Monday, August 30, 2010

Current annoyances

1. My G1 licence (which I only have for ID) expired a while back, so today I went to Service Ontario at College Park to renew it. I was a good girl and arrived nice and early at 8:30. I was given a ticket with a number in the 50s. By 10:30, the numbers had only made it as far as 25. I had to be at work at 11, so I had to leave. All that getting up early and waiting in line for nothing! I've never before in my life been in a situation where two hours of waiting in line time wasn't enough to get a simple errand like that done! So now to add insult to injury, I'm going to have to take another day off, wake up early, and spend literally half the day waiting in line.

This is particularly annoying because for years I have been writing to provincial politicians encouraging them to create an ID card that has the same ID value as a driver's licence, but does not entitle the bearer to drive. I'm sure there are blog posts on this subject somewhere within the archives. They already have the resources to screen people and photograph people and issue this ID, and they could even make money off it because initially at least they could totally get away with charging the same fee as for a G1. This would solve the ID problem for people who are medically unable to drive, make the line move faster because they wouldn't have to conduct knowledge and eye tests of all G1 applicants, and facilitate the process of getting seniors to stop driving when the time comes (it's a lot easier to get Grandma to give up driving if she no longer has a driver's licence, and it's a lot easier to get her to let her driver's licence lapse if she doesn't need it to open a fricking bank account).

Few things in life annoy me more than when I've solved a problem and communicated the solution to the people who can make it happen, but still have to be inconvenienced because they won't make it happen and I can't do it unilaterally.

2. I recently started subscribing to Discovery Health because they have a morning exercise show. It's called All-Star Workout, and it's really quite good. Good variety, suitable intensity, easy to follow - totally worth the extra $2.79 a month on my cable bill. But now it looks like they're discontinuing that show come September, which means that there are NO English-language non-yoga exercise shows on in the morning on any of the channels Rogers provides. (Yoga is fantastic, but I put on weight if I do only yoga.)

What happened? There used to be a number of different ones to choose from, and now there are none. Surely I'm not the only one who finds this the most convenient way to exercise. You can do it in the privacy of your own home, it doesn't cost anything (other than cable fees, which most people are paying anyway), it provides far more variety than you'd get from DVDs and more innovation than you could come up with yourself.

So now, in addition to simply motivating myself to exercise, I have to come up with how to exercise. My entire adult life, I've just turned on the TV and done what it tells me, and it's worked well. But now I have to make my own plan, figure out whether to get DVDs or a Wii or what, and this for something that I absolutely detest doing. Exercise is the least favourite of all my chores!

In the US, they have a TV channel called FitTV that shows exercise programs all day every day. We should have that here! It would be beneficial to public health! We're always hearing about how people are too sedentary and need to exercise more, so why not make it as easy as humanly possible? You turn on the TV any time of the day or night, and someone is there to guide you through your workout. What could be easier? We could even just use the US TV channel, just have our cable companies carry it. They do carry some TV channels from other countries directly, and surely FitTV would be more beneficial to Canadian society than, say, Spike.

Sunday, August 29, 2010

How can the median family income be three times the median individual income?

From an otherwise unrelated article:

So in a city where, according to the 2006 census, individuals earned a median income of $26,754 a year, and annual family median income was $75,829 and declining, councillors’ wages are nothing to sneer at.


How is the median family income three times the median individual income? The vast majority of families/households (not sure why they chose the word "family" instead of "household", but I don't think that's relevant here) have either one or two breadwinners.

I do understand what the word median means, and I do understand that because we're talking about the median, these two numbers are not mathematically related to each other. But it does seem like they should be closer. Just applying logic, you'd assume that the family income is more than 100% but less than 200% of the individual income. But instead it's nearly 300%. What's going on here?

Saturday, August 28, 2010

Tragic ungoogleability

This is Monty Python's Galaxy Song:



Very useful for science students! Except who does astrophysics in miles any more?

What this song really needs is a metric version! I've been saying that ever since Grade 12 Physics class, and every once in a while I google to see if anyone has done it yet.

