Featured Links - January 22, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

CJ in a box

• The Self-Checkout Nightmare May Finally Be Ending. "Self-checkout is a failed experiment, and a growing number of stores are backpedaling on these cursed machines." They're OK if you just have a couple of items, but replacing most or all of regular checkouts with them is not consumer friendly. 
• Source Code in TV and Films. "Images of the computer code appearing in TV and films and what they really are. See https://behind-the-screens.tv for video versions of some."
• We spoke with an expert on building with wood as a climate-friendly housing solution. "One such innovation is mass timber construction, which means building with wood as the primary material. With projects built using mass timber being able to reduce carbon pollution during construction by up to 45 per cent, using wood to build our cities, including homes, schools, and infrastructure, has a host of environmental benefits."
• ‘Super cool’: 27-year-old Sault producer wins two Emmys. "Algoma University graduate Hannah Rowswell is part of a California-based animation company recognized twice during the Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles." The awards were for work on two of my favourite shows: The Last of Us and For All Mankind.
• All the Big Horror, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy Films We're Excited for in 2024. "In io9's 2024 movie preview, we run down the big (and small) genre titles coming to theaters this year." I found ten movies that look promising. What about you? Leave a comment,
• Long COVID expert at US Senate hearing. "The burden of disease and disability from long COVID . . . is on par with the burden of cancer and heart disease."
• Lighting up Long Covid. "An important new mechanistic study and a blitz of other reports that help our understanding."
• The Ransom Center's Movie Poster Collection at the University of Texas at Austin. "Consists of an estimated 10,000 posters and spans the entire history of film from the silent era to the present day. All sizes of American film posters are represented."
• A Reporter’s Journey Into How the U.S. Funded the Bomb. "Watching “Oppenheimer,” a journalist wondered (perhaps a bit obsessively): How did the president get the $2 billion secret project past Congress?" A rather interesting bit of history. 

Photo of the Week - January 21, 2024

I took this picture with my phone while getting some exercise walking at the mall earlier in the week. I thought it worked best as black and while. 

Mall skylight

  

Saturday Sounds - Bob Dylan ~ April 29 & May 12, 1976

This week's Saturday Sounds post is a real treat. There aren't many good recordings of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Review tour. So if you are a Bob Dylan fan, you will DEFINITELY want to check this out - a pristine soundboard recording from two Rolling Thunder tour shows. It's a significant find and you can read about it in this article from Relix. 

I saw one of the Toronto shows (the second one on December 2nd, 1975) at Maple Leaf Gardens and it was one of the more memorable concerts I've been to. I'd love to have a recording of that show but I haven't been able to track one down. There is a decent audience recording of Dylan's performance from the previous night up on YouTube. 

We're Toast 46

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Winter playground

• 2023 was Earth’s hottest year on record. "It was the warmest year on record for 29% of the global population, 77 countries, and 3 continents; 21 nations or territories set an all-time extreme heat record." This is the best summary article on the subject that I've seen to date.
• There's Been a Staggering Increase in People Killed by Fungi Every Year, Study Finds. "New research estimates that deaths from fungal infections have doubled since just a decade ago.
• Greenland’s Glaciers Are Melting Way Faster Than We Thought: Study. "A new study found that Greenland is losing 30 million metric tons of ice every hour." That's equivalent to one square kilometre covered to a depth of 30 metres. Per hour.
• "Nobody and nowhere will be safe": Experts say we can't hide from climate change. "In the movies, heroes can outrun the apocalypse. But in the real world there's no exit from the climate crisis."
• Climate change fueled a rise in rare disease outbreaks last year. "This year’s spate of rare illnesses may have come as a surprise to the uninitiated, but researchers who have been following the way climate change influences disease say 2023 represents the continuation of a trend they expect will become more pronounced over time: The geographic distribution of pathogens and the timing of their emergence are undergoing a shift."
• The New Space Race Is Causing New Pollution Problems (gift link). "Earth’s stratosphere has never seen the amounts of emissions and waste from rockets and satellites that a booming space economy will leave behind."
• Critical Infrastructure Is Sinking Along the US East Coast. "Up and down the Atlantic Coast, the land is steadily sinking, or subsiding. That’s destabilizing levees, roads, and airports, just as sea levels are rising."
• We could be 16 years into a methane-fueled 'termination' event significant enough to end an ice age. "Methane emissions from tropical wetlands have been soaring since 2006 and accelerating at the same breakneck speed as when Earth's climate has flipped from a glacial to an interglacial period."

