Monday 16 October 2017

Toomas Karmo: Remarks, Including Duly Diligent Advisories to Organs, on the R.F.Garrison 2017-10-14 Memorial

Some mementos of Prof. R.G.Garrison, by way of a snapshot from one of my approximately five GNU/Linux GNOME desktops. Anticlockwise, from top right: a /usr/bin/xterm window, configured to display some of my casenotes on the Garrison database conservation problem (in fact - perhaps helpfully? - a formal report which I wrote around 2009, for several individuals in Prof. Garrison's circle); performers of Chilean music at the Prof. Garrison's 2017-10-14 memorial; a /usr/bin/xterm window, configured to display my sole casenote for a never-completed biographical essay on Prof. Garrison (although it was I who wrote this note, its pronoun "I" refers to Prof. Garrison); a framed photograph, as displayed at the 2017-10-14 memorial, of a meeting between the very Catholic Pope John Paul II and the very nice-but-not-Catholic Prof. Garrison, in the context of a Vatican Observatory "Summer School" at which Prof. Garrison was lecturing. - Popes tend to be friendly toward astronomy without being knowledgeable. A wonderful photo exists of John XXIII examining 1960-era gear which I think was used by the Vatican Observatory to construct a line atlas of the iron spectrum. (Iron absorption lines are prominent in the spectroscopy of the cooler stars, such as our own Sun.) The Pope who got farthest in astronomy was amateur observer Paul VI. Paul VI was said to have liked visiting the Castel Gandolfo telescope, near Rome, which back in the 1960s and 1970s was pretty much all the Vatican had. Nowadays, Castel Gandolfo is light-polluted, and the serious work gets done in Arizona, at the "Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope" (VATT).  Francis I for his part is too busy in Vatican City to spend much time at  Castel Gandolfo, and the Arizona VATT mountaintop will surely be too remote for him to visit.  - As is usual with Web publications through blogger and blogspot, the image can be enlarged through mouse-clicking. 
Quality assessment:

On the 5-point scale current in Estonia, and surely in nearby nations, and familiar to observers of the academic arrangements of the late, unlamented, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (applying the easy and lax standards Kmo deploys in his grubby imaginary "Aleksandr Stepanovitsh Popovi nimeline sangarliku raadio instituut" (the "Alexandr Stepanovitch Popov Institute of Heroic Radio") and his  grubby imaginary "Nikolai Ivanovitsh Lobatshevski nimeline sotsalitsliku matemaatika instituut" (the "Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky Institute of Socialist Mathematics") - where, on the lax and easy grading philosophy of the twin Institutes, 1/5 is "epic fail", 2/5 is "failure not so disastrous as to be epic", 3/5 is "mediocre pass", 4/5 is "good", and 5/5 is "excellent"): 4/5. Justification: There was enough time, given an unvaoidably brisk overall work tempo, to write out most or all of the appropriate points to reasonable length,.


Revision history:
All times in these blog "revision histories" are stated in UTC (Universal Coordinated Time/ Temps Universel Coordoné,  a precisification of the old GMT, or "Greenwich Mean Time"), in the ISO-prescribed YYYYMMDDThhmmZ timestamping format. UTC currently leads Toronto civil time by 4 hours and currently lags Tallinn civil time by 3 hours.

  • 20171020T0131Z/version 2.1.0: Kmo added a graphic. He  reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.1.1, 2.1.2, 2.1.3, ... .
  • 20171017T1825Z/version 2.0.0: Kmo, running about two and a half hours late, finished converting  his finegrained outline into coherent full-sentences prose. He reserved the right to make tiny, nonsubstantive, purely cosmetic, tweaks over the coming 48 hours, as here-undocumented versions 2.0.1, 2.0.2, 2.0.3, ... .
  • 20171017T0414Z/version 1.0.0: Kmo had time only to upload a moderately polished finegrained outline. He hoped to convert this into a short full-sentences essay by UTC=20171017T1600Z.