Unfortunately, it seems the band Metric has a song called "Twilight Galaxy", which renders a metric version of the galaxy song very difficult to google. This is a tragedy for science students everywhere!

If you write a metric version of Monty Python's Galaxy Song, or find one elsewhere and want to link to it, make sure you include "Monty Python" in the title to preserve what little googleability is left!

Why people who support mayoral candidate Rob Ford's ideas should be concerned about him

1. Rob Ford "forgot" that he was charged with drug possession in the US. Regardless of whether or not the drug charges themselves are a problem, forgetting that they happened (and this only 11 years ago) is a problem. Do you remember your last encounter with police? Yes you do. Do you remember every encounter you've ever had with police? Probably. I do, and they weren't even negative. Dealing with police is unusual, inconvenient, a break from routine, and pretty scary. Having it happen in another country with strict drug laws is even scarier. So how could he have forgotten it? Is he losing his faculties? Does he face police charges so often that they've become routine? Or does he think his constituency is so stupid they won't notice that there's something wrong with this picture? I can't imagine any scenario that wouldn't be a cause for concern among his supporters.

2. Rob Ford wants to stop immigrants from moving to Toronto, saying we have too many people already. Remember when you first moved to Toronto? All the application forms you had to fill out? The stress of waiting for acceptance? Of course not, because it doesn't work that way. You just show up. Secure housing and move in. Or don't secure housing first if you don't want to, just show up. Being able to live wherever you want in Canada is an actual, enshrined-in-the-Charter capital-R Right. The mayor of a city can in no way do anything about it. So why bring it up as though it's actionable? Does he egregiously misunderstand the scope of powers of mayor? Or does he think his constituency is so stupid they're unaware of how it works? I can't imagine any scenario that wouldn't be a cause for concern among his supporters.

Friday, August 27, 2010

How to spot an optimistic Francophone

I already knew that there are two French words for the ordinal number "second" (deuxième and second), but I only very recently learned the difference between the two. It turns out second is used when there are only two things being counted, and deuxième is used when there are more than two.

So here's my theory: if you want to tell if a Francophone is an optimist or a pessimist, as them the name of the war that took place in Europe in 1939-1945. If they say «Seconde Guerre mondiale», they are an optimist. If they say «Deuxième Guerre mondiale», they are a pessimist.

Thursday, August 26, 2010

A horse

Today I saw a police horse for the first time since the G20. (If you're just tuning in, the reason why this is significant is described in anecdote #1 here.) I was glad to see that I still reacted to it like a beautiful animal rather than like a police weapon, but I still didn't feel safe. My first reaction was "Oh, wow, a horse!" But an instant later I was instinctively looking around for kettling escape routes, getting my phone out of my purse in case I need to document anything, and hastening towards the subway hoping not to attract the attention of the police officer.

Before the G20, I probably would have approached the horse, engaged the officer in conversation, found out the horse's name and asked if I could pet him, taken a picture, maybe had a look at that interesting horse trailer set-up he had going on. It would have been a positive experience, community relations, a citizen taking interest in the work our police do. But instead I hurried along with my head down trying to be invisible, just like my relatives did when they were oppressed behind the Iron Curtain, before they managed to flee to Canada.

In the aftermath of the G20, there was a hashtag on Twitter called #MyToronto. People used this hashtag to post things that are awesome about Toronto - our real city, not the police state it had been transformed into. I posted pictures of Pride and Yonge St. hockey celebrations, descriptions of cars with two World Cup flags and children peering out the front window of the subway car, anecdotes of multilingualism and diversity and street life.

But the very first #MyToronto moment of my life was that day, ten years ago, when my newly-arrived teenage self got to pet a police horse in the middle of a busy downtown. That was my very first glimpse of how the city promises me something bigger and better than I'd ever imagined. That was the very first step in the process that would turn The Big City into My City.

And now it's gone.

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Cute of the day

Did you go look at how big the Pakistan flood is? If not, go look at it now.

