One of the coolest moments living in downtown Vancouver during the Olympics is when you're sitting in your apartment watching the hockey game and you hear the whole city cheer when Canada scores a goal. After the Men's Hockey Gold Medal Game went into overtime I decided to set my recorder on my deck and let it run.

It sounds foreboding to begin with. The helicopters and crows hover and caw. Then a cheer washes over Vancouver.

I tried to remain quiet, journalistic, but I let out single clap of excitement as we scored. I may have said something too. Goal scored! Or maybe that was the guy who lives above me, or his TV, or the guy who lives across the alley. We're all so close together.

If you're using IE or have java turned off or you just want a copy, here is the mp3.

This is a recording of 61 Highway written by Fred McDowell. U.S. Route 61 connects Louisiana to the northern states and is path that the blues took to get north. Where the 61 crosses the 49 is where Tommy Johnson (and later Robert Johnson) sold his soul to the Devil to play guitar.

Fred McDowell's music feels very familiar to me. As a middle class white boy I can't relate to the specifics of his music, but I can relate to the joys and the sadness of it. Of course I'm not alone in this. This is the reason the blues is such a transcendent art form. But Fred's music resonates in me. When he writes that the 61 Highway is the longest road he knows, this is not only a statement of fact, but an allusion to the history behind the it, and a reflection on the burden of travelling that road. It ceases to be just a highway and becomes a symbol of personal journey.

This is the third song in a series of me learning to sing. My voice is getting stronger and more confident. I think this song also suits my voice. I still have a hard time keeping my lungs to the end.

For you poor souls still using Internet Explorer the lovely flashplayer above is probably broken, so here is a link to the mp3. There are more of my solo guitar recordings on jimmycorp.com.

Sarajevo was the high point of our trip to Europe. We spent the least time there, but were lucky enough to have the best possible guides, Azra and Dino, to show us around. They took us everywhere, talked openly about the siege, which they both lived through, and paid for all our food and drinks. If you're going to spend a single day in a city, that is the way to do it. We can't thank them enough.

I was often embarrassed taking pictures in front of Azra and Dino, but I took as many as I could. Taking pictures of the destruction in the city made me feel guilty, so I didn't take many. They didn't live through the siege just so I could take pictures of the aftermath. I also felt guilty buying my flower pot made out of artillery shell. Turning something terrible into something beautiful is how the smith put it. The guilt was good because it helped me focus on how wonderful the city was.

Sarajevo has many dualities. Its people lived through a four years siege, but they're incredibly good natured. We had already spent over half a day being shown around before Azra suddenly remembered to point at a building and say "Oh! All those holes up there are from machine guns." I hadn't taken my eyes off them since I got to the city.

When we were at the tunnel used to carry goods into Sarajevo during the siege, Azra recalled with some amusement that as a child they would have to run across the street here and jump into the ditch before they could get picked off. They seemed unbothered by it, but it was the first time they'd visited since they were kids.

They drove us to the countryside on either edge of the city. On the East side there was a beautiful bridge over a river valley. I walked across its broken cobble stones to get a picture from the other side. Dino yelled at me "James, landmines!" I was very aware that I'd never had to think of that in my entire life, but for him it was common. That's why he's alive. Lush forests and mountains, the overwhelming richness of the land, unaccessible because of landmines waiting restlessly.

As you look through the pictures you may want to listen to this recording of the call to prayer. Of the five Muslim prayers this call at around 10:10pm sounded the beginning of the night prayer. The rain makes it hard to hear, and it amplifies the traffic noise, but you can hear the calls from each of the nearby mosques in concert.

There's still so much to the city I'd like to experience. I'm fascinated by the mixtures of religions that for years lived peacefully. When we first got to the city it was pretty emotional, and we thought coming was a mistake. But seeing how the city recovered, the resilience of the people who live there, is inspiring.

There have been two stories in the news lately. One is the idea that the banks are "too big to fail", so we should break them up. The other is that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) is apparently fated to fail, an idea I think is ridiculous. The LHC is the largest experimental project ever undertaken. It's purpose is to search for the Higgs boson, the "God particle", among other things. Maybe it was these stories, or maybe it was that last meeting with my supervisor, but I've been thinking about science and failure. Is the LHC too big to fail? Could a single idea bring down physics as a whole?