[CAUTION: A bug in the blogger server-side software has in some past months shown a propensity to insert inappropriate whitespace at some points in some of my posted essays. If a screen seems to end in empty space, keep scrolling down. The end of the posting is not reached until the usual blogger "Posted by Toomas (Tom) Karmo at" appears. - The blogger software has also shown a propensity, at any rate when coupled with my erstwhile, out-of-date, Web-authoring uploading browser, to generate HTML that gets formatted in different ways on different downloading browsers. Some downloading browsers have sometimes perhaps not correctly read in the entirety of the "Cascading Style Sheets" (CSS) which on all ordinary Web servers control the browser placement of margins, sidebars, and the like. If you suspect CSS problems in your particular browser, be patient: it is probable that while some content has been shoved into some odd place (for instance, down to the bottom of your browser, where it ought to appear in the right-hand margin), all the server content has been pushed down into your browser in some place or other. - Finally, there may be blogger vagaries, outside my control, in font sizing or interlinear spacing or right-margin justification. - Anyone inclined to help with trouble-shooting, or to offer other kinds of technical advice, is welcome to write me via Toomas.Karmo@gmail.com.]




On the Saturday which was 2017-10-14 came the event I had long been anticipating with unease and worry. On that afternoon, many tens of people gathered in the Common Room of Massey College, in the physical and intellectual centre of the University of Toronto, for their communal memorial to Prof. R.F. Garrison. 

I discussed Prof. Garrison's scientific and community contributions in my blogspot posting of 2017-08-14 or 2017-08-15, headed "Prof. Robert F. Garrison Remembered (1936-05-09/2017-08-13)". Now I have to discuss his memorial. I will try to do so in the spirit of my companion blogspot posting this week, on the Innermost House Foundation. I will in a particular way try to follow the spirit of Innermost House as I discuss shadowy, troubling, things - my presumed surveillance officer Z____ from the University of Toronto, and his connection (or rather, in my respectfully submitted estimation, in his present lack of connection) with the organs of Russian state security. 

****

Seldom, if ever, have I seen a memorial so well planned and executed. Toward the end, music was delivered in the Chilean tradition dear to Prof. Garrison, who through much of his career had been a guiding mind at the David Dunlap Observatory's erstwhile Andean outstation. My afternoon's unhappiness was relieved, at this Chilean moment, by seeing a few couples even dancing.

Additionally, there was music of the highest professional calibre from one of Ontario's leading vocal ensembles, the Nathaniel Dett Chorale. (From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nathaniel_Dett_Chorale, one gathers that President Obama had the good fortune to hear this ensemble performing at his 2009 Inauguration.)

And there were speeches.

Here I treasured not only Garrison family reminiscences, and words from variable-stars authority Prof. John Percy, and of course remarks from Prof. Garrison's Shelton-family collaborators regarding Supernova 1987A, but also a set of remarks from Prof. Garrison's sometime Ph.D. student Prof. Richard Gray (Department of Physics and Astronomy, Appalachian State University). As I remarked in my blogspot death notice for Prof. Garrison back in August, Prof. Gray is the lead author, with Fr Chris Corbally, S.J. (Vatican Observatory Research Group, Arizona) his collaborator, of the currently authoritative work on stellar spectroscopic classification.

I was touched that upon timidly entering that big Massey College space, I was so promptly greeted by Prof. Garrison's widow. She was under no obligation to be specially warm toward me in her crowded assembly - standing as I do at the mere periphery of Toronto scientific life, and having not even been properly diligent in visiting Prof. Garrison, in his capacity of mentor, during the final phases of his illness.

I am pained that I did not correct dots correctly, and so did not take the correct initiative in greeting my astrophysics-coursework classmate, through fully three years, Adam Muzzin (now Prof. Adam Muzzin,  Department of Physics and Astronomy, in Ontario's York University). He for his part had directed to me a glance of friendly query.

