impudent strumpet

Things They Should Study: what percentage of the population can read on trains but not on buses?

2012-02-02T16:27:00.003-05:00

One of the reasons why Transit City is of particular interest to me is that I get carsick reading on buses but have no problem reading on trains. A trip in any kind of rail vehicle - even the old-fashioned streetcars they have downtown which are nowhere near as awesome as LRTs - is an opportunity to relax and get some reading done. A trip in a bus, it's at best lost time, and at worst a struggle against nausea. Transit City maximizes the number of potential trips that can be taken by rail, thus maximizing multitaskability.

As I've blogged about before, multitaskable commutes increase productivity, and multitasking in a vehicle generally involves reading of some sort. I'm not the only one who is more prone to carsickness in buses than in trains, but I can't find any data on the percentage of the population to whom this applies. If it's a large percentage of the population, this should be a factor in transit planning - or at the very least it should be public information so we can make an informed decision about whether to take it into consideration.

The first page of google results gives numbers ranging from 33% to 90% of the population being prone to motion sickness, so the number of people affected is probably not negligible. Someone really needs to research this so we can get some real numbers.

Controversial things that I would like to be available if I were one of the people affected

2012-02-01T21:36:00.001-05:00

1. Sex-selection abortion. I was a wanted child, conceived quite mindfully and intentionally, and life is still hard. I have wished that I hadn't been born, but I've never been glad that I was born. (Long before I even knew what abortion was, I realized that I hadn't been born, I wouldn't mind not having been born). I'd imagine it's far worse if your parents don't think you're worth having because of your biological sex, but you would be worth having if you had a different biological sex. If my parents had wanted to abort me for being a girl, I would have wanted that option to be available to them.

2. The option of committing suicide when in prison. I always thought that part of the punishment of prison is that they prevent you from committing suicide, so you live to be raped and tortured another day. So, if I were in prison, I'd be very glad to have the option of ending it. However, I don't think the senator's proposal of providing rope for hanging is ideal. Nooses look hard to tie (I wouldn't know how to do it without googling, and I don't think they're allowed internet in prison) and I don't know the results of hanging with a poorly-tied noose. In addition, your bladder and bowels release when you die, and if the body's hanging from the ceiling that would all spray around the room and then someone would have to clean it up. A cleaner and more reliable method would be preferable. On top of all that, it isn't right for people who have been convicted of crimes to have the right to suicide when euthanasia isn't yet available to the general public. Nevertheless, I do support the general principle of suicide being an option, both inside and outside of prison.

I don't expect many people to agree with me on these points. I'm be the first to admit that I'm more nihilistic than most, and I'm certainly not saying that others should feel the same way just because I do; I do very much see where people who disagree with me are coming from. However, the fact remains that, if I were one of the people affected first-hand by these questions, this is what I would want.

Things They Should Invent Words For

2012-01-31T20:01:00.000-05:00

I once saw some photos from a Harry Potter premiere that named every actor, the character they played, and the character's blood status. For example, "Rupert Grint, who plays pure-blood wizard Ron Weasley, arrives at the premiere of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows."

Apart from the fact that they're politically incorrect within the Potterverse (I doubt even the Rita Skeeter would be so crude as to mention blood status of an actor at a premiere!), the problem with those captions is that blood status is only meaningful to fans, and fans would already know the character's blood status. If you don't know that Ron Weasley is a pure-blood wizard, the fact that Ron Weasley is a pure-blood wizard is inconsequential to you.

The name of the actor is relevant if you don't know who the person in the picture is, the name of the character might be relevant if you've read the books but aren't familiar with the movie actors, but there are no circumstances under which the blood status of the character is relevant to a reader who wouldn't already know the blood status of the character.

We need a word for this kind of situation, when if you could use the information you already have it, and if you don't have the information it's not useful.

Things They Should Invent: WhereCanIBuy.com

2012-01-29T17:54:00.006-05:00

Last summer I bought a full-length mattress wedge. I ended up buying it online (from overstock.com) because I couldn't figure out where to get one in real life. I searched for it in real life by going to the websites of every store I could think of that sells mattresses and seeing if they had any mattress wedges listed on their site. None of them did. I did a bit of fruitless googling, then ended up just searching sites that sell general merchandise. I'm happy with the product I got, but I seriously doubt that there is nowhere to buy a mattress wedge in Toronto. There has to be an easier way.

They should invent a single comprehensive website where you enter your postal code and the item you want to buy, and it finds stores in your area where you can buy it. You can search either by general type of item ("mattress wedge") or by your specifications ("four-cup coffee maker with timer") or by a particular brand and type("Touche Éclat #2"). It would also be interesting to list the prices and whether the item in question is in stock. To make this as easy as possible on merchants, the website's database should be compatible with the most common inventory management systems, so they can all batch upload their inventory for us to find.

This would not only be convenient for customers, but would also be good for smaller, more local businesses. If we haven't the slightest idea where to buy something, we tend to gravitate towards large department or discount stores, or relevant chain stores. (When I was talking about mattress wedges, you were probably thinking The Bay, Sears, Sleep Country, Walmart.) But what if some little storefront nearby has the product in question, but you've never noticed it before because it's in the opposite direction of your commute? A single central directory would direct customers to the store that's best positioned to serve them, not just the best-known. Win-win.

Clothing drop boxes

2012-01-28T19:52:00.000-05:00

I was very surprised and disappointed to hear that some city councillors are considering banning used clothing drop boxes.

I like them. They're convenient for me. Someone who wants my unwanted stuff is giving me a convenient location to drop it off at my leisure. They say some of the boxes aren't for charity, but that doesn't negate their convenience. They also say some of them don't give the clothes to the needy, instead selling them to recyclers to use to make recycled textiles. That doesn't bother me either, because it means I can put things like holey old underwear and stained t-shirts and odd socks in the box instead of throwing them out.

All the problems listed in the article seem to be that existing laws and regulations aren't getting enforced. There are already rules about who can and can't operate them. There are already rules against putting big boxes on other people's property without their permission. To ban the boxes because existing rules aren't getting enforced would be to fall into this trap.

In the meantime, there's a very simple first step to solving this problem that they could have taken in that very news article: name the two organizations who are actually licenced to run clothing drop boxes. Every article I've seen on the subject says there are two legit and licenced organizations, none of them name them. Naming them would cost nothing, take up only a few minutes of time, and allow us to make informed choices about where we drop off our old clothes. The news media could even do this themselves without having to wait for city council to act.

Nivea Soothing Care lip balm is not dishwasher-friendly

2012-01-28T16:50:00.003-05:00

Nivea Soothing Care lip balm (the one in the light green tube) is no better or worse than any other drug store lip balm. However, the lip prints it leaves on drinking glasses don't come out in the dishwasher nearly as well as other lip balms. Therefore, I don't recommend it for dishwasher users who don't like having to touch up their dishwashing by hand. A very similar product that comes out easily in the dishwasher is Nivea Hydro Care (the one in the light blue tube).

"You're welcome" vs. "No problem" revisited

2012-01-23T19:05:00.001-05:00

I've blogged before about the nuances of "you're welcome" vs. "no problem" as a response to "thank you".

But reading this story from Not Always Right gave me some sudden insight on why the "you're welcome" people don't like being told "no problem": they want it to be a problem!

They seem to be interpreting "you're welcome" as "you are welcome [in the sense of "entitled"] to impose upon me by making this request of me", and see a "no problem" as implying that they are not entitled to that. "No problem" is equalizing, "you're welcome" is subservient.

I use "no problem" specifically because it is equalizing, in an attempt to neutralize the burden of gratitude in the other party. I'm saying "It's okay, we're cool, you don't owe me any gratitude, I'm not putting this on your tab." This is what I like in customer service and in life in general, so I try to give it to others.

It makes me feel welcome in the literal sense, the same way I'm welcome in, say, my parents' home. I'm totally allowed to walk in and fix myself a drink and rummage through the fridge. In a customer service context, it makes me feel like they're giving me good service because I'm just as cool as they are, not because I'm above them. Because they like me, not because they are obligated to serve me. They're saying "Hey, it's you! How are you doing? Do you want a coffee?" rather than doing their job and rolling their eyes at me when I leave. And, while it is totally their prerogative to just do the job and roll their eyes at me when I leave, I'd much rather have them like me.

But the "you're welcome" people don't seem to care about that, they seem to prefer to be treated with deference, liked for their position rather than for themselves.

Things They Should Invent: DoINeedToStartAtTheBeginning.com

2012-01-21T21:35:00.003-05:00

Lately I've been thinking that Downton Abbey has started sounding interesting to me, but I don't know if it's something that you can pick up in the middle or if I have to go back to the beginning of the series and catch up.

They need to make a single comprehensive website for every series ever - TV, books, and anything else that comes in series form - tell you whether you need to start at the beginning or whether you can just jump right in. They could take user votes and comments, and it could work like Rotten Tomatoes.

For TV series, they could also incorporate a feature that gives you alerts whenever certain series is starting to air from the beginning on a TV channel in your area, so if you want to catch up the old-fashioned way you can.

Things They Should Invent Words For

2012-01-20T18:11:00.000-05:00

We've all heard the expression "privatizing profit and socializing risk". The phenomenon I want to make a word for is similar, but I can't seem to structure an analogous expression. It's a sort of socialization of the requirement for expertise, but not precisely.

One example of the phenomenon is pensions. They seem to be moving away from defined benefit pensions, where experts manage it for you, to defined contribution pensions, where they give everyone a little bit of money and tell them to go manage it themselves.

Another major example comes from from job searching. Based on what my parents and grandparents tell me, employers used to be willing to hire unskilled labour or workers with a lot of potential but no particular experience in the area (and they tended to look upon university degrees as potential), and then let them learn on the job or train them up so they could eventually move up the ladder and do better-paying work. But in my own job hunting experience, I find that most employers want workers who already have the very specific skills and experience required for the position - even when it's something easily learnable like proprietary software. And, on top of that, employers have been known to reject applicants who have education that isn't strictly required for the job.

This also reminds me of how every once in a while you hear employers in the news saying that they can't find enough skilled workers, but these complaints about the lack of skilled workers seem to be reaching my ears far more readily than information about what kind of skills which employers need, and how to go about acquiring these skills, and how to figure out which of those jobs you'd be a good fit for rather than picking some skilled trade at random.

Anyway, the general concept I want to coin a word for is this sort of increasing expectation over time that individuals who are not involved in organizations or fields of expertise are independently responsible for developing knowledge of the needs of those organizations or the skills of those fields of expertise, whereas historically the larger organizations were more willing to make the effort to integrate and orient people.

I'm not explaining this as well as I should be. Coinages and better explanations welcome.

Journalism wanted: why are burqas made from synthetic fibres?

2012-01-19T21:42:00.004-05:00

Over the past decade or so, I've read several different articles by different journalists visiting Afghanistan who described their respective experiences wearing a burqa. (Most recently here.) And most, if not all, of these articles mentioned that the burqa was made of some synthetic fibre that doesn't breathe.

How did that come about?

Conventional wisdom is that Afghanistan doesn't have much in the way of infrastructure. A lack of infrastructure should make manufacturing synthetic fabrics difficult, so I would expect people to wear natural fabrics made in traditional ways - whatever it was that people did in the centuries and millennia before industrialization. Synthetic fibres also seem inconvenient for burqas (something that breathes would be better), and more convenient for other things. So why are they using it for burqas? This would suggest that synthetic fibres are more readily available than natural fibres. How did that happen in a country with so little infrastructure?

Obviously not all burqas are made of synthetic fibres. Some of the burqas available for sale on the internet in English are available in cotton and sometimes even silk, although I'm certainly not assuming that what I can google up in English is representative of the general burqa market. I've also seen a number of newspaper articles mentioning in passing (for the purpose of explaining to readers what a burqa is) that they're made of cotton; it's quite possible the people writing these articles have no first-hand experience with burqas or are just repeating what they've googled up. But every article I've read by a journalist who actually wore a burqa in Afghanistan has them describing it as made of synthetic fibres that don't breathe. (Unless they're purposely giving synthetic ones to journalists for some reason?)

There's a story in there somewhere. Even if it turns out to be obvious to those familiar with the Afghan garment industry, there's a story in there for ignorant westerners like me.

Whatever happened to cable shows on regular TV channels?

2012-01-18T22:25:00.003-05:00

A couple of years ago, TV shows that normally only play on the movie networks were showing old seasons on normal basic or extended cable channels. For example, the first two seasons of Dexter were on Bravo, and the first two seasons of Big Love were on Showcase.

Then they stopped doing that. Why didn't they continue doing that? Both these shows reached five seasons (and Dexter is still going on), but they never showed more than the first two on the channels that I get.

I know they're available on DVD (as well as all the usual unofficial methods), but I find it very easy to procrastinate TV and movies when I know I can watch them any time. If they're on at a specific time, I'll tune in and watch; if they're on DVD or on my computer, I always feel "Meh, I can watch that any time."

SOPA protest idea

2012-01-17T20:29:00.002-05:00

I don't know offhand how technologically feasible this is, but just putting it out there: what if the major sites going dark to protest SOPA instead blocked access to their sites from users at .gov addresses? It seems like it could be done on the same principle as geoblocking.

Teach me how arts donations work

2012-01-16T19:20:00.003-05:00

From The Ethicist:

I was excited to take my granddaughter, Rachel, to see a local production of “The Nutcracker.” But this season, the production was being underwritten in large part by David Koch, a billionaire who supports numerous political causes that I think harm our nation. He also supports many worthy medical, educational and arts organizations, but I think those good works buy the complicity of the institutions in question. I’m sure my granddaughter would have liked to see the show, but rather than validate this patron’s actions and beliefs, I boycotted it. Should those who feel as I do have joined me?

Does the donor get anything out of higher ticket sales? I was under the impression that he's out of pocket the same amount regardless of whether the tickets are sold or not, and I can't see how boycotting would have any impact on him. What am I missing?

Putting away the childish things

2012-01-15T18:21:00.000-05:00

Just before xmas, I had a rough night. My annual bout of strep throat descended upon me rather more quickly than usual and left me unable to fall asleep. All my usual self-care techniques and a dose of melatonin weren't enough to help, and, because I'd already taken the melatonin, I didn't want to take a stronger sleep aid. So I lay cocooned in bed with my eyes closed, planning the fastest way to get antibiotics the next morning and wishing for sleep to overcome me. Fortunately, I had Smurfy with me. Smurfy, as you may remember, is my very favourite stuffed toy smurf who has been with me since I was a little baby. Having the familiar shape of Smurfy there to cuddle with, as I have on countless other rough nights, brought me calm and comfort made it easier to get through. I was awake, but I wasn't fretting about it. I was just lying there, warm and safe, until the walk-in clinic opened.

In the next morning's newspaper, I found that Doonesbury was doing an arc where Sam (age 12) decides to give up her dolls. That made me think of how, when I was a kid, I was constantly aware of the fact that I'd "have to" give up Smurfy. It was weighing on my mind from the age of about 6, and it was utterly terrifying. And all that time, I felt vaguely ashamed that I hadn't already managed to give him up.

I didn't bring Smurfy to slumber parties for fear of being mocked, and never slept well. I trained myself to sleep with other (newer, less worn out, more expendable) stuffed animals so I'd have a more respectable-looking contingency plan for multi-night overnight school trips. I would put Smurfy away when I had a friend over, and obviously he gets the night off when I have human company in bed with me. (An interesting side effect has been that the minimum requirements for sharing my bed have always been you need to be better company than Smurfy. I have met more people than you'd expect who do not meet this requirement.) But, despite all these efforts, Smurfy never became unnecessary. There's still a certain shade of comfort that only he can bring. So I've given up the idea of giving him up. I may choose not to use Smurfy from time to time for various reasons, but that's no reason to abandon my oldest friend and forever eliminate the possibility of enjoying that particular shade of comfort ever again.

