Public Professor

By Beth Gerwin

Have you ever had the experience of waking up somewhere other than your own bed at home, and for a moment not knowing where you are? Maybe a loud noise in the movie you were watching rouses you from your nap on the couch; or a crow cawing outside your tent wakes you as dawn breaks on your first day of a camping trip. Sometimes you might awaken with a start, but often the strange combin-ation of unfamiliar noises and an unfamiliar bed does not shock your mind. "How odd, that crow sounds like it's right above my head" you might think peacefully, before becoming conscious enough to realize that it actually is right above your head, and that you, rather than the crow, are in an unusual place.

Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922) opens his famous and enormously long "Remembrance of Things Past" - published in seven volumes between 1913 and 1927 - with a description of this same experience. His reasons for this choice are multiple, but one of the main ones is precisely that the experience is so widely shared. Turning the pages of his book, says Proust, the reader will relive moments of his or her own life, magnified through a lens. Proust is fascinated by the kinds of tricks that our minds and memories play on us, because to him, such universal experiences are what make us all human. Almost inevitably, Proust's first paragraphs will open the floodgate to our personal versions of the same event. This is also why such mental quirks are valuable and important. Proust is constantly seeking to revive the quickly forgotten moments we all live through daily, to explore them, remember them, and treasure the doorways that they open into our past and present lives.

Of course, there is more at stake than a trip down memory lane. What Proust wants to examine through this example is another element of the human mind that we all have in common, for better or for worse, habit formation. Habits are our innate tendency to normalize what is around us. They help us feel at home, says Proust, but they also encourage us to accept and conform to our surroundings, sometimes all too readily.

The question of becoming habituated to what is "normal" at a particular time is not a trivial one. It certainly wasn't for Proust, who was writing during the rise, the crisis and the aftermath of the First World War. Half Jewish and homosexual, Proust was keenly aware of the dangers of hypocrisy and intolerance that are inherent in societal habits and comfortable prejudices. This is why the opening pages of the novel's first volume, Swann's Way (1913), breathe life into a common experience of being shaken out of our habits. When we wake up in an unfamiliar place, for a moment our habits are left aside, and we are open to new and surprising feelings as we hover, half-asleep, between what we expect - to hear the alarm going off, to smell coffee - and what we are actually experiencing. It is a rare moment in which our minds are truly open and yet, though it is rare for us as a species, it is common to us all as individuals.

Eventually, claims Proust, habit will catch us up and reassure us. The cawing of the first crow will become expected, a familiar part of the early-morning routine at the campsite. But we should not lose touch with the accepting amazement we felt on that first morning. Remembering it, we remain open to the later disruption of our habits, too. And when a crow interrupts our thoughts on a busy workday, we should allow our memories to take us out of ourselves, back to a childhood camping trip, and to a world full of possibilities.

Beth Gerwin is an assistant professor of French, University of Lethbridge.

Old age isn't what it used to be, and in some ways it probably never was. We know there are a lot of older people compared to 50 years ago. The percentage of people over 65 is around 15 per cent in Lethbridge, because the city is an Alberta retirement centre.