I was touched that I was greeted warmly by various former DDO colleagues, several of whom would now have adequate, or arguably adequate, reasons for personal coolness. It seems to me that in the just-mentioned portion of Saturday's socializing there was an element of generous understanding - a sort of tacit, generous, acknowledgement that in the destruction of 32 out of the total 77 David Dunlap Observatory and Park hectares, and in my failure to save so much as a single tree from the commercial ambitions of the De Gasperis and Muzzo families (they are acting through the "D.G. Group" subsidiary "Corsica"), and in my concomitant loss through legal bills of the bulk of my life savings, I did not now have to be made a target of reprisals. (I do, after all, plead - here today on this blog as on earlier occasions - that I did pretty much everything I could think of, from 2007 right up to 2014 or 2015, in the teeth of opposition, and that my various actions have in their seeming recklessness harboured also an element of prudence. Who could ever have predicted not merely that the greater part, but that, astonishingly, the entirety, of the Ontario Municipal Board (OMB) and Divisional Court work would in the end prove futile? Was it not a reasonable supposition when the OMB hearings kicked off, back in the northern-hemisphere summer of 2012, that the conservationists, under the aegis of my friends the Richmond Hill Naturalists, would succeed in blocking at least a few of the most offensive of the developers' projected Hillsview Drive McMansions, so close to the main dome? The expectation would surely have been reasonable - I do not say, reasonable back home in Estonia; but I do say, reasonable in so well governed and law-abiding a jurisdiction as Finland, or again Switzerland. And are we not in general right in according to the Canadian legal system the same level of confidence as we habitually accord to, at any rate, Finland and Switzerland?)

****

In the course of conversations in that big Massey College room, I obtained a point of scientific importance, which I now set down to supplement what I was able to write here to blogspot on 2017-08-14 or 2017-08-15, in discussing Prof. Garrison's database: Contrary to what I had feared, the physical media on which the database was stored are safe - and this despite my own lack of diligence, as discussed in my posting of 2017-08-14/2017-08-15. It will suffice for a couple of us now to work on the problem together. We will have to get the database once more running as an application under Prof. Garrison's antique OS/2 operating system, whether running the legacy hard drive, or better an exact byte-by-byte mirroring of it, either on his (as I learned on Saturday, conserved) workstation, or (better?) on some other. (I myself have some documentation for OS/2, and conceivably even an installation CD.) - The run will of course be the first step toward doing a flat-ASCII database dump, for which I think I can work out the appropriate SQL commands, I think drawing in part on some private casenotes regarding the organization of Prof. Garrison's SQL tables. With flat ASCII safely in hand, we can hope to port the SQL tables to some modern database-managing application, running under some convenient modern flavour of GNU/Linux. 

****

From that thing of joy which is the database, I turn now to a darker aspect of the Saturday afternoon. (That afternoon does as a whole remind me of a passage in Homer, about the minds of men being cast over with varying sunshine and cloud, as Olympus may from moment to moment decree.) Was I under surveillance; and if "yes", then on the part of what organ, or even alliance of organs?

We are told to pray for our enemies. However, I do not have enemies, at any rate in the sense of having people I am out to punch, kick, sue, or even in vigorous ways humiliate or mock. It is true that I imagine, perhaps especially in the morning shower, fancy courtroom scenes, involving this person and that. In these scenes, I reduce this person or that to a pulp, quivering in the dock, as I quietly pose question upon incisive question, in my imagined capacity of amateur advocate. In my flattering scenario, I end by suavely murmuring to my now-weeping victim and the judge, "Thank you. That was helpful." And afterward, outside the courtroom, I am urged by my learned opponent, perhaps property-developer advocate Mr David Bronskill, to enter the legal profession, so as to ornament the Ontario Bar. At this point one switches the flow of hot water briefly over to the Icy Cold, and then one reaches for the towels.

Enemies in the sense just sketched are the proper province of the schoolyard. In a schoolyard, I imagine noses could on occasion be bloodied and clothes on occasion torn.

