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Saturday, February 23, 2008
Chinese Activist Friend
February 23, 2008
John Goddard
staff reporter
Chinatown community leader and founder of the popular Urbane Cyclist shop, Eugene Yao, has died at 61.
True to his values, Yao created the shop 10 years ago near John and Queen Sts. as a workers' co-operative and commuter cyclists' hub.
"It's like an old-style neighbourhood store," customer and friend Dora Nipp said yesterday. "Everybody knows you. It has all the courtesies and civilities of yesterday."
Yao was born in 1946 in Shanghai, China, and came to Canada in 1969 as an electrical engineering student at McGill University.
"He came to my 21st birthday party and we made an acquaintance," recalled his wife, Winnie Ng, a McGill sociology student at the time. "After that, I bumped into him in the street. He was riding a bicycle and I said I'd like to learn."
Yao and Ng married and in 1975 moved to Toronto. He took a series of engineering jobs with large corporations, and both became prominent community activists in the Spadina-Dundas area.
She worked at Settlement House helping various waves of immigrants, ran for Parliament as Trinity-Spadina's New Democratic Party candidate in 1993 and is on leave from her position as Ontario director of the Canadian Labour Congress to study for a PhD.
He helped establish English-language classes for garment workers and later served as Toronto president of the Chinese Canadian National Council.
In 1994, Yao lost his job to corporate restructuring.
"He later said it was a blessing in disguise," Ng said. "It freed him to take a risk and do something entirely different."
Long a passionate environmentalist and bicycle lover, Yao took a course from the Barnett Bicycle Institute in Colorado and a business course from Seneca College.
With three others and neighbourhood volunteer help, Yao opened the cycling shop as a democratic co-operative of worker-members.
"I can go away for a month and know that everything will be okay," he told an interviewer last year.
Yao died Feb. 12 of liver and heart problems. A celebration of his life is to be held tonight, 4-6p.m., at Cecil Community Centre, 58 Cecil St. The Ontario College of Art and Design is accepting donations for the Eugene Yao Urbane Cyclist Bicycle Design Award.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Math Religion Trouble
TheStar.com - News - Math + religion = Trouble
Actually, since Pythagoras the relationship between men of numbers and the Deity has been more along the lines of love-hate, but it's a rich vein
January 26, 2008
Ron Csillag
Special to the Star
Which math-phobic among us has not beseeched God for help with another colon-clenching algebra or calculus exam? Had we heeded the words of the German mathematician Leopold Kronecker, perhaps we would have realized we've been talking to the wrong person: "God made the integers; all else is the work of man."
Pythagoras, who gave us his eponymous theorem on right-angled triangles, headed a cult of number worshippers who believed God was a mathematician. "All is number," they would intone.
The 17th-century Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza echoed the Platonic idea that mathematical law and the harmony of nature are aspects of the divine. Spinoza, too, posited that God's activities in the universe were simply a description of mathematical and physical laws. For that and other heretical views, he was excommunicated by Amsterdam's Jewish community.
German mathematician Georg Cantor's work on infinity and numbers beyond infinity (the mystical "transfinite") was denounced by theologians who saw it as a challenge to God's infiniteness. Cantor's obsession with mathematical infinity and God's transcendence eventually landed him in an insane asylum.
For the Hindu math genius Ramanujan, an uneducated clerk from Madras who wowed early 20th-century Cambridge, an equation "had no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God." Though an agnostic, the prolific Hungarian mathematician Paul Erdos imagined a heavenly book in which God has inscribed the most elegant and yet unknown mathematical proofs.
And famously, Albert Einstein said God "does not play dice" with the universe.
What is it with God and mathematics? Even as science and religion have quarrelled for centuries and are only recently exploring ways to kiss and make up, mathematicians have been saying for millennia that no truer expression of the divine can be found than in an ethereally beautiful equation, formula or proof.
Witness, for example, such transcendent numbers as phi (not to be confused with pi), often called the Divine Proportion or the Golden Ratio. At 1.618, it describes the spirals of seashells, pine cones and symmetries found throughout nature. Other mysterious constants like alpha (one-137th) and gamma (0.5772...) pop up in enough odd places to suggest to some that they are an expression of the underlying beauty of mathematics, and to others that someone or something planned it that way.