The magnets of the ATLAS detector at LHC.

In an earlier meeting Eric and I were discussing a new model for dark matter proposed at at talk he attended. It really wasn't a new model, but an attempt to fix a model that was severely broken. Eric referred to the work as "bullshit", but filtered through the rich molasses of his eastern Russian accent it comes out as "bu-shit", and is much more offensive. Coming from his mouth it also means that the theory is broken.

I won't go into the details of the theory, but it seems that many people are investing their time on science that is just plain wrong. Why does this happen? In particle physics it may have to do with the lack of experiments to tell people they're wrong. Doing is often the best way to determine how the world works, and unfortunately we haven't had the means to test these ideas. Communities build careers based on these ideas, but then someone comes along and points out a subtle detail that ruins it. If it happens to a large community, they'll spend the rest of their career trying to fix it any way they can. These patchwork fixes instead of just dropping the idea and moving on are what draw Eric's ire.

I was talking about this with my friend Matt and he joked about a string theory "bubble burst". I'm not sure if he was just joking, or was aware that this was a perfect analogy. For years string theorists were the great hope in physics and they got the faculty positions. Many of the brightest physicists worked relentlessly to fix a theory that had the potential to unify physics and as a result a large number of new students became string theorists. But now, thirty years later, people are becoming wary, and there are fewer jobs for these students trained in pure string theory. Having the bubble burst is what may happen to the dark matter particle theorists I mentioned earlier.

Toothpaste for dinner knows there's trouble.

These bubble bursts are unfortunate, but they aren't the end of physics. This is just what happens when a group of investors lose faith in a field of business like housing or dot-coms or physicists lose faith in a field of physics. These bubble bursts are unfortunate for the investors and the businessman but the rest of the economy keeps on going. The fields of condensed matter and cosmology are untouched by the happenings in particle physics. More importantly, the public perception of physics doesn't change.

The difference between investors losing faith and the public (i.e., all investors) losing faith is an important one. Imagine if we were unable to get the LHC started, or more likely, image we just didn't find the Higgs. With so much pop physics coverage of this experiment, laden with terms like "the God particle", would the public see this as a failure? Or would we be able to spin what we do find into some kind of success? If not, the public might want to stop funding such projects. And worse, they may lose faith in physics all together and cause an academic crash, just like when the public loses faith in the economy. Thousands of physicists would be out of jobs. Is this now considered too big to fail?

Of course this is all very alarmist of me and people might wonder why it matters if a bunch of geeks lose their jobs. Unlike an economic crash we're not losing money, we're losing ideas. When a bubble bursts we lose the ideas that aren't working anyway, but in an academic crash we would lose all the good ideas too. The kind that after 30 years lead to a new kind of plastic, the transistor, the internet, the types of technology that are so ubiquitous one couldn't even image them being invented.

So, faithful reader, is there this another lesson to learn from economics? We've already learned that we have to spend money to make ideas, and that gambling big leads to big ideas. Is there anything more? I suppose it's comforting to know that if we fail, there's a chance someone will bail us out.

In an odd effort to delay processing the photos from Croatia, because that would be hard work, I decided to sift through all my photo archives looking for gems I may have missed. It turns out that I still had a bunch of photos from Oahu and Maui that I hadn't processed yet, because that would have been hard work. I'm sure I'm not alone, faithful reader, but I've noticed it's in my character while procrastinating to make more work for myself.

I'd likely be better off not letting my mind wander, but really it's the only way I think of new projects. Instead of linking you to only the Maui work, the link in the picture below leads to the full gamut of my Hawaiian experience, because a lot of hard work went into it.

I've been to Hawaii twice and have had the opportunity to visit three of the islands: Kauai, Oahu, and Maui. One trip was for my honeymoon and the other for a friends wedding, leaving the islands filled with connotations beyond their intrinsic romance. I'm always amazed at how distinct each of the islands, and moreso how varied each of the islands is within itself.

The pictures probably do a better job conveying this. Some might find it interesting that the Kauai gallery was the first set of digital pictures I took and processed. There's quite a difference in style when compared to the other two galleries. I've definitely taken the "my sliders go to eleven" philosophy to heart lately, but I like the results. What do you think, faithful reader?