Did you look at it? Really?

Okay, now you can watch the monkey with the pet kitten

You need to drop everything and look at this right now

Remember that website that project the oil spill onto a map centred on your hometown?

Now they have one that does the same thing with the Pakistan flood.

You really need to look at this. Seriously. It's so much bigger than I ever thought possible. It's even bigger than I thought it would be after people told me it's so much bigger than I ever thought possible.

Monday, August 23, 2010

A concrete improvement to one of the TTC panel recommendations

I've been reading the TTC Customer Service Panel Report (PDF), and I thought of a way to improve upon Recommendation 2R.

The report says:

OBSERVATION 2R

Many customers stand right in the doorway of the subway cars, which blocks and slows down passengers getting on or off.

RECOMMENDATION 2R: Review Subway Door Signage

The TTC should review the current signs that say, "Do not block doorway.” A more effective sign should be developed and used on all subway car doors.


This issue would be better addressed by thinking about why people stand in doorways.

People stand in the doorways because those little red and clear wall-like things next to the doorways are convenient to lean against. It's easy to stay balanced there, and you can even have your hands free to read or text or game. To address this - especially if there's still time to tweak the design of the new subway cars - they need to make the doorways less convenient places to stand, and other parts of the subway car more convenient places to stand.

In terms of immediate action, the best thing they could do install a rail down the centre of the ceiling of trains that don't already have a rail there. (Some do and some don't). When there's no centre ceiling rail, it's very difficult to stand in the aisle, so more people will gravitate to other parts of the trains (including all the nice convenient walls and bars near the door). A centre rail enables tall people at least to stand comfortably in the middle of the aisle, well away from the doors, without fear of losing balance. It won't solve the whole problem, but it will help.

In the more long term, the ideal would be good handsfree standing places that aren't near the door.

The other thing to keep in mind is that it's totally okay to stand in front of the doors that aren't going to open. If I'm riding north on Yonge from downtown and getting off at Eglinton, it's totally okay for me to stand in front of the left-hand doors, because all the downtown stations use the right-hand doors and Eglinton is the first station to open on the left. I'm in front of the doors the whole time, but totally out of everyone's way.

However, sometimes people block doors because they don't know which doors are going to open next. Longtime riders on familiar routes know, but people who are new to a given route sometimes stand in front of the wrong door thinking they're diligently keeping out of the way. If there was some kind of visual or audio signal indicating which doors are going to open next, people could get themselves out of the way before the train pulls into the station.

***

Also, I just had to add this really bizarre thing from the Panel's proposed list of customer responsibilities:

Never run to catch the bus, streetcar, or subway. This is dangerous for you as well as other riders.


I see the argument for not running on a subway platform. However, by telling us not to run for a bus or streetcar, they'd be basically telling us not to run down the street! Sorry, TTC, but that's out of your jurisdiction. We can evaluate the risk of running down the street for ourselves, thanks.

I sincerely hope they choose not to retain that particular wording.

Sunday, August 22, 2010

Things They Should Invent: standardized, widely-known way for children to make clear that they're just being cheerful to be polite

(This actually stems from another blog post that I'm hoping to get up today (the one about the secret to unhappiness, if it's up by the time you're reading this). I started composing the other one first but this one just came barging in and wrote itself beginning to end.)

I dislike the word "sulking" and similar concepts. They trivialize a person's emotions by implying that they're feeling those emotions for the sole purpose of annoying other people. Think about your own life. When you feel a negative emotion, is it in any way about how other people will feel about it? Of course not! Your emotion is your emotion, and you're expressing it because it's what you're feeling.

(I always find it especially bizarre when parents say their child us "up sulking in their room." Remember when you were a kid and, for whatever reason, weren't interested in being downstairs where everyone else was, so you went up to your room? Think about what you were doing. Were you sitting there with arms crossed and a sour face grumbling about the goings-on downstairs? Of course not! You were reading your books, playing with your toys - living your life, basically, rather than doing stuff you didn't want to. It was the childhood equivalent of whatever you're doing at home today on this rainy Sunday.)