Karl Schroeder Is Serializing His New Novel

SF author and futurist, Karl Schroeder, is serializing his new novel, The Fallow Orbits,  on his blog, Unapocalyptic. 

Today I’m proud to launch the serialization of my short SF novel, The Fallow Orbits. This book is an homage to the inspiration of my youth, the late great Andre Norton.

As many of you know, I discovered science fiction through Norton’s books. Her books are still my sick-day go-to reads, even if I spend the rest of my time trying to keep up with the astonishing and beautiful works being produced by current authors like Ada Palmer, Karen Lord, Deji Bryce Olukotum, and so many others. Norton was a born storyteller, and what I know about narrative momentum and pacing, I learned from her.

The Fallow Orbits may be honoring an older style of science fiction—and it’s definitely in the Atompunk genre, with no tech higher than 1960s-era—but it’s packed with modern ideas. In particular, I’ve replaced the usual vague hand-waving about why we would want to build a Dyson Sphere (“for the real estate!”) with an actual, solid reason. It’s a really fun one, too—I think you’ll like it.

He's putting the first chapter of the book up for free; if you want to read more, you'll have to subscribe to his blog. 

In a post earlier this week, he describes the genesis of the novel.

Then I stumbled across an ad for the SciFidea Dyson Sphere contest. Write a story about a Dyson Sphere, get $20,000. Hmm. Tough decision. I’ve never entered a writing contest and never planned to, but the prize looked nice. And, hey, I had this world I’d been developing that, while not exactly about a Dyson Sphere was, shall we say, Dyson-Sphere-adjacent.

So what the hell. I already had a spacefaring civilization that was naturally and believably low-tech, as well as the characters, and the scenario. I figured I’d write a 30,000-word novella and submit it.

It turned into a 60,000-word novel.

Which didn’t win the contest.

This did not bum me out the way you might expect; after all, I’m an award-winning, widely translated novelist, I know I wrote a fun story, and it’s perfectly fine that it wasn’t the kind of story the contest was looking for. It might just be the kind of story you’re looking for, to help you through this dark and gloomy January—if you’re interested in a classic space opera packed with loquacious aliens, nuclear-powered spaceships, free traders, a thieves’ guild, space pirates, secret societies, abductions, sword fights, disguises, intrigue, and an ancient secret so explosive that it could topple an entire civilization…

Best of all, you can read The Fallow Orbits right here, if you’re a paid subscriber.

 Do check it out, and if you like it, subscribe. 

Fair disclosure: I've known Karl through the SF fan community in Toronto for many years. He's a brilliant thinker, an accomplished author, and I've enjoyed everything I've read by him. If you haven't read his books and you're looking for a good place to start, I'd recommend his Virga series, starting with Sun of Suns. (Please, please, please, will somebody film this!).

 

It Could Go Either Way

It looks like 2024 will be a pivotal year around the world. On his blog, author Charlie Stross points out that roughly half the world's population will be voting in elections this year, including the United States and the world's two largest Muslim countries. Given that there has been a world-wide trend to autocracy, there could be some bad consequences if that trend continues. 