By Kent A. Peacock
“It hit an iceberg and it sank,” said Robert Ballard, who discovered the hulk of the Titanic in 1985. “Get over it.” Judging from the attention being given to the 100th anniversary of the sinking, people aren’t ready to get over it yet, and I think they are right.  
I used to teach the Titanic in a course on engineering ethics. Even then, almost 20 ago, it was clear the loss of the ship was caused by a perfect storm of professional negligence and possibly even criminality, and I presented it as a textbook case of what professionals should not do. New information, some very recent, about how and why the ship sank, and how the facts about the disaster were shamelessly covered up afterward, only reinforce this picture. Those who died on the wreck will not have died entirely in vain if we learn something from the sorry tale of this entirely preventable disaster.
The picture of the sinking in James Cameron’s 1997 movie “Titanic” is incorrect, although based on the best knowledge available at the time he made the movie. Cameron depicts the ship breaking in two, with the bow sinking quickly and the stern bobbing about at a 90-degree angle for agonizing minutes before taking the plunge. It makes for terrific theatre, but the experts now know the ship did not sink that way, and the ship’s builders knew only weeks after the disaster precisely how and why the ship sank but covered up the facts for decades.
Here’s what really happened: the ship started to go down by the bow after scraping the iceberg. At first the ship sank slowly, which should have made it possible to save hundreds more had there been enough lifeboats and proper lifeboat drills. But when the ship got to an angle of about 11 degrees from the water it suddenly ripped apart and both chunks vanished beneath the surface almost instantly.
How could such a massive hull snap in half like a twig? It is true that the quality of the steel was probably not up to today’s shipbuilding standards. However, the ship was doomed by three major design flaws. First, the watertight bulkheads had been stopped short of the top deck to allow room for a squash court and other first-class amenities. Second, the steel and rivets were not thick enough.  Third, and fatal, the ship’s designer, Thomas Andrews, had added an expansion joint amidships to accommodate the flexing of the hull. The joint was designed incorrectly and under the huge stress of the ship being lifted out of the sea by thousands of tons of water in its bow, the joint propagated a crack that split the hull in half.
Andrews had originally specified steel that was probably thick enough, but management insisted he cut it down in order to save weight and thereby fuel costs. Andrews foolishly allowed his professional judgment to be overruled, and he ended up on the bottom of the Atlantic for it. He had added braces and the faulty expansion joint to compensate for the weakness of the hull, but it was not enough; the Titanic for all her size was barely seaworthy, and the claim that she was “unsinkable” was pure hype. It was not really an iceberg that sank Titanic but the fact that marketing and pound-foolish cost control were given precedence over prudent engineering. The Titanic will be a case study in the professional ethics curriculum long after the tragedy has faded from the public eye.
Kent Peacock is a professor in the department of philosophy at the University of Lethbridge.

We started the Public Professor column to give readers an idea of the diversity of topics in academic work. Sometimes ideas and methods developed in one field of study or technology aid other kinds of investigations.

The recent mild winter has turned out to be the fourth warmest ever for most of North America. The surprisingly warm and early spring of 2012 that followed has been a surprise with a mix of challenges and windfalls in terms of matters such as heating bills and road maintenance.

By James Linville

My last column for Public Professor (Feb. 4) stirred up a bit of a controversy. One letter writer expressed shock that a “teacher of religious wisdom” would label the Bible’s creation stories “mythology.”

The word “myth” is frequently used to disparage as false, or deceptive, stories held to be true by others. I presume the letter writer thought I had meant this. In scholarly contexts, however, “myth” denotes stories which are foundational to a group’s sense of identity or understanding of the world. By using the term, scholars do not judge a story as inferior or childish, but as important and sacred to others, regardless of how those people may label it themselves. 

In this light, the biblical creation accounts and the gospels themselves can be labelled “myth” since they are central stories in Christian theology. Some (but not all) Christian scholars are resistant to this because it puts the Bible on the same level as other religions. Yet, a common cross-cultural academic vocabulary is necessary for Religious Studies. Given the great number of religions throughout history, it is rather arbitrary to protect one tradition from the critical analysis directed at all others or to adopt the judgments of one tradition over others. For example, I cannot count the times I have had students from an evangelical background become indignant when I or the textbook refer to Roman Catholics as Christian. If I adopt their meaning of “Christian,” however, will I not incur the anger of the Catholic students? Scholars and their students need to come to terms with the exclusivist claims and counterclaims to legitimacy that mark the history of religions.