I've been reading Miss Conduct's book (which is very interesting - a lot of examination of people's motivations, which I find useful), and one thing she mentions several times is "People aren't [X] at you!" The guest at your dinner party who doesn't eat shrimp isn't not eating shrimp at you, he's just not eating shrimp - just like that other guy who doesn't have a shrimp on his plate at the moment. The girl in the bar who looks hot isn't looking hot at you, just like how you aren't being tall at her.

Similarly, a kid who's feeling a negative emotion isn't sulking at you. They're just feeling a negative emotion. The real issue is the parent would like the kid to hide the negative emotion and pretend to enjoy the situation, and the kid isn't doing that.

So at this point we have to ask ourselves: why do people hide negative emotions? Think about your own life. You hide negative emotions when you have something to gain by doing so. What do kids have to gain by hiding negative emotions?

Let me remind you of another phrase you probably heard in your childhood: "See? That wasn't so bad!" When you're a kid, if you get through a situation you dislike without expressing a huge amount of negative emotion, you parents get all smug and told-you-so about it. Then next time you don't want to do something, they completely dismiss your feelings "Oh, don't be silly, you'll like it." Or, if it's the same thing, "What's the matter? You LIKE X!" And not only do they dismiss your feelings to your face, they also convince themselves that you actually did like the thing, to the point that they truly believe that your word on what you do and do not enjoy cannot be taken at face value.

Therefore, there's absolutely no motivation for a kid to hide their feelings. If they do, their feelings won't be taken seriously next time and the parents will truly think that the kid likes the things they say they didn't like. Their only possibility for being taken seriously is to express their feelings as vociferously as possible. (And even that often doesn't work because parents think they have to instill that kids won't get their way by "whining".)

So what is needed is a way for kids to express to their parents (before the fact, after the fact, or both) that they don't really enjoy something but were just trying to make the best of the situation to be polite. The parent would need to communicate this to them explicitly, as well as talking to them about why and under what circumstances and to what end people might hide their negative emotions. And then - this is the important part - the parents need to praise them for being good, and believe and remember that the kid actually dislikes the thing in question. If the kid doesn't like going to church but was good and sat quietly through the whole mass last week and then does the same this week, the parent needs to be thinking "They were so good and polite and helpful to sit quietly through mass!" It is absolutely imperative that the parent not start thinking "Oh, I see little Johnny likes church now. I knew he'd come around!"

Saturday, August 21, 2010

Slice of life

Summer, 10 years ago. My bedroom was right under the roof. My fast food shift started early in the morning and ended early in the afternoon. I'd come home, tired from being on my feet all day, smelling of grease, just in time for the afternoon thunderstorm. (Convective weather was like clockwork that year.) I'd change out of my smelly clothes, lie down on top of my comforter and wrap it around me like a cocoon, and let the sound of the rain beating down on the roof lull me to sleep. Somehow, these conditions made for the most interesting dreams.

I work a regular schedule now, at a computer, in an office, sitting down. I make more in a day now than I did in a week then, and my life is way easier and less stressful. I wouldn't go back then for anything. But, on rainy days like today, I miss my afternoon naps.

Counter-asshattery

A few days ago, Salon printed this story where a guy feels so emasculated by having lost his job that he feels the need to engage in a truly pathetic ritual of irritating the people near him in the grocery line. This is one of those pieces that makes me look stupid because I can't tell if it's serious or satire.

In any case, ever since I read it, I've felt the need to be outright solicitous to the people around me in grocery lines. I get the bar for the person in front of me AND the person behind me, big smile, "Here, let me get that for you." I'm all kinds of sorries and excuse-mes when squeezing past people in the aisles, I'm all "thanks so much" at every little interaction with the cashier. All of which you don't care about, and I wouldn't be posting if that was the whole story.

What makes this interesting is I'm not the only person doing this! I've had two grocery runs since I read that story, and I've encountered three other people also doing the same!