It used to be that every year at the beginning of school I would point out how small the new students were and how young they looked. I feel like this has all changed. Now they mill about campus, hulking Adonis's and leggy Amazons. Is this just me?

Seeing them all in one spot I was struck by the inefficiency of this group of behemoths as they lurch up stairs and eat their hamburgers. The physics of how the body scales and the energy it requires is not kind to tall people. I'm pretty tall and when I sit down to eat, I eat a lot. How much more food it must take to support these giant students than an average sized population? Not only do tall people make more money and are perceived to be more attractive, but they also eat all the food. More than that, there's something fundamentally inefficient in being tall. And they can't help it.

1. Tall People Eat More

Let's assume that your body scales proportionally to your height: taller people have proportionally larger muscles and torsos and legs and so on. More precisely, if I change a person's height h, their volume changes proportional to h3. This is not the formula for the volume of someone of height h, but it is how that formula changes with h, or how it scales with h. It seems reasonable to say that the amount of energy to contract this muscle also scales as volume h3 and the amount of food to provide this energy also scales proportional to their volume h3. These are just scaling arguments and not actual formulas. If the average height of the population jumped 5% from say 5'8" to almost 6', the amount of food required to sustain that population jumps by 16%! You can get this number by plugging h=1.05 into the scaling arguments. Ironically, these students are probably tall and properly proportioned because they have proper nutrition, which then contributes to food shortages and poor nutrition. This scaling also means that if everyone gets the same portion of food, then tall people don't get enough and are skinny, and short people get too much and are fat. This may explain the the tall skinny, short fat cliché.

from the short and the tall of it.

2. Tall People Use More Energy

So these giants need to eat big hamburgers and oversized cookies just to live, but they also tend to lurch and lumber up stairs while they do it. I've been thinking about how tall bodies work less efficiently every since I wheezed my way up a hill recently while my friends bounded up it.

Never mind that they're in better condition than I am, I'm using physics to make excuses. Because I'm taller than my friends I weigh more than they do. As a result lifting my body up a hill takes more energy, but as we discussed earlier, muscles and the energy to run them scale with mass h3. I use more energy than my short friends and have to lift more, but I also have bigger muscles and eat more food. So it seems that climbing a hill should be as hard for a short person as a tall person, and that I have only my poor conditioning to blame. But this isn't entirely true. The disadvantage of being tall is that for long hikes the ability to take in oxygen affects performance. As one gets taller the ability to take in oxygen doesn't scale with how much oxygen the body needs.

3. Tall People have less efficient Lungs

A well known scaling advantage (energy-wise if not comfort-wise) of being big is that you retain heat better. There is less skin (surface area h2) to lose heat through compared to volume h3 for a large creature than a small one. A similar argument can be made for the ability for a tall body to take in oxygen. This depends on the surface area of you lungs which scales differently than the volume of blood in your body. If your lungs were smooth on the inside the ability for you to take in oxygen would scale as h2. But lungs have little branches inside and are more like fractals. I've read that a two dimensional lung has a fractial dimension of 1.74. In reality (3 dimensions) the surface area that can take in oxygen scales somewhere between h2 and h3, let's guess that it's h2.5.

The point is that as you get taller, your muscles get bigger your heart is bigger, but your ability to take in oxygen does not scale as well. Your lung surface area per mass scales as h-0.5, so a person who is 5% taller than you will take oxygen into the blood 97% as efficient as you, given your cardio is the same. In day to day life you wouldn't notice this, but it will factor in when you really try to push your body.

This is Bryn, Brian is long gone.

4. Tall People are Harder on Their Bodies

After huffing and puffing my way to the top of this hill, at a disadvantage because of the treacherous fractal scaling of my lungs, we just turned around and walked back down. As you know, faithful reader, this tortures the knees. The torque around your knee scales as h4, one factor of h for the length of your leg and 3 factors of h for your weight. In a weak attempt to keep my mind off the pain in my knees I calculated that the torque around my knee was near the torque of a midsize car engine.

