How dryers work

Do dryers use more energy turning around and around, or producing heat? I've always set my dryer heat on low to save energy, but it just occurred to me that I might be inadvertently using more energy by requiring them to turn longer.

Plastic bag ban vs. urban realities

I think the people who are lobbying to ban plastic bags aren't taking into account urban life. This explains so much! I often hear people say "Why on earth do you need to put X in a plastic bag?" where X is something that needs to be carried home, just like everything else. This would always get me puppy-head-tilt confused, but after reading this I realize they think the stuff doesn't need a bag because they think it's going in a car trunk.

A&P and Dominion, for example, sell a 99-cent reusable shopping bag that holds the equivalent of about three plastic bags of groceries, and give 5 air miles to customers with reusable bags. With all grocers and other stores on board, through their associations, competition will set in and incentives are likely to rise.

The incentive program flows from a pilot project in Sault Ste. Marie, which is trying to find out what it takes to get people to remember to bring their reusable bags back to the store.

"What are consumers looking for? What will make them remember to open the trunk and bring the reusable bin or the reusable bag. `Gee, if I'm going to get $5 off my groceries I'll do it,' or air miles or whatever the incentive is – what is enough to (encourage) them to take it back?" Jo-Anne St. Godard, executive director of the Recycling Council of Ontario, said of the pilot project.

See, the thing of it is, there is no trunk involved. I can't just stick the reuseable bag in the trunk because I don't use a car to grocery shop. I just stop by the store right on my way home from work. And because the store is conveniently located right on the way home from work, I don't plan my grocery shopping. I start getting hungry before I leave work, and on my way home I just buy whatever I'm craving to eat. (And yes, eating exactly what I'm craving is an important part of life for me. Planning my meals would seriously reduce my enjoyment of life.) So if I couldn't get my purchases bagged at the store, then I'd have to carry around one or two of those big Dominion tote bags with me all day, every day, just in case I start craving something for dinner that I don't have at home. Either that or I'd have to walk home from the subway, grab my shopping bags and walk back to Dominion, then go shopping and walk back home again. That's 15 minutes of walking where there is normally five, which is significant when your commute is only 17 minutes. So for people in high-density urban areas, where grocery shopping isn't done with a car and isn't a special trip because it's right there in your immediate neighbourhood, not having bags provided by the store is a far greater inconvenience than just having to keep some extra bags in your car trunk. And, as I've mentioned before, if the store didn't give me plastic bags, I'd need to buy (and subsequently throw out) plastic bags for garbage disposal purposes.

My suggestion: have stores bag customers' purchases in biodegradable plastic bags.

Fun with words

In a code-switching conversation with a Francophone, I used the English word "frumpy." My interlocutor wasn't familiar with the word, and I couldn't explain it well, so I reached for my handy Collins-Robert. One of the options it gave was mal fagotée.

Ergo, if you are frumpy, it's because you haven't been Queer-Eyed.

Ninja Turtles!

Once upon a time, this was the coolest thing ever. Really. The animation seemed l33t and everything.

But this is just a tragedy.

I think Dear Abby printed a fake letter

I think today's first Dear Abby letter is a hoax. It's alleged from a father warning people that the latest thing among teenage girls is to have a "prom baby" (i.e. get knocked up at the prom) to get out of going to college. But consider:

1. If someone is smart enough to get into an Ivy League school, they would know that taking care of a baby is harder than going to college. These people are 17, not 13.

2. In what world would it be easier to tell your parents you're pregnant than to tell them you're not feeling ready for college?

3. If they really wanted to sabotage their own chances of going to college, wouldn't they just submit a poor application? Don't US colleges require essays and interviews and all kinds of stuff like that rather than just filling out a form? Why not just submit a crappy essay or blow the interview?

4. If they really wanted to have a baby, why would they put all their eggs in one basket by depending on getting pregnant on one specific night? Wouldn't they instead work on arranging their lives so they have multiple opportunities to "try"? Even highly supervised kids, in their final year of high school, could arrange to have some "group projects" that required a lot of work at a conveniently parent-less house, or find some way to be alone in a car. This does take some stealth and lying and good luck, but if it's really that important to get pregnant, it's not that hard to make it work.

5. When I was that age, the thing to do if you weren't feeling ready for college was to work for a year. It was considered a responsible, perfectly respectable thing to do. Surely they've heard of that!

6. All the Google results for "prom baby" (excluding those where the two words appear next to each other but aren't intended as a single term) point to a) this column, or b) references to babies that were born at proms, not conceived at proms. The only Google Blog Search results or Technorati searches (again, excluding those where the words appear next to each other but aren't intended as a term) are referring to this specific Dear Abby column. If this were really a trend, it would have been mentioned on the internet by now.

