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Home>Members>Professional oversight>The Syndic's Office
The obligation to cooperate: always relevant The obligation to cooperate: always relevant http://chad.ca/en/members/professional-oversight/the-syndics-office/476/the-obligation-to-cooperate-always-relevant
Occasionally, the Discipline Committee of the ChAD is asked to rule on violations involving members engaging in obstruction, despite clear legislative provisions prohibiting such behaviour.
In 2009 and 2010, the Committee reiterated that when the syndic conducts an investigation, he enjoys powers similar to those of the police. And these powers even extend to third parties.
Specifically, on February 10, 2010, the Discipline Committee of the ChAD found two claims adjusters guilty of having obstructed the work of the syndic.1 Let's take a closer look.
A Telling Example
In January 2009, the syndic asked several claims adjusters to produce certain documents and information regarding their conduct with regards to a specific file. The claims adjusters believed that the syndic was on a "fishing expedition" and hired a lawyer to represent them. What was the result? During a six-month period, they interfered five times with the syndic's investigative work, and in so doing, contravened the Code of ethics of claims adjusters.
The adjusters justified their refusal to provide the documents requested by claiming that the syndic had harassed them and abused his power. However, the Discipline Committee rejected these grounds.
"This ruling reminds us that when the syndic requests information or a document, the professional has no choice but to provide what is requested," explains Me Claude G. Leduc. "Neither the professional nor the Discipline Committee has any right to question the syndic's methods. The syndic's powers of investigation are similar to those of the police." In his opinion, believing it was a "fishing expedition" showed a lack of understanding of the syndic's role. "The syndic does not go fishing without information," Me Leduc points out. "As soon as he receives information from an insured, a colleague, the media or even an anonymous source, he has authority to investigate." And refusing to cooperate with the syndic is not a wise thing to do.
Me Leduc adds that when in doubt, you can always ask the syndic for further information or clarification by mail or even by phone. If needed, the syndic may also grant the professional extra time to respond to his requests, if he sees that the latter is acting in good faith. However, according to Me Leduc, the syndic is entitled to not give any additional time to professionals who have already been granted an extension, as was the case here. In his opinion, "At the end of the day, interfering with the syndic's ability to investigate also means interfering with the protection of the public."2
Since then, the Discipline Committee of the ChAD has had to reiterate these principles on more than one occasion. In a case heard on October 23, 2013,3 the defendant was found guilty of obstruction pursuant to section 34 of the Code of ethics of damage insurance representatives for having failed to comply with a summons from the syndic. He was found guilty of this charge, and he was suspended for one year.
In another ruling, handed down on May 27, 2014,4 defendants were both found guilty of breaching sections 34 and 35 of the Code of ethics of damage insurance representatives for failure to respond to requests for information from the syndic. They were fined $2,000.
In a ruling handed down on July 7, 2014,5 the Discipline Committee of the ChAD reviewed the relevant case law concerning the syndic's powers of investigation and the obligation of both professionals and third parties to cooperate with the investigation. In this case, given how long the obstruction had lasted, the threat to the protection of the public, and the defendant's systematic refusal to respond to the requests of the assistant syndic, the defendant was fined $3,000 and suspended for 30 days.6
On September 24, 2014,7 the Discipline Committee of the ChAD found the defendant guilty of breaching section 56 of the Code of ethics of claims adjusters, due to his reluctance to provide the information the syndic had requested. He was fined $3,000.
As is clear from these rulings, obstructing the work of the syndic can take many forms, from reluctance to an unequivocal refusal to answer or failure to attend a meeting. The resulting remedies can vary from a minimum $2,000 fine to being temporarily suspended.
An Obligation that Even Concerns Third Parties
On December 17, 2009,8 the Discipline Committee of the ChAD reminded members that the syndic's power to investigate also applies to the third parties he contacts.
In this case, a trustee in bankruptcy refused to give the syndic access to documents concerning a broker "unless ordered to do so," because he was unsure as to whether he could give the syndic access to the information requested without violating privacy legislation. And yet the Discipline Committee's order was clear, given the fact that the syndic's primary function is to investigate and his powers of investigation allow him to obtain the information he needs to carry out his duties from anyone—even a third party—without even having to obtain a search warrant.
The substance of this ruling is in accordance with the ruling in a case heard before the Supreme Court of Canada, Pharmascience v. Binet, 2006 SCC 48, according to which both professionals and third parties must cooperate with the syndic's investigation or face penalties.
In conclusion, refusing to cooperate with the syndic is not the best thing to do.
A reminder regarding relevant regulatory and ethical provisions
The Act respecting the distribution of financial products and services
342. 342. No person may hinder the work of a person conducting an inquiry, in particular by misleading that person.
The Code of ethics of damage insurance representatives
34. A damage insurance representative must answer without delay any correspondence from the syndic, the co-syndic or an assistant to the syndic in the performance of the duties devolved upon them under the Act and the regulations thereunder.
34.1. A damage insurance representative must, in particular, appear before the syndic, an assistant of the syndic or a member of their staff as soon as he is required to do so.
35. A damage insurance representative must not, directly or indirectly, obstruct the work of the Authority, the Chamber, one of its committees, the syndic, the co-syndic, an assistant to the syndic of the Chamber or a member of their personnel.
The Code of ethics of claims adjusters
54. . Claims adjusters must answer without delay any correspondence from the syndic, the co-syndic or an assistant to the syndic of the Chamber in the performance of the duties devolved upon them by the Act respecting the distribution of financial products and services (chapter D-9.2) and its regulations.
55. Claims adjusters must attend any meeting as required by the syndic, the co-syndic, an assistant to the syndic or a member of their personnel.
56. Claims adjusters must not, directly or indirectly, obstruct the work of the Autorité des marchés financiers, the Chamber or one of its committees, the syndic, the co-syndic, an assistant to the syndic or a member of their personnel.
By Me Marie-Josée Belhumeur, LL.B., syndic
1 Chambre de l'assurance de dommages v. Benoît Mayer et Michel Guertin, 2009 CanLII 73927 (QC CDCHAD).
2 The comments on these rulings were first published in La ChADPresse, March April 2010, vol. 11, no. 2.
3 Chambre de l'assurance de dommages v. Pierre Vézina, 2014 CanLII 4584 (QC CDCHAD).
4 Chambre de l'assurance de dommages v. Marc Belzile et Marie-Claude Belzile, 2014 CanLII 30258 (QC CDCHAD).
5 Chambre de l'assurance de dommages v. Marc Gignac, 2014 CanLII 41706 (QC CDCHAD).
7 Chambre de l'assurance de dommages v. Brigitte Bisaillon, 2014 CanLII 62657 (QC CDCHAD).
8 Chambre de l'assurance de dommages v. Pierre Fecteau et Jean Gagnon, 2009 CanLII 72969 (QC CDCHAD).
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Wind Ensemble & Wind Symphony
Ball State Wind Ensemble and Wind Symphony
Categories: Sursa Performance Hall, Arts and Entertainment, Open to the Public, Student Life, Virtual Events
Calendars: School of Music Calendar, Bands Calendar
Start: April 28, 2023 7:30 p.m.
End: April 28, 2023 9 p.m.
Location: Sursa Performance Hall
The Wind Ensemble is under the direction of Thomas Caneva, director of bands.
Learn more about the Ball State University Bands.
To be announced.
Tickets available through the College of Fine Arts Box Office located at Sursa Hall starting August 1.
General Public: $8 in advance / $10 at the door
Seniors: $5 in advance / $7 at the door
BSU Faculty/Staff: $5 in advance / $7 at the door
Students: free* in advance / $5 at the door
*One (1) free student ticket per ID is available in advance (before 5 p.m. on April 28) at the College of Fine Arts Box Office
In person: Monday through Friday from Noon to 5 p.m., or starting 1 hour before the performance
**Please note: As part of our commitment to sustainability, all College of Fine Arts tickets are paperless and are accessible via email confirmation. Your confirmation email contains your digital tickets which can be scanned at the door from your mobile device, or you can print your digital tickets at home to be scanned. There is no need to visit Will Call prior to the performance.
Parking is available in the McKinley Parking Garage (entrance on Ashland Avenue) located immediately south of Sursa Hall. Metered parking ($1/hr) is available on the first floor of the garage until 7 p.m. at which time parking is free.
This concert will be offered as a livestream - visit the Concert Livestream Page to watch live. Streaming begins approximately 15 minutes prior to scheduled concert start time.
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redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Heat the oil in a large flameproof casserole dish or saucepan and gently fry the onion, leeks and fennel for 10 mins, stirring occasionally, or until the veg is well softened and lightly browned. Add the garlic and spices, and cook for 30 secs more. Season well with ground black pepper.
Tip in the chopped tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers, chickpeas, orange juice and peel with 300ml water and bring to a gentle simmer. Cover loosely and cook for 20 mins, stirring occasionally, until the potatoes are softened but not breaking apart.
Add the fish pieces on top of the bubbling liquid and cover. Poach over a medium heat for 3-4 mins or until the fish is just cooked. Adjust the seasoning and serve scattered with parsley.
If cooking for two, chill the remaining portions after step 2, before adding the fish. When ready to serve, simply reheat on the hob, add the remaining fish and cook as above until piping hot throughout.
We have made this so many times and it never fails. I always leave out orange, fennel, and just use white fish and it still tastes great (though I add more spices than suggested).
We enjoyed this recipe and I will make again. I used half the amount of orange peel and sliced it very thinly so just got a hint of orange which was nice. Needed plenty of seasoning and I added a splash each of Tabasco and Worcestershire sauce and threw in some fresh coriander for good measure. Might add some tomato purée next time to add depth but overall I thought this was a nice recipe.
We really enjoyed this, used half the quantity of fish (as only 2 of us) but all the other ingredients & saved half (as suggested in the tips) before adding the fish. Having the rest this evening with prawns - yummy!
More like a veg stew than a fish stew even though I followed the proportions (other than using the whole fennel bulb instead of half). I had to add another tin of tomatoes as I found it quite dry. Needs loads of seasoning as surprisingly bland considering the nice ingredients. It made loads though, the four of us ate all the fish and there's still quite a bit of veg left which I'll probably blend into a soup or something. Won't be making it again.
Again this was very delicious, but also made too much for us to eat in one go. The salmon I already had, because I had bought quite a lot from M&S on special the month before. I had it in the freezer already, so just had to add the cod. We like the orange taste of these meals. my only complaint would be is that they are all quite similar.