Some of the potential outcomes are disastrous. A return to the White House by the tangerine shitgibbon would inevitably cut off all US assistance to Ukraine, and probably lead to a US withdrawl from NATO ... just as Russia is attempting to invade and conquer a nation in the process of trying to join both the EU and NATO. This would encourage Russia to follow through with attacks on the Baltic States (Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia), Finland, and finally Poland, all of which were part of the Russian empire either prior to 1917 or under Stalin and which Putinists see as their property. Having militarized the Russian economy, it's not clear what else Putin could do after occupying Ukraine: global demand for fossil fuels (his main export) is going to fall off a cliff over the next decade and the Russian economy is broken. Hitler's expansion after 1938 was driven by the essential failure of the German economy, leading him to embark on an asset-stripping spree: stealing Eastern Europe probably looks attractive from where the Russian dictator is sitting.

But as Charlie points out, there are also some encouraging trends.

Leaving aside the global fascist insurgency and the oil and climate wars, and it's worth noting that we are seeing exponential growth in the rate of photovoltaic capacity worldwide: each year this decade so far we've collectively installed 50% more PV panels than existed in the previous year. 50% annual compound growth in a new energy resource will rewrite the equations that underly economics in a very short period of time. The renewable energy sector now employs more people than fossil fuels, and the growth is still accelerating.

Whatever happens, the world will probably be a very different place in three or four years.  

Incidentally, Charlie's blog is one of the few exceptions to the rule about not reading the comments, especially since he is restricting discussion on this post to non-US politics.

 

Converting an Image of Text Into an Editable Format

I had a recipe that I wanted to share with the family, but the original was a scanned PDF of a rather smudgy page that I didn't want to share.

I was able to convert it text and edit it in Word, then save it as a much cleaner and smaller PDF. 

1. Open the original PDF in Acrobat Reader.

2. Select the graphic and copy it to the clipboard.

3. Open Paint and paste the image into Paint.

4. Save it as a PNG and close Paint.

5. Open the new image file with the Snipping Tool.

6. Select the text, right-click and choose Copy Selected Text. 

7. Close the Snipping Tool.

8. Open Word or your text editor of choice and paste the text.

9. Edit to remove extra lines and fix line breaks. 

9. Save the file in the desired format.  

It sounds complicated but only took a couple of minutes. This technique would also work if you wanted to edit the text from one of those social media posts where people have posted a screen shot of text.

If you have Acrobat Pro, you could probably do this directly in that program. There are other tools that would work too but these are what I had on hand. 

Featured Links - January 15, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about:

Winter walking hazards

• Huge ancient city found in the Amazon. "A huge ancient city has been found in the Amazon, hidden for thousands of years by lush vegetation. The discovery changes what we know about the history of people living in the Amazon."
• Why Are American Drivers So Deadly? (gift link): "After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again." This probably applies to Canada as well as we drive the same cars and drivers are just as badly behaved.
• I Found David Lynch’s Lost Dune II Script. "It was only about halfway done, but the script David Lynch wrote for the sequel to his 1984 adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel, Dune, was still better than Dune Messiah."
• Why You Should Rest—a Lot—If You Have COVID-19. 'The only guaranteed way to avoid Long COVID is not to get infected by SARS-CoV-2. But if someone does get sick, "Rest is incredibly important to give your body and your immune system a chance to fight off the acute infection,” says Dr. Janna Friedly, a post-COVID rehabilitation specialist at the University of Washington who recovered from Long COVID herself.' 
• Instagram’s co-founders are shutting down their Artifact news app. "Artifact, the news app created by Instagram co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, is shutting down just a year after launch. The app used an AI-driven approach to suggest news that users might like to read, but it seems it didn’t catch on with enough people for the Artifact team to continue making the app." This is sad news. I liked Artifact a lot and found it quite useful. 
• The Space Force is changing the way it thinks about spaceports. "There's not much available real estate to grow Cape Canaveral's launch capacity."
• How Threads will integrate with the Fediverse. "This is an exceptionally long post detailing pretty much everything I learned at an event shortly before Christmas at Meta’s offices in San Francisco. I’ve been delayed in writing it up because of traveling back to the UK for Christmas and other commitments – and because I wanted to capture everything."
• Quantum mechanics model unveils hidden patterns in stock markets. "A new study published in Financial Innovation has developed a novel quantum model for stock market fluctuations that incorporates economic uncertainty and herding behavior. The study aims to provide a deeper understanding of the origins and implications of stock market anomalies such as fat tails, volatility clustering, and contrarian effects." There's a some people call stock market analysts quants. 