What I'm surprised about is that Dear Abby didn't clearly see that this was a hoax.

Freaky Google ads

I was sent an email containing a number of family photos. The subject line was "Photos" and the body of the message was blank. The image files themselves were numbered, not given descriptive names.

Here are the Google ads that Gmail served up alongside this message:

Menstruation Pictures
Free Pictures & Illustrations About Menstruation.
www.healthline.com


Pomeranian Warning
All The Things You Probably Weren't Told About The Pomeranian
www.ThePomeranianManual.com


Che Guevara Rebel Test
Are You a Rebel Like Che Guevara? Take This 30 Second Free Test & See
www.DaVinciMethod.com


Lhasa Apso Dog Warning
All The Things You Probably Won't Be Told About the Lhasa Apso Dog.
www.lhasa-apso-dogworld.com

SEXISM!

All the best Mother's Day cards say "from your son". And the messages on them aren't gender-specific, or even based on gender stereotypes! Some power in the greeting card industry just randomly stuck "Happy Mother's Day From Your Son" on all the best cards, leaving only lame ones for daughters and genderless children! WTF?

And don't get me started on the difficulty finding a humorous card for a grandmother from an adult grandchild!

Offers and counter-offers

Often on TV when people are negotiating the price of something, they often write it down on a piece of paper and pass the paper back and forth instead of saying the amount verbally. Is that so the TV show won't age, or do people actually do that IRL?

University sports

Some universities, in the US especially, put a lot of effort into their sports programs. They give athletes huge scholarships to come play sports at their school. Question: what's in it for a university to have a good sports program? Is it just bragging rights, or do they get something else out of it?

"Inspected by Postal Supervisor"

When I was preparing to move, I arranged to have Canada Post forward my mail to the new address, just in case I forgot any address change. Shortly after I moved in, I got some mail at my new address with yellow forwarding stickers on it, so that made me feel reassured. But just before I returned the keys to my old apartment (i.e. over a week after the date when my mail forwarding was to start) I checked my old mailbox just in case, and found some very important letters in there. So I sent an email to Canada Post explaining the problem, emphasizing how serious the consequences would have been if I hadn't gotten these letters, and imploring them to make sure the forwarding went smoothly in the future. There was a brief email exchange where I clarified certain particulars (I hadn't known what information they needed at first), and then the next morning, while I was in the shower, someone from Canada Post called and left me a voicemail saying that in addition to looking into my forwarding request and making sure everything was good, they were having the carrier who delivered to my old address keep a lookout for letters with my name on them and physically hand them to the carrier at my current address if they find any (because apparently all the mail is given to the carriers at the same physical location). So I was happy with all that.

So today I got another very important letter, addressed to and delivered to my new address and marked "do not forward" by the original sender. And someone wrote on it in pen "inspected by Postal Supervisor", with today's date and some illegible initials.

I wonder if that is because of this mail forwarding problem, or if it's a completely unrelated thing?

Essential services

On the morning of Monday, April 23, one of the news stories on the radio was that the students of Virginia Tech were returning to class. Apparently classes had been suspended since the shooting, and students also had the option either completing their semester, or taking whatever their current mark was and leaving for the rest of the semester. I remember thinking that was very civilized, and reflecting wistfully on the flexibility of academia.

Then it was time to head out to work. There had just been an accident where a TTC worker was killed, the subway was offline for my entire commute. The TTC was out in full force trying to cover for the outage. Every available single bus (including these really old retro buses) was being used to shuttle passengers along the subway routes. There were transit supervisors everywhere directing people. Basically everyone in the entire system was going full throttle to make sure the city keeps moving.

Despite the fact that the two situations are very different, the contrast nevertheless really struck me. At Virginia Tech they get the time and flexibility they need to recover a bit, while the TTC people have to jump right into work full throttle without missing a beat.

I hope the general public keeps this in mind next time they're inclined to get all bitchy at the TTC because it pays some of its workers over $20/hour.

Fictional universes

When I'm reading science fiction or fantasy or historical fiction, the one thing I really enjoy is just immersing myself in the peaceful everyday life of the fictional/historical universe. I love the whimsy of everyday life at Hogwarts. I love the bucolic peace of the Shire. I love the very beginning of Gone With The Wind, before the Civil War starts. Unfortunately, these genres tend to demand that once the calm happy everyday existence in the universe is established, it is completley boulversé. The protagonist has to leave everyday life to go off on some grand adventure (which will take up most of the plot), and then introducing the reader to the universe is set aside in favour of the larger plot.