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The Yankees signed this Puerto Rican giant in 1988 after selecting the 6'7″ right-hander in the 15th round of that year's amateur draft. During his senior year at Miami Lakes High School in Hialeah, Florida Munoz was a star basketball player who had scholarship offers to play hoops at several big-time schools. In fact, he planned on playing on the hard court at UNLV but bad grades forced a change in those plans and he went to Palm Beach Community College instead. That's when the Yanks drafted him and convinced him to give professional baseball a shot.
He spent four-plus seasons in the Yankee farm system, where he was converted into a closer when he reached Stump Merrill's Columbus Clippers Triple A team in 1993. After starting out the season there with a 3-1 record and 10 saves, the Yanks called him up to the Bronx in late May to join Buck Showalter's bullpen.
A confident 25-year-old at the time of his call-up, Munoz asked for and received Goose Gossage's uniform number 54. He then spent his first month in pinstripes reminding New York fans of the Goose, pitching in a setup role for then-Yankee closer Steve Farr. By June 29th his record was 2-0 with 3 holds, 17 K's and a solid 2.50 ERA.
Unfortunately, he faltered in the second half and then the Yankees grew concerned about his weight, which had gotten above the 260 mark by the end of his debut season. He got his weight back down that winter but was unpleasantly surprised at the beginning of the Yanks 1994 spring-training camp to find he had been dealt to the Phils in the deal that brought starting pitcher Terry Mulholland to New York.
The Phillies tried to make him a starter again and his 7-5 record in that role during the strike-shortened season of 1994 indicated there was some wisdom behind the move. But he hurt his arm the following year and went a combined 1-14 during his final five big league seasons.
This Hall-of-Fame Yankee outfielder, this former Yankee starter and this WWII hero all also were born on March 3rd.


We've all overheard conversations that are stuffed with technical terminology and industry jargon that they make little to no sense. When specialized terminology is at play, deciphering things takes a base of knowledge that extends beyond common sense. This is especially true when it comes to acronyms, which can sound like pure Greek to those who aren't in the know. As you might expect, your intranet is rife with technical terms, and getting to know some of the more common ones is essential.
Learning how to use intranet software is actually far easier and less intimidating than you might expect, and taking the time to internalize common terms and abbreviations will help. Many of these terms pop up on a regular basis, and you'll save time if every member of your organization is familiar with them. Educating community members ahead of time is essential to streamline the company intranet. While not exhaustive, the following list contains some of the most common terms you'll encounter, each having its own specific function and purpose.
A user's activity stream is one of the primary aspects of the social community as it keeps people informed about company happenings. The activity stream is the first thing users see when they log in to the intranet, and it lists off recent updates and happenings occurring within the community. Navigating an activity stream is fairly easy once you get familiar with how the intranet operates and most activity streams mimic the functionality of major social media networks, making the learning curve relatively non-existent.
Similar to an intranet's activity stream, an activity ticker helps to keep people updated on recent events without requiring them to go elsewhere. The activity ticker sits within its own scrolling window in the community, so you don't have to visit another part of the intranet to access it. An activity ticker is extremely useful when a community is rife with user action.
Every social intranet requires an administrator, an individual with unlimited access that ensures proper use and management. The tasks handled by an administrator can vary dramatically, ranging from putting out fires and displacing arguments, to simply ensuring that functionality doesn't suffer when changes occur. The role of an intranet administrator is a very important, full-time job and it's essential to choose wisely the person who will fill this seat.
Business blogging is a huge part of the Internet and it is just as effective when utilized as a feature of your social intranet. You and your staff members can create blogs for entertainment purposes, for outlining internal documentation, or for posting to the Internet at large. For best results, choose bloggers within your organization who have a penchant for the written word, as quality is essential here.
Calendars serve as a major part of any active social community, and learning how to harness their power is essential for each and every community member. When calendars are properly utilized, scheduling becomes a breeze, and common issues such as double-booking simply disappear. One thing that sets intranet calendars apart from third-party applications is that community members have a choice between two different varieties — "personal" and "shared." Personal calendars help you keep track of your own life, while their shared counterparts help keep you and your colleagues on the same page. For best results, personal and shared calendars should be used in conjunction with one another.
A campaign can be viewed as an effort, or group of efforts, put forth in an attempt to solve a problem. Within the company intranet, a campaign can refer to a project, internal marketing effort, team-building exercise, and so much more. When campaigns are properly designed and seen through from beginning to end, they can have a profound impact on both the intranet and the business itself.
Content refers to anything that makes up the bulk of a social intranet, and can vary dramatically from one organization to another. A photo house, for example, might use their intranet to manage thousands of photographs, while keeping blogs and wikis to a minimum. Similarly, tech firms might prefer to outfit their intranets with technical documentation and keep media such as photos and videos from taking over the social community. There's really no right or wrong way to outfit an intranet with content, but having an intranet content strategy is typically the best way to determine what's right for your social community.
One of the most useful features of a well-designed social intranet is cases, which can be utilized for a variety of different purposes. Cases can be opened and used as tickets for internal or external issues, or for managing projects. Because the status of a case is easily changed on the fly, this serves as a highly useful system for issue tracking or publishing project updates to the community. When cases are properly utilized, they can help to take a social intranet to entirely new heights.
Employee engagement is essential for making sure the intranet works properly. Improving employee engagement is often a lengthy process, but it's not nearly as difficult as most people think. By simply paying attention to the needs of your staff members, and showing that you care, you can achieve higher levels of engagement, especially if you work toward fostering a more productive staff.
No matter what industry, members of an active organization have to keep track of events on a regular basis. Events can range dramatically in function and purpose, from phone conferences, to trade shows, and everything in between. Keeping track of events isn't always easy, but the "Events" feature in social business software makes it possible to manage events without even leaving the intranet. As an added benefit, events within your intranet help keep everyone on the same page, which lowers the chance that someone might miss an important meeting or end up surprised when an event pops up unexpectedly.
It's important to view an intranet as a social community, similar to mainstream social media platforms which people use to keep up with friends and family. The "Friends" feature found within today's modern intranets illustrates this nicely, as it is used in a similar manner to those of larger social media networks. This feature isn't necessarily essential to getting a social community off the ground, but it can help you keep track of what your colleagues are up to, and helps make the community run more effectively.
Many people are well-aware of the functions that a homepage serves in the context of the Internet at large, and it's not far off from how a homepage works within a social intranet. An intranet's homepage can serve as the ideal starting point for community members, especially those who are new to your organization. The difference between them however, is that an intranet homepage lets users access documentation, share ideas, post questions, watch how-to videos and more, making it an effective training center that can streamline the onboarding process.
There will inevitably be situations in which something sparks the imagination of you or your employees, yet you simply don't have time to flesh things out properly at the moment. The intranet ideation feature helps you jot down a quick revelation, ensuring that you don't lose any inspiration. Ideas can be marked down on the fly, and other community members can expand upon them should they have any insight to contribute. Similar to a quick notation system, the "Ideas" feature can really come in handy when utilized regularly.
Information overload occurs when too much media is presented to your community, and it's one of the most important things to avoid when attempting to streamline an intranet. This often happens when spaces aren't used, which can help to ensure that people are only seeing the information they need to and not that which pertains to others. Text, photos and videos can all add up to create information overload, but the problem is avoided by simply taking time to improve intranet organization.
Since modern intranets are designed with sociability in mind, there are a variety of different tools which can be used to get the attention of others. With "mentions," you can tag someone in a status simply by preceding their name with an "@" symbol. Users are notified when they have been mentioned in a post, and the end result is a more tightly-knit community of employees that work together instead of strictly individually.
Messages in a social intranet can change how you communicate with other members of your organization. A well-designed intranet chat and messaging system allows community members to participate in group or individual conversations, all of which will be backed up so that no important information gets lost. Once you get acquainted with messaging and chat in social intranet software, you'll find that you and your employees use email less and less as time goes on, as internal messaging is simply a better vehicle for communication.
Notifications help community members keep track of how their contributions are received by others in the community. One example of this feature is that users receive a notification when a wiki they've created is updated by other community members. When combined with the activity stream and activity ticker, notifications are quite powerful and help to eliminate any confusion that might occur when things get busy.
Spaces are essential for getting the most out of a company intranet. Just as an organization is made up of multiple departments, a social intranet can be comprised of multiple online workspaces, each devoted to a specific team, project, or other piece of the community. Spaces help keep information overload at bay by presenting community members with only the information they need to see, which results in a high level of organization.
A member's interests are especially effective at bringing a community closer together thanks to employee profiles. Profiles allow people to list their hobbies, interests, skills and qualifications in a way that can be searched by other community members. This capability helps alleviate questions as to whether or not an individual is right for a specific job. Filling-out a user profile takes just a few minutes, and the benefits are numerous.
Many people are familiar with the concept of wikis thanks to the popularity of communities such as Wikipedia, and for good reason. In the context of the social intranet, a wiki is essentially an internal page that can be edited and collaborated upon by a number of different users. Wikis serve as a framework for internal documentation, but there are countless ways they can be used with the right amount of planning. Note that wikis can become cluttered if organization isn't a priority, and a cleaner environment will be easier to navigate.
Workflow in a social intranet typically refers to the process an employee, or group of employees, follows in order to take a task from start to finish. While an organization may preach specific workflow guidelines, there's no getting around the fact that everyone has their own unique way of handling tasks, and variety should be encouraged.
There are numerous other terms associated with intranets, and surely the terms may vary depending on your intranet provider, but one thing is certain, by studying and understanding these general terms, you have a greater opportunity for achieving intranet engagement and success.
Tim, thanks a lot for this. I've been plunged into the world of online social communities as a commercial site moderator from a standing start. I possess a unique accumulation of knowledge on one subject, but know nothing of your world. I'm of a vintage that I don't even do Facebook! As a result of your words, glimmerings of light have dawned in how I can proceed with some tasks. I've also gained some inspiration for what I could do. Thanks.
Lyn, thanks for sharing. And I hope that you keep coming back for more. We have a wealth of knowledge about collaboration, intranets, and much more on the site. Let me know if there's anything I can do for you.


