Friday, May 31, 2019

Books read in May 2018

New:

1. Lethal White by Robert Galbraith
2. The Pemmican Eaters by Marilyn Dumont
3. I'm Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya

Reread:

1. Immortal in Death

Things the LCBO Should Invent (or, rather, re-implement)

1. Indicate on your Favourite Products list whether each product is available in your preferred store.

2. Indicate on your Favourite Products list which products are on sale.

Both of these functions were available in the previous version of their website, but were eliminated in their last website update, and it really cramps my style!

I was thrilled when the Favourite Products list was introduced, because it made the way I shop so much easier!  Whenever I particularly enjoy a product, or hear about a new product that sounds interesting, I add it to my list.  Then, next time I'm going to buy a bottle, I simply scroll through my list, see at a glance what's both on sale and in stock at my local store, and buy whichever of those items best meets my current needs.

But since they changed their website, I now have to click through to each item to see if it's on sale, and to see if it's in stock.

The new website design seems more focused on trying to get you to order online, but that also cramps my style.

Online orders take multiple days to ship, and even ordering online and picking up in store takes multiple hours. In contrast, my local LCBO store is literally across the street, so I can go buy a bottle and be back home in under 10 minutes if the lines aren't too long.

Also, the LCBO website has a minimum order of $50, whereas I tend to buy only one (cheap) bottle at a time for personal use.

(Given the LCBO's mandate, perhaps they shouldn't be incentivizing buying larger quantities all at once?  I've heard that alcoholics will drink all available alcohol, so if anything the LCBO should be incentivizing buying only one bottle at a time!)

They had a fantastic feature that met my needs perfectly, and then changed it for no apparent reason!  I wish I knew how to convince them to bring it back!

Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Sentences

The following is a quote from Hyper Focus: How to be More Productive in a World of Distraction by Chris Bailey. As usual, any typos are my own.
As you read, your brain is hard at work converting the raw bits of perceptual information into facts, stories and lessons that you remember and internalize. After your eyes register the waves of light emanating from the page, your mind generates words from them. These words temporarily fill your attentional space. You then begin connecting the words to form syntactic units and clauses - the fundamental building blocks of sentences. Finally, using your attentional space as a scratch pad, your brain groups those combinations of words together into complete idea so you can extract their higher-level meaning.

Sentence structure can influence this process and slow down or speed up how quickly you read. Much as the world doesn't combine many groups of data in to sets greater than seven, every book is structured to accommodate a reader's restricted attentional space. Sentences have a limited length and are punctuated by commas, semicolons, and dashes. According ton one study, the period at the end of a sentence is the point when our attentional space "stops being loaded, and what has been present in it up to that moment, must be in some way stored in a summarized form in a short-term memory."
This is super interesting to me, because reading isn't natural! It's an entirely artificial construct that, for the vast majority of people who are literate today, has only been available to our ancestors for a few generations - not nearly long enough for our brains to evolve to accommodate it. (For example, compulsory public education was introduced recently enough in the various places where my ancestors lived that I have personally met the first people in each branch of the family to have access to it. Some were my great-grandparents and some were my grandparents. One of them is still living.)

I always thought of learning to read as simply sounding out words until you can do it automatically, but upon reading this I realize it involves so many more mental processes than I originally thought, not all of which are natural, but all of which the majority of the population can learn to do automatically with just a few years of instruction and practice!

And this also extrapolates to spoken language (although spoken language isn't nearly as recent and our brains have had more time to evolve accordingly). Our brains learn to pick up not just the meaning of words and how syntax works, but the very concept of a sentence - picking up cues that mean "This thought is done, save to memory", and, conversely, conveying those cues.

Language surely did not emerge with a fully-formed grammar, so human brains had to figure out both how to indicate "This thought is done, save to memory" and to process that concept.

I wonder if, in the very early days of human language, processing these concepts was difficult, like how reading is hard work when you're a little kid? I wonder if elders were thinking "Kids Today! Why can't they just point and grunt?"

I wonder if there are, or ever have been, any languages that don't have the concept of a sentence?

Thursday, May 23, 2019

How the Big Bang Theory writing team is like a deadbeat dad

This post contains full spoilers for The Big Bang Theory, up to and including the end of the finale.

Bringing a new baby into the universe means work. You have to care for the baby and the subsequent child and the subsequent teen and the subsequent adult, providing for their physical and emotional and material and logistical needs and launching them into an adult who can function and thrive in the society into which they were born and whatever that society evolves into.

Bringing a new baby into a fictional universe also entails a certain amount of work. You have to figure out and reflect in the story you're telling how this new baby affects their parents and the characters around them, and how they are affected by the particularities of the universe you're bringing them into.  When you're starting with pregnancy, you have to address how the pregnant parent feels about the pregnancy, how this affects their relationship if they're coupled, the implications pregnancy and childbirth and childrearing have for their life (and for the plot).


But the writers of Big Bang Theory didn't do any of this work when they decided to make Penny pregnant in the season finale.

