climate, photos, miscellany
Presumably after considering the consequences of doing so, Google has become a sort of unusual executor of the digital estates of users who opt in to their ‘Inactive Account Manager’ feature. They are given the option to set how long a ‘timeout period’ must pass before the system kicks in. They are then allowed to [...]
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Bonus: a demonstration of why I can’t just hand my camera to passers-by to take a picture After 32 years as the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, climatologist James Hansen is retiring (New York Times, Nature). He now intends to devote more of his time and energy to pushing for action on [...]
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One element of developing Toronto350.org has been learning how to do complex cooperative work using a devoted group of volunteers. This afternoon, we are having a ‘bibliography party’ for our University of Toronto divestment brief. We will be taking all the sources people have collected and putting them into biblatex format. It will then be [...]
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238 items in all, this is a draft list of texts for my forthcoming comprehensive examination in Canadian politics. I can’t help noticing that it was typeset in LaTeX.
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“It was argued that rights could be safeguarded in an absolute fashion, but section 1 of the Charter reads, “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” [...]
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If you want to get approval for a huge project with many risks and serious associated problems, one strategy is to get decision-makers to split up the question into tiny pieces. Forbid the people on one team from considering the issues another team is looking at. That way, you can prevent the consideration of interactions [...]
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On Tuesday night at 7pm, I am participating in a panel discussion organized by University of Toronto Environmental Action and featuring MPP Peter Tabuns, environmental activist Angela Bischoff, and School of the Environment and Munk Centre Professor Erich Vogt. Among other topics, we are meant to discuss: “How can young people get their voices heard [...]
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“The political philosopher par excellence of the organic constitution was the Anglo-Irish theorist and statesman Edmund Burke, who wrote a century after Locke. Burke did not share the Age of Enlightenment’s optimism about the capacity for each rational individual to discern fundamental political truths. ‘The individual is foolish, but the species is wise.’ Instead of [...]
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Canadian charities – especially environmental charities – now feel threatened that they will lose their special tax status if they engage in ‘political’ activity. The Canada Revenue Agency website describes the rules: Registered charities are prohibited from partisan political activity, because supporting or opposing a political party or candidate for public office is not a [...]
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In Joseph Anton, Salman Rushdie describes the debate in the U.K. about whether to censor a film called International Gorillay which depicts a group of terrorists seeking to kill a character named Salman Rushdie. Rushdie the author wrote to the BBC pledging that he would not sue them for libel if they showed the film. [...]
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