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Coyote Gulch
The health of our waters is the principal measure of how we live on the land — Luna Leopold
Home2018September26
Despite risk of unprecedented shortage on the #ColoradoRiver, @USBR commissioner sees room for optimism — @WaterEdFdn
September 26, 2018 Coyote Gulch 2007 Shortage Sharing Agreement, Climate Change, Colorado River Basin, Colorado River Compact, Colorado Water
Brenda Burman. Photo credit: USBR
From the Water Education Foundation (Gary Pitzer):
Western Water Notebook: Commissioner Brenda Burman, in address at foundation's water summit, also highlights shasta dam plan
The Colorado River Basin is more than likely headed to unprecedented shortage in 2020 that could force supply cuts to some states, but work is "furiously" underway to reduce the risk and avert a crisis, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Brenda Burman told an audience of California water industry people.
During a keynote address at the Water Education Foundation's Sept. 20 Water Summit in Sacramento, Burman said there is opportunity for Colorado River Basin states to control their destiny, but acknowledged that in water, there are no guarantees that agreement can be reached.
"While you can't control weather, you can't control climate in many ways, what we do know is that we can look at the risk ahead and we can find ways to address that risk," she said.
In a talk that touched on Reclamation's work across the West, Burman also said California needs more water storage to take advantage of exceptional runoff years and pointed to the Bureau's proposal to raise Shasta Dam as one solution.
The first woman commissioner in Reclamation's 116-year history, Burman, 51, lauded the "great tradition" of cooperative efforts by stakeholders to maintain the Colorado River's viability even as people have begun to contemplate the potential impacts of a coming crisis.
"Everybody has come together, and we are working furiously about how do we address that risk, how do we buy it down, how do we control our own destiny," she said. "We are very close and very hopeful of coming to terms this year with a deal on the Colorado River … where everybody is taking a little bit of a hit, finding more flexibility, but knowing that the future may hold more difficult problems."
Should dry conditions continue this winter, Reclamation projects a 57 percent chance of a shortage declaration in 2020, which would be the first time that has ever occurred. Under the first tier of a shortage declaration on Lake Mead, Colorado River water deliveries, primarily to Arizona, would be cut. The seven Colorado River Basin states — California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — have responded with pending drought contingency plans that are centered on the idea that all water users, not just those with junior water rights, have a stake in keeping the system whole.
"When you look at the risk that's being faced on the Colorado River, I commend the senior water users who have stepped up," Burman said. "Senior users on the Colorado River system have very much stepped up and said, 'We recognize this risk and we are willing to come to the table to figure this out.'"
The overseer of the Central Valley Project (CVP) and the vast apparatus of the Colorado River Storage Project, Reclamation employs about 5,000 people in maintaining 475 dams and 337 reservoirs across 17 Western and Great Plains states.
Burman assumed her duties amid a whirlwind of water policy activity in California as a new federal administration began to establish its priorities for managing the CVP. The emphasis of that task, which includes the proposed raising of Shasta Dam, was crystallized in August when Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke called for a plan to maximize water supply deliveries from the CVP to farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. Asked about the plan at the Water Summit, Burman said work on it is still underway.
Burman lamented the inability of the current water storage system in California to take advantage of the runoff that comes during exceptionally wet years, such as 2017.
"There is a huge reliability problem on this system," she said. "There is not enough infrastructure and we don't have enough places to put water, whether it's above ground or underground. It is time for us to take a look at what is available and what is affordable for increasing the capacity of this system so that the water supply is more reliable in dry years."
She called the proposed raising of Shasta Dam, which has been discussed for more than 20 years and is controversial in some corners, "by far the most cost-effective project" for creating a water supply.
"If you raise the dam by 18 feet … you can actually have an incredible effect," she said. "You can produce over 600,000 acre-feet of new capacity and new space in that system. If we had filled that up in 2017, that would have helped so much this year. It would have helped with meeting our responsibilities to fish and meeting the responsibilities to our contractors."
CVP contractors south of the Delta support the idea of raising the dam because the extra storage could help with their supply during tight times and provide the necessary water for embattled salmon populations.
Some environmental and fishery organizations and the nearby Winnemem Wintu Tribe oppose raising the dam.
In a March 2018 letter to some congressional leaders, Natural Resources Agency Secretary John Laird wrote that a dam raise "would violate California law due to the adverse impacts that project may have on the McCloud River and its fishery."
In addition to her time as a deputy commissioner with Reclamation and a deputy assistant secretary at Interior, Burman's 25-year career has been spent with the Salt River Project in Arizona, Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, The Nature Conservancy and the office of Arizona Senator Jon Kyl.
A graduate of the University of Arizona College of Law, Burman was a judicial clerk for the Wyoming Supreme Court and Coconino County Superior Court in Arizona.
She began her career as a park ranger at Grand Canyon National Park. In her testimony last year to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, she talked about the lessons learned from that experience.
"In the canyon, we counted on scarce springs in the backcountry for our water supply, and on the rim we counted on a rickety old pipeline that often broke to bring water from Roaring Springs up to the rim and the tourist area," she said. "It was a learning experience that taught me the value of water and the hard work it often takes to get it."
As warming strains #NM's water supplies, 'status quo' no longer works — New Mexico Political Report #RioGrande
September 26, 2018 Coyote Gulch Climate Change, Colorado Water, Groundwater, Rio Grande Basin, Water Law
Historical storage Elephant Butte Reservoir as of September 26, 2018 via Water Data for Texas.
From the New Mexico Political Report (Laura Paskus):
The Rio Grande Compact, which divides water among Colorado, New Mexico and Texas was signed in 1938. And New Mexico's water laws today are still based on codes that the territorial legislature passed in 1907.
But as the climate changes and warmer temperatures affect the state's rivers, reservoirs and aquifers, the same tactics and strategies that may have helped New Mexicans weather dry times over the past century won't keep working. And perhaps no place in the state offers such a stark reminder of that fact than the reservoir behind this dam. After a dry winter and hardly any snowmelt this spring, Elephant Butte Reservoir is at three percent capacity, storing 58,906 acre feet of water as of September 24.
Historically, people tend to listen to what they want to hear, rather than what they need to hear: What they need to hear is that our laws do not reflect hydrology and our hydrology is changing for the worse, and if we do not manage it, it will manage itself," says Phil King, an expert on hydrology and the relationship between surface and ground water in southern New Mexico. "I would much rather correct the system ourselves through management than let nature do it's cold, hard reality fix," adds King, a professor of civil engineering at New Mexico State University and a consultant to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, or EBID.
Stopping the 'death spiral'
EBID serves about 8,000 farmers in the Rincon and Mesilla valleys in southern New Mexico, from Arrey to the border town of Santa Teresa. If you've eaten chile from Hatch or pecans from Mesilla, fed alfalfa to your horses or poured milk from a New Mexico dairy into your coffee, you've consumed water that EBID's farmers divert from the Rio Grande and Elephant Butte or pump from the aquifer.