I wonder if that was the author's original intention? I wonder if maybe he ran into an asshat at the grocery store, so decided to instigate a mass effort of grocery-story counter-asshattery?

Mystery of the moment

I know some people who don't live in Toronto but have opinions about Toronto municipal politics. Their opinions are most often not compatible with what I need and want my city to be.

These people, as individuals, claim to care about me, as an individual. In most, if not all, cases, I'm the individual in Toronto that they care most about.

However, instead of accepting that I will take my political action in the way that is most compatible with what I need and want my city to be, they try to change my mind and get me to take the action they would take if they lived here (which they don't). Even though it affects me but not them.

WTF?

How to get all law-abiding citizens to trust police with two simple rules

1. If you are found to be innocent of whatever police were trying to arrest/detain/search/question you for in the first place, you (and anyone acting on your behalf/in your defence) cannot be charged with assaulting a police officer, obstructing justice, resisting arrest, and all those other laws that exist to enable police to catch bad guys.

As I blogged about before, a main reason for being afraid of the police is that even if their original reasoning or methods are bullshit and you're just trying to protect yourself, they can still rightfully arrest you for assaulting an officer or resisting arrest. If a bunch of plainclothes police try to throw you into a van and you try to fight back because, hey, strange men throwing you into a van, they can still charge you with resisting arrest, obstructing justice, assaulting an officer, mischief - even if it was a case of mistaken identity and you aren't actually the person they wanted to arrest.

So they should change this rule. If law-abiding citizens truly had nothing to fear, we'd be much more trusting of and willing to cooperate with police.

2. If the conditions of your detention do not meet Geneva Convention standards, you get financial compensation. Always. Period. Even if you're guilty.

As I mentioned in #10 of my braindump, what makes me more afraid of the police than of the black bloc is the detention conditions. If the worst a law-abiding citizen had to fear from police is having to sit around for a while, with access to sufficient drinking water and adequate toilet conditions, while the red tape is untangled, we'd have no reason to fear them. But once they start denying us drinking water and threatening us with rape, they become the biggest threat to us - and the reason why I now wouldn't even consider calling the police unless the threat I faced was even greater than several days of insufficient drinking water and rape threats. If they could get back to a place where I can be confident that the inconvenience I'd suffer if wrongfully arrested is no worse than waiting in line at some government office, I could trust them again.

Variations I'm toying with:

a) Financial compensation for inhumane detention conditions is somehow deducted from police salary increases. Not sure if this is logistically possible, not really comfortable with establishing the precedent of cutting workers' pay punitively (what if it was just the police chief's pay?), pretty sure pay negotiations would just take this into account and demand higher increases to adapt.

b) If you're found to be innocent and are detained under inhumane conditions, not only do you get financial compensation, but you get a get out of jail free card (or maybe several, depending on the length and severity of your detention). So next time you're guilty of something, they have to throw out the charges, or next time you find yourself kettled or otherwise detained by police, they have to let you go. Even if you're guilty that time.

Why you should be worried about our police even if you feel safe around police

Arising from this.

It seems the best strategy the police can think of when faced with a large peaceful crowd with a minority of criminal element hiding inside is to arrest everyone.

Apart from the fact that the world can be defined as a large peaceful crowd with a minority of criminal element hiding inside, we should be worried because arresting everyone appears to be the best strategy they can think of.

That's not a very good strategy, is it? Any of us could have thought of that!

Think about your own profession or vocation or calling. You sometimes face challenges that look impossible to outsiders, right? And, using your training and experience and expertise and talents, you can find solutions to these challenges that outsiders would never have thought of, with a better outcome than they could have ever achieved themselves, right?

If part of your hair gets cut off by accident and you look like an idiot, you'd expect a professional hairdresser to be able to work around it to give you a flattering cut that looks like it's on purpose. It would be unacceptable for them to shave your head. If you stain a difficult-to-clean piece of clothing and take it to a professional drycleaner, you'd expect them to come up with some way to remove the stain without wrecking the clothes. It would be unacceptable for them to throw it in the washing machine with Tide and bleach and hot water.