If you increase you height by 5% the torque around your knee increases by about 21%, and the stress increases, but no matter you size the knee is still just bone, ligaments, and cartilage. This is probably why Basketball players, and tall people in general, always have such bad knees later in life. Having these ligaments and cartilage apply and lubricate these huge torques destroys them.

5. A Tall Runner Must Be Underweight

My last thought on this has to do with forcing the body to perform against the scaling. In distance running you want to be tall and efficient, a combination contrary to scaling. For efficiency you want to be short and have larger lungs compared to your body, but for stride length you want to be tall. You can't really have both so the alternative is to be underweight. Being light is obvious, but being underweight means you have the large lungs and stride of a tall person, but you only have to supply oxygen to small muscles.

Looking at a chart of champion runners we see that the taller people are more underweight and that the shortest man is actually not underweight at all. There is an ideal height that matches efficiency and stride, and if you are not that height you have to change your weight. Of course I'm simplifying it greatly, disregarding conditioning and the competitive spirit. But it is interesting.

6. Being Tall vs. Evolution

My wife pointed out to me that if being tall is so bad, why are we getting taller. My only answer beyond selection bias (tall people are more attractive and have more kids) is that the cultural evolution we are going through is allowing it. People are no longer evolving as a response to their natural environment. As evidence I found the graph that actually shows people getting shorter until the point in recent history where cultural evolution has taken over.

So, faithful reader, next time you envy your tall friend's greater earning power and intrinsic attractiveness take comfort in the fact that you need less food to survive, can climb stairs with ease, and late in life you will actually be able to move without pain.

I tend to work in bursts, which makes it difficult to maintain a blog singularly designed to display my productivity. Lately I've been unproductive, spending my free time rather enjoyably playing video games. My goal is to use these gaps in productivity (more precisely content) to tell you, faithful reader, a little more about myself.

I learned how to play music from Jim Reilly. Our lessons were very loosely structured. I walked in, Jim told me what key we were playing in, we improvised until Jim stopped and told me to get the fuck out, I walked out. This worked for me. I didn't really want to learn songs and Jim was happy to play with someone who was old enough to actually hold their instrument. I was 22 years old at the time and waited for lessons to start in a hallway with children leaning against guitars bigger than they were and ballerinas running around aspiring to be princesses.

I learned more about musicianship than I ever would have learning actual songs. Don't tell anyone but I've recently found out that learning songs helps develop technique much quicker, and I probably should have spent more time on it. The most important part of these lessons was to never stop playing once you've played everything you know, but to keep going, and that's where really interesting music happens. Stuff you've never heard comes out. So, faithful reader, through this requirement to fill the void, update the last edited time stamp, these gaps in content may help you learn something about me as a person, and not just about what I do.

To help introduce myself I'll show you something on jimmycorp that you may have missed. The unreality gallery is a cache of images that I like or have some bizarre attachment to. The most personal is a photograph of my great great Grandfather Tousaint Lucier in handcuffs in front of the Regina Courthouse.

He was one of Louis Riel's councilmen and was arrested following the rebellion. It's likely that clicking on the picture above will not get you there, but keep clicking and you'll see a big version eventually.

Lionel likes to put other images in here, as it is somewhat of a dumping ground. I sift through it every once in a while to make sure it all resonates with me. If you see something really twisted, it's probably Lionel's doing. Not me, never.

That's right, more Europe. I have hundreds of these pictures and they aren't running out any time soon, so get used to it. It takes me forever to decide which pictures to include in the gallery and it takes even longer to process them all. I want to give a feel for the city, but I also only want to keep the good pictures. Often the pictures I like most are very bad at capturing the feel of a city. The pictures I take in an attempt to capture the city are usually pretty bad. So, faithful reader, when you see a lemon think to yourself that James thinks it's terrible to.

Our great European journey takes us from Vienna to Budapest. The contrast of our experiences in the two cities is quite amazing. Unlike Vienna, it seemed like we did almost nothing notable, but the city captured us. We mostly wandered it aimlessly, stumbling across the landmarks. This is reflected in the large number of pictures with Alyssa in them. Often she was my only subject. The picture below leads to the gallery.