For roughly a century, EBID farmers have supplemented irrigation water with groundwater. Without it, they would not have survived the drought of the 1950s. But they pumped during the wet years, too, including throughout the 1980s and '90s. Then, beginning around 2003, about four years into the Southwest's current drought period, pumping ramped up even more.
That's a problem, especially in the Rio Grande Valley, where river water recharges the groundwater, and pumping water from the aquifer makes it even thirstier for river water.
With both the surface water and the groundwater strained, the system suffers a double-whammy, King says. That causes a positive feedback or what King calls a "death spiral."
Even though scientists, engineers, hydrologists and farmers know the two are intertwined within the same system, in New Mexico, groundwater and surface water are managed separately. King calls that "hydrological folly."
"We've got some major rethinking to do with New Mexico water law: Status quo is not an option," he says. "I think what people need to understand is we are facing conditions that mankind has not faced here before."
And the only way to reverse that death spiral is to use less water.
The drying riverbed of the Middle Rio Grande near the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge on April 4, 2018. Photo credit: USBR
Vail Symposium presents #The Law of the #ColoradoRiver: Conflict and Collaboration on Thursday, Oct. 3, 2018
September 26, 2018 Coyote Gulch Climate Change, Colorado River Basin, Colorado Water, Education
From the Eagle River Watershed Council via The Vail Daily :
The mighty Colorado River is a source of life flowing through seven Western U.S. states and Mexico, providing water to nearly 40 million people; it's the backbone of agriculture, tourism, recreation, irrigation and hydropower industries in the West.
The river basin has a complex history of governance at the state, federal and local level known as the "Law of the River." Famously over-allocated at the time of signing, the Colorado River Compact of 1922 is the cornerstone of the Law of the River and dictates the management of the river's flows between Upper Basin and Lower Basin states.
How do water managers take on an already over-allocated river with growing stressors such as drought, climate change and an ever-growing population? What will happen if water levels continue to drop in Lake Powell and Lake Mead? What is a "compact call" and what will it mean for Western states, as well as Eagle County as a headwaters community?
The Vail Symposium presents The Law of the Colorado River: Conflict and Collaboration on Thursday, Oct. 3, at Hotel Talisa in Vail with experts John McClow, Anne Castle, Pat Mulroy and Eric Kuhn. The panel is intimately involved in the management of the Colorado River Upper and Lower basins and will present answers to these questions as well as the innovative strategies being implemented to combat the growing threats to the river such as the Drought Contingency Plan, System Conservation Pilot Program, Minute 319 & 323 and more.
The program starts at 6 p.m. and costs $25 in advance and $35 at the door. Tickets are available at http://www.vailsymposium.org.
"The Colorado River is a lifeblood in our community both recreationally and in terms of agriculture," said Kris Sabel, executive director of the Vail Symposium. "We're pleased to be able to host such a timely and enlightening discussion in partnership with the Eagle River Watershed Council."
Anne Castle is a senior fellow at the Getches-Wilkinson Center for natural resources, energy and the environment at the University of Colorado, focusing on western water policy issues. From 2009 to 2014, she was assistant secretary for water and science at the U.S. Department of the Interior where she oversaw water and science policy for the department and had responsibility for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the U.S. Geological Survey.
Eric Kuhn was, until earlier this year, the general manager of the Colorado River District, a position he held since 1996. Kuhn started employment with the Colorado River District in 1981 as assistant secretary engineer and has served on the Engineering Advisory Committee of the Upper Colorado River Compact Commission since 1981. From 1994 through 2001, he served on the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
John H. McClow is a graduate of the University of Colorado and Colorado Law. He has practiced law in Colorado since 1973. He has represented the Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District since 1991, becoming full-time General Counsel in 2006. He is a member of the Board of Directors and is past president (2014) of the Colorado Water Congress and is vice-chair of its State Affairs Committee. He served as Colorado's Commissioner on the Upper Colorado River Commission from 2013-14.
Pat Mulroy is a former senior fellow at the Metropolitan Policy Program. In addition, she serves as the senior fellow for climate adaptation and environmental policy at UNLV's Brookings Mountain West. She is a founding chair of the Western Urban Water Coalition, and she was a founding member of the Water Utility Climate Alliance. She served on the Board of Directors for the National Water Resources Association and with the Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies first as treasurer (2009-2011) and then as president (2011-2013).
Moderator Holly Loff has served as the executive director of Eagle River Watershed Council since 2013. Under her direction, the Watershed Council set and continues to implement a strategic organizational path that focuses on advocating for the health of the watershed, focusing on education, fostering collaboration and securing diversified funding.
Fountain Creek "Creek Week" September 29 through October 7, 2018
September 26, 2018 Coyote Gulch Arkansas Basin, Colorado Water, Fountain Creek
UCCS Clean the Stream Team at the 2015 Creek Week. Photo via the Fountain Creek Watershed, Flood Control and Greenway District.
Click here for all the inside skinny and register:
Make some memories and make a difference!
3,000 Fountain Creek Watershed residents will come together from
Saturday, Sept. 29th – Sunday, Oct. 7th
from Monument to Pueblo,
and everywhere in between to clean our watershed!
View the list of events and clean-ups by clicking here.
12th Annual Restoring the West Conference on October 16-17, 2018 at Utah State University
September 26, 2018 Coyote Gulch Climate Change, Colorado Water, Education
The City of Boulder's Open Space and Mountain Parks Department (OSMP) has begun a major restoration project that will improve native fish habitat in Boulder Creek and restore natural areas surrounding the creek. This ecological project also will repair damage from the 2013 floods by returning Boulder Creek to its pre-flood channel, and will include the planting of more than 11,000 native trees and shrubs. These plantings will help improve the creek's sustainability and resiliency, and help mitigate damage to private and public property during future floods. These efforts are occurring in two areas east of Boulder. Photo credit the City of Boulder.
From RestoringTheWest.org. (Click through to sign up for the email list for updates):
Overcoming land management and restoration challenges to achieve sustained yield of multiple uses on public lands will be the focus of the 12th Annual Restoring the West Conference on October 16-17, 2018 at Utah State University. By law the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, and many other governmental agencies must manage their lands for "sustained yield" of "multiple-uses" like outdoor recreation, range, timber, watershed, and wildlife and fish "without … impairment of the productivity of the land". Demand for these resources on public lands, and for ecosystem services and other previously unanticipated outputs, is increasing greatly. Management has gotten more complicated as uses and users have increased. At this conference researchers and managers will share ideas about and examples of compromise, collaboration, and creativity that can improve management and restoration of public lands for sustained yield of the many resources we value. The conference will include two days of plenary sessions and an evening social including a poster session. We hope you will join us in October – stay tuned for more information, agenda details, etc.
This conference is organized and sponsored by Utah State University including USU Extension Forestry, the Department of Wildland Resources, the Quinney College of Natural Resources, and the Ecology Center. Support also comes from the Western Aspen Alliance.
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text:
title: "24 Days of GHC Extensions: Type Operators"
---

