Thursday, February 29, 2024

Quick Post About TNT, and other matters...

And to think. 

The entirety of the Canadian Railroad System. The rails that connect the east coast of Canada to the west coast, providing the lifeline that was most essential to Canada's growth and is still a key element in the modern economy, that most of the intensive labour required to build those railroad lines was provided by the first labour force composed of the earliest Chinese and Asian Canadians, the Indigenous population who'd all worked amongst the British, French and European colonizers and of course a few million pounds of TNT (Trinitrotoluene). The explosives used to terraform much of the Canadian soil along the path of the railway.

I as a Canadian am grateful for all the labour that contributed to that wondrous project. A wonder of Canadian ingenuity, engineering and of course, those Construction Engineers (when I use that term I'm referring both to the skilled architects and planners whose efforts required a lot of math and physics, and the hired labour that actually implemented these plans) who made it all possible, and likely for a wage under the standards that we have today, relatively speaking when you factor in the timescale and the local value of the currency.

Sincerely, thank you to the Construction Engineers who worked on that railroad and made it possible back in the 1800s, and of course, thank you to TNT ;-)


Here's a short (8 minutes) documentary showing actual footage of the railway and its construction from Bibliothèque et Archives Canada on YouTube.

The Building of a Transcontinental Railway in Canada: [extract] (1910)

Click the following link if for some reason you can't see the archive, which will take you direct to the Bibliothèque et Archives Canada: Bibliothèque et Archives Canada.


Or, if you'd like a quick dramatization depicting one of the many risks that Chinese and Asian Canadians took during the construction of the Canadian railway, not to mention many other significant contributions to our history, take a look here at TVO (TeleVision Ontario). 

TVO is one of the public access television stations that I personally credit (amongst private stations like CBC, CTV, CHCH and of course CityTV) for spurring many elements of my curiosity as a child (under my parents' and teacher's guidance) and into my teenage years that led to much of the content you see here. Conside that during that time, the internet was purely a vehicle of research, academia and the military, all long before the world wide web. Check this link for the episode S01 E32 - Nitro and watch it to get a dramatization about this very topic. Now imagine that part of the Canadian Railway passes through the Rocky Mountains, and what an incredible feat of terraforming and construction engineering that must have been in order to make that all happen.

Not From Canada?

If you're arriving at this page from another country besides Canada, you should consider that there's probably an extensive railway there and that it was built by people who persevered through some of the hardest labour and engineering challenges that we can imagine, even today. I'd bet that if you searched on the internet for those topics local to your place in the world, you'd find a hoard of information on the topic. Maybe, amongst those people who built your railways, you'll find many other internationals and expatriates who worked alongside your own population and contributed to perhaps the most important project of your country's early history. Like the air ways in your body that allow you to breath, or your circulatory system that carries nutrients to other parts of your body, the railway is the first step to building a lasting infrastructure and economy.

Also, remember that TNT, although it can be used to make devastating weapons, can also be used to create the means to prosperity and feed many people ;-)

Climate Crisis

Now, with that same kind of determination and execution, we can tackle the climate crisis in much the same way that the railway system was transformed as newer, more efficient forms of energy became available, but this paradigm can be applied through expertise and labour to create the next generation of solutions. In the future, all trains will be zero emission electric engines with much higher speeds (approaching those of the sound barrier) while of course, producing little or no damaging exhaust, noise pollution, EMF or turbulent conn trail damage. The city subway systems are often the testing grounds for the technology involved in creating the future long distance commuter systems.

Much like the President of the United States did today (which was highlighted by Doctor David Suzuki's team in a recent email), President Biden stood down big oil, which definitely is the kind of thing that Ayn Rand would have been ecstatic about if she was alive to see it, for this highlights the very essence of what she was saying needs to be done. However, that choice to do so was made by Biden's team and highly likely, himself. 

