Imagine No Religion 2

It’s been more than a week since the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops. I’d never been to Kamloops, and in fact had only ventured into the Interior a couple of times. So hey, this was a little closer to home than TAM, a lot of the local skeptical crowd would be there, why not go too? It’d be like a 2-day long Skeptics in the Pub.

It’s been more than a week since the Imagine No Religion 2 conference in Kamloops. I’d never been to Kamloops, and in fact had only ventured into the Interior a couple of times. So hey, this was a little closer to home than TAM, a lot of the local skeptical crowd would be there, why not go too? It’d be like a 2-day long Skeptics in the Pub.

May 18

Road trip! We left Vancouver in the late morning, and decided to take Highway 1 to Kamloops. Longer, but more scenic. We stopped for lunch in Hope, snapped some pictures, and moved on.

Highway 1

Greenwood Island

After that, it gets a little confusing. I took lots of pictures but for the most part I only have a vague idea of where I actually was. One stretch of Hwy 1 looks pretty much like another, and I had very few landmarks to guide me. Still, it was a great experience. How often do I get to see a semi-arid landscape like this? Don’t think I’d want to live there (I do like the green), especially with nothing but tiny-ass town for miles around, but it’s nice to visit.

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Cows in a field

And then we got to Kamloops. A pretty little town!!

View from the conference centre: North Thompson River

There wasn’t much going on Friday night except a debate (not covered by conference fees, because it was open to the public). You know the drill: two atheists and two theologians debate the age-old question: does God/Gods exist? Actually, they only debated the Judeo-Christian God, with the same lame arguments you’d expect: Prime Mover, the fine-tuning argument, the argument from absolute moral values, atheism requires omniscience, if you consider the evidence with your heart you’ll see it, etc… All of them have been debunked, all of them show these theologians have never debated in front of a mainly skeptical audience. Not surprising, really. The other debaters, Matt Dillahunty and Christopher DiCarlo took them on and demolished their medieval arguments, though of course no minds were changed. Oh well.

Two Moons and Granville Island

I took a picture of the Moon two days apart, on May 9 and 11. I’m quite happy with the amount of detail! Previously when I shot the Moon at night it was nothing but a fuzzy white blob.

I took a picture of the Moon two days apart, on May 9 and 11. I’m quite happy with the amount of detail! Previously when I shot the Moon at night it was nothing but a fuzzy white blob.

Waning Moon

Half Moon

And around that time, I went down to Granville Island to see the Vancouver Men’s Chorus end-of-spring show. They did not disappoint! And on the way I snapped a few photos of Granville Island

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TRIUMF

Last Sunday—yes, I’m just getting around to blogging about it—I went on my third tour of TRIUMF. Fortunately indoor vball season’s over, and grass only starts next month, so I was free to bask in SCIENCE!

Last Sunday—yes, I’m just getting around to blogging about it—I went on my third tour of TRIUMF. Fortunately indoor vball season’s over, and grass only starts next month, so I was free to bask in SCIENCE!

I already knew how it was supposed to go, but it was good to go over the basics: a scale model of the installation, a broad overview of what TRIUMF does, going through the offices where we looked at old pictures of the cyclotron’s construction, and peeked at the control room. The Starship Enterprise hanging from the ceiling was a nice touch, though it was a little spoiled by one of the monitors showing Wheel of Fortune. Well, they gotta kill brain cells somehow, right?

TRIUMF control room

The magic starts in the ion creation chamber, where hydrogem atoms are bombarded with electrons; the negative / positive ions are separated by the chamber, with the positive ones (I think) repelled from the chamber walls and funnelled towards the cyclotron. Though my pictures don’t show it (the apparatus was in a very crowded room), the Ion Source has very smooth metallic walls with rounded corner, very old-school. It’s not to look pretty, though: sharp corners of any kind would distort the electrical field around the walls, leading to arcs and sparking, and nobody wants that.

Then, the cyclotron itself. Of course it’s covered in meters of concrete so we outsiders couldn’t look at the actual machinery, but there was still some pretty cool stuff to play with. Mostly, the paperclips. Though the concrete protects us from the radiation, there’s still a bit of a magnetic field around, enough to make paperclips stand on end.