As GHC gradually adopts more and more extensions that allow us to do
dependently typed programming in Haskell, it's natural that we'd like be more
expressive at the type level. Today, we'll look at the
[type operators](https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/latest/docs/html/users_guide/glasgow_exts.html#type-operators),
which allows us to use more natural syntax when we write our types.

The extension itself is straightforward. As the documentation mentions,
ordinarily an operator doesn't mean anything special when used in types - GHC
would interpret operators as type variables, not particularly useful! However,
now that we've got some support for type level literals, it's desirable to
concisely type out computations using infix operators (for example, addition and
multiplication of natural numbers).

Recently, I was working with a little templating engine using a variant of
[*data types a la carte*](http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~swier004/Publications/DataTypesALaCarte.pdf). I
wanted to be able to write templated emails, where I can compose emails from
text fragments and variables that need to be filled in later. However, not all
emails have the same variables - a registration email doesn't have the same
variables as a booking confirmation email. To work with this, I decided to use
data types a la carte to represent open data types.

If you're new to this method of programming, we're essentially breaking apart a
data type into a combination of functors. For my email templating, I use the
following:

```haskell
data I a = I { unI :: a }
data Var a x = Var { unK :: a }
```

`I` is the identity functor - we use this to insert text literals. `Var` is a
constant functor - it ignores the data under the functor, instead choosing a
variable as a placeholder. The last remaining piece of the puzzle is the ability
to combine literal text with placeholders. We can do this with one more
functor - the sum functor:

```haskell
data Sum f g a = InL (f a) | InR (g a)
```

Armed with this, we are free to write our emails:

```haskell
data UserVar = UserName | UserEmail

email :: [Sum (Var UserVar) I Text]
email = [ InR (I "Dear "), InL (Var UserName), ", thank you for your recent email to Santa & Santa Inc."]
```

However, the type of email templates becomes messier when we have multiple variables:

```haskell
data ChristmasVar = ChristmasPresent

email :: [Sum (Sum (Var UserVar) (Var ChristmasVar)) I Text]
email = ...
```

What is... Lisp?! Instead, we can define an infix operator, and the type becomes
a little more readable:

```haskell
email :: [(Var UserVar + Var ChristmasVar + I) Text]
email = [ "Dear "
        , var UserName
        , ", thank you for your recent email to Santa & Santa Inc."
        , "You have asked for a: "
        , var ChristmasPresent
        ]
```

There's more work that's needed to complete the email templating, and a [full
code listing can be found on Github](https://github.com/ocharles/blog/blob/master/code/2014-12-08-type-operators.hs). However,
hopefully you can see how a fairly obvious extension (opening up the
restrictions on how we write our type signatures) can find its way into some
interesting applications.

----

*This post is part of
[24 Days of GHC Extensions](/pages/2014-12-01-24-days-of-ghc-extensions.html) -
for more posts like this, check out the
[calendar](/pages/2014-12-01-24-days-of-ghc-extensions.html)*.

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


Chaplain (U.S. Navy Captain) Jon Cutler, director of Religious Affairs for Combined Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA), traveled to Kampala and Mbale, Uganda, from May 29 to June 2 to discuss new initiatives promoting regional stability.
The visit included meetings with key Ugandan Anglican, Protestant, Roman Catholic and Muslim religious leaders.
"The main goal of this trip was to learn how to partner with these leaders and to discuss their interest in a regional interreligious conference being planned by the All African Conference of Churches," said Cutler.
According to Cutler, the U.S. Department of State supported and helped facilitate the meetings.
"Religion is intrinsically linked with the government," he said. "I represented CJTF-HOA and the U.S. government with a religious voice." Cutler's meetings were conducted in coordination with U.S. Embassy, Kampala, officers.
Cutler recalled similar engagements from his 2009 tour in Iraq.
"We use this same approach to engage with religious officials throughout East Africa," he said. "Like Iraq, the leaders here were eager to learn more about what we do and all expressed a keen interest in attending an upcoming interreligious conference in Kenyan later this year."
"This was a very productive meeting which allows us to establish a relationship," said Father Joseph Htuwa, chancellor of the Ugandan diocese of the Roman Catholic Church.
According to the National Census of October 2002, Christians of all denominations made up 85 percent of Uganda's population. While Uganda is a predominantly Christian country, about 12 percent of the residents are Muslim.
The President of the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council, Sheikh Kavuma Siraj Zaid, hosted Cutler at Kampala's Gaddafi Mosque, the offices of the Uganda Muslim Supreme Council.
"This is the first time I have ever spent time with a Jewish Rabbi," Zaid explained. "It was a very enjoyable time and we were able to have discussions about many important topics. We were very pleased to have the Rabbi visit and begin a new friendship."
Cutler expressed appreciation for the graciousness of the Muslim community.
"They welcomed me and were very hospitable. We had an extensive theological conversation and I believe it was a very positive meeting."
Cutler was asked about Judaism traditions such as the Sabbath and the laws of kosher.
"I also spoke about our common Abrahamic tradition and gave some examples using Jewish Midrash, or interpretation," he said.
One stop was at the Ugandan Jewish community of Abayudaya, which is the only Jewish community in Uganda. There are approximately 1,200 members of Ugnada's Jewish community. Cutler conducted religious services with local Rabbi Gershom Sizomu.
"It was a very special occasion to have the Chaplain come here today," said Sizomu. "He came with messages of peace and reconciliation and is discussing issues common to all religious faiths." Cutler also lead part of a Shabbat service and gave the homily at the village synagogue.
Bishop Zac Nyiringiye of the Anglican Church in Uganda hosted Cutler and expressed interest in a continuing dialogue.
"Any time we can discuss matters impacting us all, it is time well spent. So, I was very pleased that the Rabbi took time to visit here and explain his objectives," Nyiringiye said.
"Overall, it was a very successful trip," Cutler said, citing key leader engagements with eight Ugandan religious leaders. "I think several of them may have been a bit surprised that a U.S. military officer and a Jewish Rabbi would call on them," he said. "But they were all very receptive to discussions and all see the need for peace and reconciliation. On that point everyone sees a clear common interest."