But does that translate into actual belief?
The New York Times reported recently that mathematicians believe in God at a rate 2 1/2 times that of biologists, quoting a survey of the National Academy of Sciences. Admittedly, that's not saying much: Only 14.6 per cent of mathematicians embraced the God hypothesis, versus 5.5 per cent of biologists (versus some 80 per cent of Canadians who believe in a supreme being).
Count John Allen Paulos among the non-believers. A mathematician who teaches at Temple University in Philadelphia and who has popularized his subject in bestselling books such as Innumeracy and A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper, Paulos's latest offering is a slim but explosive volume whose title is self-explanatory: Irreligion: A Mathematician Explains Why the Arguments for God Just Don't Add Up (Hill & Wang).
This newest addition to the neo-atheist field crowded by the likes of Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris and others emboldened by the recent transformation of non-belief from a 97-pound weakling into a he-man, Paulos thankfully employs little math, preferring to see things, as he tells us, in the stark light of "logic and probability."
Deploying "a lightly heretical touch," he dissects a playlist of "golden oldies" that includes the first-cause argument (sometimes tweaked as the cosmological argument, which hinges on the Big Bang), the argument for intelligent design, the ontological argument (crudely, that if we can conceive of God, then God exists), the argument from the anthropic principle (that the universe is "fine-tuned" to allow us to exist), the moral universality argument, and others.
The famous Pascal's wager – that it's in our self-interest to believe in God because we lose nothing in case He does exist – is upended as logically flawed, based on what statisticians call Type I and Type II errors.
Lord knows Paulos isn't the first mathematician to proclaim his lack of religious faith. Cambridge's famous wunderkind G.H. Hardy loudly and proudly adjudged God to be his enemy. To Erdos, God, if He existed, was "the supreme fascist."
Even as Paulos works to refute the classical arguments for God's existence, he does something too few of his mindset do: Chide non-believers for unsportsmanlike conduct.
"It's repellent for atheists or agnostics," he admonishes, "to personally and aggressively question others' faith or pejoratively label it as benighted flapdoodle or something worse. Those who do are rightfully seen as arrogant and overbearing."
That doesn't prevent him from doffing the gloves. The ontological argument is "logical abracadabra.'' The design, or teleological argument, is a "creationist Ponzi scheme'' that "quickly leads to metaphysical bankruptcy.''
Much of theology is "a kind of verbal magic show.'' A claim that a holy book is inerrant because the book itself says so is another logical black hole.
However, math, specifically something called Ramsey theory, which studies the conditions under which order must appear, can account for the illusion of divine order arising from chaos.
Paulos provides a nice counterpoint to theoretical physicist Stephen Unwin's 2003 book The Probability of God, which calculated the likelihood of God's existence at 67 per cent, and to Oxford philosopher Richard Swinburne's use of a probability formula known as Bayes' theorem to put the odds of Christ's resurrection at 97 per cent.
Those and other efforts remind one of the story, perhaps apocryphal, of Catherine the Great's request of the German mathematical giant Leonhard Euler to confront atheist French philosopher Denis Diderot with evidence of God. The visiting Euler agreed, and at the meeting, strode forward to proclaim to the innumerate Frenchman: "Sir, (a+bn)/n = x, hence God exists. Reply!"
Diderot was said to be so dumbfounded, he immediately returned to Paris.
To Paulos, the tale is a great example of "how easily nonsense proffered in an earnest and profound manner can browbeat someone into acquiescence."
His arguments notwithstanding, Paulos concedes that there's "no way to conclusively disprove the existence of God."
The reason, he notes, is a consequence of basic logic, but not one "from which theists can take much heart."
As for the problem of good and evil, he defers to fellow atheist, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Weinberg: "With or without religion, good people will do good, and evil people will do evil. But for good people to do evil, that takes religion."
Or as Paulos might say, no mathematician has ever deliberately flown planes into buildings.
Ron Csillag is a freelance writer from Thornhill.