Paperclips

Then we moved on to the projects: what does TRIUMF do with all these particles?

First, they produce medical isotopes, to use in PET scans and so on. Since they have a very short half-life, those are used exclusively by the UBC Hospital. I think they even have a special conduit to deliver them directly. Makes sense, it’s not like you could carry them around in a paper baggie.

Second (and this is a new one to me) TRIUMF is a center for proton therapy. Normally it’s impossible to treat tumours growing in the back of the eye. You could try to remove the eye and clean it up, but you couldn’t put it back. Shooting gamma rays is also a bad option: a beam strong enough to burn out the tumour would also destroy the eye, and damage what’s right behind the eye—ie: the brain. Heavy particles like protons, though, have a very different absorption pattern. Most of the energy would be deposited at a specific depth. The eye would get a bit of it, but not much, and the brain would get none.

Melanoma of the eye is very rare (TRIUMF gets about 10 cases / year) and other forms of cancer can be dealt with using other methods. As the guide pointed out, no for-profit corporation would have developed proton therapy, it took government-funded research centres to make it work.

Then there’s DRAGON (“Detector of Recoil and Gammas Of Nuclear reactions”). And yes, one piece of machinery had a poster of a fantasy dragon on it. Basically it’s a project to figure out what went on in first-generation stars. Those stars were composed only of very light elements: hydrogen, helium, and a bit of lithium. As I understand it, DRAGON’s research involves shooting beams of these different elements at each other and seeing what comes out.

Funny thing: University of Notre Dame has recently completed a competitor for DRAGON. They call it St. George. Oh those wacky physicists!

Over dinner I learned about a little lookout off SW Marine, with a great view of Iona Jetty and the airport. You can bet I took lots of pictures!

Iona Jetty and a single tug

The shallows

Mythbusters!

The Mythbusters were in town this Sunday! Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage took over the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for a couple of hours of fun and science. Though I’m a huge fan I hadn’t actually planning to go, since I’ve got volleyball on Sunday nights, and I didn’t think a live show would really add much to the experience—unlike, say, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, who graced the Vogue Theatre back in November.

The Mythbusters were in town this Sunday! Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage took over the Queen Elizabeth Theatre for a couple of hours of fun and science. Though I’m a huge fan I hadn’t actually planning to go, since I’ve got volleyball on Sunday nights, and I didn’t think a live show would really add much to the experience—unlike, say, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, who graced the Vogue Theatre back in November.

But no, this was totally worth it. Adam and Jamie brought lots of audience members, kids and adults, to participate in SCIENCE or play with cool tech like one of their high-speed cameras (ever see someone blowing a raspberry in slo-mo? Fucking hilarious). No explosions, because they couldn’t afford the insurance, but they did have a medley of their best blowing-shit-up moments on a big screen. (including the cement truck. That never gets old).

One thing that struck me was the number of kids, even on a school night. It’s great that their parents are raising them to love science and technology, to question and explore the world around them.

The men, the legends

Swami Adam testing his bed of nails

About to catch the arrow

Holiday Photos: Find The River

As is my wont, I flew back to Ottawa to visit withe the family over the holidays. As is becoming my wont I took photos of the landscape from the plane, both coming and going. On the way over, the weather was completely overcast from Calgary to around Sudbury, but what I got was top-notch; Little towns like Temagami, Lumsden’s Mill, Fort-Coulonge, and Ste-Cécile-de-Masham, towns that I’d never heard of but suddenly became amazingly interesting places I might like to visit someday; islands and lakes like Lac La Pêche and Rapides-des-Joachims; and completely random places like some farm out near Russel, ON.

As is my wont, I flew back to Ottawa to visit withe the family over the holidays. As is becoming my wont I took photos of the landscape from the plane, both coming and going. On the way over, the weather was completely overcast from Calgary to around Sudbury, but what I got was top-notch; Little towns like Temagami, Lumsden’s Mill, Fort-Coulonge, and Ste-Cécile-de-Masham, towns that I’d never heard of but suddenly became amazingly interesting places I might like to visit someday; islands and lakes like Lac La Pêche and Rapides-des-Joachims; and completely random places like some farm out near Russel, ON.