Penny is the one character who has expressed the wish to never have children.  The show has spent some time on this, and on what it means for her marriage to Leonard (who is amenable to having children).

But when they presented her as pregnant in the series finale, they didn't show us how she got from her previously-established point of never wanting children to her new point of having no apparent objections.


As everyone who has ever either made a choice to have children or made a choice not to have children knows, this is not a decision made lightly or on a whim.

And as those of us who have changed our minds know, changing your mind requires even more soul-searching than making the original decision. I myself spent night after night working my way from "Aww, babies are cute and make my ovaries ache!" to "Given what I suffer in day-to-day life, could I really look my child in the eye and justify bringing them into the world" to "You know, what I want isn't actually a human being that I have to keep forever - I just want a small adorable creature to look at me with love in its eyes."

Changing one's mind about whether to have children is an excruciating process of working through hard truths, and that needs to be honoured.

What hard truths did Penny have to work through? What did she think and feel?  What is it like to find yourself with an unwanted pregnancy while married to someone who wants children?  Did she consider terminating the pregnancy?  Did she talk to anyone?  Did she tell Leonard? Before or after she made the decision to keep it?

There's a lot going on here, in a character that the show worked hard to make us care about from the beginning and in a relationship the show worked hard to make us care about from the beginning, and they didn't do the work of showing us any of it.

And it doesn't just stop with the decision to keep and welcome the baby - there's also the future to think about.  How does a baby affect their lives and careers and housing situation?  Penny is the primary breadwinner - how does her pregnancy affect her career?  How does that end up affecting their finances?  How does that end up affecting their relationship? How does a pregnancy affect Penny's health, both during and after the pregnancy?  How does the whole situation affect the baby?  What's it like to be a child who was originally unwanted? How does the fact that Penny originally didn't want the child affect her relationship with the child?  How does Leonard's fraught relationship with his mother affect his relationship with the child?  What happens if the kid gets Leonard's looks and Penny's brains?  And then has another sibling who gets Penny's looks and Leonard's brains?

The writers spent 12 years carefully crafting a scenario that gives rise to all these interesting questions, then abdicated responsibility for answering any of them.


If they didn't want to raise all these questions, they could have not brought up the idea that Penny doesn't want to have children - they could have simply not mentioned it at all and instead focused on the geeky science antics that we're all here for in the first place! But since they did introduce the idea that Penny doesn't want children in the first place, their duty as writers is to work through the consequences of this decision and their subsequent reversal of the decision.


And on top of all this, we live in a reality where the "but what if you change your mind" excuse is all too often used to deny people the reproductive health care that's best for them.  The Big Bang Theory is both set and produced in the US, and this episode aired at a moment when laws are being changed in the US to deny people the reproductive health care that's best for them.  And the Big Bang Theory people who are on Twitter do seem to object to this development.  And yet they made a much-watched season finale that reinforced the excuses used to deny people the reproductive health care that's best for them.


So basically, after 12 years of working on making us care and proactively reassuring us that they wanted a childfree marriage, the Big Bang Theory writers up and impregnated the one person who had expressed the desire never to have children, then ended things and ran off without doing any of the work that resulted from the pregnancy.

They never gave a moment's thought to our feelings and the expectations that they had spent 12 years building up. They never gave a moment's thought to what this means for the baby. They never gave a moment's thought to what this means for the mother. They never gave a moment's thought to what this means for the marriage. They never gave a moment's thought to the example they're setting for the many other people over whom they have influence that they've carefully cultivated over years.

Where I come from, we call that a deadbeat dad.

Sunday, May 12, 2019

What if they didn't tell the heir about the entail?

The estate is entailed upon the male line! But the current master of the estate only has daughters! When he dies, the estate will be inherited by some distant cousin nobody has ever met! And the heir would be perfectly entitled to throw the widow and daughters out of their home! What do???

This is a common trope in fiction - well-known examples include Pride and Prejudice and Downton Abbey - as well as, I'm sure, being something that happened from time to time in real life.

But I wonder, what would happen if they just...didn't tell the heir that he's the heir?

It seems like it would be reasonably easy to conceal that information in an era before computerization and mass communication - it's just sitting in a file in some office somewhere, no one can look it up on a database or anything. It probably wouldn't even be too difficult to destroy the records if needed. (Maybe the lawyer whose office they're in is bribable?)

In Downton they have the additional complication that Lord Grantham is an earl with a seat in the House of Lords so his empty seat would be conspicuous, but Mr. Collins in Pride and Prejudice has no such distinction (and doesn't even share the Bennet surname!)  If they just didn't tell people the estate was entailed, people probably wouldn't even notice if they just kept living there after Mr. Bennet died.

Even if people did know the estate was entailed, what if they just told the neighbours that the heir was kind enough to let them continue living there?  Matthew Crawley legit would have let the Crawleys continue living at Downton, and it's perfectly plausible to stranger that Mr. Collins, being a man of the cloth, would have done the same. Or they could tell their neighbours that their lawyer discovered that the heir had died, thereby breaking the entail.