Photo of the Week - January 14, 2024

I walked down to Frenchman's Bay earlier this week to see if there were any birds sheltering on the bay, which is a major bird habitat during the winter. There were only a few, though that will probably change once the weather gets colder and the bay freezes over. This was taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

A few birds on the bay

 

Saturday Sounds - Phish - Gamehenge - 12/31/2023

In a tradition that was started by Bill Graham at concerts in San Francisco, Phish stage an elaborate production as part of their New Year's Eve concerts. This year, they performed the full Gamehenge suite, which started out as Trey Anastasio's thesis for his music degree. The band has only performed it a few times, the last being in 1994, and it's been at the top of fan request lists for many years. 

Phish have generously posted the full suite to YouTube in pro-shot 4K HDR video with soundboard audio. It really is quite a spectacle complete with a flying mockingbird.  You can read a bit more about the show in this Relix article. Enjoy.

More Useful Coding Tutorials for Technical Writers

Here are some more links to tutorials for technical writers who want to improve their technical skills. These are all from the excellent freeCodeCamp site.

• "This in-depth course will teach you Web Development for beginners. You'll learn key tools like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You'll even learn how to commit your code with Git and deploy it to the cloud. My friend Akash teaches this course. He's not only a developer – he's also CEO of a machine learning startup. This man knows webdev like the back of his hand, and he's stellar at teaching it." (20 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-web-development-with-this-free-20-hour-course
• "If you're building an AI system, please consider learning about AI ethics. freeCodeCamp just published our second primer on this important and potentially extinction-preventing topic. You don't need to know a lot about programming or about philosophy to enjoy this course. You'll learn about the current Black Box AI approach that many Large Language Models use, and its limitations. You'll also learn about some scenarios that were previously considered to be science fiction, such as The Singularity. freeCodeCamp is proud to help inform the discourse on developing AI tools responsibly." (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/the-ethics-of-ai-and-ml/
• "If you've experimented with Large Language Models like GPT-4, you may be somewhat disappointed by their capabilities. Well, getting good responses out of LLMs is a skill in itself. This course will teach you the art and the science of Prompt Engineering, and even introduce some AI-assisted coding concepts. Then you'll be able to write clearer prompts and get more helpful responses from AI. I spent some time learning these techniques myself, and was blown away by how much more useful they made ChatGPT for me." (3 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/prompt-engineering-for-web-developers/
• "freeCodeCamp also published a MySQL for Beginners course this week. You'll learn Relational Database concepts and SQL basics. This is a practical, jargon-free, no-nonsense course. I think you'll enjoy Josh's straightforward teaching style. It's clear to me that he's spent a large portion of his waking life using MySQL." (2 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/learn-mysql-beginners-course/
• "Harvard's CS50 course is the most popular course at Harvard, and the most-watched Computer Science course in history. Through freeCodeCamp's partnership with Harvard, I present to you the brand new 2023 edition of this course. You'll learn CS fundamentals like Data Structures and Algorithms. You'll also learn C programming, Python, SQL, and other key tools of the trade. I know learning to code is a big undertaking. Ease into it with this fun, beginner-friendly course." (26 hour YouTube course): https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/harvard-university-cs50-computer-science-course-2023/
• "A String is one of the most primordial of data types. You can find String variables in almost every programming language. Strings are just a sequence of characters, usually between two quote marks, like this: "banana". And yet there are so many things you can do with Strings: Concatenation, Comparison, Encoding, and even String Searching with Regular Expressions. Joan Ayebola wrote this in-depth handbook that will teach you everything you need to know about JavaScript Strings. (full  handbook)":  https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/javascript-string-handbook/

Terry Bisson, RIP

Locus is reporting that author Terry Bisson has died at the age of 81. He's probably best known for his 1990 story, "Bears Discover Fire", which won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards, but he wrote many excellent novels and published several story collections. 