I did not myself suffer such things to any notable degree. When one looks at the lives of others, who did suffer them, one applauds above all the stance of eventual mathematical physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), on his first day at the Edinburgh Academy.

When I started school early in the September of 1958, not knowing English, and to my alarm seeing children in boisterous play, I wailed in the only language I then knew - I see in my mind's eye that noisy Nova Scotian classroom, with its firewood piled high in a small side-room, as though it were yesterday - Aga  Ämi, millal siis õpitakse?" - "But Mummy, when, then, are they going to be learning?"

Young James, on the other hand, got well and truly worked over. We are told in biographical notes (cf http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/HistTopics/Maxwell_House.html) that he came home "with his tunic in rags", "his neat frill rumpled and torn". But, we are also told, he came "/.../ excessively amused by his experiences, and showing not the smallest sign of irritation".

So either you can have enemies, or you can not have them (instead diverting energies into, perhaps, mathematics), and I choose the latter.

Now, O Gentle Reader, comes the topic of people for whom I myself wish no ill, and toward whom indeed I try to be correctly sympathetic, sorry and helpful, but who all the same may have it in for me in my past, present, and future capacities as a DDO troublemaker. In particular, there is the high academic administrator Z____, remaining through much or most of Prof. Garrison's memorial immobile, at practically the sole spot in Massey College's big public space which gave him a commanding view of everything important. I, mounting countersurveillance in response to anticipated surveillance, was of course also pretty much immobile, and of course likewise in a good vantage point. We stayed at all times ten, or so, metres apart, without exchanging the slightest tokens of recognition.

It was Z____ who was the chief 2003-era or 2007-era architect, within the University of Toronto at the ordinary Departmental level, as opposed to the more exalted decanal and Vice Presidential  levels,  of the University's eventual, widely condemned, 2008 DDO sale. I am not at all sure that Z____was on a surveillance mission. If he was, I have no proof that Z____'s interest lay in me. But it is true that of all the persons in that room, I was the sole DDO troublemaker, the Visible Tree-Hugger. If Z____ had anyone else in his sights in that room, then he was poorly briefed, and was wasting both his own time and the time of his masters. This would seem to me uncharacteristic of his sharp intellect. It is also true that (I repeat) we squared off, as people must in all spookshops be trained to do - in MI5, in MI6, in Mossad, in FSB, in Estonia's Kaistepolitsei - with the two of us far apart, each thoughtfully selecting the spot  physically appropriate for (so to speak) his particular set of Embassy duties. All I can do here is to put everything on public record, herewith assuring Z____ that I mean him no harm.

****

It will in addition be asked: Was Z____'s putative Saturday operation linked to FSB-cum-SVR?

Russia has been very active indeed in the last 48 or 72 or so hours, reading my blog with an assiduity only seldom precedented in my personal blogspot operations. Whether the so-recent downloading was linked to Z____, I cannot say.

Trying to be helpful to everyone, I make the following points:

  • I am most desperately sorry for the current situation in Russia. I wish Russia no ill. Quite the reverse - I wish Russia to turn aside from its current trajectory, which can only end badly. (On the current trajectory, things hold together, more or less. for twenty years, or even for thirty. Then, however, Vovan Vovanitch is dead - he may, I grant, as a person from my own generation, now reasonably aspire to high old age, in imitation of Mr Robert Mugabe - with the oilwells running dry (in their own eventual, sad, imitation of Britain's now-departed "North Sea Oil"). What comes next? On the current trajectory, the Russia of the mid-century has no world-class universities, no manufacturing capable of competing with China and Germany, and perhaps not even any correctly managed forests. So I think people to the east of the Urals will have to throw their mid-century political lot in with China, and that the people to the west of the Urals will have to do all in their now-limited power to avoid becoming a failed state. I know we in Estonia, surveying this impending meltdown from our own side of the Narva River, may not always be too keen on east-bank wild dancing, on east-bank vodka binges, on east-bank balalaikas,  on those teary east-bank folk songs - I do, on the other hand, in a certain russophilia, applaud two such songs in my blog posting of 2017-03-20 or 2017-03-21, headed "A Russia Situation Appraisal, for Kmo Case Officer and Others" - or on the noisy, wearisome, kinda-sorta American-patriot exaggeration of legitimate love-of-родина-or-отечество. But Russia deserves something better than failed-state status. A country with Tolstoy, Rachmaninoff, geometer Lobachevsky, and theoretical physicist L.D. Landau in its history deserves better.)
  • I appreciate that my presumed FSB or SVR case officers are unlikely to themselves be recruited from the criminal and near-criminal classes. The old rule from the pertinent recruitment folklore - The organs check you out, they find out if you fight dirty in a street brawl, or again are capable of killing some small animal; if those initial observations are promising, the organs set up a situation, harvest the resulting компромат, and make you a recruitment offer you cannot refuse - is in their case unlikely to apply. They do, to be sure, know who pays their nice salaries. But they are themselves no criminals, merely analysts - not even all that different from me in their training, their literary and musical interests, and their temperament. There is not the slightest point in shaking a fist at them.
  • It is interesting that FSB and/or SVR should be working hard on my case (with all that blogspot downloading, now and in past months, and perhaps also with that pleasant pair of sex workers waiting for me in vain, that night I emerged from the Toronto Hacklab - unless, indeed, it was the DDO developers, in place of FSB or SVR, who engaged the pleasant, talkative,  молодой человек and the pleasant, silent, дебушка; but I really do not think Italians are so detail-oriented). All the same, I cannot in the legitimate Russian public interest encourage Russian officials in fostering illusions. The organs need NATO dirt. Mere dirt on a Canadian municipal matter, such as DDO, is of scant Foreign Ministry utility. This is a point I have already covered in all the correct detail - right down to the matter of professional services putatively rendered to a few York Region officials, perhaps outside Richmond Hill, by our erstwhile local Natasha (now said to be an "investor" in one of the warmer parts of the Union, and I think unconnected in her professional life with the just-mentioned pleasant молодой человек and pleasant дебушка)  - in my blog posting of 2017-03-06 or 2017-03-07, headed "Open Letter to My FSB/SVR Case Officer, with a Query on Practical Russian". 
  • Racking my brains for some way the FSB or SVR could play the DDO card, I still come up with nothing beter than what I was able to offer in the posting of 2017-03-06 or 2017-03-07: if (if, if) you want to run a big public-relations risk - and I advise against it - then first buy up some of the DDO developers' lots, as currently promoted at http://myobservatoryhill.ca/, and then with diplomatic fanfare turn them back into greenspace. Explain, as the rootballs of birch saplings enter newly humus-remediated soil by way of a graceful botanical tribute to the родина or отечество, that Vovan Vovanitch is "as a worried friend of Canada doing for Canadian natural and scientific heritage what Canada, in its hour of need, lacked the courage and skill to do".
  • In the a priori improbable event that FSB or SVR in future approach Z____, exploring the prospects for collaboration, Z____ should proceed circumspectly, on no account doing anything which could later be construed by some troublesome blogger (by me, for example) as the accepting of a personal benefit. The sole question which can in that a-priori-improbable contingency of an approach be allowed to form in Z____'s cranium is, "What might I now do, working with these now approaching three-letter agencies, to protect the telescope I helped harm in 2008?"
  • All parties should feel free to consult me if necessary. I am not haughty; I am not proud; I am not stiff; I do not carry on like some doctrinaire Estonian-diaspora Cold Warrior, much though it might sometimes sound that way: if people come to me, I will give what help I can. Admittedly, I might, even while giving help, seek guidance from such Church or NATO authorities as might seem to me from hour to hour, in the rapidly evolving situation, appropriate. 
[This is the end of the current blog posting.] 

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