Part of the “work” religions do is to express for a group of people the essential correctness and boundaries of their own way of life and how they are the possessors of a special truth and are different from other people. The job of Religious Studies is not to affirm this effort at differentiation but to understand it as it develops and is expressed in politics, art, literature, ethics and more. What religions set aside as special, sacrosanct and beyond question, and how and why they do this are the very things that scholarship must investigate. This is not to determine if the beliefs are true or false, wise or foolish but to understand how those ideas and the behaviours surrounding them work within a society and within the lives of individuals.

In many ways we live not only in the physical world but in worlds of the imagination shaped through education, socialization and personal experience. Religion is only one aspect of how people imagine their world and link themselves to one another in societies. Indeed, in many cases, there is no fundamental distinction between religion and other aspects of culture.
People often fail to see how their ideas of what seems normal or natural are actually the result of human decision, political or environmental realities, or the once-radical views of a particular individual. Religions themselves are always changing. This includes how rituals are performed, what structures of authority are accepted, and even the key doctrines and beliefs that are taught. No religion is immune to this even as they affirm that their core teachings are eternal or divinely given. Indeed, the affirmation may be an attempt to find order and stability within the vagaries of history.

Dr. Linville will be giving a rather playful and provocative talk on Religious Studies and secularism on Tuesday, March 27 at 7 p.m. in Turcotte Hall 201, entitled “On the Job of Not Practising What I Teach. Some Personal Reflections on Religion, Academia, and the Evil Atheist Conspiracy.” Go to http://www.uleth.ca/artsci/event/17242 for more details.

James Linville teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Lethbridge.

By Dennis Connolly In the previous article on tides, my main purpose was to explain the puzzle of two high tides a day. I mentioned that the high tides came every 12 hours as the earth spun through the two ocean bulges. To complicate matters, the moon moves in an elliptical path around the Earth. The moon is directly overhead approximately every 25 hours. Consequently, the time between high tides is nearer 12 hours and 25 minutes. Also the moon’s cyclic, varying distance from Earth affects the tides significantly, as does the moon’s cyclic varying height above the horizon. Further, there is friction between the ocean and the Earth’s surface moving underneath, so that the ocean bulges are not exactly beneath an overhead moon, but always several hours behind, trying to “catch up” as it were. The exact motion of the moon is very complicated. Sir Isaac Newton wrote: “Thinking about the moon’s motion makes my head ache.” It was several years (and several headaches?) before Newton could accurately predict where in the sky to look for the moon in a year’s time. Similarly, the sun’s varying height above the horizon, its varying distance from Earth, and the effects on the moon’s orbit all further complicate tidal predictions. To accurately predict tides for a particular port for an upcoming year, one must first collect tidal records (ocean heights every hour), in that port for a minimum period of a year. Every port, even just a few kilometres away, has its own unique hourly records, due to coastal irregularities and varying ocean depths. Once these detailed hourly records have been collected, the calculations of prediction, using Fourier Analysis, can begin. Before 1873, it took many months to calculate a year’s future tides for a single port. Then William Thomson invented the tide machine, a set of connected brass cogs with a moving pen at the machine’s end. The pen scrolled up and down as a roll of paper was fed underneath. The cogs were set according to the collected tidal records of a particular port. However, the intense calculations needed to set the cogs took hundreds of hours. Once the cogs were set, amazingly, in minutes, out came the graph of a year’s future tides for that port. This first tidal machine is now in the London Science Museum. I can never visit London without calling in to view this ingenious invention. Then, in 1878, Thomson, later Lord Kelvin, invented the mechanical Harmonic Analyser in order to reduce the massive cog-setting calculations from months to hours. (The great Astronomer Royal, George Airy, had predicted that such a complicated analyser would be impossible to build.) Soon, sophisticated tide machines were being built around the world. In Liverpool there is a very large electrically driven tide machine (Google “Doodson Machine” for a photo and details). This machine ran 24 hours a day, accurately predicting tides for ports around the Empire. It took approximately three days to print a year’s future tides for a particular port. Computers finally took over in the early 1960s, printing out future tides almost instantly; however, for tidal predictions at any particular port, one still must collect and feed into the computer a year’s worth of this port’s unique hourly tidal records (19 years of records is better if you want really accurate, long-term predictions which take into account, for example, the 19-year Metonic Cycle of the sun’s effect on the moon’s orbit). No wonder Newton complained of headaches! Of interest, at the site: http://www.math.sunysb.edu/~tony/tides/. There are two rather nice photos of Halls Harbour, Nova Scotia, taken six hours apart. Also below, on the same page, is a drawing of Kelvin’s 1873 tide machine. Predicting the Tides. Dennis Connolly is an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Lethbridge.