A few years ago, I read his novel, Fire on the Mountain, which is one of the few books that have made me weep. I wrote this in my blog at the time.

I have just been blown away by a novel – Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain, which is an alternate history novel in which John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was successful, leading to the establishment of a black nation in the south. Finishing the book was an interesting experience – I was enjoying the book a lot and came to the end, read the last line, and found myself sitting on the couch weeping. Spoiler alert: the last line was. “Plus such beautiful shoes.”

I was not expecting that. And it was the last line that did it. It just snuck up behind me and smacked me upside the head when I wasn’t expecting it.

That is the mark of a true master. And it was such an innocent last line. Just four words – but just exactly perfect words.

Twenty Lessons About Tyranny

Seven years ago Timothy Snider published a list of twenty lessons that we should learn from twentieth-century history. He since expanded it into a short book called On Tyranny. 

He recently listed the twenty lessons in a Substack post and they are worth looking and remembering. Here are the first three.

1. Do not obey in advance.  Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.  A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 

2.  Defend institutions.  It is institutions that help us to preserve decency.  They need our help as well.  Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf.  Institutions do not protect themselves.  They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.  So choose an institution you care about -- a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union -- and take its side.

3. Beware the one-party state.  The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start.  They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents.  So support the multiple-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections.  Vote in local and state elections while you can.  Consider running for office.

Featured Links - January 8, 2024

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. It's a longer than usual this week because of the holiday hiatus.

A foggy winter country scene

• Siberia’s ice is melting, revealing its past and endangering its future (gift link). "Siberia is heating up around twice as quickly as other parts of the world. The rapid change is causing the frozen ground known as permafrost that coats about two-thirds of Russia to thaw for the first time in ages."
• What We Lost When Twitter Became X (archive.ph link). "As a former Twitter employee, I watched Elon Musk undermine one of the Internet’s most paradoxical, special places."
• 1 Key Element Gives The 2000 Dune Miniseries An Advantage Over Villeneuve's Dune Films. "Over two decades later, one key element still gives the 2000 Dune miniseries a huge advantage over Denis Villeneuve's Dune films. Here's what to know." The 2000 miniseries is well worth tracking down and watching; it's available on YouTube. 
• How The Beatles helped turn the Pentax Spotmatic into an iconic camera. "The Pentax SLR had huge influence on a generation of photographers - including the Fab Four."
• Unpredicting 2024. From science fiction author and futurist, Karl Schroeder: 'If we reframe the coming year around one simple idea—expect surprises—then it becomes clear that predictions are irrelevant and can even be dangerous when they lead us to rely on eventualities that don’t happen. Because the future we care about is the dimension of surprise, by definition we can’t predict it. So ignore all those “predictions for 2024” articles, they’re not going to help.'
• SOTP: State-of-the-Pandemic. "The pandemic's 2nd biggest wave of infections and what the JN.1 variant is telling us." A detailed look at current conditions and future possibilities from Eric Topol. 
• How Standard Ebppls Serves Millions of Requests Per Month with a 2GB VPS; Or a Paen to the Classic Web. "Standard Ebooks is a project that takes transcriptions of public domain literature, like the kind typically available at Project Gutenberg, and creates beautiful, modern ebooks out of them using a detailed style manual. Volunteers from all over the world work to produce these ebooks, and then we release them free of cost and free of copyright restrictions."
• 2024 Fediverse Predictions from Tim Chambers. "These are fun and like seeing the tech predictions starting to pop up in a lot of other places."
• Why U.S. streets are becoming deadlier for pedestrians. "Pedestrian deaths in the United States have been going up since 2009. Over 3,000 more pedestrians died in 2021 than in 2009, a trend that's not mirrored in other industrialized countries, where pedestrian fatalities are actually declining. Even stranger these deaths in the U.S. occur more frequently in the evening. So, why are so many pedestrians dying at night in the United States?"
• The fall of Firefox: Mozilla's once-popular web browser slides into irrelevance. "With its market share hitting a new low, can Firefox rise from the ashes or is this the end?" 
• Elon Musk Has Used Illegal Drugs, Worrying Leaders at Tesla and SpaceX. (Archive.ph link) "Some executives and board members fear the billionaire’s use of drugs—including LSD, cocaine, ecstasy, mushrooms and ketamine—could harm his companies." I wouldn't be surprised to see him off the board of Tesla and SpaceX because of this.

