Zone, which observes standard time by subtracting eleven hours from Coordinated Universal Time (UTC-11). The zone is one hour behind the Hawaii-Aleutian Time Zone, one hour ahead of Howland and Baker islands, and 23 hours behind Wake Island Time Zone.

Samoa happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the International Date Line, an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days. Immediately to the left of the International Date Line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the International Date Line in the Western Hemisphere (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/29/skip-a-day-why-not-samoa-did/).

It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the International Date Line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the International Date Line.

China, which has just one time zone – Beijing Standard Time – making the time zone uncommonly wide. In Kashgar, in the extreme western part of China, the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m.  In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Historians aren’t the only academics to ponder these sort of things.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)  professor of philosophy Bradford Skow suggests a “box” universe theory, as describes “now” as an arbitrary place in time and states that the past, the future and the present all exist simultaneously, suggesting that if we “look down” on the universe, as if we were looking at a piece of paper, we would see time spanning all directions, exactly the same way that we see space at some point. I believe my three friends unanimously concluded this was rather bunk, but good fun.

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Cardinal Timothy Dolan has it right on Catholic respect and admiration for Billy Graham

It was probably one of the shorter tributes published last week after the death of 99-year-old Protestant evangelist Billy Graham, but nonetheless Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who heads the Archdiocese of New York, had it exactly right about Graham’s place in Catholic understanding.

Writing on the Archdiocese of New York’s website Feb. 21, Cardinal Dolan, wh0 grew up in the American Midwest in Ballwin and St, Louis, Missouri, said, “As anyone growing up in the 1950’s and 1960’s can tell you, it was hard not to notice and be impressed by the Reverend Billy Graham. There was no question that the Dolans were a Catholic family, firm in our faith, but in our household there was always respect and admiration for Billy Graham and the work he was doing to bring people to God.”

Graham, a graduate of Florida Bible Institute, was baptized by immersion in a Baptist church in 1938 and ordained to preach by a Southern Baptist congregation in 1939. While his early years of ministry were marked by antipathy towards Roman Catholicism (in 1948 he reportedly said, “The three greatest menaces faced by orthodox Christianity are communism, Roman Catholicism, and Mohammedanism”) Graham within a few years had greatly moderated his position on Catholics and by the early 1950s was friends with Venerable Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, the finest Catholic communicator of his or any other Catholic generation to date, and Cardinal Richard Cushing, archbishop of Boston from 1944 to 1970. The story of how Sheen and Graham met has been oft told. According to Graham, the two happened to be on the same train from Washington, D.C. to New York City. Graham was apparently already in his pajamas when Sheen knocked on his door, wanting to meet him for a chat and to pray, and the two became fast friends.

Billy Graham’s crusades, one of the most remarkable cultural phenomenons of 20th century Christianity, made him a representative Christian, deeply respected across denominational lines, including by Roman Catholics, many of whom also attended his Crusades. In June 1972, at the peak of the “Jesus movement,” which began on the west coast of the United States in the late 1960s, spreading primarily throughout North America, Europe, and Central America with members of the movement  often called “Jesus people,” or “Jesus freaks” more than 80,000 high school and college students gathered in the Cotton Bowl Stadium in Dallas for Explo ’72, organized by Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as Cru) to celebrate the person of Christ and mobilize youth to take the Good News to friends and family when they returned to their hometowns. Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, led the initiative, and Billy Graham, the most important Christian crusade and revival evangelist of the latter half of the 2oth century, preached at it.  Cardinal Karol Wotjyla, just before he was elected pope, later to become Pope Saint John Paul II, invited Graham to Poland to preach a mission in Krakow in 1978.

While Graham’s life was a powerful witness to the repentance and redemption he preached, he paid a price with some of his more hardline fellow Protestant evangelicals for his warming towards Roman Catholics, leading some to publicly label him as a disobedient compromiser at best and an outright apostate at worst. So it goes. There is always a price to pay on the walk.

Said Dolan last week: “Whether it was one of his famous Crusades, radio programs, television specials, or meeting and counseling the presidents, Billy Graham seemed to be everywhere, always with the same message: Jesus is your Savior, and wants you to be happy with Him forever. As an historian, my admiration for him only grew as I studied our nation’s religious past, and came to appreciate even more the tremendous role he played in the American evangelical movement. May the Lord that Billy Graham loved so passionately now grant him eternal rest.”

