Thursday, June 11, 2009

Redraw the midtown Toronto electoral map

Click here for a Google map of Yonge & Eglinton. It opens in a new window because you're going to have to keep referring to it to follow along this post.

See the cluster of highrises? (If you're having trouble seeing the cluster of highrises, click on Satellite and remove the checkbox from Show Labels to see more clearly.) The vast majority of the highrises are residential. As of this posting, there are at least six more completed and inhabited highrises that aren't shown in the several-years-old satellite imagery, and at least three more under construction. There are a wide variety of shops, restaurants, services and amenities at street level on Yonge St. and on Eglinton Ave., and there's a subway station right at the intersection of Yonge & Eg. When they first built the subway this was the terminus, so it's been a transit hub for over 50 years and has developed accordingly. The result is a high-density, walkable, transit-centric, safe, convenient neighbourhood. As you can see, the highrise cluster is surrounded by houses, but since each highrise contains at least 200 units, we far outnumber the house people.

The highrise people define the culture of the neighbourhood - are the culture of the neighbourhood. The neighbourhood is safe and convenient and walkable and high-density because of us, and we sought it out because it's safe and convenient and walkable and high-density. It's solidly yuppie but nowhere near posh because of us, and we sought it out because it's solidly yuppie but nowhere near posh. If you remember the Three Cities income polarization study, you might have been wondering what's up with that tiny island of middle-income smack dab in the middle of Toronto, surrounded by a sea of higher income. If you remember Poverty by Postal Code, you might have been wondering what's up with that tiny island of moderate poverty smack dab in the middle of Toronto, surrounded by a sea of low poverty. That's us. We are distinct from the surrounding communities by virtue of differences in income and lifestyle.

However, our political boundaries do not reflect this.

Our little community falls on the intersection of three different electoral ridings. Refer back to the Google Map, and turn labels back on if you turned them off earlier. Everything west of Yonge and north of Eglinton is in the riding of Eglinton-Lawrence. Everything east of Yonge and north of Broadway (i.e. two blocks north of Eg) is in the riding of Don Valley West. Everything south of Eg west of Yonge and south of Broadway east of Yonge is in the riding of St. Paul's. (All these riding names link to Elections Canada maps. I can't seem to find a Google Map of riding boundaries and don't know how to make one myself - if you know of one, please leave a link in the comments.) We are in a distant corner of each riding, and in each riding we are outnumbered by house people. We are a larger high-density cluster than any other within the boundaries of any of those three ridings, but because we're carved up into three pieces we are a negligible demographic within each riding.

This isn't a huge problem at the federal and provincial levels. I've never felt inappropriately represented by my MP or my MPP, and I do feel like I fit in well with the general demographics of my riding. However, it is something of a problem at the local level, because when it comes to issues under local jurisdiction, house people and highrise people have different needs and priorities, car people and transit people have different needs and priorities, and people tend to prefer the kind of density that they have chosen to live in.

And that's the thing about Yonge & Eg - if you're here, you're here by choice. While it isn't nearly as rich as the surrounding houses, it's not the cheapest of neighbourhoods. It's not trendy, but it is a desirable location and priced accordingly. If you prioritize living in a house, you could get a house in outer 905 for the same money. If you prioritize a living arrangement that is convenient for driving, you can live somewhere further from the subway where parking can be had significantly cheaper. If you don't like density, you can live somewhere lower density at a significantly lower cost. If you're living in a highrise at Yonge & Eg, that means that you want a high density neighbourhood, you want a walkable transit-convenient car-optional lifestyle, and you either want a highrise or you're willing to accept a highrise in exchange for the high density car-optional neighbourhood.

But because we're divided among three different wards, we are outnumbered in each of our wards by people in a significantly higher income bracket who have chosen a different kind of neighbourhood and a different lifestyle. They're into houses and cars and lower-density residential neighbourhoods. They might live in Lawrence Park or Forest Hill or Bridle Path. They might care about lawns. They might not care if the grocery store is within walking distance. They might consider it a good thing that their street isn't busy. They're not after the same thing we're after, because if they were they'd choose to live in our hood.

However, because they outnumber us within each ward, they sway our city councillors on municipal issues. This puts us in the weird position of living in a highrise at Yonge & Eg and being represented by a city councillor who is opposed to building highrises at Yonge & Eg. We might have moved here deliberately to live carfree, only to find ourselves represented by a councillor whose first thought on any development is "but how will it affect traffic?" We sought out and rejoice in the benefits of our high-density neighbourhood, only to hear our councillor say "density" like it's a dirty word. We're cheering over the Eglinton Crosstown line, but might be represented by a councillor who is hesitant about it.