Photo of the Week - January 7, 2024

For the first Photo of the Week post for 2024, here's a lone kayaker on Frenchman's Bay. I took this with the 5x zoom on the Pixel 8 Pro and used the Dynamic filter on Google Photos to add a bit of contrast. Although this was taken a couple of weeks ago, the bay is still not frozen over. 

Kayaker on Frenchman's Bay

 

Saturday Sounds - Electric Hot Tuna - 2021/11/13 - Fur Peace Ranch

 For the first Saturday Sounds post of the New Year here's Electric Hot Tuna from Jorma Kaukonen's Fur Peace Ranch, It's an officially released webcast so the sound and video quality is excellent. This is the electric configuration of Hot Tuna with Jorma Kaukonen playing mostly electric guitar, with Jack Casady on bass and Jusin Guin on drums. 

I've enjoyed Hot Tuna ever since their first album came out way back when though sadly never caught them live. This isn't as intense as their raging 1970s shows but the playing is still first rate and features a wide-ranging selection of songs from their long career. Enjoy.

We Need To Lose Our Fixation on Economic Growth

I was watching a newscast recently in which the commentator was bemoaning the slow growth in the economy. That started me thinking about exponentials and limits to growth. It's pretty clear that mainstream economists and the politicians in thrall to them have no conception of what awaits us if economic growth continues over the long term. Coincidentally, I've come across several articles in the last few days on that exact subject. 

• From Nature: Degrowth can work — here’s how science can help. "Wealthy countries can create prosperity while using less materials and energy if they abandon economic growth as an objective.
  
  Researchers in ecological economics call for a different approach — degrowth3. Wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being. This approach, which has gained traction in recent years, can enable rapid decarbonization and stop ecological breakdown while improving social outcomes2. It frees up energy and materials for low- and middle-income countries in which growth might still be needed for development. Degrowth is a purposeful strategy to stabilize economies and achieve social and ecological goals, unlike recession, which is chaotic and socially destabilizing and occurs when growth-dependent economies fail to grow."
  
  
• From Phys.org: Evolution might stop humans from solving climate change, researchers say. "Central features of human evolution may stop our species from resolving global environmental problems like climate change, says a recent study led by the University of Maine.
  
  The study explored how human societies' use of the environment changed over our evolutionary history. The research team investigated changes in the ecological niche of human populations, including factors such as the natural resources they used, how intensively they were used, what systems and methods emerged to use those resources and the environmental impacts that resulted from their usage.
  
  
  This effort revealed a set of common patterns. Over the last 100,000 years, human groups have progressively used more types of resources, with more intensity, at greater scales and with greater environmental impacts. Those groups often then spread to new environments with new resources."
  
  
• And finally, this rather depressing article from Nature, not directly connected to growth, except that more growth means more climate instability: Earlier collapse of Anthropocene ecosystems driven by multiple faster and noisier drivers.
  
