This week's photo is of a stand of e-scooters ready for someone to hop on. I think this is a project of the City, and no, it doesn't compenste for the lack of public transit. I have no urge to try one; my eyes and my balance preclude that.
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| An addition to public transit |
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| Our toasting Earth |
Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| Docks waiting for summer |
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| Beachfront wheelchair ramp |
I've been a fan of Bruce Hornsby since the late 1980s and have seen him perform a couple of times (once in 1992 with the Grateful Dead and in 1993 with his band). He's released consistently enjoyable music since then and his latest album, Indigo Park, is no exception.
Relix published an in-depth profile of Hornsby and the album recently.
As he is tracking the unexpected origins of “Indigo Park”—the title-track of the new, 10-song studio set he’s scheduled to release on April 3 via Zappo Productions/Thirty Tigers—Hornsby is sitting in a hotel room in Houston, before a solo set at The Heights Theater, and then he’s off to a college town about an hour away. The Virginia-based musician is quick to mention at the top of his Zoom interview that, despite over four decades on the road, he’s never played this particular venue before. And that desire to experience fresh musical situations has continued to guide the pianist through an unexpected latter-career renaissance that’s led to the release of four albums in five years—2019’s Absolute Zero, 2020’s Non-Secure Connection, 2022’s ’Flicted and 2024’s Deep Sea Vents—a prolific second act scoring films and his own version of a Never Ending Tour with his veteran band, the Noisemakers. In that time, he’s also naturally aged into a gracious elder stateman, collaborating with improv-forward favorites like Goose and Eggy on stage and working closely with a new generation of indie-rock icons in the studio.
There are two songs written with the Dead's late lyricist, Robert Hunter, and collaborations with several musicians, including Bonnie Raitt and the late Bob Weir. I've listened to the album a couple of times and like it a lot. If he was coming to Toronto on his current tour, I'd probably be going.
Back in January, the Pentagon had a meeting with a US cardinal in which they basically threatened the Catholic Church and mentioned the Avignon Papacy. That was a period in the 14th century in which the French kidnapped the pope, keeping the papacy in France for 70 years.
I hadn't heard about this until seeing a post today from Dean Blundell. I did check and there are multiple news sites also reporting about the meeting (here and here, for example).
Pope Leo will not be visiting the US for the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of 1776. Instead, he'll be visiting the island of Lampedusa, off the coast of Sicily, where many African migrants arrive.
I very much doubt that Pope Leo will visit the US as long as the Trump administration remains in power. And I do not doubt that the Catholic Church and the papacy will be around long after the Trump administration fades into unhappy memory.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| A choppy bay |
It's Easter weekend up here in the Great (not so) White North, and I'm taking the weekend off from blogging. It's time to work on my income tax return and maybe start getting the yard back in shape if it doesn't rain too much.
I'll be back here on Monday with a post about Canada and the US. Until then, here'a a picture of our cats (CJ on the left and McGee on the right).
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| CJ and McGee |
Things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
Note: There are no April fool jokes in the post.
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| The rite of spring |
Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in March.
I've known about tracking pixels for a long time but never figured that they were much of a problem. Of course, they do reveal that you read an email or accessed a web site, but there are riskier things to worry about reading emails or browsing the web.
But things have changed, as Steve Gibson pointed out in the latest installment of his Security Now podcast. From page 8 of his show notes:
I just learned how far tracking pixels have evolved. They’re easy to miss because, much like cookies, the code their presence on any webpage allows to run is hidden from us. But last Wednesday the 18th, the security researchers at Jscrambler shared what they had recently learned about what TikTok and Meta are doing.
Their headline was: “Beyond Analytics: The Silent Collection of Commercial Intelligence by TikTok and Meta Ad Pixels”. As we’ll see, this writing is targeted at web merchants who are voluntarily adding these insidious tracking pixels to their sites’ own webpages without a full appreciation or understanding of the privacy implications for their visitors.
It turns out that Meta and TikTok are grabbing both personal information (names, addresses, phone numbers, credit card information) and a log of just about everything that people are doing on sites with these tracking pixels. From the report, Gibson quotes this:
Meta’s pixel includes a feature called Automatic Events, which is enabled by default. The feature automatically scans page elements and captures information such as checkout interactions and visible payment card details, including the last digits, expiration date, and cardholder name. Since this is the default behavior and not an opt-in, merchants may not be aware that the pixel is collecting this information. On separate sites, Meta captured recipients' full names and delivery addresses when users selected address options during checkout.