But what's sad is that I spent so much of my life thinking I did have to give him up. For years I dreaded the fact that I would one day have to manage without Smurfy, and at the same time felt guilty for still needing him. I'm not entirely sure where this idea came from. I don't remember anyone specifically telling me that I'd have to give him up. It might be an extrapolation from the fact that none of the adults around me slept with stuffed animals. But right now, if I were ever talking to a child who's worried that they'd need to give a beloved toy, I'd tell them outright "You don't ever need to give it up. You can keep it as long as you want. The reason why you don't see a lot of adults with toys is that people tend to find they don't need them as much as they get older, but that doesn't mean you have to give yours up. And even if, as you get older, you find you need it less or don't want to use it every day, you can still keep it for the rest of your life, in a box or a closet or a drawer, just in case."

Being able to soothe oneself to sleep is a useful life skill, and a harmless comfort object that reliably does the job is a good thing to have on hand. No one should ever spend years like I did dreading having to do without when giving it up is so unnecessary and keeping it is not in any way a problem.

I am now happy with UPS

2012-01-15T17:34:00.000-05:00

For years and years I've been complaining about UPS and begging businesses I deal with not to use them for shipping.

That has changed. I am now happy with them.

Why? Because now, when a package is delivered by UPS when I'm not home, it's left at the local UPS store, just a couple of blocks away, rather than at the depot an hour's bus ride away. This makes them just as convenient as Canada Post, so I now have no reason to asks the businesses I deal with to please NOT use UPS.

(As an added bonus, it saves UPS time as well, since they now seem to make only one delivery attempt and then leave it at the UPS store, rather than three delivery attempts and then leave it at the depot.)

It's too bad it took them at least eight years to make this change (the first time I had the depot problem was eight years ago), but I'm very glad it's been made.

Excellent customer service from Office Depot and Raynor Group

2012-01-14T19:39:00.000-05:00

The armrest on my desk chair broke. I didn't particularly want to shop for a new chair, so I decided to contact Office Depot (where it was bought) to see what would be involved in replacing just the armrest.

Office Depot referred me to the chair's manufacturer (which is called Raynor Group), and instructed me to send them a copy of the receipt and they would send me a replacement part. I emailed them a scan of the receipt, and just a few days received a new armrest by courier at no cost to me!

This is particularly impressive because a) the chair is eight years old, and b) Office Depot is out of business in Canada! I wouldn't have been terribly surprised (disappointed, but not surprised) if they'd told me there was nothing they could do for me. But instead they exceeded my expectations, stood by their products, and solved my problem at zero cost or inconvenience to me! Well done!

Post your facial mask recommendations here

2012-01-13T20:37:00.004-05:00

For years, I've been using Bioré's self-heating pore mask. It helps clean my pores, tighten up my wrinkles, encourages any festering cystic acne to come to the surface, and generally makes my skin look and feel better.

But they discontinued it about a year ago. I bought every single box I could find, and now I'm down to my last box.

Can anyone recommend another product that does the same thing?

Things They Should Invent: "people you may know who have died recently"

2012-01-13T20:04:00.001-05:00

I've noticed social networks are pretty good at identifying people I might know or people I might be interested in. What if they could combine that with an obituary search and send you alerts of people you might know who might be dead or bereaved?

You could enter your employment and educational history, so the system can identify people who worked with or went to school with you. You could also enter the names of people you're interested in, either in that you'd want to know if they've died or you'd want to know if they're bereaved. You could customize extensively what kind of alerts you get. For example, if you grew up in a small town, you might want to be alerted every time someone in your age cohort is mentioned in a obituary, because it's probably someone you know. If you have an unusual surname, you could be alerted every time someone with the same surname is mentioned.

Unlike social networks, there's no need to be reciprocal. If you want to be alerted if your high school crush or your high school bully appears in an obituary, you can do so without anyone finding out. However, you could have the option of allowing the information you've entered about your age, hometown, employment and educational history to feed other people's alerts, so if you die or are bereaved, other people who probably know you can be alerted, even if only your name is mentioned in a list of survivors.

It does sound like it has the potential for false positives, but this could be partially mitigated with a small message saying why you're getting each alert, like on twitter recommendations. (e.g. "You are receiving this alert because you requested alerts about people who attended Beauxbatons between 1999 and 2003." "You are receiving this alert because it mentions John Smith, whose personal data indicates that he was born in Dog River, Saskatchewan in 1980.") Given the creepy accuracy of facebook, twitter and linkedin recommendations, I think it might work.

On Canada as a world leader

2012-01-12T18:57:00.005-05:00

One thing that has always surprised me about federal governments (the current one in particular, although it's quite possible that I may have forgotten similar actions by other governments) is the extent to which they aspire to make Canada a major player on the world stage and a global leader in many areas. Population-wise, we are a small country. We're smaller than Poland! For other countries to even notice us would be punching way above our weight.

Sometimes as part of the same initiatives and sometimes in the form of other initiatives, they also seem to be trying to contrive sources of national pride, coming up with new slogans and events and heritage minutes as though our existing concept of what we aren't isn't already enough.

That's why it surprises me that the government would allow our same-sex marriage to end up in a legal quagmire.

Same-sex marriage is one area in which we are a global leader and where people around the world look up to us as a role model. And this occurred organically, through the natural course of our internal affairs. It wasn't grasping like Own the Podium or contrived like this recent obsession with the War of 1812 (since when do we commemorate the beginning of a war rather than the end anyway?). It was simply our country correcting a flaw in its existing jurisprudence, creating a fairer and more just life for its citizens. But it resulted in the world flocking to our doorstep, and genuine, spontaneous pride in our country.

The government would be very foolish to fuck this up indeed.

How Nortel pensioners can state their case more compellingly

2012-01-11T19:56:00.001-05:00

On the radio yesterday morning, I heard an interview with a Nortel pensioner talking about the aftermath of the severe cuts to their pensions and benefits. Unfortunately, he didn't make his case very compellingly. When the interviewer asked him to describe how it affected his life, he said something about how he and his wife have to sit down and budget and figure out if they can afford expenditures. But that's not going to elicit sympathy in those who aren't already onside - people are going to say "So what? That's how real life works."

So here, with, as Col. Brandon says, an earnest desire to be useful, are some starting points for Nortel pensioners and others in similar positions to make their case more compellingly.

What decisions did you make in your working life that you would have done differently if you'd known you weren't going to have the promised pension or benefits? Did you work full-time for the purpose of increasing your pensionability, even though you didn't need the income? Did you stay with the job rather than pursuing a higher-paying or more rewarding alternative so that you'd have a pension? Did your spouse forgo pursuing pensionable employment to pursue their dreams or stay home with the kids or go back to school or have a go at starting a business because you had the security of your pension?

How would you have scheduled your retirement differently if you'd known you weren't going to have the promised pension or benefits? Would you have stopped working when you did? Have you been out of the workforce for 10 years and suddenly have to make money? What about older retirees - is there anyone whose dementia started setting in around the time pensions are eliminated so now they can't work and need more expensive care, but still have a decade or two of life expectancy left?

How would your financial planning have been different if you'd known you weren't going to have the promised pension or benefits? How much money did you pay into your pension anyway? Did you ever get any of that money back? By how much were your RRSP limits reduced each year? How much compound interest have you missed out on? Can you afford your home? Do you now have to live somewhere less pleasant, less safe, less convenient, less conducive to aging in place? Are there now bugs crawling out of your walls?

How would your basic life decisions have been different? Did you pay for your kid's wedding or your parent's nursing home only to discover that now you'd be much better off with that money back? Did you put one kid through university and now can't afford to do so for the other? Are you locked into a three-year iphone contract? Do you now have to ration your cheese intake? Would your family planning decisions have been different?

How does this affect your health? Can you no longer afford the proton pump inhibitors you need to eat adequately or the acupuncture you need to relieve your chronic pain? Have you cut back on dental care? Is your glasses prescription current? Will you have to have your dog put down earlier than you otherwise would because you can't afford the lifesaving veterinary treatments?

Tell people, in specific terms they can identify with, how the pension cutbacks have affected your everyday life. Tell them about choices you made that were sensible and prudent with the assumption that you'd get the pension you were promised, but that you would have made differently if you'd known that you wouldn't get the promised pension. Keep at the forefront of your message the fact that you were promised more, and not only planned accordingly but paid commensurate contributions into the pension plan. That's far more compelling than vague statements about having to budget.

What if your boss goes undercover but you don't want to be on TV?

2012-01-09T23:06:00.002-05:00

It seems TTC Chair Karen Stintz went undercover as an ordinary TTC worker as part of a reality TV show called Undercover Boss.

Stintz was introduced to her TTC co-workers as Ruth Bear — her middle name and her mother’s maiden name. To explain the cameras, the TTC employees were told that Stintz/Bear was the subject of a documentary about a woman re-entering the work force.

But what happens if you actually are an ordinary TTC worker (or an ordinary worker in some other workplace) and your boss decides to do something like this, but you don't want to be on TV? Suppose you're assigned to work as part of their team, or you're the person whose job it would normally be to supervise the newbie? If one of your team members is being filmed, it might not be logistically possible to stay out of camera range.

Do they even take this into account? Are people given the option of another assignment if they don't want to be on TV? Or are people forced to be on TV just because someone near them is being filmed?

Things They Should Study: best use of charitable donations

2012-01-08T00:24:00.003-05:00

There is a lot of information out there about different charities from the perspective of the percentage of money raised that goes to the cause vs. administration. And there's a lot of information about how to optimize tax incentives etc. But I'd really like more information about the best general strategic approach to take.

Would you get better results by donating to a charity, or by donating to a political organization that works to obsolete the need for that charity? Would my charitable dollar help more people if I donated it to a third world country (on the assumption that the cost of living is lower there, so therefore they could buy more stuff with it) or if I donated it locally (on the assumption that less of it might get lost in transit?). Callous as it sounds, do you get better long-term results by saving lives or by improving lives? Do you save more lives, or improve more lives, with food or with health care? Or health research? Or education? Or literacy? Do microloans get better results because of their relendability?

The same could apply with volunteering. What's the best use of general volunteer labour? Which sectors benefit most from a donation of time, and which benefit most from a donation of money? What about donations of specialized professional services? What about in-kind donations?

Some might object to this way of thinking on the basis that it might lead to a dearth of donations in areas that, while still worthy causes, are found to not to be the very best use of charitable donations. I'm not sure whether this would be the case, because people donate for all kinds of reasons. People donate to research into the disease that killed their grandparents or the disease whose genes they carry. People donate because a friend is doing a charity run. People volunteer for the humane society because doggies are awesome. People donate because they're asking for a loonie at the cash register and they're getting a loonie in their change. People donate because they have some stuff in their house that they want to get rid of. It isn't all calculated.

But, in cases where it is calculated, it would be useful to have information on the best strategic approach.

Problems with Bluefire Reader

2012-01-07T16:36:00.005-05:00

I switched to Bluefire Reader in November, when the upgrade to iOS 5 killed Stanza. Most of the time it works, but sometimes it will just cease to be able to read a certain file. Sometimes this presents as, when I search through the file, the spinner will spin and spin and it will never find anything or stop searching. Sometimes it presents as, after I switch to another app then go back to Bluefire, it will show me the library instead of the page I left it on and then spin and spin when I try to open the book I was reading. On the "info" page, the current page for these books shows up as page 1 instead of whatever page I was actually on.

Every file that this has happened with has been a DRM-free epub. It's happened with three separate files out of a total of somewhere between 10 and 20 files.

Following the instructions for when a spinner won't go away listed on this page doesn't help. Deleting the book from my ipod and then putting it back on doesn't solve the problem. Converting the book to PDF and then back to epub does make it openable by Bluefire again, but it messes with the formatting so it's not as easy to read. (Converting them just to PDF also works, but makes them even harder to read.) I can't find any way to look at the back end of either Bluefire or the epub files either through my ipod or through my computer.

I haven't been able to google up any evidence of anyone else on the internet having this problem, so I'm blogging it. If you google your way here and are also having this problem, I encourage you to post your findings in the comments. (Anonymous comments welcome.)

Fortunately, Stanza has since updated for iOS 5, so I'm back to using it. It should be noted that Stanza is able to open and search the epub files that made Bluefire freeze and crash, so the problem lies in something Stanza can do that Bluefire can't.

Things They DID Invent

2012-01-04T21:11:00.000-05:00

1. In 2004, I came up with the idea of library drop boxes that automatically scan the books. North York Central Library just installed those this past month.

2. In October, I tweeted my surprise that there is no googleable evidence that Bruce Springsteen ever covered Bob Seger's Old Time Rock and Roll. In December, that egregious oversight was rectified:

Demisexual

2012-01-01T21:51:00.005-05:00

I learned a new word today: demisexual. The description given in the link is an accurate description of my sexuality. However, I reject the term itself, because I don't feel that my sexuality is less than full and I don't care to have it defined by someone else's standard of what constitutes full sexuality.* I will continue to use my own coinages: "congenitally monogamous" or "orientationally monogamous". Nevertheless, it is interesting and somewhat gratifying to know that there's a name available in case I need it, and that it's common enough to get a name.

*Some might question why I would object to being referred to as demisexual when this term appears to originate from the asexual community, who apparently have no objection to being referred to as asexual. Why the objection to being defined as having half a trait when others have no objection to being defined by the absence of the trait? Here's an analogy: I am childfree, which means I have no desire or interest to have children. That is simply true, accurate, and, in some contexts, pertinent, so I have no objection to being labelled as such. However, there are some people out there who have very few children. I doubt they'd enjoy being referred to as "semi-parents". (Or, for a perfect analogy, "demi-parents", but I think "semi" sounds more natural.) They certainly don't feel they're less than full parents and wouldn't be best pleased if their parenting was defined as less than 100% just because other people parent more people than they do.

Guitar makes doggie happy. No guitar makes doggie sad.

2011-12-30T17:59:00.001-05:00

The disparity between the size of glasses and the size of standard drinks

2011-12-29T19:02:00.001-05:00

Reading about a game on the LCBO website that tests how well you can pour a standard drink, I was reminded of the first set of wineglasses I ever purchased.

I had one or two wineglasses among my worldly possessions already, but I wanted to get some that matched. They were cheap, from the dollar store or something, but they were decently nice-looking and I quite liked them. We christened them with a lovely glass of wine that gave us quite a happy buzz indeed. The next day, I got home from work and poured myself a glass of wine, and...discovered that there wasn't even one glass left in the bottle? How could that be? The two of us had one glass each the previous day, there are five glasses in a bottle, where did the rest of the wine go?

Turned out they were oversized glasses. When you filled them to a reasonable-looking place, they contained two standard drinks of wine (unlike my previous glasses, which, when filled to a reasonable-looking place, contained one standard drink of wine.) No wonder we got such a good buzz on the previous night! There hadn't been any serious consequences to that little adventure, but what if those glasses had been used to serve to someone who had been driving?

This gets me thinking that it would be useful if glasses intended for alcoholic beverages were only available in single standard-drink sizes. Of course, oenophiles would probably complain because they like those oversized bowls so you can get the nose of the wine. So what if there was a line on the glass itself indicating how far to fill it for one standard drink? What if the box they come in or the bottom of the glass was marked with a warning label saying how many standard drinks it holds?

This would probably still garner complaints about the government meddling in commerce and whatnot, so here's a faster and easier solution that should offend no one: the LCBO should give away free glasses. They should be simple but attractive, of decent quality, and sized to make it impossible to accidentally overserve. They should be available in any quantity up to whatever constitutes a normal set of glasses like you might find in a wedding registry. You can just walk in and pick them up, no drama, and perhaps they could even include them with purchases as a value-added bonus at the beginning. Drinking glasses are cheap (I've bought them commercially in a set for as little as 50 cents a glass), the LCBO's profits are high, and hindering accidental overserving surely falls within their social responsibility mandate. The fact that they're given away for free at the place where you go to buy alcohol anyway means that people would have to make more effort to get oversized glasses than to get standard-sized glasses, so more responsible drinking is easier than less responsible drinking.

Personally, I'd still prefer if all alcohol glasses commercially available had to be sized to a standard drink, but I think a lot of people would complain. Giving them away at the LCBO would get the job done for people who don't care what kind of glasses they use and people who do want their glasses sized to a standard drink, without giving those who want non-standard glasses any reason to complain.