“From Jerusalem, I mourn the death of Billy Graham,,” tweeted Father Jonathan Morris at 7:09 a.m. Israel Standard Time (IST) last Wednesday. Morris is the pastor of  Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church in the Bronx.  “From this earthly city of human brokenness, I can imagine more easily the New Jerusalem, where Our Lord has now welcomed his faithful son, #billygraham,” Morris tweeted.

It took me a few months to get around to finishing, but back in 2015 I watched the last 18 minutes of a slightly more than 26-minute TED conference talk titled “On technology and faith” that a then 79-year-old Billy Graham gave in California in February 1998. If you are interested, you can watch it here at: http://www.ted.com/talks/billy_graham_on_technology_faith_and_suffering#t-399663

The talk, like many Graham gave over his long life, was remarkable for any number of reasons, and delivered with his usual homespun, folksy North Carolina wisdom. I once wrote right after that observation, “If it’s not too much of a stretch, I’ve long considered the Southern Baptist preacher with a worldwide appeal transcending Christian denominationalism, and even extending to non-Christian religions, as somewhat analogous to a living saint (Catholics don’t have living saints, much less Protestant ones, but grant me a moment of literary licence.) It was all half, true, half in jest, of course. No one knew better than Billy Graham himself that he was no saint, and indeed, was a sinner, as we all are.

While most of what was written about the passing of Billy Graham last week was pretty fair and accurate, an unfortunate minority of pieces that have appeared have not only been mean-spirited but unfair to his historical record on the major social issues of his life and times. Drives me crazy! I shouldn’t let what finds its way onto social media get under my skin, but I still do at times.

Yes, Billy Graham, was a man of his times, as we all are. He got things wrong. But Billy Graham never shirked from later admitting he had been wrong, expressing sorrow, repenting and apologizing. He may have got some important things wrong at times, but he was not on the wrong side of history.

Martin Luther King, a fellow pastor, called Graham a good friend. While Graham’s crusades had been desegregated in 1953, before either custom or the law required it, he had no hesitation at admitting he should have been on the Selma to Montgomery civil rights marches in March 1965, but he wasn’t. In 1993, Graham agreed with the suggestion HIV/AIDS might be a judgment of God. He later admitted he was wrong and apologized.

Billy Graham fought the good fight, finished the race, and kept the faith.

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Closing Time: Last hoist for Thompson’s Birchtree Mine

On the surface, it was an unseasonably warm and brilliant orange early autumn day. Underground, it was closing time. Not last call, but rather the hard rock mining on-the-job equivalent: last hoist.

This day has almost come for Birchtree Mine in Thompson, Manitoba before. In fact, the day did come for Birchtree for most of a decade in the 1980s, as the mine was on “care and maintenance” because of unfavourable market conditions from December 1977 through 1989.

And on Oct. 18, 2012, Vale had announced care and maintenance was being considered for Birchtree Mine in 10 months time in August 2013. After finding $100 million in cost savings at its Manitoba Operations, bringing its cost per metric tonne for finished nickel to under US$10,000, Birchtree Mine would receive on May 6, 2013 a reprieve that lasted almost 4½ years. Until now.

As well as nickel, Birchtree has deposits of copper, cobalt, gold, silver, platinum and palladium. Re-opening of Birchtree was considered in 1981, but was deferred in favour of development of the Thompson open pit mine. Care and maintenance is a term used in the mining industry to describe processes and conditions on a closed minesite where there is potential to recommence operations at a later date. During a care and maintenance phase, production is stopped but the site is managed to ensure it remains in a safe and stable condition.

Preparation to place Birchtree on care and maintenance again some 28 years after its last mining production 12-year hiatus begins two days hence on Monday. Asset recovery is expected to be complete by mid-November, and the plan is for the mine to be officially on care and maintenance by Dec. 31. The current life of mine plan has long anticipated the closure of Birchtree Mine at some point around now. Vale, however, could, as was the case with Inco in 1989, reopen Birchtree Mine should nickel prices rebound more strongly than forecast in the next few years, and the company has said it believes there is a future for the mine.