  "A major concern for the world’s ecosystems is the possibility of collapse, where landscapes and the societies they support change abruptly. Accelerating stress levels, increasing frequencies of extreme events and strengthening intersystem connections suggest that conventional modelling approaches based on incremental changes in a single stress may provide poor estimates of the impact of climate and human activities on ecosystems. We conduct experiments on four models that simulate abrupt changes in the Chilika lagoon fishery, the Easter Island community, forest dieback and lake water quality—representing ecosystems with a range of anthropogenic interactions. Collapses occur sooner under increasing levels of primary stress but additional stresses and/or the inclusion of noise in all four models bring the collapses substantially closer to today by ~38–81%. We discuss the implications for further research and the need for humanity to be vigilant for signs that ecosystems are degrading even more rapidly than previously thought."
  
  

My 2023 in Tech

2023 turned out to be a big year for tech upgrades here at Chez Soltys. That was partly due to getting some money from parents' estates and partly due to aging equipment needing replacement. 

• I bought a Kindle Fire HD 8 tablet primarily to use as an ereader because I'm finding it harder to read on the Kindle Paperwhite. It works well as an ereader, but it is underpowered for any use other than web browsing and Amazon's proprietary O/S is limiting compared to stock Android. 
• I upgraded my ancient HP desktop PC to a custom-built system with an AMD processor, an Nvidia 3060 TI video card, and SSD drives housed in a large and quiet Fractal Designs case (no RGB lighting, thank you). I've had no issues with the hardware but I'm finding Windows 11 to be a mixed bag. Paul Thurott's Windows 11 Field Guide and Stardock's Start11 have been a great help.
• I was happy with my Pixel 4a phone but Google stopped providing updates. I upgraded to the Pixel 8 Pro and so far I'm very happy with it. The cameras are spectacularly good and have made me reconsider my investment in Fujifilm's X-S10 camera.
• At my doctor's suggestion, I bought a FitBit Sense early in the year. Then Google offered a free Pixel Watch 2 with the pre-order of the Pixel 8 Pro, so I moved to that. It doesn't have the battery life and real-time arrythmia detection of the Sense, but it's superior in every other respect. 
• After upgrading my desktop PC, it became clear that the gaming experience was less than ideal because my Lenovo 28" monitor couldn't keep up with the video card. I bought a very nice LG 32GP750-B gaming monitor on sale. It is basic in features (speakers and USB ports would have been nice), but otherwise is just fine with excellent picture quality. 
• When I retired five years ago, we treated ourselves to a Vizio P55 TV. It was great until a couple of years ago when the active backlighting started to exhibit problems and Vizio no longer provided firmware updates to fix them. We decided it was time for a new and larger TV and bought an LG C3 65" OLED set. This is a vast improvement in picture quality and we are very pleased with it despite some minor issues noted in my first impressions post. 
• On the smart home front, we bought a smart plug for the backyard lights, that Google Home saved from the recycle bin,  and an Aosu video doorbell, both handy little devices. 

Next year should be quieter on the tech front. We have to start dealing with some long overdue household renovations which will not be as much fun. 

Best of What I Watched In 2023

I've been posting monthly lists of what I watched, mostly just so I can go back and see what season of a show is the last one I've seen. This post is a short list of my favourite movies and TV shows that I watched last year (many were not 2023 releases).

Movies

• Everything Everywhere All at Once
• Tetris
• Turning Red
• Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse
• The Creator
• Searching for Sugar Man
• BlackBerry
• Barbie

 TV Shows

• Slow Horses (season 2)
• Carnival Row (season 2)
• The Last of Us
• The Power
• Silent Witness (seasons 21-26)
• Good Omens (seasons 1-2)
• The Wheel of Time (season 2)
• Payback
• For the Love of Dogs (seasons 9-11)
• Doctor Who: 60th Anniversary and Christmas Specials

What I Read in 2023

2023 was another year where I resolved to read more books and didn't manage to do it (11, same as in 2022). I'm still spending too much time on social media; Twitter used to be my biggest time sink, but now it's Mastodon. Reading the news also eats up a lot of my time; I subscribe to three newspapers (Toronto Star, New York Times, Washington Post) and get several (too many) email newsletters on varying topics. 