Wherein googleproofing may have been inadvertently invented 80 years ago

2011-12-23T21:13:00.003-05:00

From the Wikipedia entry on the Shirley Temple cocktail:

The cocktail may have been invented by a bartender at Chasen's, a restaurant in Beverly Hills, California, in the 1930s to serve to the child actress Shirley Temple to help her deal with her growing alcohol addiction. By offering a non-alcoholic alternative to drink when not on-set, establishments frequented by the actress were able to hide her problem from the public.

Upon reading this, my first thought was to google up confirmation of whether Shirley Temple had an alcohol addiction. And I wasn't able to, because the search results were dominated by discussion of the drink, including statements that it's non-alcoholic and recipes for alcoholic ones.

If the drink was invented to help Shirley Temple hide her alcohol addiction, it was far more successful than they could possibly have imagined.

Do the less fortunate really need to be fed cafeteria-style?

2011-12-23T19:45:00.001-05:00

Picture a holiday charity meal for the less fortunate. The most common image is a turkey, gravy, stuffing, potatoes, veggies, etc. being served by friendly volunteers, with the occasional politician or celebrity mixed in for a photo op dishing out stuffing.

But why is it set up in such a way that there are volunteers and photo ops dishing out the food? That puts the clients in a position of forcing them to express gratitude to a different person for every single food item. That could feel awkward or humiliating for people who aren't entirely comfortable with receiving charity, and they might not feel free to ask for more stuffing please or no brussel sprouts thank you for fear of being judged.

It seems to me that serving the meal buffet-style, where people just help themselves to however much of whatever they want, would better protect the clients' dignity, with the added bonus of freeing up volunteers to do other work.

Am I missing anything? Is there any advantage to cafeteria-style that I'm not seeing?

Horoscopes

2011-12-22T19:09:00.002-05:00

The Star:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY for Thursday, Dec. 22, 2011: You might remind others of a cat with nine lives this year. Don’t push Lady Luck too far. An element of excitement also runs riot in your next year. Flex, detach and maintain a sense of humour. Stay grounded and realistic. If you are single, you could meet someone very important to your life’s history. After this year, look at this tie more seriously. If you are attached, the two of you really care about each other. Domestically, one element could shake up the status quo. SAGITTARIUS makes a great doctor for you!

G&M:

IF TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY:

It seems you are under divine protection. It seems you can do no wrong. Take a few risks over the coming 12 months. Do things other people would not dare to try. You’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain.

This is a particularly interesting set of horoscopes, because I've been considering buying a condo (with more seriousness than all the other times I've been considering buying a condo.) The mention of a doctor makes me a bit nervous though. I've had enough of doctors.

Analogy for eating for health

2011-12-21T19:12:00.000-05:00

There are a lot of people in the world who eat with the primary goal of providing themselves with optimal health and nutrition. I'm not into this. One of my greatest sources of happiness in life is eating exactly what I want exactly when I want, and I find that focusing on health and nutrition unduly detracts from this simple pleasure. Health and nutrition people can't understand this. "But what could possibly be more important than your health?" they say. "It will make you live way longer."

Here's an analogy:

Imagine a sex act that doesn't give you an orgasm and (either on its on merits or by virtue of the partner you're doing it with) isn't particularly fun for you. The kind of sex act where you wouldn't feel at all deprived if you never engaged in it again. Now imagine the combination of sex act and partner are such that it takes a long time. It takes far longer than it would take you to have an orgasm with your favourite sex act. It takes long enough that you're starting to wonder why people consider premature ejaculation a problem. And imagine doing this sex act in a position where you have to do all the work. You can't just lie down and relax, you have to do it all yourself - and it takes way more work than your favourite sex act does.

Now suppose you have to do this sex act somewhere between three and six times a day, every single day, for the rest of your life. Even if you're away from home or out with friends, when it's sex time you have to drop everything and find a suitable place for the sex act (which is often away from all the fun everyone else is having), and you have to either carry around all the equipment necessary or make sure it's available wherever you'll be going, all of which is rather conspicuous and is detrimental to general social spontaneity.

Even if your favourite sex act isn't contraindicated, it's difficult to fit it into your schedule since so much of your time and energy (and physical tolerance for friction) are consumed by the non-fun sex act.

And if you complain about any of this, people reply with "But it's SEX! What could possibly be more important?" and cite research studies that show that if you have sex this particular way, you'll be able to continue to do so for decades longer than most people can maintain an active sex life.

Doesn't that sound like a special kind of purgatory?

What if the library gave patrons credit for early returns?

2011-12-16T18:49:00.004-05:00

One thing that surprised me in discussions of the library charging for holds that aren't picked up is the number of people who are annoyed not just by people who don't pick up their holds, but by people who pick up their holds on the last day before they expire, or keep library materials check out right up until the due date.

I don't consider this a problem myself and I don't know if the library considers it a problem, but nevertheless my shower gave me an idea to address it:

What if libraries gave patrons credit for holds picked up early or books returned early? For example, using amounts that make the math easy and might not necessarily be the optimal ratio, suppose they credit one cent to your account for every day before the deadline that you either pick up a hold or return an item. Late fines are currently 10 cents a day, so this would mean that if you're a cumulative total of 10 days early in circulating your material, that will cancel out one day's late fine.

The big question here is whether circulating material faster is more important to the libraries than the revenue generated by fines. I don't know the answer to that question.

The other question is whether this would motivate people to game the system by taking out material they don't want and returning it right away. This incentive could be partially mitigated by allowing the credits to only offset future fines and you still have to pay fines already incurred. People could still game the system, but how many people are organized enough to game the system in anticipation of future late fines but not organized enough to get their books back in time? I don't know the answer to that question.

But if it turns out it actually is important for the library to encourage faster circulation of materials, this could be a starting point for brainstorming.

Analogy for banning niqabs (or any other clothing, for that matter) at citizenship ceremonies

2011-12-15T20:41:00.001-05:00

I was so outraged that this is being done in my name that I couldn't blog about it for days. But my shower gave me an analogy:

Suppose there's an elite search and rescue team. Throughout its history, the vast majority of the team members have been male, although there's never been any rule or practice preventing women from joining.

The first step to joining the team is a physical fitness test. Everyone takes their test at the same time, and, because it's such an elite search and rescue team, these tests sometimes attract VIP visits and media attention, and applicants' families and friends often come along to watch. There has never been any dress code for the tests, but it's ended up that the vast majority of the candidates don't wear a shirt when taking the test. So, even though there are no gender or clothing rules, it's not at all uncommon to see an entire test group full of shirtless men. Some of the women who take the test also do it shirtless (Maybe they like the tradition? Maybe they're more comfortable that way? No one has ever thought to ask.) and some wear shirts. We don't have any data on how many do or don't wear shirts. (For that matter, we don't have any data on how many men, if any, wear shirts.) We actually don't even have any data on how many applicants are women. The statement that's it's dominated by shirtless males is based solely on visual observation.

Then, suddenly, the head of the search and rescue team announces that all fitness tests must be taken shirtless. In support of his statement, he cites a story told by one of his colleagues about how he was observing a fitness test and saw a group of women wearing shirts. The colleague told this story in a tone of voice that suggested he thought it was a problem, but the best reason given is that wearing a shirt is not what most people do. There's no logistical reason why a shirt would get in the way (they do need to briefly listen to applicants' lungs with a stethoscope before the test - although some question whether that's even medically necessary - but that could easily be done around a shirt or behind a screen away from the crowds and cameras), and there's no other dress code for the tests.

On top of all this, they announced the no-shirt rule at the last minute. There are thousands of applicants already in the system, who have spent years getting in shape and training their dogs and learning how to climb mountains and fly helicopters and scuba dive so they can fulfill their lifetime goal of being a part of this team, all without any idea that they might suddenly have to perform in front of a crowd and cameras in less clothing than they feel comfortable wearing.

Isn't that just assholic??? It's disproportionately cruel and humiliating to the people affected, and for no good reason. It's not going to give people a sense of belonging, it's going to give them an urge to flee.

The new recruits will grow comfortable as members of the search and rescue team on their own, as time passes and they collect empirical evidence that they are welcome and valued members. As we all know from our private lives, if you want to make someone feel comfortable about wearing less clothing, you don't start by removing their clothing; you start by making them comfortable. There's no reason to force people to do something they're uncomfortable with in front of a large audience on their very first day just for superficial visual consistency.

Why the idea of nominal fees for library materials grates

2011-12-13T22:52:00.001-05:00

Recently, my city councillor asked for feedback on the idea of the library charging $2 to borrow DVDs. My visceral reaction was negative - a far stronger negative reaction than could be explained by the basic fact that libraries are meant to be free. At first I thought that this was because people who are least able to afford $2 for a DVD (like my grandmothers, for example) are also less likely to have the resources and the know-how to acquire movies for free through unofficial channels. But another aspect that grated was this treatment of certain library materials as Less Than other materials.

I've finally figured out why this is bothering me so much. It all goes back to my letter to my 18-year-old self. One of the things I wrote was:

Read Harry Potter. Read the complete works of Miss Manners. Read the In Death series. Read Introvert Advantage. Read Malcolm Gladwell. Watch Eddie Izzard's comedy and every interview he's ever done. These will all not only entertain you, but help you navigate the world better.

All of these things were transformative. From Harry Potter, I learned how to do literary analysis (yes, this is AFTER an academic career that involved lit courses in four languages) and how to use the happy place fandom gives me to chase away my dark moods. From Introvert Advantage I learned how my brain and energy work. Miss Manners gave me much-needed perspective on real-world social expectations to counteract the skewed context I grew up in. Eddie and In Death made me brave (insofar as I am brave, which is still exponentially braver than I was before I met them). Malcolm Gladwell taught me about Entitlement, which also coalesced all the other stuff I'd learned.

All of these materials are rather lowbrow. Anyone could make a convincing argument that any of this stuff is Less Than and Unworthy. Despite the fact that I've been exposed to more than my fair share of Serious Art and academic writing, it was a children's book series, a newspaper advice columnist, a couple of pieces of mass-market pop psychology/sociology, a transvestite comedian, and a series of formulaic mystery novels that ended up being what made me.

(At this point, some of you are thinking "What kind of pathetic person gets life-changing inspiration from such banal material?" The answer to that question is, obviously, "Someone who very much needs it.")

So, you're now asking, what does this have to do with the library?

Like most people, I don't like to pay for something when I don't know if it's going to work. This means that I don't buy books, movies, or other art/entertainment/information media if I don't know if I'm going to like it or if it's going to teach me what I need to learn from it. I borrow it from the library instead.

I didn't know going in that any of this stuff would be transformative. I didn't even know if I would like it. I added it to my library list because it seemed like it had the potential to be mildly interesting, but I never would have bought it - not even for a nominal price. There's enough pop cultural comfort food to keep me reliably entertained that I don't ever need to try anything new. The fact that I could try them all risk-free is what made it possible for me to discover all these things.

On top of that, there's also the fact that these transformative works are far from the only things I borrowed from the library during that time period (the past 8 years of my life). Most of the stuff I borrowed wasn't nearly as transformative - I'm sure I don't even remember 80% of it! But, because I can borrow as much as I want, I get to separate the wheat from the chaff and become a better person in the process. Even a nominal fee would be enough make me think twice before putting a hold on something I'm unsure about, which would have been enough of a barrier to prevent me from discovering my true inspirations.

I'm sure no one else has my exact combination of inspirations, and many people have a similarly unpredictable combination of inspirations out there waiting for them. (And I sincerely hope there are even more out there waiting for me!) The world will become a better and better place as everyone expands their horizons and finds their way to their own inspiration, so we must not introduce any cause for hesitation.

A mission for Toronto Public Library patrons

2011-12-10T17:02:00.005-05:00

They've recently announced a new list of possible savings for the library to meet its reduced budget. I have a number of discrete thoughts on these, which I'm going to spread out over probably three blog posts. But we'll start with a simple mission for all library patrons.

One of the proposed savings is to charge people who don't pick up holds. This grabbed my attention because I recently had a hold that didn't turn up on the hold shelf. I looked through all the books on the shelf and it wasn't there even though the computer said it was. I was up to talking to people that day, so I went to the librarian. She looked through the hold shelves with me and couldn't find it either, so she placed another hold on the item for me and it came in a few days later. However, it still shows up on my account as a hold that I didn't pick up.

While we were looking through all the hold shelves, the librarian mentioned they'd had a few similar problems recently - apparently some glitch in the computer system. And it occurs to me that this is the kind of problem that would likely be underreported - it's very easy to just shrug your shoulders and renew the hold once its hold shelf time has expired rather than tearing a busy librarian away from their job.

So, in light of this potential new policy, here's a mission for all Toronto Public Library patrons: if your hold isn't on the hold shelf but the computer says it is, tell a librarian. If the problem I encountered is systemic or recurring, it needs to be reported to its full extent before the new policy comes into effect. And if it turns out it was completely temporary and has been fully resolved, then everything is fine and no one will have to go to any trouble.

Things They Should Invent: administer medication through breastmilk

2011-12-09T21:19:00.002-05:00

A friend of mine has to give medicine to her month-old baby. The medicine is liquid, and apparently tastes disgusting. The poor baby HATES it and tries not to swallow it, making the whole thing an ordeal.

What if the mother could take the medicine instead? Then she could nurse the baby as usual and the baby would get her medication without having to deal with the yucky taste.

We know that bad drugs can make their way into breastmilk, so why not good drugs? Obviously this wouldn't be appropriate for every medication or every situation, but wouldn't it be nice to have the option? I'm sure there are quite a few cases where the mother would rather take a bit of unnecessary medication herself than have to make her poor baby miserable several times a day.

Update: The mother of the baby in question informs me that it would change the taste of the milk, which slightly blows my mind. I do think the taste wouldn't be as strong as the taste of the medication itself, and still think science should figure out how to do this on principle.

Assholic behaviour I have encountered recently

2011-12-06T19:06:00.001-05:00

1. A two-lane side street. I'm waiting patiently to jaywalk mid-block. The car coming from my left stops and waves me past. I look right, and there aren't any cars coming from my right. So I start across. Then the car BEHIND the one that stopped to wave me by decides to pass the stopped car by driving on the wrong side of the road, nearly hitting me in the process. The weird thing is he wasn't even stopped that long - definitely under 10 seconds, maybe even as little as 5 - before the guy behind him decides to come roaring past on the other side of the road.

2. A rainy day. The lady walking in front of me down the street is carrying a golf umbrella. I always think this is inconsiderate because it makes it impossible for someone else to pass you on a narrow or crowded sidewalk while also carrying an umbrella, but she's walking fast enough that I don't need to pass her so she isn't my problem. Turns out she lives in my building. She walks up to the front door of the building, gets under the overhang, then starts to shake her umbrella out by opening and closing it repeatedly, taking twice as long as people normally take to do this. The problem with this is, between the diameter of the umbrella and the range of the water being shaken off it, there's no room for anyone else to get into the front doors or even under the overhang. Anyone else who might want to get in (i.e. me) is stuck outside in the rain until she finishes shaking out her umbrella.

And one I might have done myself...

3. There's a guy on the subway who looks rather like my cousin's husband. But it can't possibly be him - what on earth would he be doing in Toronto? Besides, I know my cousin's husband broke his leg recently, and this guy isn't on crutches or anything. Then he gets off the train...and he's wearing a walking cast! Ooops...

A little less conversation: building better consensus-building

2011-12-03T16:35:00.008-05:00

One thing I find absolutely tedious about watching youtubes of Occupy is the people's mike. It takes such a long time to say anything! This also echoes something I find tedious about municipal politics: live, in-person consultations where anyone gets to get up and talk. Again, it takes such a long time! Surely it would be faster, easier, and more convenient to have everyone submit their ideas in writing - reading is faster than talking, and the writing process tends to result a more organized deputation than extemporizing does.

But, at the same time, there's a certain democracy to everyone getting up and having their say in full that we don't necessarily want to lose. So how can we make the general process of public consultation faster and easier and less tedious without making it less democratic?