We are a community with shared needs and priorities, and, when it comes to issues under the jurisdiction of the local government, our shared needs and priorities are different from those of the surrounding communities. The entire highrise cluster should fall within the same ward so our community and its unique needs can be suitably represented at the one level of government where our unique needs are in fact relevant.

More information please: isotope edition

Why does only one nuclear reactor produce medical isotopes? Why don't they all? I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere in media coverage - if I've missed something, post a link in the comments.

Also, Medical Isotopes would be a good band name, as would Sexy Isotope Crisis. I think anything containing the word isotope would make a good band name. And also I just like saying isotope.

Isotope. Isotope isotope isotope.

Isotope!

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Things They Should UNinvent: connection fees for telecommunications

If you switch phone or TV or internet providers, you usually have to pay a fee to get hooked up.

If they really wanted people to switch, they'd get rid of these fees.

Is the US louder than Canada, or is Buffalo louder than TO?

For a long time I've noticed that the commercials on US TV channels are kind of loud and unsubtle. I just assumed this was a difference between the US and Canada.

But it occurs to me that the difference might not be that they're USian and we're Canadian. It might be because the US channels I watch most often are from Buffalo, and the Canadian channels I watch most are from Toronto. Toronto is the biggest city in Canada, whereas Buffalo is smaller and is more of a local centre. So TO is more likely to be able to attract top advertising dollars and talent to make sleek and clever commercials.

What do you think?

Monday, June 08, 2009

I wonder if shoplifting will increase as reuseable shopping bags become more common

The other day, I was carrying around a big reuseable shopping bag full of all kinds of things. There were a few bottles of wine, several bottles of hair products, and a couple of library books. It was close to full, awkwardly-shaped, heavy, and rattling. When I put it in a small shopping cart at Dominion, it took up nearly the whole cart.

Then it occurred to me that it would be the easiest thing ever to shoplift with that thing. I select something off the shelf, put it in my cart with no particular care, it could easily end up in the bag by accident. It wouldn't be readily noticeable to myself or others, and it could totally plausibly happen by accident. I could go through the checkout with an assortment of cheap groceries, have one or two expensive things accidentally fall into my bag, and claim "Oh, shit, terribly sorry, it was a total accident, of course I'll pay for those!" if called out on it.

If you're using one of those stiffer rectangular bags that stores keep trying to sell you for a dollar, you could totally walk around with it heavy and full, put it down on the ground as you browse the cosmetics shelf, then accidentally knock things over and have one or two of them land in the bag. The bag is there, wide open. Putting it down is perfectly natural if it's heavy. And I don't know about you, but I accidentally knock stuff down half the time I shop for make-up.

I wonder if stores have noticed a difference in shoplifting rates since people started carrying around these behemoths.

Sunday, June 07, 2009

Mashup bunny: Dion vs. Dion

From the retro files, someone should mash up The Wanderer vs. Runaround Sue

If they wouldn't work as a mash, you could totally tweak the tempo (and the key if necessary) and combine them in an a capella or barbershop arrangment.

A pillow between your knees

The past few months I've taken to sleeping with a pillow between my knees. It's SO much more comfortable, like exponentially so - my hips are aligned better and don't need to be cracked nearly as much when I wake up. If I'm particularly stiff going to bed, curling up in a quasi-fetal position with a pillow between my knees feels like one of those static yoga poses that slowly loosens your joints. I just lie there still and feel my hips ease and relax.

I've mentioned this to several other people, and those who have tried a pillow between their knees all unanimously agree that it helps in a way similar to what I've described.

But why? Why are we designed so that we're more comfortable sleeping with a physical obstacle changing our alignment than sleeping however we just naturally fall? That doesn't seem like very good design to me.

Saturday, June 06, 2009

Things They Should Invent: kettles that go PING!

There are some kettles that whistle when they're boiling, but they just keep boiling until you come and unplug them. There are other kettles that shut off automatically once they've started boiling, but they don't make any noise to tell you they're done apart from the subtle click of the switch turning off.

I want the best of both worlds. I want a kettle that automatically shuts itself off AND makes a noise to tell you it's done.

Thursday, June 04, 2009

Things They Should Invent: universal standard exemption from Godwin's Law

The problem with the generally-accepted application of Godwin's Law is that it assumes that a comparison with nazis is always hyperbole.

This is not necessarily true. I'm sure we can all envision, even if only hypothetically, a situation in which the best possible analogy is a comparison with nazis, and discourse would suffer from not having this analogy readily available.

Someone - ideally a committee of big-name internet people with a wide variety of political opinions - needs to standardize criteria under which a comparison with nazis is apt. If these criteria apply, people aren't allowed to shut down their opponents by shouting Godwin at them.