Coastal residents are well aware of high tides, low tides, neap tides and spring tides. Residents of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick see the ocean rise 15 metres in six hours, the world's largest and most impressive tides.

By Bryson Brown
Prime Minister Stephen Harper recently declared his government will not allow “foreign interests” to derail plans to pipe diluted bitumen across British Columbia for export to China and other Asian markets. Although some of Alberta’s political parties would like to see more attention paid to environmental concerns, all support further expansion of tarsands production. The Government of Alberta recently stopped spending the $2 billion that had been allocated to subsidize carbon capture and sequestration, reserving the last few hundred million for other purposes.
But hitching our economic prospects to growing the tarsands is a serious mistake. In the long run, burning all or most of the reserves is unthinkable: it would add on the order of 200 parts per million (ppm) of CO2 to our atmosphere all by itself, putting us well on the way to climate catastrophe. And a worrisome financial question was recently raised by the Bank of England:
The Bank of England will evaluate whether the U.K.’s exposure to investments in greenhouse gas-emitting industries poses a risk to financial stability, Governor Mervyn King said. (Bloomberg, 2012/02/07)
As Canada and Alberta continue to expand our fossil-fuel industry, we need to ask ourselves this question, too. Each of the last three decades has been the hottest on record. Insurance giants like Munich Re report increasing losses to weather disasters, losses out of proportion to other kinds of losses. Last year the U.S. had at least 12 weather disasters costing over $1 billion each; the previous record was nine (Washington Post, 2011/07/12). Ocean heat content continues to climb, Arctic ice to decline, and global temperatures continue to rise (see Levitus et al. in Geophysical Research Letters 36 (2009), NSIDC.org and data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/).
The world’s oil companies collectively report reserves of 2,795 gigatons; burning them all would put us over five times the CO2 levels of just 150 years ago, transforming our planet permanently. Sea level would rise continuously and too rapidly to build on coastlines at all; the acidity of sea water would disrupt shell formation and the development of fish embryos, causing mass extinction in the seas; climate zones would shift so rapidly that trees and animals would be unable to adapt or migrate fast enough; higher temperatures would drive down grain yields and droughts like that in Texas this year could become permanent.
But if burning all these fuels will lead to disaster, putting all our economic eggs in the fossil-fuel basket is too big a risk. We need to invest in longer-term prospects, including energy efficiency and alternative sources of energy. These investments are underway already, in China, in Germany and in many other countries — and the new industries emerging from them are already competing successfully in many areas.
Together, we’re on the verge of exceeding the ability of the Earth’s climate to cope with emissions of greenhouse gases, and Canadians are contributing more than our share. Canada produces about 1.8 per cent of total emissions (we have the third-highest per capita rate in the world) — but we represent less than .5 per cent of the world’s population. Worse, our government seems determined to do nothing to change this. No one seriously thinks we will meet our declared target of 17 per cent reduction in our GHG emissions from 2005 levels by 2020. Projections for Alberta alone anticipate emissions of 400 million tons in 2020, making up 88 per cent of Canada’s total target of 450 Mt for 2020 (see Mark Jaquard in the Vancouver Sun, 2012/01/26). It’s long past time to change course — our children and grandchildren are depending on it.
Bryson Brown teaches logic and philosophy of science in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Lethbridge.