Here's what I've got so far:

We start with a whiteboard, which can be either literal, virtual, or metaphorical depending on what's needed. For a set and reasonable period of time, everyone writes on the whiteboard every factor they can think of that needs to be taken into consideration for the issue in question. Each factor only needs to appear on the whiteboard once, no matter how many people think it's important (we'll address the number of people who think it's important in a minute.) So even if every single person in the room thinks it's important for the new widgets to be backwards-compatible with existing widgets, only one person needs to stand up and say so or send in an email saying so for it to get written on the whiteboard.

This is also a question and answer time. Anyone can post or ask a question, and anyone can answer or expand on anyone else's answers. All questions asked and all answers given are recorded on another whiteboard for everyone's review.

After the period of time for contributing to the whiteboard is over, there's a voting period. During the voting period, everyone votes on each factor on two axes: Agree/Disagree and Important/Unimportant. You can cast a neutral vote by abstaining. Once all the votes have been tallied, you can see what the collective's priorities are. Then they can take action to implement everything that gets a high number of Agree and Important votes and avoid everything that gets a high number of Disagree and Important votes. Things voted Unimportant but with a clear Agree or Disagree consensus will be addressed if doing so doesn't interfere with the things voted Important. Things voted Important but without a clear consensus could be subject to further discussion/dissection, or looked at in terms of how they related to other Important factors with clearer consensus.

Whiteboard and voting will be made as accessible as possible. The whole thing could be online if everyone involved has internet access, but if that's difficult for anyone then in-person, telephone, write-in, and any other kind of input method people might require should be allowed.

The enormous advantage of this method would be that it eliminates duplication. Instead of having to hear (or even read) dozens of impassioned pleas on the importance of backwards-compatibility, only one person has to bring it up and the importance will be made clear in the voting phase. At the same time, if one lone maverick is insistent that the widgets should glow in the dark, it's right up there with all the other idea and will stand and fall on its own merits. If other people think it's a good idea, it could go through even though that one guy doesn't have very much reach.

This method of consensus-building is far from perfect, but I'm putting it out there as a starting point. Improvements welcome.

You can't just replace screen time with exercise

2011-12-01T18:48:00.000-05:00

I was annoyed to wake up yesterday morning to my radio telling me that the Heart and Stroke Foundation thinks we should be exercising when we would normally be watching TV or looking at the internet. As though those two things are anywhere near interchangeable.

Screen time is pleasurable and relaxing; exercise is a chore.

Screen time is multitaskable, conducive to cooking or eating or housework or light reading or more than one kind of screen time at once; exercise requires the full attention of your whole body and entirely too much of your mind.

Screen time is logistically simple - just turn it on and plop down; exercise requires different clothes and a shower afterwards and, depending on your health situation, planning what you do or don't eat before and/or after.

Analogy: suppose I decide that people aren't intaking enough current events and should read more newspapers. When they protest they don't have the time, I say "How much time do you spend driving around in car every day? Why don't you spend that time reading a newspaper instead?"

Not that simple, is it?

This irritated me so much that I skipped exercising yesterday just because I didn't want them to win.

Things They Should Invent: robocalls that disconnect automatically when they hear a voicemail beep

2011-11-29T21:32:00.002-05:00

I hate it when spam robocalls leave me a message on my voicemail, because then I have to log into my voicemail and delete the message so my phone won't keep telling me I have a message waiting. This most often happens with those "To lower your rates, press 1" robocalls, so leaving a message doesn't even help them with their marketing because they need a real person to press 1 in real time. And, because they annoy me so much, these are the calls that I'm most motivated to report do the Do Not Call List people.

Solution: technology that would allow robocallers to recognize the voicemail "leave a message" beep and hang up when they hear it. That way the spammers aren't wasting their time and resources, people aren't getting pissed off, and people are less likely to report them for DNC list violations. Win-win!

Comedy guilt

2011-11-28T17:16:00.003-05:00

This takes a lot of talent:

He's doing silent physical comedy all alone, without anyone to play off or react to. He's doing it in front of a live studio audience without corpsing. There's fire involved, and a live animal on stage with him.

But it doesn't make me laugh. Physical comedy very rarely does it for me, even though it takes a lot of skill, athleticism, choreography, timing, and rehearsal. In this particular case, rehearsing probably meant they had to light the set on fire spray foam about, and clean up multiple times. To say nothing of the work involved in writing the whole thing.

But it still doesn't make me laugh, and I feel really guilty about that.

My dreams are back!

2011-11-27T12:50:00.006-05:00

For my whole life, I've gotten particularly vivid, interesting, and emotionally satisfying dreams right before I wake up naturally. That's why it's so important to me to sleep to completion at least once a week. My typical pattern is I sleep until early morning, wake up to pee, and, if I don't have to get up early that day, go back to bed for dream time. The dreams come at their best around 8-10 a.m., regardless of what time I went to bed.

But this pattern got disrupted when my GERD asserted itself this past summer. During the initial phase when I couldn't eat, I was going to bed early from fatigue and weakness and waking up early from hunger. After I was diagnosed, my diagnosis kept haunting my dreams (a recurring character was a demon with my face and a gremlin's body who had been sentenced to a hell where she was forced to eat the exact same quantity of the exact same dry, tasteless food every day, regardless of how hungry she was). The changes to my bedtime routine I made to trick myself into drinking less made me go to bed early, which made me wake up early, which made me miss peak dreaming time.

But the past few nights, I've naturally stayed up late, and naturally slept later, and finally started having dreams like I'm used to. Vivid, interesting, plot-filled, satisfying dreams that I'm physically capable of returning to after waking up if I roll back over and close my eyes again.

Some might say that this isn't a good thing, that it was better when I was naturally waking up earlier without any particular incentive to go back to sleep. But my dream time is an important part of myself that I'd thought I'd lost forever, so I'm very glad to have it back!

What if patients were allowed to deprioritize longevity?

2011-11-26T20:25:00.004-05:00

They recently changed breast cancer screening guidelines, reducing screening in areas where it hasn't been proven to reduce mortality.

What bugs me about this is they're only looking at mortality. The reason why I'd be particularly concerned about breast cancer as compared with other cancers is I don't want to lose my breasts. I like my breasts and I want to keep them. If I'm going to be moved to take any particular measures to avoid breast cancer, it's going to be because I want to keep my breasts, not to avoid dying. However, we don't have the information to make that decision. They didn't look at whether early detection reduces the need for mastectomies, or, for that matter, chemotherapy. (I'd also very much like to keep my hair and continue my 17-year non-vomiting record.)

This is similar to my attitude towards GERD. I've been thinking about it pretty much non-stop for the past three months, and I've concluded that I'd very much prefer being able to eat exactly what I want for 100% of my life, even if it means my life is much shorter. I'd rather die at 50 having eaten exactly what I want every single day than live to 100 without eating anything that makes me happy. (Unfortunately, this isn't quite an option, because the disease manifests itself as difficulty eating. If I get esophageal erosion or Barrett's esophagus or esophageal cancer, I will be physically incapable of eating pleasurably.) However, the general medical approach assumes that dietary restrictions are a perfectly reasonable first step in preventing what might ultimately develop into esophageal cancer, and I can't find any sign that medical science is even thinking about working to eliminate the need for dietary restrictions.

As a patient, I'd really like to have the option of choosing to have my medical care not focus on keeping me from dying, and instead prioritize getting the most out of whatever time I do have. (And I want to be able to define "getting the most out of" for myself, so that it includes such fripperies as pleasure and vanity.) This would require not only the consent and cooperation of my medical team, but also the consent and cooperation of medical science. My doctor can't change my breast cancer screening protocol to maximize my likelihood of being able to keep my breasts unless medical science does research into whether screening helps avoid mastectomies, not just prevent death.

At this point, some people reading this are probably thinking "But...I want to avoid death!" And I know that with breast cancer awareness specifically, some people are really bothered by campaigns that focus on the fact that breasts are awesome rather than the fact that cancer can be fatal. So I'm not saying that patients shouldn't be able to prioritize survival and longevity. I'm just saying that we should have a choice. If you want to live to 100 no matter what, medicine should help you. If I don't have a problem with dying younger because it will spare me Alzheimer's, medicine should help me get what I want out of life.

From a disgustingly pragmatic point of view, allowing patients to deprioritize longevity might also save the health system money. Why pour resources into extending the lives of people who don't care if their lives are extended? (You might say "To keep them from dying of something complicated and expensive," but who's to say they won't die of something complicated and expensive decades later anyway? (Someone really should do research on that.)) There's the potential to save a few patient-decades of care with the full consent of the patients, and actually make them happier while doing so.

Things They Should Invent: minimum Service Canada staffing levels proportionate to the number of unemployed Canadians

2011-11-19T20:53:00.001-05:00

Recently in the news: there are delays in Employment Insurance because the government has cut EI processing jobs.

That seems rather backwards, doesn't it? Demand is up, so you cut back your workforce? I can't imagine that decision being made anywhere in the private sector. (Of course, I also couldn't imagine it being made in the public sector.) If Service Canada increased the number of EI workers during times of high unemployment, they would not only be addressing the increased demand, they'd be marginally reducing demand (and the unemployment rate) by hiring unemployed people. Automatic job creation!

Therefore, I propose they make a policy that the number of EI workers has to be at least X% of the number of people on the unemployment rolls.

At this point, you're wondering why I want them to make a policy rather than just being smart and hiring more people. The reason for making a whole policy is to prevent the same problem from reoccurring in the future. The government could spin it beautifully as a sustainable policy to better serve Canadians and put people back to work - alluding to the fact that private sector totally hires people when demand goes up, to play to certain segments of their base. Once it's all written down and codified, then they'll have to jump through hoops to lay off EI workers during times of high unemployment rather than the current situation of having to jump through hoops to hire more EI workers during times of belt-tightening.

You're probably also wondering why I put the wiggle-words "at least" in there. That's to give Service Canada reasonable leeway in its staffing. If they have some people who are nearing retirement, this will allow them to hire replacements (and get them trained and reasonably experienced) before the retirees leave with all their corporate memory. This also prevents them from necessarily having to lay off workers at the slightest fluctuation of the unemployment rate.

At this point, you're probably wondering "But what if improved technology results in fewer workers needed per unemployed person? Then they'll be stuck with all these extra workers." That could be addressed with a clause requiring an automatic review of the prescribed minimum threshold whenever existing workers find themselves with a certain amount of downtime.

Causes I would like to get involved in

2011-11-16T21:33:00.004-05:00

1. Sufficient and reliable funding for all medical research

Many charity fundraisers are raising money for research into various diseases. Our first thought when we hear this is that it's a good cause. But why is such vital medical research dependent on charity? There should be a better way to make sure that all medical research gets the funding it needs without having to resort to begging or be dependent on the kindness of strangers.

2. Replace property tax with income tax

As I've blogged about before, property tax is silly because it does not directly reflect ability to pay. I know that municipalities use it because that's what the law limits them to, but I think it would serve us all far better if property tax were eliminated and replaced with an income tax at the municipal level.

However, I don't know how to make either of these things happen. Does anyone know of any organizations that are already working on these issues?

Garbage chute poll

2011-11-15T21:59:00.004-05:00

Please answer in the comments: which side of the building is your garbage chute on? I welcome multiple answers if you can remember from previous buildings you've lived in as well.

This question came up when I was taking out the garbage today and started pondering why the garbage chute is always on the east side. And I came up with a really good explanation too: the prevailing winds are from the west, so having the chute on the east reduces the incidence of that annoying phenomenon where the wind whistles up the garbage chute.

Then I realized that I don't actually know if the chute is always on the east. I've only lived in two buildings with garbage chutes, both of which had a north-south main hallway. In my old building, the service/freight driveway that garbage trucks would have to use was on the east side of the building (and could not have been positioned any other way. In my current building, it's actually on the west side and there's a bit of a convoluted system to get the garbage from the garbage room to the truck area.

So I'm trying to figure out whether I've spotted a pattern or this is just a coincidence. Please contribute your data points.

Is it easier to start a business in a small town?

2011-11-13T17:29:00.000-05:00

In one episode of Corner Gas, Brent mentions that he runs the only gas station for 40 km. In another episode, he mentions that he's started renting out movies because no one else in town does. When Lacey is renovating the Ruby, the townsfolk are at loose ends because there's nowhere to get a good cup of coffee. Watching this, it occurred to me that it might be easier to run a business in a very small community, because you'd be the only game in town.

This made me think of a book I'd read a while back, Big Sort. One of the points made in Big Sort was that, as a general demographic trend, people who live in less urban areas tend to prioritize self-sufficiency. The book didn't comment on entrepreneurship, but in life in general I have observed a correlation between valuing self-sufficiency and valuing entrepreneurship. In the more extreme cases, this manifests itself as thinking that applying for jobs and waiting for someone to hire you is insufficiently diligent, and what you should really be doing is starting your own business and creating your own job.

So I wonder if this entrepreneurship-über-alles attitude correlates with more rural environments, and, if so, if entrepreneurship looks more feasible to them just because the small businesses with which they're familiar are the only game in town, rather than one of three on the same block?

Wholesale and retail

2011-11-12T21:58:00.000-05:00

Wholesalers sell products at lower prices and in larger quantities to retailers, who sell them at higher prices and in smaller quantities to customers. Customers usually can't buy wholesale - you have to be a business to do so.

I wonder how this system came about? Because if you think about it, it's really weird and arbitrary. If such a system didn't exist, could you imagine being the first person to invent it? "Okay, you can buy my widgets at very low prices, but you have to buy at least a thousand of them, and you can only do so if you have a store set up to sell them to other people." That would never work! But somehow it has worked, and it adds this whole extra layer to the economy.

And why do you have to be a business to buy wholesale anyway? If an individual wants to buy a whole pallet of toilet paper, why on earth would a wholesaler care?

Things They Should Invent: Movember buy-out

2011-11-11T21:48:00.003-05:00

Movember is a fundraiser where people spend the month of November growing a mustache, to raise funds for prostate cancer research.

The problem, of course, is that mustaches are yucky. I wouldn't want to grow, kiss, touch, or look at mustaches. And I'm sure I'm on the only person in the world who feels this way.

But it looks really assholic to not participate in a charity fundraiser - or, worse, to try to convince someone else not to participate in a charity fundraiser - on purely aesthetic grounds, no matter how well-founded they are.

Solution: you can contribute money to a Movember participant earmarked as anti-mustache funds. If any participant's anti-mustache funds exceed his pro-mustache funds, he gets to shave.

For example, suppose your husband is participating in Movember and has raised $100 for growing a mustache. You find mustaches repulsive and don't much fancy the idea of going a whole month without enjoying the benefits of his mouth. So if you contribute $101 in anti-mustache money, he'll shave. Of course, if someone else donates more pro-mustache money to him, you'll have to donate even more anti-mustache money.

At first glance, paying to shave mustaches seems contrary to the spirit of Movember, but it would actually bolster its missions of raising money and awareness. Since the anti-mustache money would go to the same charity as the pro-mustache money, this introduces the potential to double the amount of money raised! And giving anyone the ability to eliminate people's ugly facial hair will certainly do way more for awareness than simply having some people walking around with ugly facial hair. (Compare: "Dude, what's with the cheesy mustache?" "I'm raising money for prostate cancer research." vs. "Dude, what's with the cheesy mustache?" "If you donate $X to prostate cancer research, I'll shave it!")

How many complaints about our health system are due to poor communication?

2011-11-11T18:51:00.004-05:00

A while back there was a story in the news about a lady who fell in a hospital and was told to call an ambulance.

TorontoEmerg points out that paramedics would have the equipment to move a fall patient without damaging the spine.

So it sounds like the real problem is that they didn't explain, or didn't successfully explain, to the lady why they needed an ambulance.

I've only had one ER visit in my life, for a broken bone when I was a kid. I didn't understand what was going on, and because of that I thought they weren't going to fix me, at all, ever. Even though I've learned far more about diagnosis and triage in the intervening years and know intellectually that their actions were appropriate, I still can't describe it in detail because it makes me flash back to that feeling of terror, and to this day I find anything having to do with bones absolutely squicky.