Or, if the heir did know he was the heir, what if they just didn't tell him when the master of the estate died? Under normal circumstances (in the absence of the Darcy-de Bourgh connection), Mr. Collins would have no way of knowing anything that happened at Longbourn. 
It also occurs to me that an imposter absentee heir could be brought in.  Get some guy that one of the daughters is enthusiastic about marrying, tell everyone that he's the heir, and ultimately the children of the daughter who marries him will inherit the estate.  If the actual heir turns up and the imposter heir has already done the work of ingratiating himself to the neighbours, it should be fairly straightforward to accuse the actual heir of being the imposter - it's not like they have photo ID!

Was there some kind of central authority enforcing these entails and communicating to these distant heirs the fact that they were the heir?  Because if there wasn't, it seems like they would be one lawyer bribe away from it not being a problem.

Monday, May 06, 2019

What to do if you feel guilty about receiving an unneeded scholarship

 From the third letter in this Ethicist column:
When I was in eighth grade at a parochial school in the Midwest, I received a scholarship to the high school as the No. 1 student. This was a school tradition. For 70 years, I have felt guilty that the No. 2 student transferred to the public high school instead of continuing his Catholic education. My family was not wealthy, but I would have gone to the Catholic high school whether it was free or not. Should we have refused the scholarship so that someone more needy could use it?
A way to mitigate the guilt that has followed you for 70 years could be to pay it forward by donating a scholarship to your high school, perhaps for the #2 student from your elementary school, or for a high performing student with financial need. I'm sure the school would be happy to guide you in how to best target the scholarship.

If you can't afford to donate funds for a scholarship in perpetuity, I doubt they'd say no to a one-time scholarship to put one student through four years of high school.

If (like mine) your old high school has since closed, you could donate to another comparable school in your community of origin, or in your current community.

If there isn't a high school that's a suitable option, another possibility would be to donate the amount of a typical Catholic high school tuition towards the post-secondary education of a needy student (someone from the public high school your classmate attended?).

In any case, you'd be using the fruits of your education to make a comparable education available to someone else, thereby, at a minimum, balancing the scales.

Friday, May 03, 2019

How to calculate a personal cost-benefit analysis for the Ontario Library Service

Short version:


To calculate how much actual money you pay to support the Ontario Library Service, multiply line 428 of your tax return * 0.00003181673.


Full version:



Last year, I calculated a personal cost-benefit analysis of the tax dollars that I, personally, pay in support of my local public library.

In the wake of recent cuts, I was going to write up a personal cost-benefit analysis for the Ontario Library Service, but before I could do so, the Toronto Public Library announced that these cuts wouldn't affect their services.

However, there is much more to Ontario than just Toronto, and the differences in population and population density mean libraries in many other parts of Ontario have smaller collections (and therefore need more interlibrary loans) and smaller municipal tax bases (and therefore are more dependent on provincial funding.)

So, for everyone else in Ontario, here's how to calculate your own cost-benefit analysis of the Ontario Library Service.

Ontario's total revenue for the 2017-2018 fiscal year was $150.6 billion.

The Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Sport's 2017-2018 funding for Ontario Library Service North was $1,645,800, and for the Southern Ontario Library Service was $3,145,800.

$1,645,800 + $3,145,800 =  $4,791,600 in total funding for the Ontario Library Service.

$4,791,600 / $150.6 billion = 0.00003181673.  This is the portion of your provincial taxes that support the Ontario Library Service. (If you prefer percentages, that's approximately 0.003%)  

The amount you paid in provincial taxes can be found on line 428 of your tax return.

Therefore:

To calculate how much actual money you pay to support the Ontario Library Service, multiply line 428 of your tax return * 0.00003181673

To calculate the amount saved by the recent cuts, divide this number by 2.

Then you can look at the resulting dollar amount and see how it compares with the library services you use over a year.

You can also look at how this will add up over your lifetime, and how that will compare with the library services you use over your lifetime.


If you don't want to do the math yourself:


I, personally, pay $0.15 per year towards the Ontario Library Service, so the announced cuts would save me $0.075 per year.

A single TTC fare is currently $3.25, which is 43 years of OLS cuts. In 43 years I will be 85, and 3 of my 4 grandparents died by that age. So if I ever, even once, have to leave my neighbourhood to fetch a book because it is not available by interlibrary loan (for example, if it can only be sourced from a library that's affected by these cuts), I will not have gotten my money's worth.

Mailing a book would cost even more than that.  And buying a book would cost even more than that. 

So basically, if I am ever, even once in my life, inconvenienced by these cuts, I will not have gotten my money's worth.

Considerations:


The Ontario fiscal year runs from April to March, so the 2017-2018 numbers are from April 2017 to March 2018. I've used these because I couldn't find the 2018-2019 public accounts. The tax return numbers I've suggested using for your own salary and taxes paid are from January 2018 to December 2018 (assuming you used your 2018 return).  If anyone can provide a source for more current numbers, or for numbers that cover the exact same time period, please post in the comments.