Friday, June 23, 2006
TTC Sketch Artist
"A steel-toed sketch artist"
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/toronto/story.html?id=1ce98db4-e8e6-467e-bdba-8f1bdee9511e&k=37681
Friday » June 23 » 2006
A steel-toed sketch artist
Wychwood Park
Peter Kuitenbrouwer
National Post
Friday, June 23, 2006
He's a sketch artist with steel-toe boots. For years Anthony Jim, an engineer at the Toronto Transit Commission's sprawling Hillcrest Yards, took lunch- hour strolls in Wychwood Park, Toronto's tiny, historic gated enclave that is just across Davenport Road.
"It's very enjoyable," he said. "Many TTC employees walk through. It splits the day in half and takes away some stress.
"I walked here many, many times and said, 'Hmm, I can sketch it.' Then five years ago I started."
Armed with nothing but a sheet of 8½ -by-11-inch paper and an HB pencil, he began to draw the heritage homes, and people began to notice.
"Albert Fulton, the archivist of Wychwood Park, said, 'Anthony, you have to sketch all the houses."
Five years later, Mr. Jim has drawn 58 of the 60 Wychwood homes. The other two are under renovation, and he'll do those sketches next year. Many he had to sketch in winter when the leaves had fallen; in this lush, wooded community, most houses are hidden behind foliage in summer.
"When I hide in someone's backyard and sketch, I feel like I'm in Muskoka," said the father of two.
Mr. Jim sold all the drawings, most of them to the homeowners, for about $250 each, and raised more than $10,000. He gave every cent to the United Way. "It's fun," said Mr. Jim, a rail-thin man whose grin is as big as a streetcar. "I improve my sketching skills by doing some good for United Way. And some people invited me in to have a drink or a tea inside."
I met Mr. Jim on the corner of Davenport Road and Bathurst Street yesterday, where he sat in the shade of the big trees here and worked on a sketch of the TTC central control building.
I was winded from climbing the hill on Bathurst north of Dupont Avenue. Talking to Mr. Jim perked me right up.
There he sat, on a tiny blue cloth folding bench, sketching. Beside him on the cement wall was a new pack of HB pencils. So far, he has sketched the control building from two angles and is working on the third.
Many mornings Mr. Jim catches the subway from his home at Danforth Avenue and Coxwell Avenue, arrives here at 7:15 a.m. and sketches for an hour before work.
As a teen growing up in Hong Kong, Mr. Jim learned to draw from British engineers. His brother was in Canada.
"I was struggling. Working class, eh? My brother said, 'Why don't you come over here?'
In 1973, he came. In 1977, he graduated from Ryerson in engineering.
"My teacher, Anthony Souroshnikoff, was an artist as well as an engineer," Mr. Jim recalled. "He was a renaissance man."
Those mentors are with him today, as he sharpens his pencils and draws, always improving, he says.
"Each time you pick up something about the pencil skills," he said. "I'm no big artist. I'm just a regular kind of person doing regular kind of stuff. If I can help out a bit, that's great."
It's so heartwarming on my walk to meet people like him, immigrants who pour so much love into this town. Earlier yesterday, on Augusta Avenue in Kensington Market, I met Jack and Elizabeth Sunbulian, Armenians who 20 years ago figured out a good way to make money in this multi-culti town: sell flags.
Today, Araz Impressions, their shop at the corner of Nassau Street, carries the flags of 232 nations, including Kyrghyztan, Kiribati, Comoros and Curacao.
"Where's Curacao?" I asked.
"Who knows," Mr. Sunbulian said. "I think probably either the Far East or South America."
Yesterday, he stood making from scratch red-and-green Portugal key chain tassles, which he sells for $5.99. The red-blooded, fiercely nationalistic Portuguese community, passionate about their World Cup team, account for 80% of his business right now, he said.
Even so, patriots will be happy to know that his best-selling flag is the Maple Leaf.
Once again World Cup fever gripped the town yesterday; I popped into Cafe Brasiliano on Dundas Street West, where one TV showing the Italy-Czech Republic match had half the crowd's attention; the other half of the patrons were cheering for Ghana, in its match against the U.S.A.
A Portuguese friend leaving next week for the Azores, Eduardo Pimental, expressed a bit of regret about the trip. "It's much more exciting to watch the World Cup here in Toronto. Back home, there's only people cheering for one team."
pkuitenbrouwer@nationalpost.com
© National Post 2006
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