Even in less serious situations, lack of communication can be upsetting. I once asked my doctor if I could be vaccinated against chicken pox. She ordered tests to make sure I didn't already carry the antibody, then when they'd confirmed that her office called me to schedule an appointment to be vaccinated. I showed up at the appointment, and the doctor asked me "Where's the vaccine?" I looked at her, she looked at me, I looked at her, she looked at me... It turned out she was supposed to give me a prescription for the vaccine (she hadn't) which I was then to get filled at the pharmacy and bring back to her so she could inject me. I felt awkward and embarrassed, and it caused a bit of a kerfuffle with the office scheduling because she had to take the next patient while I filled the prescription and then fit me back in for my injection, and I had to pressure the pharmacy to fill the prescription as quickly as possible because they were waiting for me upstairs at the doctor's office.

All this gets me thinking: how many of people's complaints about the medical system are due to flawed communication? So much is obvious and everyday to medical professionals but completely new and rather scary to patients. How many complaints would be averted if medical professionals were able to successfully explain processes and reasoning and unknowns and expectations to patients?

Things Google Should Invent: reverse sort by date

2011-11-11T17:29:00.002-05:00

Currently, you can sort your Google search results by date, which puts the most recent results first. But the only way to see the very oldest results is to keep clicking the last of the available pages until you reach the end of the results, which can be a wee bit time-consuming if there are millions of them.

Google has the information, the technology exists (most things that have a sort by date function let you choose the order), why not give us the option for those cases where we need it?

Wherein I solve a mystery from half a lifetime ago

2011-11-11T16:41:00.001-05:00

Despite the bullies I faced in middle school, I managed to develop a small group of friends. In retrospect, it was a rather rudimentary definition of friendship, but I had people to do school projects with and talk on the phone with and invite along if I wanted to go to a movie.

We weren't much in touch over the summer between Grade 8 and Grade 9 (which was normal - my family tended to go for long vacations), but then when high school started, instead of picking up where we'd left off as usual, they simply stopped being friends with me. They didn't fill me in on plans and they ignored me if I was there. They seemed to have rather quickly made friends with some girls from the other elementary schools, and some of those girls were mean to me - stealing my things, laughing at me as though I'd violated some rule I didn't know about. My friends had also become, for lack of a better word, coarser. They'd taken up smoking and didn't appear to have any objection to drinking or drugs, they swore more, they listened to ruder music, and they seemed to be interested in sex. And, on top of it all, they seemed kind of judgmental of me for not automatically having gone through the exact same changes. (Yes, I would later take up some of these habits, but I was 13 at the time of this story and not ready yet.) It didn't make any sense to me, and I didn't understand what had happened.

The end result was I spent the next two years literally friendless. I had no one to do projects with, no one to talk on the phone with, no one to go to the movies with. And I had no idea what had happened or why, which kind of fucked up my ability to develop other friendships.

But I was recently poking around on facebook, and, 17 years after the fact, discovered what had happened: the summer between Grade 8 and Grade 9, they joined cadets.

That's where they met the girls from the other elementary school who were mean to me. That's where they took up smoking and other coarse habits. And that's where they developed a whole other life that didn't include me, or even include treating me with basic civility once we were in classes together again.

Their decision not to ask me to join cadets along with them was completely reasonable and correct. I would not have done well in that context and we all knew it. But the irony is that some very vocal adults in my life kept encouraging me to join cadets, and later reserves, saying it would be good for me. As though there was something deficient in my character that would be remedied by sending me into a context where I had every reason to believe I would be bullied even more, among other problems. And all this time, it ended up being the thing that turned my perfectly nice, slightly dorky middle-school friends into coarse, unkind people that most adults certainly wouldn't want their kids to be, or to associate with.

Gillette Fusion ProGlide

2011-11-11T15:38:00.002-05:00

I recently received a sample of the Gillette Fusion ProGlide razor. This razor is intended for men to use on their faces, but I'm a woman and I used it on my legs and armpits.

I discovered that, just like it says on the tin, you can sort of glide it lightly over your skin. I can use a lighter touch than my usual Schick Quattro. However, the first couple of uses I got a bit of razor burn on my legs, which hasn't happened to me in ages. Note that I use body wash for lather when shaving my legs. The manufacturer would probably suggest using their own proprietary shaving cream or gel, but I look at products in terms of how they fit into my existing routine, not what kind of new routine they ask me to create.

I find the size and shape of the handle less ergonomically suitable to leg shaving than my Schick Quattro (which makes sense, because the ProGlide isn't intended for leg shaving and the Quattro is).

The razor has a little extra blade on the back, which they call a "precision trimmer". I find it useful for that little bit between the Achilles tendon and the sticky-outy ankle bone, which I always miss when shaving.

In my winter routine of shaving every other day, I notice that I have less stubble 24 hours after shaving compared with my usual razor, but about the same amount 48 hours after. So it doesn't make me need to shave less frequently, but it keeps me presentable a bit longer.

I also noticed, after less than a month's use, the green moisturizer strip seems to be flaking off. I don't usually have that happen with women's razors, and I've never had it happen so quickly.

Overall, it's not for me. (Which I knew going in - it's for men's faces, not women's legs.) It does glide like they say it does, but it doesn't have the comfort and longevity of my existing razor. It's good enough that I'll use it until it doesn't shave me well enough any more, but I won't be buying more blades for it.

Analogy for Greece

2011-11-11T14:22:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a lot about the situation in Greece, and one thing that keeps popping up is that, depending on how it's framed, either there are an awful lot of people who aren't paying their taxes, or the government is particularly ineffective at tax collection. In any case, the salient point is that taxes that, by law, should be ending up in government coffers, aren't.

The more I think about this, the more that it seems that "austerity" isn't going to solve this problem. Here's an analogy for why:

Suppose you own a store. It's the only store in the area and it sells practically everything a person might want.

Unfortunately, your store has a severe shoplifting problem. Entirely too much merchandise is walking out the door without being paid for.

Downsizing employees isn't going to stop the shoplifting. You'll have fewer people to look out for shoplifters, plus a bunch of people with insider knowledge of your store who are suddenly disgruntled against you and lacking money to pay for their purchases.

Raising prices isn't going to stop the shoplifting. If your merchandise is less affordable (or even just perceived to be unfairly priced), that's certainly not going to stop existing shoplifters from shoplifting, and might incite more people to start shoplifting because they either can't afford your new prices or don't feel it's fair to pay your new prices.

Cutting back on the range or quality of your products isn't going to stop the shoplifting. People who are going to shoplift are going to shoplift what you have. Particularly discerning customers with the means to do so may opt to travel to a larger centre to buy the product that you no longer stock, or to special-order them, which means that the customers who are best positioned to provide you with revenue will have fewer opportunities to do so.

It's true that any of these measures might fix your balance sheet temporarily, for the next quarter or so, but none of them are going to solve the real problem and they may well actually make it worse. To solve the actual problem, you need to either incentivize your customers to pay for their purchases, or make it more difficult for them to walk out without paying. Similarly, Greece needs to either convince its people to pay their taxes, or make tax evasion more difficult.

Things that took a year to make it into the news

2011-11-11T12:22:00.002-05:00

1. G20 jail photos raise alarm bells for police chair.

Why were these alarm bells not raised day of? Reports of jail conditions were making it into my twitter feed while it was still going on, and I'm not even particularly connected.

2. Getting a buried Eglinton Crosstown line across the Don River would be difficult and expensive.

Why did it take them a year to notice this? The Don River has always been there!

What if quality of housing counted towards section 37 community benefits?

2011-11-11T12:15:00.000-05:00

I was looking at City of Toronto documents for a proposed development, and I was surprised to see that the developer had to contribute a certain amount of money as "community benefits" to various projects in the area. Turns out this is set out in section 37 of Ontario's Planning Act. In basic terms, it means that if developers want more height or density than normally permitted, they have to give something back to the community in exchange. In the documents I was looking at, they suggested contributing money to parks or streetscape projects.

But what if developers could contribute their community benefits through quality of housing?

For example, what if they provided more family-sized suites, or lower prices, or more energy-efficient housing, or some combination of the above? What if they provided some of the suites for use as public housing? What if they reserved a certain number (or even all!) the suites for purchase by owners rather than investors or agents who are just going to buy and flip or rent them out for profit?

As an area resident, I find it beneficial to increase the supply of suites that meet my needs, even if I'm not immediately in the market for moving. If the supply increases, that might drive down prices, thus reducing my rent increase as well as making it easier to buy.

There would need to be measures to make sure that they don't introduce crappy housing as a baseline, upgrade it to normal housing, and call it a community benefit. There also need to be measures to make sure that this better-quality or better-value housing benefits actual residents, rather than getting snapped up by investors.

Off the top of my head, perhaps quality of housing could be measured relative to the rest of the neighbourhood. If it's basically the same as the rest of the neighbourhood, you get fewer points than if you're introducing the first building in the neighbourhood to have central air conditioning. This is analogous to how the City might try to encourage grocery stores to move into neighbourhoods that are food deserts, but wouldn't take any particular measures to encourage grocery stores to move into neighbourhoods that already have a couple of grocery stores.

To keep investors and flippers from yoinking better-value housing, perhaps the amount of community benefit credit the developer gets for building lower-priced units could be based on the number that are still occupied by the original owners after a certain amount of time. The flaw here is that the developers don't have much control over what people do with their units after they buy them, but they do have the power to stop these kinds of marketing techniques and instead focus on the actual community they're becoming a part of.

The dialogue surrounding development and intensification all too often seems to disregard the fact that what they're building are people's homes, and the people who live there will be citizens, constituents, and community members. I'd really like to see analysis of a development's impact on "the community" include the people who will be living there.

Good morning!

2011-11-11T11:40:00.002-05:00

Here's what I'm doing today and why.

There might be some posts dealing with news items that are no longer fresh, because I'll probably be tapping into my drafts folder and unblogged ideas. Just think of them as deleted scenes that are now included in DVD extras.

A faster alternative to peeling eggs

2011-11-10T19:30:00.003-05:00

The way I was taught to open hard-boiled eggs is to smash them on the counter and roll them around until there's a bunch of cracks in the shell, then peel the shell off. I find that disproportionately time-consuming (#FirstWorldProblems).

I've discovered a faster way. You know how you open a soft-boiled egg by putting it in an egg cup and tapping the shell with the spoon until it breaks into two pieces? Put your hard-boiled egg down on a plate or bowl (or the counter if no one's watching) and tap it like you would a soft-boiled egg but lengthwise instead of widthwise. Now you've got two pieces, and each piece is the perfect size to scoop out of the shell with a teaspoon. Way faster!

The disadvantage of this method is you need a spoon and perhaps a dish of some sort, but if you have a dishwasher it's more efficient.

People who are really two people

2011-11-08T21:08:00.000-05:00

When I hear of someone but they don't have particular immediate importance to me, I mentally file away their name with the set of distinguishing characteristics. Sometimes I later hear of another person with a reasonably similar set of distinguishing characteristics, and I file their name away too. Then I carry these names around for a while, not realizing that they're two different people until I see them compared or contrasted.

Here are a few people I've recently learned are two different people:

- Van Halen and Van Morrison

- Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder

- Keith Olbermann and Anderson Cooper

- Peggy Nash and Cheri DiNovo

- Brian Posehn and Louis C.K.

Fear and respect

2011-11-05T16:22:00.000-04:00

Before the G20, I respected the police and was not particularly afraid of them.

Since the G20, I'm afraid of police and find it very difficult to respect them.

It appears that, in my emotional matrix, fear and respect correlate inversely, and might even be mutually exclusive.

I'm more inclined to cooperate with people when I respect them than when I fear them. Respect makes me actually want to cooperate, whereas fear makes me just not want to get caught not cooperating. (Nuance: fear doesn't make me not want to not cooperate, it just makes me not want to get caught not cooperating.)

It would be interesting to study how universal these feelings are.

Half-formed idea: how to incentivize clinical testing of alternative medicine

2011-11-01T20:12:00.004-04:00

I previously came up with the idea that they should incentivize clinical testing of natural remedies and other alternative medicine.

Here's about half a solution: everything that has been clinically proven gets covered by OHIP.

The advantage for practitioners of alternative medicine and for patients is that treatment is no longer limited by the patient's budget. Patients can receive - and practitioners can be paid for - what treatment is needed.

The advantage for social responsibility is that this makes it easier to get things that have been tested than things that haven't been tested.

The advantage for OHIP is that alternative medicine would probably be in many areas cheaper. Pharmaceuticals and medical technology can be hellaciously expensive. If herbs or acupuncture can be proven to do just as good a job, even if it's in just 10% of situations, that would save significant money.

This would mean that OHIP would have to cover a wider range of things than it currently does, such as medication and dental care. But that's a good thing - everyone needs those things and they represent significant expenses for people who don't have benefits through their jobs. Broader coverage would be more in line with OHIP's actual mandate.

One change that would be necessary is coming up with a mechanism for OHIP to cover over-the-counter medications. Many of them have been clinically tested, and we don't want to clog up the health care system by forcing people to go to the doctor for a prescription for vitamins or decongestant. But that shouldn't be too difficult to work out. Our health cards have magnetic strips, so why not just swipe them at point of sale?

In this plan, things that have not undergone any clinical testing will still remain available and paid for at the patient's expense, like they are now. Things that have gone through testing and have been proven ineffective but harmless will also continue to be available at the patient's expense. Only things proven to be actively harmful will be pulled. So, for proponents of alternative medicine, there's no downside unless they're peddling snake venom.

The missing link in this plan is still funding and facilities for conducting the research in the first place. It's likely a significant start-up expense and I doubt there are labs just sitting around waiting to be used. They'd still have to work out that part.

Complaints about baby clothes

2011-10-30T18:22:00.000-04:00

A friend of mine is having a baby any minute now, so I was looking at baby clothes. So many of the things I saw were ridiculous! These include:

- Jeggings. For infants. The whole point of jeggings is to get a nice smooth line under your long sweater, which isn't going to work on a baby because they're chubby and bow-legged and wearing diapers.

- Those velour "juicy" tracksuits. For infants.

- Sleepers with gaudy designer logos. It doesn't seem right to make someone who doesn't understand the logo advertise the designer. They weren't even classy-looking, like some logoed handbags are. They were utterly generic and I wouldn't have looked twice at them even without the logo.

- An adorable little sleeper with a rocket ships on it, and the words "Space Boy". (And no, it wasn't from the computer game. Just generic rocket ships.) Which annoyed me, because I was totally about to buy it because rocket ships are awesome, but the baby I was shopping for is a girl. Why would the designers of this garment exclude half their potential market?

- Clothes that were so beautifully soft and fuzzy on the outside that I kept wanting to pet them, but coarser and rougher and not nice at all on the inside. Why on earth would you put the nice soft fuzzy part where the baby can't feel it, and then put something coarse and rough against the baby's skin?

I also noticed in a toy store they had smurfs in their stuffed toy section. I considered getting one (because someone gave me a smurf when I was a baby and it brought me much happiness), but they weren't nice at all. They didn't even have fur, they were just this poor quality polyester stuff.

I don't know anything about babies and I don't know anything about how to tell quality in clothes. It shouldn't be that hard to make baby clothes that I don't consider unacceptable!

Watch a dog rescue another dog!

2011-10-29T16:46:00.002-04:00

(via @EddieIzzard)

Drop everything and watch the baby goat being adorable!

2011-10-26T22:50:00.001-04:00

Things Politicians Should Invent: keep track of constituents' track record

2011-10-24T19:28:00.005-04:00

I write to my elected representatives on a fairly regular basis, often expressing concern about possible outcomes of certain policy proposals. There have been times when I've been clearly right or clearly wrong. In other words, my emails says "I'm concerned that if you pass this piece of legislation, this Unquestionably Bad Thing will happen." And sometimes it either does or does not happen. In many cases it's too soon to tell, and in many other cases I'm expressing a personal preference rather than making a prediction, but sometimes my emails contain predictive statements whose accuracy can, at some point in the future, be objectively verified.