text:
Something Wild In The Blood
Best of Men's Journal
Courtesy Tay Maltsberger and Bob Shacohcs
by Bob Shacochis
This story first appeared in the December 2000 issue of Men's Journal.
Hurricane Debby had broken up, humbled by shearing winds into a tropical depression, trailing a steady, bracing suck of breeze that stretched east from Cuba all the way back to the Turks and Caicos Islands, where, on Providenciales, a young islander in swim trunks helped me lug a mountain of gear from my Turtle Cove hotel to his pickup truck. I asked the driver if he was the boatman, too, and he said yes, he was Captain Newman Gray.
"Good. You can tell me where we're going."
"East Bay Cay."
Twenty years ago, when I first came to Providenciales aboard the South Wind, a derelict ninety-eight-foot tramp freighter captained by Tay Maltsberger and his wife, Linda, the forty-nine Turks and Caicos were tiny, arid, sunbaked, and mostly useless outposts of the British Crown, still virgin turf for sportsmen, drug-runners, and real estate pioneers.
Now I was looking out the window of Captain Newman's truck at the resorts and casinos crowding Grace Bay, remembering when there was nothing on its austere sweep of beach, when Providenciales did not have a jetport or a store, only an islander-run rice-and-peas shop at its dusty main crossroads and a warehouse stocked with booze, frozen steaks, and a thin collection of building supplies. Nobody was around on the bay then except my wife and me and Tay and Linda. We'd swim from shore to a nearby reef and spear lobsters, perform ballet with eagle rays and sea turtles, and slowly retreat from the tiger shark, big as a sports car, that regularly prowled the formation. At the end of the day, we'd walk carefully back through the thorny island scrub to where Tay and Linda had anchored themselves and were attempting an unlikely enterprise for professional seafarers: Provo's first nursery and landscaping business.
"I know that place," I said to Newman, pointing to the new parking lot and retail office of Sunshine Nursery. I told him there had been a time on Provo when everybody — whites and blacks, and the West Indians especially — knew and loved the couple who started that nursery. But the captain had never heard of my friends the Maltsbergers and made only the smallest grunt of acknowledgment. My memories were beside the point to young Newman, who had migrated from his home on North Caicos to Providenciales to take advantage of the recent economic boom. I was simply the latest job, an American who wanted to be dropped for ten days on some ideal island, the only criterion being that the place have no people, no nothing, except flora under which I could escape the sun.
Within an hour we were aboard the captain's twenty-four-foot cat-hulled reef cruiser, flying toward East Bay Cay, a skinny sidecar that hugs North Caicos's windward side, separated from the mother island by a half-mile-wide channel. I had provisioned myself modestly with rice, beans, fresh vegetables, onions and limes for conch salad, beer, a bottle of rum. Otherwise I planned to fish and dive for my food, which is what one does, happily, on a deserted island in these latitudes.
Captain Newman jutted out his chin to direct my attention to a narrow cut, which I could not yet demarcate, behind a glistening bar mouth between the big island and the cay. "This is the road in," he announced, pointing to a slight taint of turquoise indicating deeper water — perhaps six inches deeper.
We came aground about a hundred feet off a rocky point, the terminus of the shaded white-sand beach I had been watching unwind for twenty minutes. We waded the gear ashore through transparent water, the two of us together hauling the heavy coolers and my main duffel bag, and finally it was done. I saluted the captain goodbye and then turned my back on him and (I hoped) every other human being on the planet for the next ten days.
As his boat receded into the distance, I pulled a celebratory beer from my cooler and sat down to engage myself in what could have been a most illumining conversation about the liberties we finesse for ourselves, but my mind went stone-blank with euphoria and I could only stare at the opulence of color — the blue of jewels, eyes, ice, glass — and the glowing white towers of late-summer cumulus clouds queuing across the wind-tossed horizon.
I was alone, as sooner or later we are all meant to be.
Texas, three days earlier. More than a few years had passed since I'd last bunked with Captain Tay, and this was by far the largest space we had shared: an expansive bed in a dim apartment annexed to the house in San Antonio that had once been his father's and was now his son's.
The captain's one-room apartment had the ambience of an exhibit in some provincial museum — the Explorer's Room — its walls hung with crossed spears, shark jaws, barnacled fragments of sunken ships, intricately carved wooden paddles, yellowed newspaper clippings, and glossy photographs of adventure.
I opened my eyes to stare at the ceiling, the morning sunlight a radiant border around the two makeshift curtains pinned over the windows, and finally called the old captain's name. No answer, and when I nudged him, no response. Captain Tay was a self-proclaimed dying man, an arthritic and half-blind silverback awaiting winter in his bone-strewn lair, and I thought, Well, that's it for him. Apparently he had slipped away in the night, fulfilling his chosen destiny by dying in the same bed his wife, Linda, had died in thirteen years earlier.
The night before, the captain had shown me a sketch on a legal pad: the outlines of a human body, front and back, with twenty-eight red X's drawing the viewer's attention to a catalog of the physical indignities Tay had suffered over the years: stitches, concussions, animal bites, punctures, cracked ribs, broken bones, and a shrapnel wound he had sustained from a mortar round in the jungles of Colombia while tagging along with his blood brother, a commander in the National Police, on a 1973 raid against guerrillas. Not indicated on the drawing were the recent, less visible assaults: a bad heart, diabetes, clogged lungs, an exhausted spirit. He had also handed me — one of his designated undertakers — his self-composed obituary, the last line of which read, "He will be buried at sea in the Turks and Caicos," and his desire was that the burial take place over the South Wind, the ship his wife's ashes had been scattered over in 1987. As I was leaving for the archipelago after my stopover in San Antonio, I thought it was damned decent of the captain to die with my convenience in mind.
But when I came out of the bathroom a few minutes later, Lazarus was sitting up, pawing the nightstand for his glasses and cigarettes. He was already dressed, because he'd slept with his clothes on. As far as I know he had always done so, ready to leap up at a moment's notice into the godawful fray.
"I thought you were dead."
"Any day now," said the captain with a spark in his hazel eyes, lying back down to smoke, his shoulders and head propped up with stale pillows. He'd been lying there for six or seven years, a veteran recluse, the lone survivor of all that he had loved, shipwrecked here on this rumpled king-size mattress.
I offered him a respite from the soul-heavy inertia of his retirement, as I'd done annually since he had hunkered down. "Come with me, Tay. Ten days on an uninhabited island. The sort of thing you and Linda used to love. What the hell are you doing lounging around here, waiting to croak?"
This was a bit more irreverence than the captain was accustomed to, and I could hear the growl forming in his throat. "I'm seventy-one years old, I'm an alcoholic, my legs are going out, I've buried all my lovers, and I've done everything a man can do down there where you're going," he barked. "Get it through your head: I want to die."
I tried to imagine him as he had been four decades earlier: a thirty-one-year-old man carrying a briefcase and umbrella, dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, stepping aboard the commuter train in Westport, Connecticut, riding to Manhattan in the glummest of moods, believing he had traded his "real" life for a half-hearted commitment to virtues that read like a checklist of the American Dream — social status, upward mobility, material comfort — but were somehow entering his system tilted, knocking him off balance. He had married Barbara Rolf, a lithe, sensual blonde from the Ford Modeling Agency, a woman whose face was radiating from the covers of Life and Paris Match and who had borne him a son named Mark. Tay was natty, lean, dashingly handsome, husband of one of the world's original supermodels, and the father of a towheaded three-year-old boy — all this, and yet he was still a despondent man riding a commuter train from Westport into the city. It wasn't another company job he was hunting for, but a resurrection, some kind of a life in which he could breathe freely again.
He had had that freedom, had pursued it with Hemingway-esque flair — Golden Gloves boxer, three years with the 11th Airborne Division during the Korean War, the big man on campus at the University of the Americas in Mexico City, twice elected student-body president. In Mexico City, he had operated his own gymnasium, teaching boxing, judo, bodybuilding. Exciting opportunities had knocked relentlessly at his door. While doing graduate work in industrial psychology, he had led a group of scientists into unexplored regions of British Guiana, Venezuela, and Brazil. There was something wild in his blood that wasn't going to be tamed, no matter how much he muffled it beneath button-down oxfords and dry martinis. Being Texan was likely part of it, he figured. His family had come to Texas just before the Alamo fell, and his great-grandfather had been a civilian scout for the Mormons on their trek to Utah. On both sides, his family lines were heavily saturated with footloose visionaries and hell-raisers and uncontainable spirits.
Stepping off that train in Manhattan, he crossed the platform and caught the next train back to Connecticut. Off came the suit, the briefcase landed in the trash, and he hired on as first mate on a sailboat out of Westport that carried tourists around Long Island Sound. And then he was gone.
"All right, come die in the islands," I told him. "Save me the sorrow of carry-ing you back there in an urn."
"I'm not moving," the captain snapped, but then he shifted himself upright and his voice became sonorous with care. "You have a good knife?" he asked. "Something that will hold an edge?" He eased up off the bed to rummage around in his moldy piles of gear. "Here, take this knife. I want you to have it."
Ever since I had met Tay and Linda in Colombia in the early seventies — I was fresh out of college, a twenty-two-year-old tadpole who had decided to see the world — the Maltsbergers had seemed intent on teaching me how to take care of myself. I took the knife, just as three months earlier I'd reluctantly taken the pistol he'd been trying to give me for years.
"Any advice, Captain?"
"Keep your matches dry."
Then I held him — this man who had taught me the vocabulary of freedom, schooled me in how it could be seized and harvested and lost, who had made his world so big and then made it as small as you can have it outside a coffin — and said goodbye to him. For all that, I could see that his inner world had never really changed, and that for those of high spirit, a life wish can at times bear a terrifying resemblance to a death wish, and a certain degree of metaphysical disorientation is bound to seep into the program. It was only that the seep had become a flood. You could walk on its banks all day long, throwing lines into the current, but the captain was indifferent to rescue, not dissatisfied with being swept along toward a promise he had made to Linda decades ago:
I will not leave you alone in the sea.