The idea isn't to make big oil the enemy. It is however to encourage them in the direction of taking risks when it comes to alternative, climate safe technologies lest we chase away innovation in favour of the short term profits offered by exploitation of the world's oil reserves at the cost of the world's biosphere itself. We then end up in a perpetual loop where in order to repair the damage we cause to the biosphere by relying on such fuels, we're forced to increase their consumption in order to generate the capital required to fix it. 

Big oil has the resources to advance toward solutions to this problem, they just have to be freed from their internal politics and business models that constrain the kind of innovation that will (eventually) lead to a decline of the exploitation of natural resources and eventually, zero emission forms of energy. The economy will adapt to support future companies who do, while those that don't will likely fade away into obscurity. There will always be those die hard enthusiasts who love having a big V8 Mopar, but that will become part of the hobbiest industry and such cars will run on entirely clean fuels and be seen on Sundays driven by their enthusiast owners on their days off.

However, I do my voting in Canada, but it helps to recognize effort that helps us all globally, because what happens anywhere, affects everywhere, especially concerning the environment. Poetically speaking, its called the Butterfly Effect.

I'll be back soon, just as red white, red black and yellow as The Butterfly Dragon, Shhhh! Digital and I will ever be. Though there's always some Mila, Barris, Nelony and Shaela in me too.


Credits and attribution:

Artwork: Amy Wong, Wendy Pusey, Ghastly, Birdman, Brian Joseph Johns, Daz3D, Unreal Engine...

Tools: Daz3D, Corel Painter, Adobe Photoshop, Lightwave 3D, Blender, Stable Diffusion (Easy Diffusion distribution), InstantID, Sadtalker, Google Colaboratory, Microsoft Copilot (Windows 11), Hitfilm, Borderline Obsession...

InstantID by: Wang, Qixun and Bai, Xu and Wang, Haofan and Qin, Zekui and Chen, Anthony. Research Paper Title: InstantID - Zero-shot Identity-Preserving Generation in Seconds.

Sadtalker by: Zhang, Wenxuan and Cun, Xiaodong and Wang, Xuan and Zhang, Yong and Shen, Xi and Guo, Yu and Shan, Ying and Wang, Fei.
Research Paper Title: SadTalker: Learning Realistic 3D Motion Coefficients for Stylized Audio-Driven Single Image Talking Face Animation.

Gratitude: Our Mentors, Senseis, Sifus, Sebomnims, lifetime inspirations, family, friends, the Nomads (ask Stanton about that one), the Music, the Movies, the Theatre, the Arts, ASMR, (both YouTube and Bilibili and the many other creators on those platforms), the Gaming and Developer communities and of course, the audience.

Martial Arts (in the words of real experts and at least one comedian): https://brucelee.com (home of the real Dragon and an entire family of inspirations), http://iwco.online International Wing Chun Organization (International presence of a very scalable intensity martial art, protected and developed by Shaolin Nun Ng Mui), https://iogkf.com International Okinawan Goju-Ryu Karatedo Federation (even Hanshi had his teachers), https://itftkd.sport International Taekwondo Federation (Here there be Taegers), https://tangsoodoworld.com Tang Soo Do World (the path of Grandmaster Chuck Norris), https://www.aikido-international.org International Aikido Federation (how else would Navy Chef Steven Seagal liberate a Nimitz Class Aircraft Carrier from a team of hijackers?), https://www.stqitoronto.com Shaolin Temple Quanfa Institute (The City Of Toronto's own Shaolin Temple), https://www.enterthedojoshow.com Master Ken's Ameri-Te-Do presence (If we can't laugh at ourselves, then we can at least laugh the loudest at others, and other Zen)

Special thanks to Aitrepreneur, Hugging Face and the YouTube educational content producers, including those catering to the AI content production pipeline and of course AlphaSignal.

Something to give you perspective: The very first teacher had no formal education, didn't graduate and was self taught, but only because they had no other choice. We do.

This content is entirely produced in Toronto, Ontario, Canada at 200 Sherbourne Street Suite 701 under the Shhhh! Digital Media banner.

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