It occurs to me that I'm most likely not the only constituent making predictive statements whose accuracy can be verified. And if this is the case, politicians' offices could keep track. Perhaps patterns will emerge as to which constituents have the best foresight, and then politicians could weight the opinions of those with the best foresight more heavily, to the benefit of us all.

Pensions

2011-10-22T19:24:00.000-04:00

Sometimes you hear of a business or employer cutting back on its employees' pensions (and sometimes governments cutting back citizens' pensions), saying it can no longer afford the pension.

Let's think about how you make a pension. You have the employees and the employer all pay in some money, usually a proportion of the salary. The amount of money they need to pay in is determined by professional pension managers. They calculate how much money is needed using actuarial tables and other complicated tools that I don't understand, then they take the money and invest it to create a fund that will pay out the promised amounts on the promised schedule.

If the pension is no longer sustainable, that means a) the pension managers fucked up, and b) more money is needed in the pension fund.

But do the people in charge of managing the pension ever face any consequences for fucking up? And do the employees ever even get offered the chance to pay what it costs to make the pension sustainable?

And then, as a result of the fact that professional pension managers who manage pensions full-time can't seem to manage pensions properly, the industry is moving towards defined contribution pensions, where those of us who aren't professional pension managers have to figure out how to manage our own pensions on top of our own full-time work.

Analogy: You hire a contractor to make your home wheelchair accessible, because a member of the household is going to need a wheelchair. You don't know much about making houses accessible, so you say "Work out what needs to be done, tell me how much it will cost, and I'll pay you in monthly installments." So the contractor works this out, you agree upon a price, and they start working and you start paying monthly installments. Then, after some time has passed, the contractor says "I can't do this. It will be do expensive." And walks away, leaving you with a half-finished, still-inaccessible house, and out a bunch of money. They never even tell you how much it will cost to finish, and when you try to hire someone to finish the job they all keep telling you to do it yourself.

***

Come to think of it, this is the core message of Occupy that the media claim to find so elusive. We want those with all the money and power to do their jobs properly and not hurt anyone. It's not much to ask, most people do it every day. If you're a pension manager, manage pensions properly. If you're an investment banker, make good investments. If you're an elected representative, represent the people who elected you. If they were doing their jobs properly and weren't hurting us, it wouldn't even occur to anywhere near as many people to calculate what percentage of the wealth they control.

Random thoughts from an old bullying incident

2011-10-21T19:49:00.000-04:00

With the recent Ontario election, I was reminded of one of my bullies. His claim to fame within the panthenon of my bullies was calling me a ho because, at the age of 12, I wasn't interested in dating yet. (It was doubly bizarre because I'd never heard the word "ho" and thought he was saying "hoe", which didn't make any sense in any universe.)

He sat in front of me in our homeroom classroom, where we had English, Math, and History classes, and he'd always turn around and harass me and mess with my stuff, stealing things and breaking things and writing on and spitting on my papers. So one day, I decided his actions should have consequences. I looked around for a weapon, and decided on my purple glue stick. Next time he started touching my stuff, I said "If you don't leave my stuff alone, I'll put glue on your shirt." He persisted in messing with my stuff, so I put glue on his shirt. He rather freaked out, and said that he'd tell his mother on me, and, since she was a teacher, I'd get in trouble.

As it happened, I knew his mother. She took over my Grade 2 class for a semester when our regular teacher went on maternity leave. I would have had no problem whatsoever explaining to her that her son repeatedly turned around and harassed me and messed with my stuff, and that I had clearly stated the consequences of continuing to do so. If he didn't want glue on his shirt, all he had to do was leave me alone. I figured that since she was a teacher, she'd get particularly mad at him for turning around and disturbing me in class when we were supposed to be working. I thought I might get in trouble with my own parents (which didn't bother me because I felt my actions were just), but I had no fear whatsoever of the prospect of explaining to a teacher the measures I'd taken to be left alone so I could do my class work.

(At this point, some of you are no doubt expecting me to say that this bully never bothered me again after I retaliated. Would be a nice plot resolution, but it didn't work out that way. He bullied me for the rest of the school year, after which we were never in the same class again.)

I have a number of thoughts arising from this incident, none of them conclusive:

1. How is it possible that a student could, on a regular basis, get away with turning completely around in his seat and bothering the person behind him during times when they were supposed to be working or listening? Turning around is visually conspicuous.

2. My bullies would always bully me any time they saw or thought that I had been speaking to my parents. When my parents tried to give me anti-bullying strategies, my bullies would say "Did your mommy tell you to say/do that?" I even got bullied for being seen with my parents out in public. In an environment like this, how does it even occur to a person immersed in bullying culture to invoke telling his mother?

3. The reason I thought it was a possibility I might get in trouble with my own parents was that grownups in those days seemed to have the attitude that just bugging someone didn't count as misbehaviour. I don't know if it was my own family or a broader social attitude of that time and place, but if, for example, my sister kept opening the door to my room and trying to come in even though I didn't want her to so eventually I shoved her out, I'd get in trouble for shoving her, but she wouldn't get in trouble for barging into my room. In retrospect, that's bizarre. In the real world, someone who keeps forcing their presence on someone else despite their protests at the very least gets a "WTF is wrong with you?"

4. The reason why I felt it was just to put glue on his shirt is a) it was proportionate to what he was doing to my things, and b) I gave him fair warning. It might not have been kind or ethical or virtuous or the kind of behaviour to which we should aspire, but I felt it was just. Sometimes I wish the rules of the real world worked this way - you give someone fair warning, and then you can take proportionate action or impose natural consequences. For example, if someone who's being harassed by paparazzi says "I do not consent to being photographed. If you take any pictures of me, I will disable your camera so you can't take any more pictures," and then they act accordingly, they'll be made out to be angry and unstable. But, really, that's natural consequences and a fair warning. Obviously I don't mean "Give me all your money or I'll shoot you," I mean more as self-defence, to get people to leave you alone. Which goes back to my previous point about lack of respect for simply wanting to be left alone.

5. One thing that made this particular kind of harassment especially annoying is I was trapped. If I faced forward and did my work like I was supposed to, he was in my face. The only way to escape him was to turn around (thus bothering someone else) and not do my work. This is why, of all the bullying I faced, the one that came from my sister was the worst - I couldn't escape her because we lived in the same house, and our parents kept making it so that we had to spend our free time trapped in the car together. In comparison, once when I was in high school, on a band concert day, this one guy kept following me around telling me how hot I looked, with enough skeeviness that he wasn't going to get anywhere. I was kind of worried because his brother was my ride home, and I didn't look forward to being trapped in a crowded car with him. But on the car ride home, he behaved himself. He didn't take up any more than his fair share of space and talked normally with everyone about subjects unrelated to how hot I looked. I gained enormous respect for him for that. He was skeevy when I could walk away, but put it away when I was trapped. No one ever taught, or even explicitly stated, that nuance - that it's no longer "just in good fun" (if you can make the argument that it ever was) when you can't walk away. I wonder if it would have helped?

Always Infinity

2011-10-19T22:43:00.000-04:00

This post is a review of a feminine hygiene product. As such, it contains descriptions of menstruation. If you don't want to read that sort of thing, skip this post.

I recently received a sample of Always Infinity, with instructions to use it on a heavy flow day. Today was my first heavy flow day since I got the sample, so I gave it a try.

The first thing I noticed is how much less noticeable it is when I'm wearing it. It's more flexible and conforms more naturally to the curve of my underwear. I'd never consider my usual Always Ultra Thin as particularly noticeable when I wear it or as not conforming to the curve of my underwear, but Infinity does it better enough that a couple of times I found myself checking to make sure I did in fact put a pad in.

I also noticed that the blood in the pad looks browner and dryer than the same blood would in an Always Ultra Thin. I can't tell why this is happening, but it might be an issue for people who need to monitor the quality of their menstruation for health reasons.

I don't have enough data to comment on absorbency. Based on the one pad I've been wearing today, it appears to be about the same, maybe slightly greater. But I don't have an especially heavy flow when I'm on the pill - a heavy flow day for me is preferably 2 pads but I can get away with one. I'd have to try it over several cycles to get a better sense of its absorbency, and really it would be more informative to get that information from someone with a 12 pad a day flow.

The verdict: more comfortable, no drawbacks unless you need to monitor the quality of your menstruation. The difference between Ultra Thin and Infinity isn't enough to make me put aside my remaining jumbo pack of Ultra Thin and switch right over to Infinity, but it's enough to make me consider going straight for the Infinity next time I need to buy a new pack.

We are part of the 99%

2011-10-15T16:51:00.009-04:00

The following picture was tweeted into my timeline. I don't know its origin, but I felt compelled to respond.

If you can't read it, there's a transcript below. As usual, any typoes are my own.

I am a college senior, about to graduate completely debt free.
I pay for all of my living expenses by working 30+ hours a week making barely above minimum wage. I chose a moderately priced, in-state public university & started saving $ for school at age 17.
I got decent grades in high school & received 2 scholarships which cover 90% of my tuition.
I currently have a 3.8 GPA
I live comfortably in a cheap apt., knowing I can't have everything I want. I don't eat out every day, or even once a month. I have no credit card, new car, iPad or smart phone - and I'm perfectly okay with that.
If I did have debt, I would not blame Wall St. or the government for my own bad decisions.
I live below my means to continue saving for the future.
I expect nothing to be handed to me, and will continue to work my @$$ off for everything I have.
That's how it's supposed to work.
I am NOT the 99%, and whether or not you are is YOUR decision.

Greetings, anonymous picture person, I'm very pleased to meet you! It sounds like we have a lot in common! I also graduated from university debt-free. I also paid my way with low-wage jobs (although, after about five years in the workforce, I was able to pull my way up to 150% of minimum wage). I also saved money for university, although I started at the age of 8. I also earned scholarships with my mid-90s average. I'm glad you get to live comfortably in an apartment! I couldn't justify the luxury of an actual apartment, so I lived in a cheap single room in student housing where things would crawl out of walls and give me panic attacks. (This also meant I had to eat out if I wanted to share a meal with friends, because I didn't have a kitchen or the physical space for more than one person to eat.) I did have a credit card in university because I'm up to the simple task of paying it off in full every month, but if you can't handle that then I applaud your decision not to have one. Even a used car was an unnecessary luxury at the time (still is, in fact), and the other things on your list didn't exist then (although I still don't have them because I can't justify the expense of a data plan.) After I graduated, I was hired by the place where I did my internships on the basis of the excellent work I did for them, and have been happily employed there ever since, with my duties now including overseeing internships for people like you. I've been able to afford an actual apartment and, a few years later, a nice apartment, still living within my means.

Isn't it satisfying when you do what you're supposed to do and things work out like they're supposed to work out?

That's what Occupy is fighting for. A world where you do what you're supposed to do and things work out like they're supposed to work out. Where you can get over 30 hours a week of work. Where universities are moderately priced. Where you can go to university even if you didn't start saving until you were 17. Where good grades will get you scholarships that will pay the majority of your tuition. Where a student can afford a cheap apartment and a used car. Where five years of hard work and brains enough to win scholarships will get you more than barely over minimum wage. Where saving for the future is even an option.

The 1%, the rich and the powerful, fucked up the world's economy, wrote themselves bonus cheques that are orders of magnitude bigger than the likes of us who have to pay our way through school on scholarships and low wages will see in a lifetime, and are trying to make the rest of us, the 99% (which does include you, BTW - even with today's unemployment rates, scholarships and 30 hours a week don't put you in the richest 1%), pay for it by creating a world where it will be harder and harder to have things work out just by doing what you're supposed to do. They're trying to make there be fewer jobs, have them less well-compensated and less secure, and at the same time to reduce available public services. This means that it will be harder for you to get and keep your 30 hours and you'll get paid less for it, and at the same time your tuition will go up and your scholarships will go down.

Occupy is not about blaming Wall St. or the government for your bad decisions, it's about the things that you and I value - hard work and planning for the future - working out the way they're supposed to work.

You are part of the 99%. Being part of it is not your decision, unless you're powerful enough to unilaterally become part of the riches 1% AND ensure that everyone else stays poorer than you. But what you do with it is your decision.

Do employers not have respect for basic work ethic?

2011-10-14T19:38:00.000-04:00

A common job interview question is "Why do you want this job?" And the true answer, "Because it's a job," is not acceptable.

Based on what my parents and grandparents tell me about their employment history, it seems you used to be able to get a job on the basis that you need a job and the job in question is a job and you're capable of doing the job in question. Employers would hire their employees' kids in the summer solely on the basis that the kids needed summer jobs. They didn't need to convince the employer of why they wanted to shovel coke or pack meat, it was obvious that they needed to make money. Apparently they even used to have designated places where people who needed work and employers who needed day labourers would all go and match themselves up with each other. The employers would hire people simply because they were there and willing to work!

And yet, every job I've interviewed for, including fast food, has had a "Why do you want this job?" question.

When did this start happening? Why do they do it? It makes me wonder if today's employers don't have respect for basic work ethic, that they went and created a world where willingness to work to earn a living is not considered sufficient motivation.

Some post-election information

2011-10-12T20:41:00.004-04:00

1. The report from Three Ontario Votes (which I've mentioned before) is now out. I'm disappointed they didn't do a full seat count for the AV model, but otherwise it's informative.

2. My traditional post-election test of the Hill & Knowlton Election Predictor: Using the actual popular vote as reported by CBC, Hill & Knowlton predicts Liberal 56, Conservative 31, NDP 20. Actual seat count: Liberal 53, Conservative 37, NDP 17.

The scariest thing I've read lately

2011-10-09T17:12:00.003-04:00

The following is a quote from John Lanchester's I.O.U.: Why Everyone Owes Everyone and No One Can Pay. As usual, any typos are my own:

By June 2008, the International Swaps and Derivatives Association, or ISDA - the association of companies dealing in this stuff - was estimating the total size of the [derivatives] market as $54 trillion, close to the total GDP of the planet and many times more valuable than the total number of all the stocks and shares traded in the world.

That terrifies me, because derivatives are entirely artificial. They just made them up because they wanted new financial products. Meanwhile, the GDP of the planet is real. It's the money we make for doing our jobs, the money our employers make from selling the products and services we produce, the money we spend on our rent and groceries and cough syrup and haircuts. And yet, this entirely artificial thing that fucked up the global economy was close to being bigger than anything real!

And, since the derivatives market was many times more valuable than all the stocks and shares in the world, this meant that the portion of financial work that comes close to touching on reality was utterly marginalized in favour of this wholly artificial creation.

And, with it, they managed to fuck up the global economy.

How can those of us who have to live in reality, and make and buy and do real things, possibly feel safe?

What if some people are better at materialism than others?

2011-10-09T12:16:00.000-04:00

Some people think that money, or accruing material objects, doesn't lead to happiness. My personal experience is that it my money and my material possessions do make me happy. There are a lot of opinions about this in the world, but most of them (including what I've blogged previously on the subject) are rather absolutist, in that they assume it applies to everyone the same way.

But what if it doesn't?

The first possibility that comes to mind is that different people gain different degrees of happiness from materialism. But sometimes I hear people saying materialism doesn't lead to happiness in the first person, i.e. describing how they would purchase material goods thinking it would make them happy, but it didn't.

I've never had that happen to me. How does that even happen? How do you not know that something isn't going to make you happy, and how does this happen repeatedly?

Which leads to the second possibility: what if some people are better at materialism than others? What if some of us are good at judging in advance what material possessions will make us happy, whereas others are just purchasing stuff willy-nilly or are easily deluded regarding what will make them happy?

How does the aging population affect voter turnout numbers?

2011-10-08T22:28:00.000-04:00

With the low voter turnout in last week's provincial election in the news, I find myself thinking of my grandmother.

My grandmother has been losing her faculties for some time, but between the last election and this one, she's being diagnosed with Alzheimer's and put in a nursing home. I don't know if she voted, and I don't know if there's any mechanism other than logistics to stop her from voting if she wants to. However, I do know that she's probably not competent to vote - she has enough memory problems that she simply cannot develop an informed political opinion - and I do know that she's most likely still on the voter's list at her old address, where she lived and received a voter card for every election for 60 years.