It'd be an injustice to the city if I said we did nothing notable, there are many attractions, but the one I should mention mention is the Szechenyi baths. These are traditional Turkish baths. I didn't take any pictures and I regret it. The great marble building that houses the baths and the old men playing chess would have easily made it into the gallery. My favorite part was the water fountains that spit or pour water from urns and serpent mouths. Men brace themselves while the water purples their back, the gentle cascade of water belying the force behind it. My massage was brief compared to those who stood under it for at least an hour. The water felt like stones and it punched deep into the muscle and afterward wading in the warm water is all I could manage.

Some Americans who were also staying at the Bellevue B&B (which is a great choice if you're ever in Budapest) asked us what they should do for the sort time they were in Budapest. We recommended a place for dinner and told them that they had to go to the baths. The woman, in an educational tone, responded "Actually we have something very similar in Arkansas, they are called hot springs and are located in a town called Hot Springs", and continued to explain that there would be no point in going to them. We mentioned that we have many hot springs in British Columbia as well, even one in a town called Harrison Hot Springs, and they're in the Rockies, which is beautiful, but they are not the baths used by Hungarian kings. They didn't seem to get it. If you're in Budapest, go to the baths.

The next installment of our trip to Europe is a short one. After Prague we were beat and I didn't really feel like taking pictures. The picture below, which also links directly to the gallery, pretty much sums it up.

Though we did some of the coolest stuff in Vienna, such as seeing Tosca at the Vienna State Opera House, watching The Third Man in an old cinema house, drinking wine and eating well at the heuriger, seeing countless Succession works (Klimt, Schiele) and learning of the Hapsburg Empire, all while having every coffee served with water on a silver platter, the city itself did not capture me. Maybe it was because we had too much to do and we were unable to stop and enjoy it. It just seemed frustrating and we were always at odds with it, fighting to get somewhere or find some place.

The few photographs I took I like. The one above and the one of the kids sunning themselves and drinking under the triumphant statue at Hapsburg Palace are among my favorite of the whole trip.

Shortly after I got my digital camera I took the greatest photo I had ever taken in my entire life. I've since learned that I always feel this about the most recent photo I've taken. But, this one was perfect. The buildings formed a cascading repeating pattern, the uniform colours lent themselves to my B&W composition sensibilities, and most importantly it was interesting. I ran home and transferred it from the camera to the computer to discover that while I was setting up the photo a man had walked into the middle of the composition and bent over, displaying his ass in the middle of my heavenly work.

In the version presented to you above, faithful reader, this offense is undetectable. Why? Because I deleted him. In a moment of weakness I loaded Photoshop and, with a trembling hand, pixel by pixel, wiped this smudge of humanity from existence. I felt terrible, but was in awe. I showed my manipulation to everyone I knew, both as a confession and as a display my prowess. I was a firm believer that Photoshop was the tool of the devil and was made to spread lies. But here it had done something useful, and no one got hurt. This got me and my friend Lionel talking about the ethics of Photoshop and the manipulation of photographs in general.

Photoshop rightly has a bad rap because it can used to do terrible things. Aside from overeager people butchershopping colours and contrast, flat out lying is the most noteworthy. In a world that has the most perfect tool to communicate its wonders, people assume that everything is photoshopped. They have been lied to so many times, why believe? Why risk being duped by the internet? We know there's no greater humiliation.

But Photoshop can be used properly as a tool of the artist to convey their truths. They have to maintain the integrity of their image, but it's very hard to know where the boundary of that integrity lies. Especially concerning journalistic photography. I now alter every photo I take. It is my darkroom; I adjust the colours and contrast such that they reflect the image I actually perceived. People have this strange idea that what is captured on the lens is the "truth", when in reality the sensor or film captures light from a spectrum different from that of the human eye, with an intensity response different than the human eye. The image must be processed to attain the truth.

Furthermore, the camera captures objects that we don't perceive. The human mind is a wonder at gathering local bits of information and assembling them into a coherent whole. But it is selective in what is chooses to make this image. This is a lesson that my dad would consistently remind me of, and is the bane of most people who take photographs. They see a subject, take the picture, only to find later that their subject is overshadowed by all this other junk. The skill of a photographer lies in rendering the subject in such a way that the junk around it vanishes, and we are left with only the elements that make the composition.