It was January 1971. Meteorologists call the type of storm that slammed into Tay and Linda in the Bay of Biscay, off the northern coast of Spain, an extra-tropical Atlantic cyclone — an out-of-season, out-of-place hurricane. Trapped in the storm's cataclysmic center, the ten people aboard their boat, the Sea Raven, watched in awe and horror for seventy-two hours as the fury doubled and then tripled in intensity. Their efforts to reach port were cruelly defeated by straight-on winds, with the tops of the massive waves humping green over the bow. Force 6 became Force 8 became Force 10. The mainsail blew out, and the captain, unable to steer, ordered the crew to chop the mizzen sail off its mast to bring the ship under control. The pummeling wind and pounding swells vibrated the caulking out of the boards beneath the engine housing, and the ship lost power.
They issued a Mayday, but the answer from the Spanish navy only increased their sense of helplessness and doom. They were going to have to wait in line; ships were in desperate straits throughout the bay, and resources were fully deployed and floundering. Not far from the Sea Raven's position, a tanker's castle toppled into the water, taking sixteen men with it. Thirty people were rescued off an American freighter that was going down nearby. A boat put out from the port of La Coruña to respond to the Raven's Mayday but had to turn back, heavily damaged. Linda watched the water rise up the hatchway steps as the Raven sank lower and lower into the colossal waves.
One summer night eight years before, she'd pulled up in front of Slug's Saloon, an infamous bar and jazz club in Greenwich Village, in a green Porsche coupe. Linda Johnson, a bony doctoral candidate in experimental psychology at N.Y.U., was working in the lab at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She also was a girl who'd been stuck too long in the convent of her education, and she was beelining from Mary Washington College to Manhattan, the center of the universe, partying like nobody's business and collecting so many speeding tickets in the city that she'd have to sell her beautiful car. She took a seat at the bar at Slug's, where Tay, back after a year in the islands, was running the food concession.
Glamour-wise, Linda was the antithesis of Barbara Rolf. She was a big-toothed, stringy-haired blonde who talked with a corn-pone drawl and a skeptically raised eyebrow. The daughter of a Vir-ginia state senator, she looked like an egghead, her blue eyes blinking behind thick kitty-cat glasses she was always terrified of losing. What Tay saw when he came out of the kitchen that night was . . . brains, an irresistible, exotic quality, given the women he'd been dating. They talked just long enough to recognize themselves in each other: two dreamers in a barely subdued fever of restlessness, possessed with a great need to be on the move away from an ordinary life. She showed up the next night at a party at his loft, and they started seeing each other. She had finally connected with the man who would open the door to the controlling passion of her life: the ocean. When her mother suddenly died in 1965 and left her $20,000 and a Volkswagen, she and Tay hit the road.
"I have left New York — it's true," Linda crowed to a childhood friend four months later in a letter sent from Isla Mujeres, off the coast of the Yucatán. "With only two chapters left to write on my dissertation, eye to eye with a goal that has teased me through sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years of training, I pulled the reins on my job, my Ph.D., my career, all for a little taste of fantasy. After cooping up my spirit for so long in stiff-paged textbooks and overcrowded seminars, when it finally broke free it shook my whole foundation, like waking up with a dream intact, or falling through a keyhole you never thought existed. . . ." She promised her friends and family that she'd be back in several months, but that would never happen. Her jaunt, her waking dream, her infatuation with the questing beast, would last for almost twenty years.
And what exactly was that trip? A very old story, a myth, the type of tale humans have been telling one another for thousands of years: two enchanted lovers, a magical boat called the Bon Voyage, harrowing misadventures, a pot of gold — in this case sunken galleons in Cartagena Bay, off the coast of Colombia. They'd been together for five years when in the autumn of 1968 Tay got word that his ex-wife, Barbara, was dying of leukemia; back in the States, ten-year-old Mark needed him. By this time, Linda had fallen in love with Tay to the extent that she could no longer imagine a life without him, and their next few months were a whirlwind of sorrow and happiness: They were married in November, Barbara was dead by January, and before the winter was out, Tay and Linda and Mark were living together in Dallas, where a network of friends had helped Tay secure a job as foreman of a highway construction crew. But as soon as the three of them reached a level of comfort as a family, the shared lust for adventure churned back into focus. Their recurring dream: to get a bigger, better sailboat and return to Colombia. Linda took classes with the Coast Guard and earned her license as a full navigator, Tay began to cultivate investors, and together they constructed a castle in the air called Sea Raven Enterprises, printed stationery and business cards (Charter Service — Seafaris — Underwater Photography — Salvage — Cruising — Movies — Treasure), and sold shares of stock.
Linda had found the Sea Raven in Denmark, frozen solid into a fjord: a 99-ton, 110-foot, gaff-rigged-topsail ketch, a classic Baltic trader built in 1920, as beautiful as any ship ever put to sail. She purchased it for $13,000, and soon Tay and Mark followed her to the Danish coast. The three of them lived on the ship at first, out on the ice; then, when the harbor began to thaw, they set up house in a nearby shipyard and hauled the boat to dry dock for a year of extensive refurbishing.
And then, having sent Mark back to his grandparents in Texas and having welcomed aboard as their captain a former Dutch naval officer named Jaap Stengs, his movie-actress girlfriend (who had never been to sea before), and a crew of six free spirits, they were finally setting sail across the Atlantic, passing first through the Bay of Biscay.
By the fourth day of the storm, the Sea Raven was drifting aimlessly in sixty-foot seas and Force 12 winds. The ship's main pumps had ceased to function, and two hundred tons of water had risen four feet above the bilge line. The nearness of death was like a dull pressure somewhere behind the freezing weight of Linda's adrenaline-wracked fatigue, and it translated into a specific dread, which she expressed to Tay: With the Raven about to go under, Linda feared they would be separated, and she couldn't bear the terrifying thought of being alone in the sea. Prodding her up the slopes of panic was the image of being tossed around — alone and drowning, with her eyeglasses slapped from her face by the waves, cruelly blinded at the one moment when clear vision, and thus a clear head, might provide her with one hope for survival. How could she swim to Tay if she couldn't even see him? He calmed her nerves as best he could by roping her to him with an umbilical cord of sheetline. Come what may, he promised, they'd be together.
They waited for the ship to sink or for help to arrive, whichever came first. At last out of the howling gloom a Spanish tanker appeared. With superhuman effort a line was made fast, and the Raven was towed into the harbor of Gijón, where according to the official record of the Spanish port authority, "after having moored the Raven and put new pumps on board, Captain Jaap Stengs burst out weeping and was not to be calmed down within fifteen minutes. Then he fell asleep."
For five months Tay and Linda remained in Gijón, overseeing the repairs to the storm-mauled ship, but back in Texas the corporation Tay had started was imploding, riddled by infighting and embezzlement. The Maltsbergers' shipyard account was suddenly cut off. To lose a ship in a hurricane was no injustice, but to lose a ship to crooks and double-crossers was an unbearable betrayal.
There's a jimi hendrix lyric that poses what perhaps is the only question worth asking: Are you prepared to be free? Not free from responsibility, necessarily, but free from external oppression and internal fear. In everyone's life, it seems, there is a season in which this question is addressed or withdrawn, one's habits changed or calcified, one's dreams realized or rejected.
When I was coming of age in the 1960s, in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., my mother took to calling me, disapprovingly, a wandering Jew, implying that I was infected by some disease of waywardness that had the potential to undermine my future and land me in serious trouble. When I graduated from college in the spring of 1973, the gate finally opened on the mystique of other places, other cultures, other-ness itself, and four months later, instead of securing an entry-level position in my expected career as a journalist, I boarded a flight from Miami to South America. My mother's suspicion was confirmed: At age twenty-two, I was declaring myself a type of hobo, falling from middle-class life into a pit of daily uncertainty.
Flying toward the San Andrés archipelago in the southwestern Caribbean, the cheapest destination available that was technically in Latin America, I was unaware that there were other people like me, people who might think of their urge to travel as an acceptable characteristic of a bona fide lifestyle. Romantics, to be sure; fools, possibly; escapists, probably. Dreamers who pursued irregular but nonetheless intrepid dreams of dubious value to the social order, their minds flaring with extravagant narratives. That's who Tay and Linda were, the first adults I befriended who had decided to step off the well-marked path and keep going.
"I surge into the waves of time, fascinated by the billowing soul of man," Linda wrote a few days before she died, composing her own epilogue. "What imponderable excess baggage we travel with on this trip bound for old bones and flaccid skin. Why ever let it be boring?"
I was grateful for the way she lived; she was the boldest person I ever knew. A life of bravery begins almost by default when you first find yourself oppressed by a low and unforgiving threshold for being bored. The only deliverance for the neurotic, the explorer, and the traveler alike is to throw himself off a cliff into the boiling waters of crisis. And then, to the best of his ability, to have fun.
"You know what's funny about our adventures all those years?" Tay mused as we lay back down together in his bed, smoking cigarettes and watching the Weather Channel play a mindless loop of Hurricane Debby footage. "We never had any money."
A friend, hearing in the Maltsbergers' sad tale a raw need to move beyond the agony of the Sea Raven, mentioned he knew an old gringo in Colombia who had a gold mine high up in the Andes and was looking for help. Never especially pragmatic until they were already immersed in challenge or folly, Tay and Linda went off to live in a bone-chilling tamped-earth hut at 11,500 feet, above the jungles of Bucaramanga. Tay and the old man struggled to refine a process for filtering gold out of the large heaps of tailings left centuries earlier by the Spanish conquistadors. They collected seven or eight ounces a week, but it wasn't enough.
After a year and a half the Maltsbergers packed their sea chests and descended the mountains all the way to the coast and beyond, to the San Andrés archipelago, where they had previously chartered out the Bon Voyage. This time, they homesteaded on remote Isla de Providencia, its barrier reefs dotted with the seduction of shipwrecks and the promise of treasure. On the edge of Providencia's central town they rented a two-story clapboard building called Lookout House and opened a four-table restaurant, the only thing they knew to do to make a living while they engaged in their treasure hunt. Mark, by then fourteen years old, joined them; he was being home-schooled by Linda and living like a kid in the Swiss Family Robinson, every day a boyhood novel of adventures.