In calculating voter turnout, she counted as a no-show. But if she didn't vote, that isn't actually a problem.

As the population ages, we're going to have more and more people in my grandmother's situation. I wonder if this will be enough to affect overall voter turnout numbers?

What I have to thank Steve Jobs for

2011-10-08T20:39:00.000-04:00

The time: early 80s. The place: the spare room in my parents' house. My father spent hours at the machine, staring lines and lines of green, hard-to-read words. I toddled up to see what was so interesting, and discovered that, even though the screen was boring, it had BUTTONS! So, of course, I tried to push the buttons.

In one of his better parenting decisions, rather than telling me not to push the buttons, my father decided to teach me which buttons to push. We started with a simple kiddie game called Bouncing Numbers. A number bounced around the screen, and I had to press the same number on the keyboard. To get to the game, I had to put a certain diskette into the disk drive, then type "RUN BOUNCING NUMBERS". So many letters, and it took a long time to find them all because the buttons with the letters on them weren't in any sensible order! But I figured it out and quickly became fluent in it. I learned how to run some other games, got into one of the programming books and started writing simple programs, and by the time I reached kindergarten I was confidently computer-literate.

Many people have written tributes to Steve Jobs in the past few days, most often singing the praises of Apple's 21st-century creations. But Apple's first inventions were some of the very first home computers ever. Bringing the computer into the home enabled me, and thousands of others like me, to become fluent computer users before we could tie our shoes. We'd then invite our friends over to play computer games, and, within a generation, computers evolved in popular consciousness from big scary geeky technology to something anyone can just sit down and figure out.

Voter's Resources

2011-10-06T21:00:00.000-04:00

Since we just had a federal election in May, I'm not rewriting everything from scratch. The pertinent links are below. For how to use them, click on "How to Vote", "Where to Vote", and "How to Vote Strategically" below. As usual, this post will be updated until election day. If I've missed anything, please let me know in the comments.

Getting Started

Election day is October 6.

Voter information from Elections Ontario

My How to Vote
My Where to Vote
My How to Vote Strategically

Platforms

Conservative
Green
Liberal
NDP

Tools

CBC Vote Compass
Election Prediction Project
Hill and Knowlton Predictor
DemocraticSPACE
LISPOP
Riding-by-riding polls for the GTA

Voted

2011-10-06T18:46:00.002-04:00

Another election on a beautiful day, and another provincial election nursing a virus (which has mutated from a sore throat to a runny nose today). I encountered many many doggies today and got a lot of petting in, including my next-door neighbour's dog for the whole elevator wait and ride. Hopefully that's enough good luck.

I didn't get a voter's card this year and had to wait in a bit of a line to register (a process that was a bit slower than I recall) but it got done in under half an hour with no particular difficulties. I voted in a seniors' residence instead of a school this time. Some of the residents were milling around outside watching all the comings and goings, and I believe some of them were working at the polling station. Nice friendly community-like chat waiting in line, dogs and children got squeed at, and the whole process took under half an hour.

Now I'm at home to nurse my cold and a glass of wine, and watch results.

Complaints about vitaminwater

2011-10-05T21:22:00.001-04:00

Given the sudden dearth of Fruitopia in my environs, I decided to try the flavour of vitaminwater that looked like it was indicated for fighting a cold ("defense" it's called, complete with USian spelling.)

1. The flavour said raspberry-apple. It didn't taste like raspberry, or apple, or fake raspberry, or fake apple. It tasted like fake cranberry. If I wanted that, I'd get cranberry juice.

2. The nutrients featured prominently on the label were vitamin C and zinc. However, on reading the fine print, I noticed these were the last two of the medicinal ingredients, behind a bunch of B vitamins (which, while important nutrients, are not what I'm after when I'm fighting a virus).

3. It contains 90 mg of vitamin C and 3.75 mg of zinc. In contrast, my vitamin C supplements contain 500 mg, and my zinc lozenges contain 35 mg (plus 50 mg of vitamin C).

I suppose I should have read the label in detail before I bought it, but I'm used to things sold medicinally (and this is labelled medicinally, with medicinal and non-medicinal ingredients rather than a nutrition box) containing significant amounts of the nutrients they're meant to supplement. In any case, I resent actual foodstuff (i.e. fruit juice) being taken off the shelves in favour something that's less food-like, less nutritious, less effective, and less yummy. I don't mind fake food in and of itself, but I don't want it displacing real food!

Where has all the fruit punch gone?

2011-10-04T19:05:00.000-04:00

Normally, I drink water during the day and with meals. However, I'm currently nursing a sore throat (likely viral), so I find myself wanting juice.

Citrus juices are on my no list for GERD, so I decided I'd drink fruit punch. At home I just mixed up a jug of Minute Maid fruit punch from concentrate (which has been my default juice since childhood), and at work I figured I'd just buy a couple of single-serving bottles of the same stuff or its Fruitopia equivalent.

But they don't sell it anywhere. Cafeteria, food court, drugstores, convenience stores, the juice aisle in the grocery store - no one has single-serving bottles of fruit punch, or in fact any non-citrus non-cranberry fruit juice.

They sell orange juice, lemonade, cranberry juice (which I'm not terribly fond of and, at least in the forms being sold in single-serving bottles, does not have significant amounts of vitamin C), and a bunch of sports drinks and vitamin water concoctions.

But I don't want fortified flavoured water when I'm sick, I want actual fruit juice! The sweetness is what soothes my throat and makes it go down easier than water.

Last time I was sick in a way that made me want juice, you could get a few different kinds of Fruitopia everywhere. Now you can't. It seems to have all been replaced with vitamin water. I already have vitamins and water in my arsenal, what I need is juice. But, somehow, it's been discontinued.

Things They Should Invent: central repository of research ideas

2011-10-03T20:16:00.003-04:00

As I've blogged about before, one thing I really enjoy about the workplace as opposed to academia is that I don't have to come up with my own ideas for what to work on. All my major projects, even in undergrad, were "think of a topic and do a project on it," and I could never think of a good topic or tell what kind of topic would produce a good project. In the workplace, I simply translate what I'm assigned. This is one of the reasons why I haven't done a graduate degree - the idea of having to think up a thesis topic (and probably project topics for the coursework) puts me off now that I've become accustomed to a world where I simply do what I'm told.

However, I often come up with ideas for research in other fields.

Surely I'm not the only person in the world who has trouble thinking of something suitable to research. And surely I'm not the only person in the world who occasionally thinks "Hey, someone should do a study on that!"

So why not put the two together?

We need one single central website where people can post any research ideas they come up with, and would-be researchers can look for good ideas. The ideas could be random things that occur to you, or they could be information you want for which no research has been conducted (for example, if you'd like clinical testing conducted on a natural remedy you're considering). Prospective researchers could use ideas or use them as a jumping-off point for their own ideas. Researchers who do use ideas could mark them as such, thus drawing attention to their research. Users could also vote for other ideas, so the ideas that more people like get a more prominent place on the page. Perhaps this demand for the research could even be a factor in helping secure research grants?

Things They Should Invent: drop-in daycare in medical buildings

2011-10-02T15:40:00.000-04:00

This post was inspired by the following question from a Carolyn Hax chat:

Hello, I am feeling very overwhelmed and hope that I can get a kick in the pants. I have 2 children under 2. My husband and I moved to a city we hate - despite months of attempts, the moms groups have been very cold to me, for example. He is getting deployed, and is away for weeks at a time. It takes everything in my power to get up each morning and do things with my kids. I know I am battling with depression and/or PPD, but I can't go to a therapist because I don't have child care. I know the steps to take to help improve my mood and stress level (exercise, etc.) but I can't drag myself out of it all to start, and I just wind up eating junk on the couch after the kids go to bed. Any words of advice? Thanks, I've been reading this chat since the beginning.

Reading this, I remembered how one of the community pools where we'd have swimming lessons had a "daycare", which was really just a room where kids could go and play with toys under adult supervision while their parents participated in adult swim classes or took a younger sibling to an infant class.

So why not put something similar in medical buildings?

It would be easier than a regular daycare from the perspective of all parties. The daycare operators wouldn't need to plan a curriculum or provide snacks since the kids would only be there for an hour or two. And the parents wouldn't need to worry about whether the daycare provides an optimal curriculum and a classroom environment that's conducive to social development, all they need for a couple of hours is for it to be safe.

It wouldn't even be terribly extortionate for the daycare to be run on a for-profit basis and charge the parents market rates for their kids to attend, because any parents who are in the market for drop-in daycare while they attend a medical appointment would otherwise have to pay for child care during their medical appointment anyway.

I'm surprised there aren't more things like this.

Teach me how union finances work

2011-10-01T22:00:00.000-04:00

There is clear choice in this election, said Hudak from Dundas on Saturday. Taxpayers can’t afford to pay big union boss salaries anymore or pay for their ad campaigns, he has said.

Does Tim Hudak not understand how union finances work, or do I not understand how union finances work?

My understanding, extrapolated from conversations with union members and observations from having worked in a unionized environment, is that union members pay union dues out of their salaries, and the expenses of operating the union (including advertising and any pay the union leaders receive for doing their union leader duties) are all funded from the union dues. My understanding is that the employer does not pay into the union (wouldn't that be a heinous conflict of interest?) So the amount of money a union spends on various things is between the union and its members.

Extrapolated to the provincial government, this means that the money union leaders get for their work as union leaders and the money unions spend on ad campaigns come out of the pockets of provincial public servants, in their role as the employees. The taxpayers, in their role as employer, aren't paying for any of it. And what the unions spend money on is between them and the public servants - the taxpayers and the government, in their capacity as employer, have no say in it or authority to change it.

Am I understanding this correctly? If not, please correct me in the comments.

Wherein I once again consider a career as a political advisor

2011-09-30T19:53:00.001-04:00

Me in January 2009.

Bob Rae today.

Things They DID Invent: Interview Your Bully

2011-09-28T20:56:00.003-04:00

A while back, I came up with the idea of interviewing bullies and other mean people to get inside their head and find out what they're thinking.

Turns out Salon is doing it, having people interview their bullies! Half of me thinks this is brilliant, half of me thinks no good can possibly come of it, and half of me wishes I was brave enough to do it myself.

Things They Should Invent: sleepable ER waiting rooms

2011-09-26T14:52:00.004-04:00

This story of a blogger's experience in the ER got tweeted into my twitter feed, and what struck me reading it is that, because he arrived in the ER in the evening and had to wait several hours, he basically went a night without sleep.

This sounds like a solvable problem.

What if there were cots for ER patients waiting to be seen? What if there were recliner chairs? What if, instead of just calling patients' names, the admissions people would actually go out into the waiting room to find them?

If patients could sleep in the waiting room, that makes wait times less of a problem. Compare the prospect of sitting for hours in an uncomfortable chair in a room full of sick people vs. the prospect of taking a nap and they'll wake you up when they're able to treat you. It would turn some ER visits (for example, a small child with a fever) from a nightmare to a mere inconvenience. Sleeping certainly gets better health outcomes than sleep deprivation. And hospital staff will have to deal with fewer angry/agitated/distressed patients if a significant number of patients are asleep.

With a few changes in furnishings and interior decoration, they can make the whole ER experience far easier and less stressful for everyone.

The Ontario voter list mystery

2011-09-25T14:55:00.000-04:00

I'm not on the Ontario voter list this election. I'm never on the Ontario voter list. Every single Ontario election since I was 18, I didn't receive a voter card and had to register on election day.

I have voted in (and registered at) every Ontario election since I was 18. Last election, I lived at the same address as I do now, so my registration from last election should be valid.

I was registered federally for, and voted in, the election this past May, and I'm pretty sure both federal and provincial get their voter's lists from the tax rolls. I recently got a jury duty questionnaire, which means provincial does know about me. But I'm not on the voter's list. And the same thing happens every election. Weird.

Things They Should Invent: incentivize clinical testing of natural remedies

2011-09-24T15:54:00.000-04:00

Whenever I'm looking into natural remedies for various things, I keep running up against the problem that clinical testing simply hasn't been done so answers don't exist to the questions I have. A lot of the time I'm willing to take the risk and try it out on myself, but for certain things (like if I think might weaken my birth control pills, for example) I want hard data. And I keep googling up against the fact that studies haven't been done, because studies aren't required for natural remedies.

I don't want to make clinical testing mandatory, because that would take a bunch of stuff off the shelves until it gets tested, even if many people have been using it harmlessly and effectively for years and years. I just want to create some kind of carrot to encourage testing of natural remedies, and to remove any barriers to testing them.

Unfortunately, I don't have any specific ideas that wouldn't have been thought of already. They'd be able to put "clinically tested" on the label. They know that already. They could do they research as pure science, through universities, rather than commercially like pharmaceutical companies do. They know that already. Someone could start a non-profit. They know that already.

But it would be extremely useful if this could somehow be made to happen, and it would increase the credibility of natural remedies in the eyes of those who are likely to be skeptical, including conventional medical professionals who are disinclined to recommend useful remedies solely on the basis that they haven't undergone formal testing.

Teach me how Catholic school funding works

2011-09-23T19:48:00.004-04:00

People talk about Catholic school funding as though everyone is paying for it out of their own taxes. Most recent example I've seen is from this article, written by a Catholic school parent:

Now, you’ll hear defenders of the current discriminatory system say that the Catholic board is funded only by Catholic taxpayers who choose to direct their school taxes to the separate system. Not true: Catholic and public schools alike are funded by general provincial revenues, and the amount of funding each school gets is determined for both systems by a per-pupil formula set by the province. But even if it were true, it would be grossly unjust. Those who send their children to private schools aren’t exempt from paying taxes to fund the public system, just as those who drive are not exempted from paying taxes to support transit capital costs.

So here's where I'm confused: from time to time, I receive a form from the municipal property assessment people that contains a question about which school board I want to support. I don't remember the exact wording and I don't have a form with me so I'm probably missing some information, but I remember that anyone can support the English-language public board, people who meet certain Catholic requirements (which I meet by virtue of having been baptised) can support the Catholic boards, and people who meet certain Francophone requirements (which I do not meet) can support the French-language boards. You can vote for trustees only in the board you support.

So is everyone really paying for the Catholic boards, or are they only being paid for by people who direct their taxes that way on their assessment? If they're being paid for by everyone, why does the municipal property assessment ask us which board we want to support? If they're only being paid for by people who direct their taxes that way, why do so many people think they're being paid for by everyone?

Ever wondered what Ontario would look like with a different electoral system?

2011-09-22T19:08:00.000-04:00

Check out Three Ontario Votes. You go and cast an imaginary ballot under three different electoral systems, and after the election they'll release the results, so we can see what our province would look like with a different electoral system.

Previous results models for different electoral systems use real-life election data, which is problematic because some voters' strategies might be different under a different electoral system. But this model lets you cast a vote under each of the systems being tested, for the election that's actually happening right now in real time.

We'll get extremely useful information out of this study - more useful than any existing data to inform any future decisions about electoral reform. I strongly encourage everyone of all political stripes to go to Three Ontario Votes and vote with each of the ballots so this information will be as complete as possible.

How I want my doctor to approach alternative medicine.

2011-09-19T21:01:00.000-04:00

I was pleased to see that CPSO is considering guidelines that are more open-minded about alternative medicine, but I'm concerned at the kinds of criticism this idea is receiving.

I would love to have my doctor give me alternative medicine advice because then I'd get one-stop shopping. My doctor would tell me if I would benefit from seeing a gastroenterologist or a gynecologist or a dermatologist. He would tell me if I would benefit from taking a certain vitamin or if I should avoid a certain over-the-counter drug. I'd also like him to tell me if I'd benefit from seeing a naturopath or taking a certain herb. I don't want to have to come up with the idea myself.

However, it concerns me that some organizations don't want CPSO even thinking about alternative medicine because it's "unscientific" or "unproven".

The reason why many alternative therapies are "unproven" is because they aren't required to undergo the same scientific testing as conventional medicine, so they often don't. The fact that they're unproven doesn't mean that they don't work, it doesn't mean that they're dangerous, it just means that the science hasn't been done yet.