The current London Metal Exchange (LME) price of nickel per pound would likely have to at least double from US$4.72 to make reopening Birchtree for a second time economically viable. While Thompson is noted for its high quality 99.9 per cent pure electrolytic nickel that is almost free of contaminants such as lead or zinc,  resulting in it often commanding a higher price than the LME price, Birchtree has relatively lower nickel grades. Nickel prices peaked at $25.51 per pound on the LME in May 2007, just months after Vale, the Brazilian mining giant, bought Inco in a $19.9-billion all-cash tender takeover offer deal in October 2006. Nickel prices have fallen nearly 70 per cent in the past six years as international supply far outstrips demand.

The nickel find near Manasan Falls, four kilometres east of Birchtree Lake and about five kilometres southwest of Thompson, that would become Birchtree Mine was first announced publicly to the world on April 22, 1964 by Henry S. Wingate, chairman of the board of the International Nickel Company of Canada (INCO) Limited.

There are several other key dates in Thompson’s early mining history: Borehole 11962 – the so-called “Discovery Hole” at Cook Lake, a diamond drill exploration hole – was collared Feb. 5, 1956 and assayed positive for nickel.

There’s also the Dec. 3, 1956 signing of the founding 33-page typewritten double-spaced agreement creating Thompson between the Province of Manitoba’s F.C. Bell, minister of mines and natural resources, and International Nickel Company of Canada Limited’s Ralph Parker, vice-president and general manager, and secretary William F. Kennedy. As well, there was Manitoba Liberal-Progressive Premier Douglas Campbell driving the last spike in the Canadian National Railway (CNR) 30-mile branch line from Sipiwesk to Thompson Oct. 20, 1957, and March 25, 1961, when Progressive Conservative Premier Duff Roblin cut the nickel ribbon to officially open the $185-million smelter and refinery, set to close also next August, as the world’s first fully integrated nickel operation, and with its 1,800 employees, second in size in the “free world” at the time only to Inco’s Sudbury operations. Vale’s Thompson operations, landholdings or mining rights, consist of at least 2,947 order-in-council (OIC) leases, mineral leases and mining claims “negotiated as part of an agreement entered into in 1956 between Vale Inco and the Province of Manitoba covering the development of the Thompson nickel deposits,” noted filings by the company in 2004 and 2008 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Thompson, originally a townsite within the newly-created 975-square-mile Local Government District (LGD) of Mystery Lake, within the Dauphin Judicial District, from 1956 to 1966, became a town on Jan. 3, 1967 and a city just 3½ years later on July 7, 1970.

Wingate, a lawyer, was born in Talas, Turkey, the son and grandson of American missionaries, and was raised in Northfield, Minnesota. He was with the New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell from 1929 to 1935, when he joined INCO as assistant secretary. The sinking of the Birchtree Mine development shaft began on Ink 6 in 1964. The three-compartment shaft was completed to 1,373 feet a year later.

Birchtree began production in 1966. Between 1965 and 1967 the production shaft on Pip 301 was sunk to 2,800 feet, with levels between 300 and 2,300 feet at 200-foot intervals. Inco announced plans in 2000 to move ahead with a $70.4-million deepening of Birchtree Mine to be completed in 2002 and help extend the mine’s life by at least 15 years. In its Exploration and Development Highlights 2001 report, the Manitoba Science, Technology, Energy and Mines Department estimated the shaft deepening would access proven reserves of 13.6 million tonnes of 1.79 per cent nickel and “extend Birchtree’s production to 2016.”

As a result of the Birchtree Mine closing, about 200 high-paid jobs are expected to disappear from the local economy over the next few months – a very big though by no means fatal hit to the local economy – including not only Vale employees but other mining sector contractors and support service positions.

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Google Search is a writer’s friend: Primo spell checker

For years now I’ve used Google Search as my go-to-spell checker on the internet for words that stump Microsoft Word’s spell checker (which is unfortunately a pretty low bar … “no spelling suggestions” and red underlined words are a pretty common occurrence. I may get one yet writing this sentence).

A spell checker is an application program that flags words in a document that may not be spelled correctly. Spell checkers may be stand-alone, capable of operating on a block of text, or as part of a larger application, such as a word processor, e-mail client, electronic dictionary, or search engine.

“The spell checker scans the text and extracts the words contained in it, comparing each word with a known list of correctly spelled words (i.e. a dictionary). This might contain just a list of words, or it might also contain additional information, such as hyphenation points or lexical and grammatical attributes,” Wikipedia tells me.