Some books are able to work around this. Judith Merkle Riley's Vision of Light has the protagonist in her optimal place narrating the events that got her there, so I got to enjoy the happy everyday life throughout the upheavel of the rest of the book. The Mists of Avalon doesn't have a single happy place, but rather a series of places are travelled through and there's no single grand quest, so, again, I get to enjoy everyday life throughout. But most often, the genre demands that we only get a fleeting, tantalizing glimpse of happy everyday life, before the protagonist runs off on a quest.

A genre that would be more conducive to showing us happy everyday life would be lighter, more domestic novels, like Little Women or Jane Austen. However, they don't really show the universe, because they were written in what was then the present, so the authors didn't focus on creating the universe with historical details because all those details were obvious at the time. So I guess a way to create the kind of historical fiction that makes me happy would be to rework these old novels in the form of historical novels, written for an audience who is unfamiliar with the details of the era. So then we could enjoy the universe, and we'd also get a plot that doesn't involve completely turning the universe upsidown. I guess that's why I tend to prefer movies of these older books. They have to create the universe rather than taking it as a given, so I get to immerse myself in the world even though that wasn't the author's original intent.

Things They Should Invent: a better way of folding fitted sheets

Fitted sheets are not rectangular, but all the ways I can find to fold them are based on trying to force them to act like rectangles. Someone should really come up with a way to fold them that takes into account their unique nature, but still enables them to fit into the linen closet. No, I don't have any suggestions or insight.

Another reason to treat detainees humanely

Remember in March 2003, when the US first started invading Iraq and you could turn on the TV and "watch war"? Remember how they were reporting that huge numbers of Iraqi soldiers were just outright surrendering? I don't know if this was true or not - I never heard much follow-up after that, and it is the sort of thing that makes for good propoganda - but the reporting made it sound like at the first sight of American military the Iraqi soldiers were waving white flags, to deliberately escape from whatever kind of hellhole the Iraqi military was. Upon hearing this mentioned several times, I turned to my father (I was at my parents' house that weekend) and said "So if this is true, that means that being a US prisoner of war is significantly better than being a free Iraqi soldier."

Obviously, I hadn't yet heard of Abu Ghraib.

This memory came back to me the other day, when the radio was talking about how people taken prisoner by Canadians in Afghanistan are treated. It occurs to me that, apart from the fact that we should be better than that, and apart from the fact that torturing our prisoners invites people to torture are citizens, and apart from the fact that it's ineffective anyway, and apart from basic human decency, this is another reason why we should treat our prisoners humanely.

Imagine if everyone, everyone in the world, knew that if they surrendered to or were arrested by a Canadian soldier, they would be put somewhere that's clean and sanitary, with sufficient food and health care, and they absolutely would not be beaten, raped, or tortured.

Clearly, the pragmatic decision would be to surrender, or to go quietly if you get arrested. Obviously some people aren't going to go along with this, but that would be out of ideology, not out of self-preservation. If our prisoners can get tortured, that gives people the motivation to do everything possible to avoid being taken prisoner, lest the unspeakable happen. Now if they didn't have this motivation to do everything possible to evade our troops, imagine how much easier that would make our military's job. Some people are still going to fight them because there is ideology and even fanticism involved, but others will have far greater motivation to go along quietly, or to surrender, or even just to treat our troops with a grudging respect. Imagine a situation where those rivers of surrendering enemy soliders - whether they were real or a creation of propganda - were unquestionably making the best decision for themselves and for their families. Wouldn't that make things better for everyone?

Money, status, and age

Sure, everyone wants to earn a living - but it turns out that with age comes a realization for many that status and money are not as important as knowing they somehow made a difference.

It sounds like they're saying that when you're young and foolish you think money and status are important, but when you get older and wiser you realize that they never were important.

I wonder if this really is the case? It occurs to me that perhaps acquiring more money and status become less important as you get older because by then you have earned or saved enough of each to live on in the long term.

I know first-hand it's quite easy to say that money doesn't matter when you have some. It's just that I tend to hear these sentiments coming the loudest from people who are resting on their laurels and collecting their indexed pensions. I somehow doubt they're looking back and saying "Wow, I wish I hadn't spent all that time in my youth building up financial security and a respected standing in the community!"

I just think people who are inclined to say that money doesn't matter need to keep that in mind. It's one thing to say "When I was young, it was more important to me to acquire money and status. But now I have enough of each and I can focus on other things." But it's quite another thing to go to someone who's in a place in their life where acquiring money and status are important, and try to convince them that these things aren't important for them just because they aren't important for you.

The litmus test: Thing back to the time one year before you got your first grownup job, however you choose to define "grownup job" to apply to your own life. How would you feel if your financial situation and social status now were no better than they were then?

