Police violence and crowd control

In the last few weeks, we've seen a number of events where large crowds of unruly people have gathered. Police response to these crowds has varied substantially, and I think it's instructive to think about what these responses say about us, as a society.

Getting health care

Like many universities, McGill offers a student health clinic. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to actually access the services, even when the support staff aren't on strike. To actually get help, you have two options:

• If it's not urgent: there is one day a month, usually but not always the 15th, on which you can make appointments for the following month. Any other time, tough luck.
• If it's urgent: you can show up at 7 AM, stand outdoors until 8 AM, and hope you were early enough to get one of the very limited number of drop-in slips. This gets you in to see a randomly-assigned doctor, fora few hurried minutes. If it's for a prescription renewal, the chances are slim that they will know anything about you or your condition. Just cross your fingers and hope they're one of the competent ones.

If neither of those options suit you, well, go somewhere else. At least this is free, unless you want dentistry or vaccination or medication.

The People's Microphone

I went down to Occupy Montreal the other day. It was pretty impressive, really; the modest park, surrounded by banks, was filled with tents and people making art. Particularly amusing was the statue of Queen Victoria wearing a Guy Fawkes mask (pictured on the right). But what got me thinking was the People's Microphone.

Source Code

No, I mean the movie. It's science fiction, of the Twilight Zone flavour: soft, set here and now, and with a little pointed topical relevance. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a soldier who gets sent into the "Source Code", eight minutes before a terrorist attack, and told that he must do whatever he can to figure out who the bomber is. He can retry it as many times as he likes. It's very like the brilliant interactive fiction Varicella (described below the jump).

Toxic waste

The Turcot interchange is one of those awful pile-of-spaghetti places where three highways meet. To make things worse, it's also the site of a currently-abandoned rail yard. Its aesthetics are marginally redeemed by some fairly impressive graffiti, but unfortunately the concrete of the raised roadways is falling apart - literally, in chunks as large as a meter square. So the plan is to rebuild it.

As often happens when they do this sort of thing, they took some samples of the ground, and it turns out it's a horrible mess. Gasoline, diesel, motor oil, PCBs, asbestos, mercury, all it lacks is a little radioactivity and maybe some pathogens and it'd cover all the bases. This is actually not too surprising, since the site used to be a lake (now completely swallowed by urban plumbing), and in fact that whole area is polluted. The Lachine canal, which passes nearby, was opened for pleasure-boating only once it had been established that all the above nastiness was in the muck on the bottom and unlikely to be disturbed. There's a strip of parkland on one side, and on the other is what used to be some pretty sketchy housing, now being replaced by upmarket condos. What the new tenants of the condo think of the toxic waste reclamation site facing them across the canal I don't know. It just looks like a fenced-off grassy berm, with a little museum of sorts explaining how the cleanup works.

What I find most surprising about all this is the origin of the pollution. I associate pollution with heavy industry - silver mines, smelters, pulp mills. But there's none of that here in Montreal, and there never really was. In fact those tend to have their own dedicated waste treatment plants that do a pretty good job of cleaning up after them (at least here in Canada). What caused the pollution in this area seems to be largely the rail yards - a century of variously leaky and dilapidated rail cars filled with any old thing, sitting on sidings, dripping away. There's no treatment system set up for that, and so all the accumulated foulness seeps into the soil.

For the most part this sort of soil contamination in an urban setting is fairly benign - if there's no construction going on, the pollutants tend to just stay put in the soil. The one exception to watch out for is gardens. If you grow food in soil full of mercury, well, the food is liable to have alarming levels of mercury in it. Unfortunately a number of community gardens - otherwise a wonderful idea for a city of apartment-dwellers - have been found to have contaminated soil.

I grow my plants in pots.