Analogy: I have never in my life undergone any sort of formal English-language proficiency testing. That doesn't mean I can't speak English. Of course, you can't go around blindly assuming that I can speak English either, but you could conduct an informal, unscientific test by speaking to me in English, and the results of that would be a pretty good indicator.

I'm also worried that critics seem to be assuming that unproven = harmful. It's very possible for something to not have been tested scientifically but not be harmful. It's even possible for it be ineffective but not be harmful.

Analogy: When I was having difficulty swallowing, I googled up the reflexology points for the esophagus and massaged them. Is reflexology scientifically proven? A quick google is inconclusive. (To say nothing of the fact that my amateur attempt at reflexology was probably not properly done.) But it certainly wasn't harmful for me to sit there massaging my own feet on the off-chance that it might help.

One of the (many) things that frustrates me about GERD "treatment" is that conventional medicine and naturopathy recommend different (and often contradictory) diet changes. For example, conventional medicine says no to citrus and yes to low-fat milk products, and naturopathy is the other way around. So I find myself in the position of having two trained, credentialed, experienced professionals, both of whom have gotten results for me in the past, telling me opposite things. And, because I don't feel pain when I'm refluxing, I can't even do an experiment and see which works best for me.

I see conventional and alternative medicines as complementary tools in my toolkit, and I want my practitioners to work together as a team rather than competing with each other. When I see medical professionals getting alarmist, conflating "unproven" with "dangerous", it starts making me wonder if they have something to hide. And I don't want to be wondering if they have something to hide, because I need to be able to trust them - I'm not smart enough to figure stuff out myself.

If my doctor were to start warning me away from all alternative treatments just because they haven't gone through full clinical testing, I'll just end up feeling disinclined to tell him about any alternative treatments I might be experimenting with. I want him to warn me away from anything known to be dangerous, point me towards any treatments or alternative medicine professionals likely to be useful, and non-judgementally give me any information he might have about things that are harmless but likely ineffective. Anything less is useless to me and weakens the credibility of his profession in my eyes.

Why I've lost confidence in Dell

2011-09-17T19:42:00.001-04:00

Every computer I've ever owned myself has been a Dell. Up until this past week, my experience with them has been consistent: I get 4ish good years of use, then have a hardware problem. The faulty hardware problem is promptly resolved via excellent warranty support, and I get another year or two out of the computer, after which I'm happy to replace it for something more up to date. Because of this longevity and excellent support, I've always blindly turned to Dell when buying my next computer, figuring it means I won't have to worry about my computer for five years.

Unfortunately, this confidence was shattered this past week.

The computer is a Dell XPS 15 bought brand new in December 2010. Last Saturday, I started having problems with Windows loading. Sometimes it would freeze on the Welcome screen, sometimes I'd get a black screen with a mouse cursor, sometimes the desktop would load but nothing I clicked on would do anything. After a System Restore failed without rebooting Windows, I called tech support.

I didn't have to wait on hold at all, just do the menu dance, and a very nice tech walked me through some troubleshooting. I appreciate his work because he started at a more advanced level than I'd been troubleshooting at rather than reiterating the basics, and was very patient through a troubleshooting process that took over an hour. We eventually determined there was a problem with my wifi adapter (I hadn't noticed because my primary internet connection uses an ethernet cable), so he uninstalled and reinstalled it, and my computer booted up beautifully. He then told me that I'd be receiving an automatic follow-up email, and if I had any further problems I should forward the email to the address indicated and they'd give me a priority call back. Brilliant idea! That would mean we don't have to troubleshoot from scratch if the problem reoccurs!

Unfortunately, the problem reoccured the next day (Sunday). And, on top of that, the computer couldn't find the wifi adapter that had just been reinstalled the day before. So I forwarded the email to the address indicated and got an automatic reply saying they aim to reply within six hours during their business hours (9-7 Central).

But they never called back.

I emailed again on Monday and Wednesday and tweeted @DellCares (who requested a DM with pertinent information and said they'd look into it), but I never got my callback.

Meanwhile, my computer was deteriorating. I was working in Safe Mode with networking, unable to access games or music or word processing. Boot-up was slower each time, the computer couldn't always detect its network card, bizarre things started happening (itunes opening when I plug in my ipod even though I specifically set it not to do that, then telling me it couldn't read the iphone even though it isn't an iphone; browsers giving me random encoding errors even on simple websites).

On Thursday, I gave up. I got an external hard drive, backed up all my stuff, and reinstalled everything from scratch using my recovery disk. It took three hours (back-up, reinstallation, and getting all my settings just so), but everything has been working properly since then (knock wood).

But this makes me lose confidence in Dell for two reasons:

1. Serious, mysterious problems that hinder useability even though my computer is only nine months old. I've never before in my lifelong relationship with Dell had to actually use the recovery disks. This makes me nervous. Whenever a boot-up takes a second or two longer than usual, I start worrying that it's a sign of a serious problem.

2. I didn't get a "priority" callback! I waited five days, requested it four times through two different mediums, and no one called me. I've always gone with Dell because I could trust their support, and now I can't? And this despite the fact that I invested in the biggest warranty possible? What will happen when I have a bigger hardware problem that can't be fixed with a full reinstall?

In the interest of fairness, I should say that I never called Dell back either. I had the option of calling them again and starting from scratch, and I opted not to, first because I still had internet access in safe mode and I decided I'd rather relax and go about my life than wait on hold/going through first-level support. I figured the phone would ring when there was someone ready and available to give me second-level support. I should also point out that, in response to my second complaint to them, @DellCares apologized and told me to contact them so they could escalate me if the problems reoccur after reinstallation.

But I've still lost confidence, mostly because they specifically told me that forwarding the email to the address specified would get me a priority callback, and it didn't. What other promised support might I not get in the future? What if it happens when I need to work? What it happens when I'm away from home and my full resources and dependent on wifi? (That is why I bought a laptop in the first place, even if I don't often end up taking it out of my apartment.) What if I were a less technically proficient customer and a full recovery wasn't easily feasible for me? And WTF even was the problem in the first place?

This loss of confidence spirals out and affects my interpretation of my whole relationship with the company. For example, during my tech support call, the technician told me about a product Dell solves that detects and repairs problems with your system. It was clearly part of his script to push this product, which I normally wouldn't have given any thought. But sitting there working in Safe Mode awaiting a callback that wasn't coming, I started wondering if they put something in the computers to deliberately make them malfunction so they can push this product.

Sometimes when people blog about problems with products or support, the company wants to make it right. The unfortunate thing in this case is that there's nothing Dell can do to make it right, apart from doing their jobs properly in the future. Getting my callback now would be useless since I got the computer working. Free stuff would be useless because there simply isn't anything I need from Dell. A store credit would be irrelevant because there wasn't money involved in this interaction, unless they wanted to give me a store credit that would last for five years and win back my trust in the meantime. (If I do have to buy a new computer in less than five years, it won't be from Dell).

All Dell can do to win back my confidence is have my computer work properly for the rest of its planned life, and give me support properly next time I need to call them, preferably without trying to sell me software at the same time. But, even so, I'll probably be doing at least some cursory comparison shopping next time.

Update: Dell initiated a follow-up call on Tuesday (9 days after I requested a call back) and we made contact on Wednesday after a round of telephone tag. They apologized for the delay, saying it was due to "technical reasons" (which doesn't instill confidence when I'm after a solution to a technical problem), listened to my whole story, and apologized for the mix-up, but there wasn't much else they could do for me because I'd already used the recovery disk.

Programming note

2011-09-12T21:34:00.001-04:00

Currently experiencing technical difficulties. Blogging will resume once they've been resolved. Expect a review of the Dell XPS 15 and Dell warranty support once I'm back.

What to do when someone is standing in front of the seat you want on the subway

2011-09-09T20:30:00.000-04:00

I always get really annoyed by people who stand in front of empty seats on the subway, blocking access to those seats for others who might want to sit down.

The other day, I was inadvertently that idiot standing in front of the seat. (The seat was vacated just before I was about to get off the train myself, and I was too oblivious to think to move.)

This lady moves in towards the seat, but I'm blocking the way. So she says to me "Oh, sorry, were you going to sit there?" Which led me to step back from the seat, give it to her, and apologize.

Some people argue that you should just ask standers who are blocking seats to move so you can sit down, but not everyone is comfortable with that approach and it is marginally confrontational, asking the stander to stop doing something (thus implying that they're being bad). This lady's approach allows both people to save face and look generous by offering the seat to each other, with the same end result.

Thanks, subway lady, and I apologize again for blocking your seat!

Things They Should Invent: install stomach lining in the esophagus

2011-09-08T18:46:00.002-04:00

Stomach acid is one of the most acidic things there is, but it doesn't harm the stomach because the stomach lining is strong enough to withstand it. However, it causes damage when it refluxes up into the esophagus, because the esophagus isn't meant to withstand stomach acid and therefore isn't strong enough.

Solution: come up with a way to line acid reflux patients' esophaguses (maybe just the bottom, maybe the whole thing) with stomach lining, so the acid reflux can't do any more damage.

Ideas on where to get the stomach lining from: could they remove a thin layer (not the whole thing) from the patient's stomach? Could they transplant it from a dead person? Could they grow it in a test tube from stem cells? Could they grow it in the esophagus itself from stem cells?

I'm not exactly sure how this could be done, but they can do face transplants and sex changes! Surely they can install a few inches of new lining!

Things They Should Invent: free chalk in public spaces at all times

2011-09-05T14:49:00.004-04:00

Inspired by the impromptu memorial to Jack Layton, I think chalk should be available in all concrete-intensive public spaces at all times, so people could write or draw whatever they want on the concrete. Write whatever's on your mind, comment on other people's graffiti like people do in the more interesting bathroom stalls of the world, draw hopscotch and other playground games on the ground and watch as besuited office workers use them on their lunch break.

The first thought that springs to the minds of people who are going to object is "But people might write bad things!" That's okay, the beauty of chalk is that it's easily erasable (and washes away with each rain anyway). And in between rainfalls, public space can become a constantly evolving dialogue and art installation. Isn't that the essence of what public space is for?

Cutest thing ever of the day

2011-09-04T18:20:00.002-04:00

Warning: this will make you ovulate

On being hungry

2011-09-04T16:17:00.000-04:00

The first symptom of what turned out to be GERD was a feeling of food being stuck on the back of my throat, which, over the next few days, quickly progressed to difficulty swallowing solid food. Food would simply take too long to pass through my esophagus, until I got to a point where I could only eat about a quarter cup of food and then had to wait a couple of hours for it to move down far enough to make room for more food. What with not being certain if it's a problem and then wanting to wait and see if it would go away by itself and then having a long weekend delay my initial doctor's appointment, I ended up spending over a week physically incapable of intaking anywhere near enough food.

And here's what I learned: being hungry makes me slow, stupid, and clumsy.

It took me about four or five days of not being able to get enough solid food down my throat to come up with the glaringly obvious idea of getting some liquid meal replacements. I read more slowly than usual, made more typos than usual, and often lost my place when proofreading. I spilled things on myself about three times as frequently, so that at any given time I'd have a wet spot or a stain on my shirt. I walked more slowly than usual. I got more easily distracted and frustrated by co-workers in other cubicles having ordinary conversations. I'd sometimes forget myself and scratch or pick my nose while in my cube or walking down the street where other people could see me.

Basically, I turned into one of the dumb kids in school. Not just the ones who got bad marks, but the ones who were slow and loud and messy and didn't follow instructions well and didn't listen to the teacher and did things like fall out of their chairs. The ones that my classmates, in the ignorance and cruelty of childhood and the language of the 80s, would have called "retards".

I've always been an A student, but if you took my hungry self and stuck her in school, she wouldn't have been able to achieve any better than a B if she's lucky. So what happens when you take an average student, someone less academically inclined, and send her to school hungry?

I've been doing my job with the benefit of sufficient caloric intake for 8 years, so I had a reputation for being competent at my job and not a total idiot in life in general, so a week of being slower than usual didn't do much harm. Plus I was having a clearly articulable, if then-undiagnosed, medical problem, so if anyone noticed I wasn't myself I could explain why. But what happens if people only ever see you when you're slower? What if this situation is baseline for you, so it never occurs to you that you could solve it with the input of more food?

Every once in a while, the idea is raised of schools providing breakfast so disadvantaged students don't have to go to class hungry. And one of the objections I always hear is parents talking about how their own kids sometimes just don't eat breakfast even though it's available at home, and complaining that all the food will end up going to non-disadvantaged kids who are just too lazy or spoiled to get up 15 minutes earlier and eat some oatmeal.

But based on this experience with undernourishment, and based on how it correlates with the traits of the kids who got labelled as stupid - and probably ended up thinking of themselves as stupid, because the whole time they were in school they were slower and clumsier and more easily distractable than everyone around them - I am absolutely certain that it's worth it to feed everyone who is interested so that those who are undernourised can be properly nourished. When I couldn't eat enough, my performance in all areas of life dropped a full letter grade. Imagine raising the most disadvantaged students' performance by a full letter grade with nothing more than a daily meal!

I don't have terribly high self-confidence, but I do have a certain sense of what I can do by virtue of the fact that I've always been an A student. Of course I can get into university! Of course I can do the next set of word problems in my math book! Of course I can read that great big long novel! But if this undernourishment had happened over a longer period of time when I was just starting school, my perception of my own capabilities would be a full letter grade lower as well. Instead of "Of course I can get into university!" it would be "Maybe I can get into university if I'm lucky." Which doesn't sound like a big deal, but imagine how it would play out at lower grade levels. "I'll never be able to read that book" could, with the simple application of food, turn into "I've never read a chapter book before, but it looks interesting so maybe I'll try." "I'll never get into university so there's no point in applying" could turn into "Maybe I'll apply and see if I get in anywhere." "I'll never be able to afford university" could turn into "Maybe I'll apply and see if I can get a scholarship."

I'd say those kinds of outcomes are certainly worth giving food to children even if they don't strictly need it.

Musical interlude

2011-09-03T14:18:00.001-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, I ended up crying on the phone to my mother about all the things upsetting me about my GERD diagnosis. I don't often do this (I can't remember ever doing it in my adult life), but it made me feel a bit better. I was rather pleased to discover that crying to mommy still works and glad that that's an available option.

The next day, as I was getting ready for work, I heard that Jack Layton had just died. On top of everything else, he's exactly the same age as my mother, and his son is the same age as me.

This is the song that got me out the door that morning.

PS: Check out around 2:21 - let's just throw a guitar across the stage for no particular reason!

Overstock.com has good international shipping

2011-08-31T18:37:00.004-04:00

I recently ordered something from Overstock.com. I was a bit hesitant because they ship by DHL (with which I've had bad experiences in the past), but I ultimately decided to buy it anyway because of the price and because the possibility of delivery is more convenient than having to go out to a store and schlep it home.

The first pleasant surprise is that Overstock guarantees the shipping and duty price - no COD! - which means that I can ask my super to accept the package for me.

The second pleasant surprise was when I got a Canada Post delivery notice, went to the post office, and found out that it was my Overstock order.

It turns out they use a service called DHL Globalmail for their international shipping (to Canada at least). I don't know exactly how it works, but on my end the result is that I get all the benefits of Canada Post delivery - no COD and the package ends up at the post office a block from my home rather than at some remote depot.

I'm very happy about this, and because of the convenience of the delivery I won't hesitate to order from Overstock.com again in the future.

How to get people to stop asking you for money

2011-08-25T20:52:00.003-04:00

Put in your earbuds and walk down the street at your normal brisk, businesslike pace. Whenever you see someone panhandling or fundraising or otherwise trying to part you and your money, make direct eye contact, smile, nod, say "Good morning", and keep going without once breaking stride. Do this for a couple of weeks, and they'll all start ignoring you.

The earbuds give you plausible deniability of having heard the exact words they use to greet you, allowing you to make your own script. The direct eye contact and acknowledgement eliminates any incentive for them to take extraordinary measures to attract your attention. And the full polite greeting gives you control over the entire script for long enough to pass the other person walking at your normal brisk, businesslike pace.

After a couple of weeks of this, the panhandlers catch on that you're useless and focus their efforts on other people.