Open Letter to Dominion (aka Metro)

Dear Dominion, who I'm not going to start calling Metro:

I know that the thing with charging five cents a bag is municipal by-law and your hands are tied. And while I do resent being inconvenienced even though I came up with a better solution, I get that it isn't your fault.

However, your pratice of having to ring in the number of bags before you ring in the groceries is ridiculous. I can't always tell how many bags I'm going to need just by looking at the groceries, and it's more important to have everything bagged well for the walk home than to save a nickel or two. I suck at 3D spatial estimation like that. Just bag my groceries, charge me for however many bags were used, and let me get on with life.

Update: I've taken to answering the question of how many bags do I want with "Whatever it takes." I'd recommend doing the same if you feel similarly.

Perhaps I need some real problems

I am currently feeling guilty for not having been aware of Tiananmen Square when it first happened. I was 8 years old.

I'm also feeling guilty for using the fact that I was 8 years old as an excuse, because I did look at newspapers at the time, although I didn't have the focus/attention span/discipline to read most of the articles.

Currently wondering

With all the stories of extreme emergency urgent last-minute difficultly-accessible late-term abortions that have been posted in the wake of Dr. Tiller's assassination, I find myself thinking about the technical aspects of abortion.

Specifically, I'm wondering why the drugs that are used to induce labour can't be used for abortion in cases where d&c (or whatever the usual technique is) isn't readily accessible. Obviously, it would be difficult, painful, and time-consuming. But in some of the cases, where the fetus is either dead in the womb* or will die upon delivery, wouldn't induced labour get the job done in a pinch? If not, what am I missing? (I've never been pregnant, you might have to explain things slowly.)

*Another technical question: if the fetus is dead in the womb, will the mother eventually go into labour anyway? If so, why? How would her body know when it's reached term?

Wednesday, June 03, 2009

Fomenting public outrage: ur doin it wrong

The Toronto Star recently seems obsessed that private-sector consultants on the payroll of the Government of Ontario expensed small food items.

The thing is, as mentioned indirectly in the second paragraph of the article, the consultants were from Alberta, so they had to travel to get here. And in the private sector, it's perfectly normal to have your employer pay for your meals while you're travelling on business. I seriously doubt they could get any decent private-sector consultant if they didn't pay for their meals while on the road. The article is trying to suggest that they shouldn't be expensing their meals because they make so much money, but that's simply how the private sector works. Your salary is compensation for your work, travel expenses are considered additional expenses.

You'll also notice that they're expensing small and inexpensive take-out, eat-at-your-desk type food. You know what this means? They aren't expensing pricey room service meals - they're running down to Tim's instead. In fact, as it says in the 9th paragraph of the article:

Consultant Donna Strating makes $2,700 a day at eHealth. She does not take the $50 per diem to which she is entitled, but charges for miscellaneous meals and snacks.


This means that she would normally be entitled to take $50 a day, no questions asked, with the assumption that she'd spend it on food and other necessities. Based on the items listed, it doesn't look like she's spending anywhere near $50 a day on food. (Judging by the tone of the article, if there were any expensive restaurant dinners the article would have said so.) So rather than taking $50 a day, buying cheap food and pocketing the rest, she's billing for her actual expenses only.

If the Star wanted to foment outrage about this eHealth thing, they could have done so in a number of ways. Some other media outlets have been focusing on how there might not have been a proper tender process for this contract, which is a much more serious issue. If the Star wanted to take a different attack from other media outlets, they could ask why we needed a private-sector consultant from Alberta in the first place? We're a rather populous province with a good number of post-secondary institutions - why isn't the necessary expertise available in Ontario? Why doesn't the Ontario public service have the expertise to implement government policies? Does this happen often? Should we perhaps be working on developing the expertise in-province?

As it stands, the whole thing reads like an especially low-quality attack ad. I expected better from te Star.

Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Well this is a disheartening development

Sims 3 causes my computer to blue screen, just as it's about to finish loading the town.

I was expecting it to maybe be slow and frustrating because I have only the minimum RAM requirement (figured I'd get more if it was annoying), but I didn't see this coming and the internet doesn't seem to know anything about it yet.

I'm going to uninstall and reinstall, but if not I have no idea what to do.

Update: Updating video drivers fixed the problem.

Props to amazon.ca

Despite the fact that I chose supersaver shipping, my copy of Sims 3 arrived today, i.e. the official release date.

On that note, I may be incommunicado for a while.

Monday, June 01, 2009

Analogy for why introverts have trouble with small talk

This started in response to the comments on this Cary Tennis letter but got far too complicated for a comment thread.