With such powerful post-processing we can easily remove unwanted elements to render the subject the way we want. An unscrupulous individual with almost no training can alter an image for their own means. It is necessary to invoke words such as integrity and honour to ensure we don't go too far. Artisitic and journalistic integrity is not new, but we do need to be reminded of it. We have to look no further than the cover of Time Magazine to find abuses of Photoshop's ubiquitous clone tool, so I will spare you and show you processing with integrity. The example is the photo Migrant Mother by Dorothy Lange and has nothing to do with Photoshop. People were cropping, dodging, burning, and filtering since the invention of photography.

This is probably the most recognizable depression era photo. The thumb on her left hand, which is resting on the pole in the foreground, has been removed. This is clearly done for aesthetic purposes, to bring the subject forward, rather than have people staring at a thumb. Does it damage the photo's credibility? No. It allows us to feel what Dorothy wanted us to feel, which is likely what she felt taking the picture.

Modern examples exist, but are hard to detect because the technology and the care taken to alter them. As proof, faithful reader, I've included below a gif illustrating my shameful deletion. The artist is not trying to deceive you by hiding some element of the photo, they are removing something they actually do not perceive should be there, thus rendering the truth of their experience. In art and journalism this is the point.

An attempt to tell the truth can lead to lies. A journalist attending the protests in Iran feels the magnitude of the crowd around them, only to go home a discover their pictures don't capture this, so they add some more people. A war photographer in Beirut feels the smoke for the burning building searing their lungs with every breath, but when they get home the smoke doesn't look that thick, so they add some more. They have manipulated the image to tell the truth of their experience. Unfortunately, they are poor photographers that failed to capture their experience. They have no integrity because they have betrayed the most fundamental aspect of their art form---capturing. Photography is capturing, it is nothing else.

As the froth and spittle from this tirade dries on the corners of my mouth, it seems that my arguments distil into a simple moral rule: it is OK to remove elements of a photograph, but not OK to add them. If it were this simple we still wouldn't be dwelling over 1984. But it's a start.

Mississippi Fred McDowell was born in Tennessee, but he played the Delta Blues. Here he is, untouchable.

I've been working on a version of You Gotta Move, which is arguably his most famous song. There have been many covers of it. The one people are probably familiar with is by The Rolling Stones, though surprisingly I didn't know about it when I started to learn the song and I've still never heard it. Learning the song was easy enough, but I have troubles playing it, specifically keeping time.

This is particularly frustrating as my musical training in on the bass. Apparently hitting the root on beat one is something I am no longer capable of doing. As my friends are aware I tend to accompany my guitar playing with incessant, tuneless humming. It's subconscious, but it aids my phrasing and helps me keep time. My friend Mike commented once that I even breathed in time doing everyday activities. Well, my attempt to learn to sing has pointed out a flaw with this. This subvocal droning was the only way I kept time. When I sing, that's the time I keep and my fingers betray me. It's a difficult habit to break.

I'm not incredibly happy with it, but it's the best I can do for now. The recording is blown out and over the top. My slide work, which is as practiced as the song itself, slips and slides around. My vocals attempt to follow. My wool slippered feet slump on the hardwood in a gross interpretation of rhythm. I present to you, faithful listener, "You Gotta Move" by Fred McDowell.

For you poor souls still using Internet Explorer here is a link to the mp3.

If you like the guitar playing here there are more of my solo guitar recordings here on jimmycorp.com.

I recently went on a canoe trip with some friends of mine to Murtle Lake. Murtle lake is North of Clearwater in Wells Grey National Park an it's the largest "no motor" boat lake in North America. It's also extremely picturesque. I've posted the most recent photos in the Countryside gallery on jimmycorp.com. Many of the previous photos in the Countryside gallery are from my previous trip to Murtle Lake, so many that I might have to change the gallery's name.

The highlight of the trip was getting to the top of Central Mountain. From there you get a 360 degree view from the tip of the North Arm of the lake to the Southern most tip of the West Arm. And you can see far, well past the Wavy Mountains to ranges unknown. We did 84 km of canoeing and 30 km of hiking---7.5 km of that was lugging the excess amount of gear we had along the portage.