“An additional step is a language-dependent algorithm for handling morphology. Even for a lightly inflected language like English, the spell-checker will need to consider different forms of the same word, such as plurals, verbal forms, contractions, and possessives. For many other languages, such as those featuring agglutination and more complex declension and conjugation, this part of the process is more complicated.”

Most of the time I do know how to spell the word triggering the red alert, but even my largely two-index fingers typing has a tendency to overrun my typing on the page when I am composing something quickly in my head, as I write (err … type), and sometimes it is just as fast, when it is more than one word, to copy-and-paste the sentence into Google Search rather than to individually correct several suspect words. Sometimes, of course, I correct the word in Word just to make sure I really do remember how to spell it. Sort of like doing math in your head, or at least on paper with a pen or pencil, rather than using a calculator. We pretty much all figure we should be able to do those things manually; we just don’t want to overdo it.

This got me thinking the other day, wondering why Google Search is so much better at correcting my spelling in sentences, almost as an afterthought, while it completes a search that may or may not be additionally helpful in and of itself. Google Search will often finish a sentence correctly for me, even if I only paste or type a part of the sentence into the search box or bar.

My first hunch was that it had something to do with the vast amount of data Google Search processes with over three billion searches a day, and developing algorithms and other proprietary tools based on that.

My second hunch was that if I was pondering this other people have thought about it, researched it, and likely written about it before me.

My intuition for both hunches turned out to be correct.

Intuition, in fact, is what Google Search is all about. What makes it intuitive? Context. Context rules.

John Breeden II, the Washington, D.C. chief executive officer of Tech Writers Bureau, who formerly was the laboratory director and senior technology analyst for Government Computer News (GCN), where he reviewed thousands of products aimed at the U.S. federal government – everything from notebooks to high-end servers – and at the same time decoded highly technical topics for broad audiences, wrote about the topic in an Nov. 18, 2011 article for GCN.

“My biggest problem with Word is that there are some words that simply trip it up,” Breeden wrote. “When writing about temperature for our many rugged reviews, I always put ‘Farenheight,’ which Word thinks should be changed to ‘Fare height.’ That doesn’t help at all.

“However, when the same misspelled word is pasted into Google, it says, ‘showing results for Fahrenheit instead.’ There are quite a few other words that confuse Word but not Google. They are not difficult to find.

“I have to wonder why Google is so smart when it comes to figuring out what word a user wants to use. My guess is that the database Google is pulling from is so massive that it’s probably seen a lot of the same basic spelling mistakes. There are probably a lot of people who have wanted to search for Fahrenheit but typed in ‘Farenheight’ instead. Nice to know that I’ve got company.

“You would think it would be simple for word processors to use the same type of technology to improve their accuracy, but I suppose that would involve capturing data from their users and then making the connections between common mistakes and the accurate spelling.

“I thought that is what spell check was supposed to do, but instead I think it just matches the misspelling with words that are somewhat close to what you’ve typed. And Google obviously goes beyond that to associate common mistakes with actual words.”

An anonymous poster at Quora, a question-and-answer website where questions are asked, answered, edited and organized by its community of users, wrote on Sept. 1, 2012 in response to the question, “How is google so good at correcting spelling mistakes in searches?”:

“Google (search engines in general) has clusters processing tons (TB’s) query logs, which try to learn the transformation from original misspelled sentence to the corrected one. These transformation schemes are fed into the front end servers which serve the auto completion (and/or corrections to queries). “Also these servers have lot more processing power and memory and disk space of course will not be an issue at all (for the learned transformations). “Also since Google crawls the entire web regularly it will learn new words and suggest corrections Word can’t do till next release.”

Quora also aggregates questions and answers to topics.

“Desktop software usually have tight constraints on processing power, memory or disk space they could use to run compared to that of server based applications and usually are expected to keep the internet usage to a minimum (at least for MS Word.) “They use static resources (dictionary that might only be current at the time of launch) and can’t employ complex algorithms due to the above said restrictions and hence employ heuristic algorithms which may not [be] very predictive of the correct word.”

Cosmin Negruseri, vice-president of engineering at Addepar, an investment management technology company, formerly worked at Google (both companies are based in Mountain View in Santa Clara County, California) as an engineer, working on ads, search and Google Code Jam, an international programming competition hosted and administered by Google, replied the same day, writing: “The main insight in modern spell correctors is using context. For example New Yorp is a misspelling of New York with a high probability.”

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