How roommates would affect my ecological footprint

The Globe and Mail proposesthat people living alone are "an environmental time bomb."

This seemed off to me, so I calculated myecological footprint. Here are the results it gave for me living alone (I apologize for the all-caps, but it came that way. The bolding is my own):

CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES

FOOD 1.8

MOBILITY 0.1

SHELTER 0.6

GOODS/SERVICES 0.7

TOTAL FOOTPRINT 3.2


IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.


IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.8 PLANETS.

Then I recalculated for if I lived in a household of six people. I kept all other variables the same, just changed the number of people:

CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES

FOOD 1.8

MOBILITY 0.1

SHELTER 0.2

GOODS/SERVICES 0.3

TOTAL FOOTPRINT 2.4


IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.


IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.3 PLANETS.

"But six is really a bit much," you're saying. Okay, so let's do it for a household of two:

CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES

FOOD 1.8

MOBILITY 0.1

SHELTER 0.4

GOODS/SERVICES 0.5

TOTAL FOOTPRINT 2.8


IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.


IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.6 PLANETS.

As you can see, the difference is really negligible. Already I'm only occupying about 1/3 of the average footprint. If I increased my household size to six, my footprint would shrink by only 0.8 hectares, which is only 9% of the average footprint in the country.

And that's with changing only the number of people - none of the other variables were touched. So that means I'm cramming six people into this 500 square foot, one-bedroom one-bathroom apartment. For a savings of only 9% of the national average. That hardly seems worth it, especially since I'm already 70% below the national average to start with!

But what if we did something more realistic. I have no idea how much space you'd need for six people, so I redid the calculations for 2 people in an 80-square-foot apartment. Why? Because that's the smallest apartment in this building that I think I could share happily with mi cielito. We're both introverts who need our space.

CATEGORY GLOBAL HECTARES

FOOD 1.8

MOBILITY 0.1

SHELTER 0.9

GOODS/SERVICES 1

TOTAL FOOTPRINT 3.8



IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 8.8 GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 1.8 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE GLOBAL HECTARES PER PERSON.




IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 2.1 PLANETS.

Not only is this higher than for if the two people lived in the 500 square foot apartment, but it's also higher than for my rating living alone. So it looks like the "problem", if there is one, isn't that people live alone, but that people who can afford to do so live with the amount of privacy we expect in our society.

But you know what? I'm not giving up my privacy. My privacy is the single greatest joy my home gives me. I'm childfree, carfree, vegetarian, and paying higher than average rent to live in a building with l33t new environmental features; and my ecological footprint reflects all that. I've done my part. If you want me to give up my privacy, work on getting everyone else's environmental footprints down low enough that mine even begins to approach the national average. Then we'll talk.

Anyone out there watch Ugly Betty?

Is Wilhelmina aware that Claire owns Mode, not Bradford? If not, why hasn't anyone told her? If so, why is she sleeping with Bradford?

Renting and home improvements

I'm just posting this because I can finally articulate something I wish I'd been able to explain earlier.

Many of the homeowners in my life don't understand why I'm so hesitant to do home repairs or upgrades. They have also been known to complain about their renting neighbours not maintaining their homes. These two things come down to one main issue that many (or at least the loudest of) homeowners don't seem to be able to grasp and that I wish I'd been able to articulate earlier:

Most maintenance falls under the homeowner's jurisdiction, but is outside the tenant's jurisdiction.

If you own a house and you want to install a lighting fixture, go ahead. You mess up, the worst thing that happens (short of hurting yourself) is you've hurt your property and you have to spend some money to hire a professional to fix it. However, if you rent and want to install a lighting fixture and mess up, you hurt someone else's property, and you can't hire a professional to fix it because contractors require the landlord's permission. So not only have you hurt someone else's property, but you've inconvenienced them to get it fixed.

If your house is drafty and poorly insulated, you can totally put in insulation or hire someone to put in insulation. This falls entirely within your jurisdiction and it is your right. But if your apartment is drafty and poorly insulated, you have to live with it. It is completely outside your jurisdiction to go around opening up the walls.

If you own a house and it needs painting, you can paint it. If you rent a house and it needs painting, that's the landlord's responsibility. If you want to paint it anyway, you need permission and maybe you'll also need to paint it back when you move out.

Basically, if I want to try something new on property that I own, all I need to do is be reasonably sure that I can attempt the process without killing myself. But if I want to try something new on property that I rent, I need to be 100% certain that I can get it back to mint condition before I move out. This is why I'm willing to install a new showerhead, but not to take risks with wiring.

Bad layout of the day

Doesn't this make it look like Boris Yeltsin is the TTC worker who was killed?