Temagami, ON

Lac La Peche

A little farm, corner of Frontier Road and Burton Road

Shooting all these remote locations was great fun. I felt like a pioneer, exploring the Ottawa River… except going backward.

A couple days after landing, I took a walk up Rideau Canal from Hog’s Back Falls. I hadn’t planned on keeping up the “exploring waterways” theme, it sort of happened. Plus, I know the Rideau Canal like the back of my hand, though it was a long time since I’d gone as far as Hog’s Back. They’re small, but really really nice-looking falls.

Hog's Back Falls

Then, a day trip to Montreal with my parents, specifically tooling around Vieux-Montréal. That was great; I don’t think I ever visited that particular bit before; plus I got to see the inside of Notre-Dame-de-Montréal, which was phenomenal. Well worth the $5 tourists had to pay (yes, even to look around and take pictures. They must really be hard up for money).

Vieux-Montreal

Chapelle Bonsecours bell tower

Notre-Dame-de-Montreal

The flight back was just as interesting. The cloud cover came and went over the prairies (sadly, Ontario was completely out), and I managed to get some good shots of Lake Manitoba (frozen), various rivers, and any number of tiny-ass towns in the middle of nowhere. Plus the Drumheller Badlands, famous for their dinosaurs.

Western edge of Lake Manitoba

Smiley, SK

Drumheller, AB

I enjoyed the by-now familiar chore of going over Google Maps and an online atlas of Canada to identify these places; post-processing to remove atmospheric haze, that was less fun. It took me several tries per photos until I got something I was satisfied with. But even then, sometimes I had my doubts. For instance, are the Badlands that yellow? (Google Images says that yeah, they pretty much are). Or some photos were too red, or too yellow… It didn’t help that the Ottawa River pictures took place around sundown, which made everything yellower. Well, I did my best, no use worrying too much about it now.

Walking Lions’ Gate Bridge

On Tuesday I did something I’d been thinking about for a while: walking over Lions’ Gate Bridge. I didn’t really plann it, I just got impatient waiting for the bus after work, then started walking along Marine Dr. The bus drove past as I was between stops, so I thought, fuck it. It was a nice evening, not too warm and not too cold, I had my camera with me and the light looked right for some good sunset shots. Why not?

On Tuesday I did something I’d been thinking about for a while: walking over Lions’ Gate Bridge. I didn’t really plann it, I just got impatient waiting for the bus after work, then started walking along Marine Dr. The bus drove past as I was between stops, so I thought, fuck it. It was a nice evening, not too warm and not too cold, I had my camera with me and the light looked right for some good sunset shots. Why not?

Lions' Gate Bridge

Traffic on Lions' Gate Bridge

Here are a few things you don’t notice when you’re driving over the bridge:

  • Those factories, or whatever the hell they are, just west of the bridge between Capilano Indian Reserve and the sea… they stink. It’s a weird smell I couldn’t quite identify. Kind of seafoodish, I guess. What are they making or processing there?
  • The bridge vibrates from the constant traffic. By itself not a big deal, but it was kicking up my fear of heights quite a bit.

North Vancouver

Funny thing, though: until I actually set foot on the bridge, I didn’t think acrophobia would be a problem. I get nary a twinge from Burrard or Granville Bridges, but Lions’ Gate is a whole other beast. I kept angling away from the outer railing, even though that’d put me in the way of bicycles (unless there was a really good shot). To turn around I shifted my feet around carefully, as though I were walking on thin ice. In fact I didn’t trust my balance unless I was steadily walking straight ahead, preferably with one hand touching something solid.

Lions' Gate Bridge, sun going down

Of course, even after I got back on terra firma my journey was far from over, because still had to cross Stanley Park, and then downtown. I was tired, starving and I needed to pee really badly, but it was totally worth it! Though next time, I’ll go on the east sidewalk, to get a better view of downtown…

The Harbour and Canada Place