This information can be used by Meta to compile a huge database of behaviour that it can sell. It's also presents a risk to anyone using those sites in the case of a security breach at Meta and because the information being sent to Meta may not be encrypted, making it a vulnerability should the user be the target of an attacker.
Both TikTok and Meta's pixel code can load and begin transmitting data before the website's consent management system has time to block it, meaning information can leave the browser before the user’s choice is applied. Even more concerning is that data may be transmitted in cleartext—occasionally within the request URL itself—exposing sensitive information to browser histories, server logs, intermediaries, and debugging tools.
This vulnerability stems not only from the pixel’s data-collection methods but also from misconfigurations during its implementation or from issues with the website's underlying architecture. Consequently, the attack surface is significantly broader than a surface-level analysis suggest
Using Firefox, which supports the full uBlock Origin, is probably a good idea. Google Chrome supports uBlock Origin Lite (which I am using), but it's not as effective as the original uBlock Origin in blocking tracking pixels, web beacons, and tracking scripts.
Yet another item to add to my To Do list.
This week's picture is a follow up to last week's photo. This is the same yucca, but without any snow on top of it. I hope it recovers from the winter. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
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| A yucca after the snow melts |
I haven't followed the musical career of St. Vincent (the stage name of Jules Buckley) closely though I have listened to some of her albums and enjoyed them. Live in London was performed at the Royal Albert Hall with a full orchestra as part of the BBC Pops series.
Orchestral pop albums can be hit or miss but this one nails it. The arrangements perfectly suit her songs and the recording quality, as you might expect from the BBC, is outstanding. She's performing in Toronto with an orchestra on her current tour but unfortunately ticket prices are out of my league.
I'm constantly annoyed and frustrated by the crap that websites are blasting my phone with when I try t o read an article or browse a web page. Popups, autoplaying videos that refuse to close, ads that jump out and shove the text I'm reading out of the way;; I'm sure you've seen it all.
If you want to get a better idea of what's happening and why, read The 49MB Web Page by Shumham Bose, a developer and user interface design expert. The article was triggered when they looked behind the scenes at what was happening when they opened an article from The New York Times website and found that the browser downloaded 49 MB of data. (That's roughly equivalent to an album of MP3s or 50 books in EPUB format).
When you open a website on your phone, it's like participating in a high-frequency financial trading market. That heat you feel on the back of your phone? The sudden whirring of fans on your laptop? Contributing to that plus battery usage are a combination of these tiny scripts.
I don't usually see most of this on my PC because I run an ad blocker (uBlock Origin Lite) that blocks much of the crap that the article discusses. I use Firefox with uBlock Origin as my default browser on the phone, despite the annoyance of having different browsers on my PC and phone. (I know, I know; it's just laziness that keeps me from using Firefox on my PC). Apps, where publishers seem to consider pushing ads their primary purpose in life, are also problematic.
I should point out that there are real security problems inherent in the use of programmatic ad auctions and tracking pixels and their associated scripts. (I'll have another post about this tomorrow or Monday).
This is the best article about web design that I've seen in a very long time. Even if you're not particularly technical, it's worth reading just to understand why your browsing experience is so unpleasant.
Things I was interested in but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
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| Bluffer's Park on a cloudy day |
This week's photo is of a hasta yucca in our front yard that has spent most of the winter buried under a waist-high mound of the snow. I hope this winter hasn't killed it off. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and edited in Google Photos to improve the contrast.
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| Leaves of a yucca mostly buried in the snow |
It's hard to believe that it's been six years since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. Concern about COVID-19 has faded into the background for most people, but it's still out there, lurking in the air when you go our shopping or go to a concert.
So what's the real situation with COVID-19 right now? Your Local Epidemiologist has published an article that looks at the current disease landscape; how much COVID is out there right now, how it's affecting people, and what are the current trends.
Six years! Six years with a complicated data story of real progress alongside real stubbornness. This anniversary is striking to me for two reasons. The first is the virus itself: it continues to surprise us, and we remain humbled by how much we still don’t understand. The second is what has happened to us in its wake.
For myself, I'm still being careful, masking in crowded situations and in medical facilities like doctors' offices and hospitals. (A good rule of thumb is that if the staff are masking then you should be too.) I'll keep getting vaccinated twice a year and keep hoping for a vaccine that protects against infection. And I'll keep reading YLE and other reputable sites for reliable information about COVID and any other nasties that might be out there.