It would be unacceptable for your translator to run the text through Babelfish. It would be unacceptable for your dentist to tie one end of a string to your sore tooth and the other end to a doorknob. It would be unacceptable for the Morgentaler clinic to come at you with a wire coathanger. It would be unacceptable for a hired hitman to just bomb the whole city where the target lives. If any of these things happened, you'd assume they're incompetent.

The reason we have professionals in the first place is that they can do things way better than we ever could ourselves - more accurately and precisely and effectively, with better results and less damage.

It appears the police couldn't come up with a better strategy for finding a small criminal element hidden in a large peaceful crowd than to arrest the entire crowd. Which any schoolchild could have thought of. If you trust and/or depend on the police to keep you safe, you should be worried about this.

Thursday, August 19, 2010

Wil Wheaton is awesome!

This story isn't new, but I just heard it yesterday.

Wil Wheaton personally replied to an 8-year-old's lost fan club application - 21 years after the fact.

Wil was my very first celebrity crush, back before it ever occurred to me that I might enjoy kissing someone someday, possibly before any real-life crush. It seems my excellent taste in celebrity crushes started early.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

A solution to busybodies

There are certain parties who like to ask very personal questions and, when you protest, say "But I was just making conversation!"

A possible solution: change the subject to something completely else that's perfectly valid for just making conversation. "So did you see any of the Perseid meteor shower?" "Would you recommend Inception or Scott Pilgrim?" "Is it just me, or are blueberries more expensive this year?" After all, that's conversation!

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Things They Should Study: economic return on refugees

My grandparents came here on a boat 50 years ago with their gaggle of children. They did manage to find jobs and be self-supporting, but if they had been economically dependent the entire time they were in Canada, plus their children had been economically dependent until adulthood, there would have been about 150 total person-years economically dependent on the state.

My grandparents' direct descendants have, so far, put in nearly 200 total person-years of full-time gainful employment, plus an additional 60 total person-years of part-time work like you have as a student.

The majority of their grandchildren are still in school. I'm the oldest and I'm not yet 30. The youngest is still in high school. Parity between my grandparents' hypothetical person-years of dependence and their descendants' person-years of productive employment may well have been reached before I even finished university. Barring mass unemployment, we're going to reach 300 person-years of productive employment within the next decades.

Wouldn't it be interesting to do research and see to what extent this pattern holds throughout the general population?

Edited to add: It has also been pointed out to me that some of my grandparents' descendants have run businesses and therefore created jobs, and some have been responsible for teaching or training future members of their own fields. (To say nothing of the fact that some have saved lives.) So our ROI is greater than just the taxes and consumer spending produced by our salaries.

Monday, August 16, 2010

How to get Canadians to embrace a 1950s vision of Canada

Lawrence Martin suggests that the current government aspires to a 1950s vision of Canada (h/t Sister Sage).

I've been thinking about the 1950s a lot lately, because the 1950s were when my grandparents were about my age. As I get older, I find myself reaching the age that my parents and grandparents were when they made major decisions that ultimately affected me, so I find myself trying to picture what I'd be thinking in their shoes during that era.

During the 1950s, all of my grandparents found themselves with large numbers of children to raise, so they all got jobs. The jobs weren't anything fancy, didn't require any post-secondary, nothing a child would want to be when they grow up, just good honest hard work.

They then proceeded to keep these jobs, go into work every day and do the good honest hard work, until eventually they retired. They all got pensions from these jobs too, except for my one grandmother whose employer offered them a pension, but the workers took a vote and decided "No, thank you, most of us are married and our spouses have pensions. What in the world would we need with two pensions?"

Let me repeat that: the economic environment was such that simply by working hard, they were able to keep the same job for decades, buy houses, and raise gaggles of children who ended up going to university. And they all got pensions, except for one workplace where the employer offered a pension and the workers declined because most of them already had another pension!

If someone wanted to convince me that a 1950s worldview is beneficial, creating similar economic conditions would certainly be a good start!