The first time I met them I was a customer in their restaurant, having sat next to one of their partners in fantasy, Howard Kahn, a diving instructor from Chicago, on the flight from Miami to San Andrés. After a fabulous dinner of baked red snapper, Linda offered us drinks on the house and sat down with us, her only customers. I had planned to stay on Providencia for a week, but before the month was out Howard and I had rented a house together down the beach. Soon I was strapping scuba tanks on my back to claw through the ballast stones of the wrecks that Kahn and the Maltsbergers were working, inconceivably, by hand, the salvage operation ill-equipped for recovering anything more note-worthy than a few copper nails and coral-encrusted potsherds lying half exposed on the bottom. At dinner each evening, Tay and Linda would open their mouths and it was like popping the cork on a magnum of rich stories. A year passed before I tore myself away.
Lookout House was sold out from under them, and they moved to Bottom House, the poorest village on the island, sent Mark back to family and to public school in Texas, and lived on the beach in a hut they nailed together out of hatch covers from a shipwrecked freighter. One day a pre-cartel entrepreneur plying the trade routes between Colombia and Florida sailed his sloop into the island, and the Maltsbergers sailed away with him to the Bahamas, passing through the Turks and Caicos, which looked to Tay and Linda like their kind of archipelago.
On Grand Turk, they opened a restaurant, only to have the newly elected government fire the sole airline that brought tourists to the island. They took to the sea again, with Tay as captain and Linda as first mate of the Blue Cloud, a five-hundred-ton freighter that sailed from South Florida to ports throughout the northern Caribbean. But after a year of offering themselves up to every petty bureaucrat in every customs house on the trade routes — imagine bringing a shipload of anything into the wharves of Port-au-Prince and you get the picture — they bought a few acres of scrubland on Providenciales and jumped ship, their long love affair with life on the sea having ripened and burst. I think they meant to start another restaurant on Provo, not a nursery, but they inherited a truckload of pots and potting soil from a bankrupt hotel and that was that. In their fifties, the Maltsbergers finally retired their quest for gold, more emblematic than real anyway, and returned to the fold of property-owning, tax-paying citizens.
My wife and I visited Tay and Linda in Provo whenever we found the time and money, and the last time the four of us drove the road between town and Sunshine Nursery, we stumbled out of the bar at Turtle Cove into the star-smeared island midnight. As we walked toward the nursery's mufflerless old Chevy pickup, Linda tripped on a rock — the roads were unpaved then — and in falling to her hands and knees she lost her glasses, which we promptly found and placed back on her face. The four of us squeezed into the timeworn cab of the truck, Linda behind the wheel. "My God," she exclaimed a few hundred yards down the road, "Bob, you're going to have to drive." She slammed on the brakes. "Tay," she said fiercely in her molasses twang, "I've drunk myself blind. I can't see a fucking thing."
In the morning we solved the mystery of Linda's sudden blindness: When she tripped coming out of the bar, the lenses had popped out of their frames, and they were still there in the dirt when Tay drove back to look for them. But on the road that night, her worst fear had finally materialized: She had lost her precious sight, the ability to see the world. She and I had climbed out of the truck to trade places in total blackness, not a light to be seen anywhere but from a canopy of diamond-bright stars above, with one big one blazing down as we passed each other around the front of the Chevy.
"God damn," she said. "I may be blind, but I saw that. Beautiful."
Seven years earlier, after a radical mastectomy, the doctors had given Linda six months to live, and she had lit into them, calling them frauds and swearing she would prove them and their voodoo wrong. She and Tay had been captaining the Blue Cloud then, and Linda had started visiting an experimental cancer-treatment center in Freeport and injecting herself daily with a controversial immunological serum she carried everywhere in a dry-ice-filled Thermos. Her cancer had been in remission ever since, but she could sense it was coming back, and it wasn't very long after that night together on the road that they would sell the nursery, which was prospering as the island developed, and Tay would take Linda to the States to die. He brought her ashes back to spread them over the wreck of the South Wind, which had proved so unseaworthy that it had been sunk by its owner, a Provo entrepreneur, off the reefs of the island, to be enjoyed forever after by scuba divers.
After the star fell and we started down the road again, Linda, staring blankly into the darkness, surprised us by asking whether we believed in life after death. If there was life after death, Linda wisecracked, Tay had better watch out: Her ghost would come a-chaperoning his liaisons with other women.
But there would never be other women, because grief, too, is blindness, sight fading inward toward memory, and the captain was too heartsick ever to care to begin again.
"Last chance, Tay. You coming with me?"
No, he wasn't, not today.
On East Bay Cay I savored the exquisite waste of time, time that other people were using to prosper in the world, time forged by others into progress and still others into dreams. I dove for lobster and conch, speared snapper, fly-fished for barracuda just for the violence of the hookup. Down in the sand I walked for miles, beachcombing in a daze. I scribbled dry observations in my journal as if it were a ship's log, and I slept soundly every night, lulled by the constant noise of nature: the far-off thunder of waves on the reef, the constant hiss and flutter of wind, the lap of shorebreak. For ten days I did precisely what I wanted: I read. Great books have made me unemployable; I can't pick one up without completely shutting down my life. In this respect Linda's influence continues to inform my days, for it was she who introduced me to Gabriel García Márquez, she who gave me my first copies of Peter Matthiessen's Far Tortuga, Joshua Slocum's Sailing Alone on the World, Graham Greene's The Comedians.
I knew what I was doing here on this far-off island — I knew how to take care of myself, how to enjoy myself — but I couldn't quite explain to myself why I had come, what I was looking for. Perhaps it was only a rehearsal for my final voyage with the captain. Or maybe it was an act akin to a transmission overhaul, lubricating the machinery damaged by life's inevitable grinding down of the romantic dream.
I thought of Captain Tay, back there on the king-sized island of his isolation, about his influence on how I'd lived my life, and about how I might measure the difference between us. Technically, at least, we were two of the most cut-loose people on earth: Americans, white males, sometimes penniless but possessed of the skills and tenacity that would always stick enough money in our pockets to get by, with a powerful and abiding sense of self-reliance and self-sufficiency. We were doing what suited us and what often made us happy. But Tay's obstinate disconnection from a world he had formerly possessed with such ferocious energy had unsettled me. Perhaps I saw myself doing just that: disconnecting. What is it that finally conquers your appetite for the world? Fear? Exhaustion? The formerly wild places now sardined with stockbrokers on tour? Paralyzing nostalgia for the way it was? Age and health? Self-pity?
The epiphany of my relationship with Tay and Linda Maltsberger, the revelation that had become as clear and guiding as the North Star, still struck me as the larger truth: Whatever your resources, the world was yours to the exact degree to which you summoned the fortitude and faith to step away from convention and orthodoxy and invent your own life. Tay and Linda knew better than most that there's never a good reason to make your world small.
An image presents itself from aboard the South Wind, an abominable vessel with a history as a drug-runner, eventually rehabilitated to run fuel between Provo and the Dominican Republic. In 1980, her owner coaxed the Maltsbergers into bringing the freighter down from a Florida boatyard. They hired me on as ship's carpenter to enclose the toilet on the stern of the boat — Linda never did get much privacy in her life with Tay — and to help them deliver the South Wind to Provo.
On the fourth day out we entered an armada of vicious squalls in the channel off the Exuma Cays. At midnight I took the helm from Tay, and for the next three wretched hours I fought alone in the darkness to keep the ship on course, waves breaking over the bow and foaming down the deck, lightning strikes erupting on all sides, white rain pelting horizontally into the windshield. Toward the end of my watch Linda awoke, stepped over to the radar screen, and proclaimed that she didn't know where we were, but from the looks of it I had steered too far west and we were about to crash into unseen rocks. Terrified, I changed course twenty degrees, and Linda, storm sibyl, as always so transcendently composed, walked out into the tempest. Sometimes I had to shake my head clear to see her properly. Her physical self, her sense of style — the clothes, the cut of her lank hair, the clunky eyeglasses — seemed so retrograde, so bolted down to the Camelot sixties, as if she still was and always would be some bookish chick from N.Y.U. who couldn't quite finish her dissertation on the urban insane.
After the ship's mechanic crawled up out of the engine room to relieve me at the wheel, I went looking for Linda and found her back at the stern. The worst of the storm had passed, and she stood in the cone of illumination under the pole that held our running light, her body swarmed by hundreds of shrieking birds that had sought refuge with us, swirling like snowflakes past the fingertips of her outstretched arms, landing on her shoulders, her head. It seemed for a moment they might carry her away. There was a look of extreme delight on her rain-streaked face, and she turned toward me and nodded as if to say, How marvelous! How miraculous! And then she retreated back inside to chart our position and bring us men safely through the night.
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text:
#pragma once

#include <string>
#include <vector>
#include <stdexcept>
#include "../exceptionhelper.h"
#include "../Matrix.h"
#include "../LESolver.h"
#include "../Interface/IElement.h"

namespace LpSolveCpp { namespace Elements { class Point; } }
namespace LpSolveCpp { namespace Elements { class Vector; } }
namespace LpSolveCpp { namespace Elements { class Plane; } }

using namespace LpSolveCpp::Interface;
using namespace MathExt;

namespace LpSolveCpp
{
	namespace Elements
	{
		class Line : public IElement<Line>
		{
		private:
			LpSolveCpp::Elements::Point *_point;
			LpSolveCpp::Elements::Vector *_vector;

		public:
			virtual ~Line()
			{
				delete _point;
				delete _vector;
			}

			LpSolveCpp::Elements::Point *getPoint() const;
			LpSolveCpp::Elements::Vector *getVector() const;

			double getC() const;

			Line(LpSolveCpp::Elements::Point *point, LpSolveCpp::Elements::Vector *vector);

			Line *MoveDown(Plane *plane);

			int GetDimension();

			LpSolveCpp::Elements::Point *IntersectPlane(Plane *plane);
		};
	}
}