The Canadian government has announced that it will fund the construction of a space launch site near Canso, Nova Scotia. Canada has been building satellites and other space hardware, like the Canadarms on the Shuttle and ISS, but has not had it's own dedicated launch site.
The government will also be funding the development of a made-in-Canada launch vehicle.
A spaceport in Nova Scotia. A spaceport in Newfoundland. Three funded Canadian rocket companies. A $105 million competitive grant program with more rounds coming. The global space economy is projected to reach approximately $2 trillion by 2040. Canada is planting its flag in that economy right now, while the ground is still moving — instead of letting a billionaire cult leader control the on-ramp.
Here’s the piece that most coverage is either missing or treating as a footnote, and it absolutely shouldn’t be.
Alongside the Spaceport deal, Defence Minister McGuinty announced that Canada plans to become a full member of the NATO Starlift initiative — a program designed to create a space-launch network across alliance members, allowing allies to get payloads into orbit on short notice, especially during a crisis or active conflict.
All I can say is that it's about time.
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| Birds wintering on the Bay |
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) has announced the finalists for the 2025 Nebula Awards. The finalists will be announced in Chicago and online during the Nebula Conference and Awards, June 3-7.
These are the finalists for the Best Novel award.
My vision is gradually getting better, so I've been taking the occasional picture, mostly using my Pixel 8 Pro. This is a picture of the ice on Frenchman's Bay, gradually breaking up and melting on a warm spring morning.
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| Ice melting on Frenchman's Bay |
This week's musical treat is piece of music that links the horrors of the Holocaust to the terrorizing of immigrant communities by ICE raids in the United States. "For Anne in the Attic" was performed in Spokane, WA earlier this month. From The Globe and Mail article (gift link) titled "Chorus of Discontent"
Dressed in church choir black, the women standing at the front of the Unity Spiritual Center in Spokane, Wash., last Sunday began to sing a new song that likens the U.S. treatment of asylum seekers to the Holocaust.
“Could they see you run for your lives as the forces of hatred pursued you, found you,” the choir sang.
“Where was their humanity?”
Midway through, the pronouns shifted − no longer “they,” but “we,” a switch from the past to the present. “Do we know? Do we know?” they sang. “Can we hear your pleas for asylum when fleeing, afraid for your lives?”
The choral arrangement, For Anne in the Attic, was written by Janice Mayfield, a local woman who penned the words after rereading The Diary of Anne Frank amid the cou--ntless headlines about U.S. immigration enforcement
I have been wondering why the current political situation hasn't generated more protest songs. There have been some, as pointed out by NPR. I blogged about Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Minneapolis" recently, but you're more likely to the 60-year-old Stephen Stills classic, "For What It's Worth" than the Springsteen song on what passes for radio these days.
You probably won't hear "For Anne in the Attic" on the radio, but it may become a modern standard in church and choral performances. (If anyone can find the lyrics online, please let me know in the comments).
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| 1st issue of Amazing Stories |
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| Lactose-free cat |
How do we address the firehose of inaccurate information that is flooding the internet right now? It’s tempting to try to play whack-a-mole, tackling one rumor after another, and there is certainly value in addressing individual claims.But emerging research shows that a better (and less exhausting) method —“prebunking,” or teaching people to recognize falsehoods before they encounter them—is highly effective. If you can teach people to recognize the common rhetorical tricks that are used to sell falsehoods, they can identify them for themselves in the wild, instead of relying on scientists and doctors to chase down every individual claim, meme, or video (which is impossible).With that, here’s a prebunking lesson for you.
I can't recommend this article highly enough. Read it, remember it, and apply it in your daily reading. You won't regret it.
It's easy to get depressed when looking at the news and thinking that everything is getting worse. But there are some trends that provide some hope, at least in the middle and long-term futures.
Science fiction author and futurist, Karl Schroeder, has published a blog post in which he highlights some things that might lead to cautious optimism about our future prospects. It's long but worth a read.
Today I’m going to describe some hard, apocalyptic truths about our short-term future. Basically, using fossil fuels for geopolitical extortion is resulting in catastrophe. But then I’m going to make three unapocalyptic claims: first, that fossil fuel coercion is becoming structurally self-defeating; second, that future material scarcities that can be used to coerce weaker nations are shallower and shorter-lived than their predecessors; and third, that the limiting constraint on industrial civilization is ultimately ecological rather than technological or political. Finally, I’ll show how this is cause for a (cautious) optimism about our mid- to long-term future.
