climate change activist and science communicator; photographer; mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph
In an act of chutzpah, Wikipedia has selected an amusing ‘article of the day.’ The subject: the Encyclopædia Britannica.
In the interest of balance, here is Wikipedia’s entry in Britannica. Unfortunately, you can only read 75 of the 737 words for free.
Today is my father’s fiftieth birthday. Unfortunately, the circumstances of employment have placed us 5,000 kilometres apart, with my mother closer to me than to him at the moment. Hopefully, he and my brothers will be able to get up to something exciting in Vancouver.
All the friends of mine who know my father know what a unique and energetic individual he is. Whenever I am in Vancouver, he tries to recruit me for 6:00am hikes every other day. Hopefully, the near future will include a few of them, some wilderness canoeing, or another expedition like the one we made to Turkey.
In any case: mnohiya lita, joyeux anniversaire, and many happy returns.
The other day, my enthusiasm for black bean sauce produced a stir fry so salty and flavourful as to be difficult (and certainly not enjoyable) to eat. Thankfully, I devised a solution – mixing it at about one part to ten with unflavoured cous cous. As a consequence, it became three tasty meals rather than one failed one.
One way or another, the Toyota Prius. is a symbolic vehicle. For some, it symbolizes how saving the planet can be relatively painless, enjoyable, and hip. You still get the same basic thing (the ability to zip around in a car) but without the guilt and with the important ability to lord it over the less environmentally responsible. Alternatively, the Prius is a symbol for the superficiality of the environmental commitments most people are willing to make. Seen in this way, it reveals how environmentalism is mere tokenism in many cases.
There are two arguments here which frequently become confounded. One is a first-order question about the ultimate sustainability of different energy systems. Is it sustainable to run internal combustion cars using cellulistic ethanol? What about plug-in hybrids charged using big nuclear fission plants? The answers to these questions are ultimately knowable to a high degree of specificity. For any given level of technology, answering them is simply a matter of applying chemistry and physics. The uncertainty therefore lies in estimations about what will be technologically possible at X or Y time.
The second-level argument is much more heuristic and intractable. There is the fundamentally liberal belief that environmental problems can be tackled fairly painlessly through a bit of cleverness and some new hardware. This is a view that takes the Prius as a positive symbol. At the other extreme is the conviction that only massive sacrifice can generate sustainability. The vision in Fight Club of people in rags pounding strips of leather on an abandoned superhighway captures this, and adherents would surely dismiss the Prius as a pathetic fig-leaf.
The latter argument seems to generate a lot more heated discussion, largely because the real meat of analysis on the former question lies in territory where most people cannot hold their own (who reading this could really calculate the efficiency of an energy grid based on photovoltaics, or of an industrial process for ethanol production from cellulose?). The latter debate requires only a will to participate, though it may not do much to leave us with an understanding of which view of the Prius is justified.
By climbing the slippery canyon walls, you could get a good view of the middle section of the cascade.
I had to spent a very long and uncomfortable day traveling to see them, so readers should be willing to tolerate a large number of pictures of the falls.
Pool at the base of the falls
It took an hour of waiting in the sun to get five other people together for a taxi from Ouzoud to Azilal.
In the hot sun, this watermelon truck had a lot of appeal. Unfortunately, they refused to sell me anything less than an entire melon.
After more than two years of faithful service, my laptop is now having serious problems. It takes upwards of ten minutes to boot, frequently forgets important preferences (like to ask for a password before letting you log in), and has distinct trouble connecting to wireless networks. In general, performance has become spotty and unreliable. Things have reached the point where I would ordinarily suspect that a virus has been generating minor havoc, though scans have not supported that hypothesis.
I am tempted to make a full backup, format my hard drive, and start from a clean install. That said, I think the inevitable physical breakdown of hardware is reasonably likely to be the cause of my woe. The constant ambient heat here – enough to keep the fan running constantly, which almost never started in Oxford – will certainly contribute to breakdown. The machine is still subject to the AppleCare plan I purchased, so perhaps it is worthwhile to send it on a potentially refreshing trip to the Apple store before such a lobotomy is carried out.
Once the IKEA bills have been paid off and some sort of a bike has been acquired, it may be time to start thinking about a new Mac.
One truly great thing about where I live: Pho Bo Ga (A-12 Lebreton Street). Two blocks from my front door is a Pho restaurant that is open until 4:00am. That means tasty, spicy Vietnamese soup at crazy times of night. You can get a huge bowl of tofu Pho for $6.25 and ridiculously huge bowls for a dollar or two more.
Of course, this would be more in keeping with my lifestyle if I were still a student – feeling good about myself if I was up before 10:00am. Even given my new salarydom, it is a valuable bit of local knowledge.
During the next three weeks, in the lead-up to a friend’s visit, I am undertaking a survey of touristic sites in Ottawa. It should involve the major museums – war, civilization, the National Gallery, the small Museum of Contemporary Photography – as well as Parliament and possibly the Supreme Court. This pre-screening is meant both to familiarize me with the city a bit and to help identify places of interest to show to others.
What else might be appropriate for a three-day-visitor? Culinary suggestions are also welcome. For the benefit of anybody else who is new to the city, it may be worthwhile to know that a collection of MetaFilter members are meeting up on August 9th.
Everything that passed through the mail from England to Canada seems to have suffered a bit in the crossing, if only by taking on an odd smell. Nothing, however, was anywhere near so badly damaged as my world map. Despite being properly packed in a rigid plastic tube, it has been bent, crushed, and mangled. That is a particular shame given that it was an especially good map, and a birthday gift to boot.
Right now, the remains (held aloft by a system of cords I rigged up) are serving as a temporary window covering for the pane facing the street. I should have given it to someone in England, or left it on the wall of my room in Church Walk for the next inhabitant to appreciate.
PS. These 34 degree Celsius days (and twenty degree nights) are a challenge unto themselves. I am looking forward to the autumn.
Unfortunately, I am still sans internet. It seems the only way to get DSL is to pledge an entire working day, then wait to discover what time the installation team cares to show up. They don’t do evenings or weekends, naturally, and they certainly cannot commit to a time more specific than ‘probably am’ or ‘probably pm.’
To anyone who has sent messages to my personal email accounts, I apologize. I simply cannot check them until I get access at home or lug my laptop to a coffee shop downtown. The latter, I may undertake tonight.
[Update: 31 July 12:05pm] At least my July 21st issue of The Economist has finally managed to wander to the right place. I am not entirely isolated from the goings on in the world outside the TLC complex.
[Update: 1 August 2007] By midnight on August 3rd, I will have a DSL connection through TekSavvy – one of the local ISPs that seems to be well liked by people on web forums. Thankfully, someone who lived in my flat previously had DSL set up; as such, I don’t need to spend an entire day waiting for Bell to show up and make hardware adjustments.