Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

My dislike of taxis

I need to be deep in Gatineau relatively early tomorrow morning for a training session. Given that I do not want to walk ten kilometres through unfamiliar terrain and the first bus that goes to this place arrives after the session begins, it seems I have no choice but to take a cab – something I generally only do in situations where it is essentially unavoidable.

I dislike almost everything about taxis: the fact that they are cars, the ‘back of a police car’ feeling of riding in one, the fact they that so sharply privilege convenience over efficiency or cost, and the barbershop awkwardness of having to share a vehicle with a stranger from whom you are buying a necessary service that makes you anxious and unhappy.

At least I will be able to take the bus home in the evening.

Materialism

The terms ‘materialism’ and ‘materialist’ seem to be popularly misunderstood. As such, it bears mentioning that there are two wildly different interpretations of what these terms mean.

Perhaps the more common interpretation is based around a desire for material possessions. In this view, a ‘materialist’ is someone who continually wants to own more things.

A much more interesting definition holds that being a ‘materialist’ means that you believe everything in the universe is made of comprehensible materials, interacting with each other on the basis of laws we can understand. This viewpoint definitely raises important questions in philosophy – and potentially lethal ones in theology – it is also much more worthy of consideration than the fact that neighbour X might want a bigger car than neighbour Y.

Clearing Indonesian rainforests for biofuel

I have already mentioned how important rainforests are to climatic stability. Likewise, the acute danger that biofuel production will lead to increased deforestation, either directly – through the madness that is palm oil biofuel – or indirectly – by increasing the price of crops like corn, the value of agricultural land, and the profits to be made from cutting down rainforest and growing cheaper things like soy there instead.

This video – found via Grist – does a good job of attaching some visuals to the argument. Unhappily enough, this crazy conversion of rainforest into palm oil biofuels is taking place in the very state where the UNFCCC is meeting right now, in order to try to tackle the problem of climate change.

Strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force, gravity, and…

In the mail today, I got some neodymium magnets from my brother Sasha as a birthday gift. They are good fun – largely because of how fundamentally counterintuitive magnetism is. Is just seems odd that things are repelled and drawn together by an invisible force that manifests itself at short distances. The danger to nearby magnetic stripe cards and hard drives is trivial when compared to their enjoyment potential.

The only downside of nickel-plated rare earth magnets is their tendency to snap together violently if you aren’t quite careful. Given how brittle they are, this can send tiny shards flying in all directions. This afternoon’s messing about only had one casualty – one of the four smallest magnets among the fifty found its way between the two largest. The larger fragments of the small magnet are now holding papers to my filing cabinet.

On the plus side, I have worked out how to build a reasonably effective magnetic canon using most of the magnets in the set and the barrel from a Bic four-colour pen. It is also trivially easy to make a compass using all fifty magnets in a line, hanging from a piece of floss.

One day, I want to get a full-sized, absurdly powerful supermagnet of the kind at the bottom of this page. At $50 to $275 apiece, they may have the lowest cost-to-danger ratio of anything you can buy online.

Newly insulated

Milan Ilnyckyj looking scary

Through a trek to the Ottawa Mountain Equipment Co-Op and the application of three days’ pay, my respectable collection of wet weather gear has had quite a few degrees of cold capability added into it.

I got some good insulated Gore-Tex gloves (they make me feel less like a mutant than mitts do); I also got a merino wool base layer, a windproof toque to supplement the more attractive one Sarah made me, a fleece neck warmer thing that makes me look like a goon when worn with the toque, a little thermometer, and a couple of miscellaneous knick-knacks, shoe de-stinking agent, and a travel towel (for future trips to nearby cities).

Naturally, the only response to getting new gear is to go experiment with it. One’s first inclination with new gear is to discover its capacities and limits. In its way, the new stuff is like the bicycle was: an enabler of motion, and a gateway to increased capability within the city as it stands.

P.S. I hate plural possessives.

Canada’s science-savvy fifteen-year-olds

Canada’s educators should be proud of the recently released results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). The test examines the performance of 15-year-olds in science and placed Canada third in the world, after Finland and Hong Kong. Following after are Estonia, Japan, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, and South Korea. Britain is 14th, France 25th, and the United States is 29th.

This is especially welcome news given the ever-increasing importance of basic scientific understanding in contemporary society. In everything from making decisions about one’s own health to voting, having an understanding of at least physics, chemistry, and biology is increasingly necessary. Hopefully, the results of this assessment demonstrate that young Canadians are being well prepared.

More information is available through their website.

Bali talks beginning

Starting tomorrow morning, there will be twelve days of talks in Bali, Indonesia intended to begin the process of drafting a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, when the period it covers ends in 2012. This particular meeting is mostly about choosing the structure for the real negotiations. Three possibilities are likely:

  1. The parties agree to extend the Kyoto Protocol, keeping in place many of its institutional structures
  2. The parties decide to create a whole new instrument
  3. The talks collapse in acrimony, with no agreement

Which of these takes place will largely depend on the stances adopted by the great powers and major emitters, especially the United States, Russia, China, Japan, Brazil, and the European Union.

Some questions of succession hang over the proceedings. The new Rudd government in Australia has only been in power for a week, and may not have a well developed negotiating position. More importantly, everyone knows the Bush administration will soon be out of power. Leading Congressional Democrats are attending the summit themselves. It remains to be seen what effect that will have.

Major climate change issues

After many years of writing on whatever came to mind, I am now trying to be more systematic in some areas. In particular, I am trying to come up with a comprehensive collection of blog posts covering all important aspects of climate change. This serves a number of purposes: it helps me to synthesize information, it should be informative to others, and it should foster discussion that helps increase the sophistication of positions and arguments. The posts are organized here:

Climate change posts

The index page isn’t the most gorgeous looking thing on the web, but it is resilient and can be updated easily. Do people see this as a useful undertaking? What would make it more helpful or worthwhile? This initiative was mentioned before, but received little attention.

Here is the code for the link above:

<a href="http://www.sindark.com/wiki/index.php?title=Major_climate_change_issues"><img src="http://www.sindark.com/photo/CCmedium.png" alt="Climate change posts" /></a>

Feel free to link it on other sites, if desired.

Ottawa is a frozen wasteland

As much as I enjoyed Ashley’s party tonight, the walk home afterwards has left me convinced that humans should not live in this place. After about forty minutes out there, well insulated, my whole body is in pain. My breath is frozen to my face in painful sheets of ice, and I have had an agonizing cold-induced headache since getting halfway home.

I want to live somewhere saner.