A week ago, the markets had a bad day. The Dow dropped by about 800 points. In a blog post, Paul Krugman made the case that the cause was a science fiction story in the form of a fictional financial report from 2028.
Last weekend Citrini Research released a report — on Substack! — titled The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis. The report, which rapidly went viral, laid out a scenario for economic and financial chaos caused by AI, written as if it were a retrospective published after the dire developments it projected. Although it’s always hard to know why financial markets move on any given day, the report may have played a role in Monday’s 800-point decline in the Dow. Science fiction moving markets? Why not?
There are two distinct questions about the huge reaction to a report that didn’t actually contain any news. It was just opinion, albeit cleverly presented. The first is whether the economic scenario the report laid out makes sense, to which the answer is no. The second is why investors are so on edge that such a report could elicit such an extreme reaction.
The report, which is really a rather dry science fiction story in disguise, makes the case that AI will completely disrupt the economy over the next few years. Not being a financial analyst, I can't comment on the accuracy of the report's predictions, but Krugman, a Nobel-prize-winning economist, doesn't think they make much sense.
Still, the fact that the report might have contributed to a large and sudden (albeit temporary) market decline shows that there is widespread concern about the long-term effects of AI technology on the economy.
It'll be interesting to see if the report makes it into any year's best science fiction anthologies next year.
Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in February. A bit shorter than usual because we watched a lot of winter Olympics.
This week's musical treat is an introduction to the music of the Grateful Dead assembled by David Lemieux, the Dead's archivist. He's picked five songs that offer a glimpse into the varied styles of the Grateful Dead: the powerhouse arena rock of Morning Dew, the out there psychedelic improvisation of Dark Star, the blues rock of Viola Lee Blues, the jazzy improvs of Eyes of the World featuring Branford Marsalis, and the delicate acoustic textures of Bird Song.
It's a good starting point for those who aren't familiar with the Dead's music and I've enjoyed listening to all of these again. I don't think I could improve on it, though might do a post with my suggestions for a second chapter.
Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.
It's been a while since I wrote on of these posts, though I have been following the news about Canada's relationship with the US pretty closely. In the past couple of weeks, I've seen more discussion about the possibility of a US invasion of Canada, something which I've posted about before this. It seems that people, including members of our government, are taking the possiblity more seriously. So I'll start this post with a couple of articles about that.
This week's musical treat is a rare video of a Joni Mitchell concert from April 24, 1983 at London's Wembley Arena. It was filmed and broadcast on the BBC 2 network. Joni is supported by a crackerjack band that included The band for this tour included Michael Landau (guitar), Russell Ferrante (keyboards), Larry Klein (bass), and Vinnie Colaiuta (drums).
The poster didn't include a setlist, but the full concert setlist is included on setlists.fm. The hour-long video includes some of my favourite songs: "Free Man in Paris", "A Case of You" and "Amelia". It looks like the original 4:3 video has been stretched to 16:9 but the audio is just fine. Enjoy.
I was going to include this post by Emmett Macfarlane in a Featured Links post next week, but after reading through it a couple of times, I decided it deserved it's own post.
If you've been paying any attention to Canadian politics recently, you'll likely have seen mentions of a growing separatist movement in Alberta (and to a lesser extent in Saskatchewan and British Columbia). That's always been an undercurrent in Western Canadian politics, but its become more prominent since the rise of the UCP in Alberta and the second Trump administration in the US. But what Alberta's Premier Danielle Smith is now proposing is more dangerous than plain separatism. As Macfarlane states in his post, she is now the most dangerous politician in Canada.
We like to denigrate comparisons to Trump as lazy because Trump is distinct in so many ways. He tells more lies than any other politician. He actively and nakedly seeks unlawful self-enrichment. He is on multiple counts a criminal. He is monumentally stupid. In short, any other politician will always have attributes that distinguishes them from Trump. Smith is no criminal. She’s not stupid. But once we see that Trump is as much a symptom as he is the cause of America’s anti-democratic rot, we should recognize the same holds for people like Danielle Smith. She is the most dangerous politician in Canada, launching an agenda not only of fear and greed, but one that seeks to undermine the country, its federal structure, and its spirit of tolerance and compassion. It is nothing short of evil, and it must be fought on all fronts.