Think of the pool of all possible conversation topics - everything you might ever conceivably blurt out - as a well-organized email folder system. The vast majority of the emails are archived by topic. These are things you can say in reply to productive and substantive inquiries. There are a few emails in your inbox. These are new things that you can introduce during a lull in conversation. And there's a bunch of crap in your spam folder. These are things that are completely useless in conversation. (e.g. "There are four light switches in this room." "The capital of Uruguay is Montevideo".) You hardly ever look in your spam folder anyway, it's all the Nigerian finance minister trying to enlarge your penis and sell you fake university degrees anyway. Sometimes you do go into your spam folder for a specific reason, just like sometimes you do need to know what the capital of Uruguay is, but the vast majority of the time you ignore it and it isn't even worth thinking about.

I think introverts have a stricter spam filter than extroverts. We have things in our spam folder that more extroverted people would consider suitable conversational openings. There are fewer things in our inbox, and some of the things that (by conventional social standards) should be in our inbox are in our spam folder.

For example, it would never ever in my life occur to me to ask a casual acquaintance about their vacation plans. The topic was simply in my spam folder, right in between "I have a hole in my sock" and "I had two cups of coffee today." (Yes, these are things I might just announce to a close friend, but, as I've blogged about before, it works differently for close friends.) When I read someone mention that as a possible topic of conversation in the Cary Tennis comments, a lightbulb went off. "Oh, THAT'S why people at work keep asking me that!" Because it was in my spam folder, I figured they were asking me for a particular reason, just like if your best friend sent you a penis enlargement email you'd assume they have some particular reason for doing so.

So where extroverts can just reach into their inbox - the first page you get to in any email interface - to find an appropriate topic, our inboxes don't have enough topics. So first we have to come up with the idea of looking in our spam folder at all. Then we have to sort through it trying to find something that's less crap. We can't give them just anything from the spam folder, we have to sort through the whole thing (and how much crap is in your spam folder right now?) trying to find the conversation equivalent of, say, a shoe sale flyer rather than penis enlargement spam.

And the other problem is, once we find the exact conversational nugget we need in our spam folder, we think "Hey, there's some useful stuff in here, let's filter less strictly so it ends up in the inbox!" Then we set our spam filter too low and end up with all kinds of crap in our inbox, and the next think you know we're walking around offering to enlarge people's penises. This manifests itself in the phenomenon of people who claim to be introverts going off on a babbling rant about themselves or their interests. Because all the stuff in our inbox tends to be stuff we're genuinely interested in, if someone treats one of our spam topics like an inbox topic we assume they're genuinely interested.

So unless you want us randomly free-associating and dumping the entire contents of our mental spam folder on you, you'll have to either tolerate our pauses or take more than your share of the lead.

Edited to add: Having been bullied adds another dimension to all this. My bullies would often ask me questions that would sound perfectly innocuous to outsiders and that adults with benign intentions may well use as fodder for small-talk, but the bullies would use whatever I answered as fodder for bullying.

For example, they might ask me what I did that past weekend. If I didn't do much of anything (which, objectively and outside the bell jar of adolescence, I rather quite enjoy), they'd mock me for not having any friends. If I did something with my family, they'd mock me for spending time with family because I don't have any friends. If I did something with friends, they'd mock me for the insufficient coolness of my friends or our activity. In the weird world of middle school, it was a loaded question to which every possible answer was socially unacceptable.

So because of all this, a bunch of topics that appear benign to outsiders are quarantined in my mental spam folder because they look just like emails that have previously given me viruses. After having been judged so often for my answer to "What did you do this weekend?" I wouldn't dare ask that of an acquaintance or co-worker any more than I would ask them "So are you a top or a bottom?"

Half of all marriages end in divorce? FALSE!

Statscan data (emphasis mine):

According to General Social Survey (GSS) data, divorced Canadians represented 7% of the total population aged 15 and over in 2006. In fact, divorce affects more people than what recent data leads us to believe: about 13% of Canadians aged 15 and over had experienced at least one divorce during their conjugal life, and nearly half of them had remarried.


More Statscan data (again, emphasis mine):

In 2006, more than one-half (51.5%) of the population aged 15 and over was unmarried, that is, never married, divorced, separated, or widowed, compared to 49.9% five years earlier.


If 51.5% of the population has never been married, that means 48.5% have been married. And, as is clearly stated in the first quoted paragraph, 13% have been divorced.

This means that 26.8% of all marriages end in divorce.

New Rule

If someone who has in the past demonstrated google fu asks you a question, you aren't allowed to tell them to google it unless you are absolutely certain the answer is readily googleable. Be prepared to suggest specific keywords when they reply that they have already googled it.

I have 20 years to learn not to be clumsy

I'm clumsy and uncoordinated and live in a small and poorly organized apartment. And I have a habit of dancing around like an idiot when no one is watching. As a result, I often trip over stuff and fall down.

It occurs to me that this will be a problem when I'm post-menopausal. I'll have to figure out how to work on it.