Here are the books I managed to read in 2023.

•  A Study in Emerald by Neil Gaiman (graphic novel)
• Chivalry by Neil Gaiman (graphic novel), currently reading
• The Year's Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015 edited by Rich Horton (currently reading)
• A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine
• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (unfinished)
• The Future of Another Timeline by Analee Newitz
• The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz (my favourite book of the year)
• Tides of Fire by James Rollins
• The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi
• Dead Lies Dreaming by Charlie Stross
• Quantum of Nightmares by Charlie Stross (in progress)

As has been the case for the last decade, all my reading is on a device. I've tried reading a couple of dead tree books and just can't manage it comfortably. I have transitioned from reading on my Kindle Paperwhite to mostly on my Pixel 8 Pro phone and Kindle Fire tablet using Google Play Books when possible.

For 2024, I'm going to finish Charlie Stoss' New Management trilogy and then dive into Ian McDonald's Hopeland. After that, we'll see.

Movie and TV Reviews - December 2023

Short reviews of what Nancy and I watched in December. 

Movies

• Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny: The (hopefully) last movie in the franchise was better than I expected but certainly not the best of the five. I could have done without the time travel element. (Disney+)
• BlackBerry: The story of RIM and the Blackberry from the time Jim Balsillie came on board in 1996 to 2007 when the Apple iPhone was released and the Blackberry fell on hard times. It's a very watchable movie and I recommend it even if you're not particularly into tech stuff. (CBC Gem)
• Barbie: This turned out to be much better than I expected. I was not expecting a movie about a doll to be a pointed social commentary. It's also a brilliant (literally) piece of filmmaking that's full of nods to filmic history. (The opening sequence, for example). Greta Gerwig should definitely take home the Best Director Oscar next year and it wouldn't surprise me to see the movie take Best Picture. (Crave)
• Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse. This movie justifies the cost of our OLED TV. Like its sequel, it has some of the best animation I have ever seen. (Disney+)
• Seven Psychopaths: I missed this when it first came out and decided to watch it because we really liked Martin McDonagh's earlier film, In Bruges. This wasn't quite that good but still enjoyable with a stellar cast of bad guys, taut snappy dialog, and an unpredictable plot. (Prime rental)
• Die Hard: The classic action film somehow has become a Christmas staple. I'm not sure what that says about society these days, but we watched it anyway. (Disney+)
• Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I enjoyed this more than the first Black Panther movie, which I found tedious. This one had better pacing, at least. (Disney+)
• Die Hard 2: I don't consider this one a Christmas movie the way the first one is, but it's still one of the classic action flicks and really comes alive on our new TV. (Disney+)

TV Shows

We finished watching Ghosts season 5, Paul O'Grady's For the Love of Dogs season 11, and Antiques Roadshow season 27. 

• Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. A Godzilla-themed series with a conspiracy element reminiscent of Agents of Shield. Well made and reasonably entertaining if you accept the basic premise. But it needs more monsters and more action in the last part of the series. (Apple TV+)
• A Murder at the End of the World: This started out by reminding me of Knives Out 2 with a group of diverse people sequestered in a remote location at the behest of a billionaire with delusions of grandeur. It's quite good though my suspension of disbelief was stretched pretty thin by the fifth episode.  (Disney+)
• Cadfael (seaons 1-4) : An historical murder mystery/drama based on a series of books by Ellis Peters set in 12th century England and aired beginning in 1994. Derek Jacobi plays Cadfael, a Benedictine brother and herbalist with a penchant for solving murders. This being the 12th century, there were quite a few. I have no idea about the historical accuracy, but it's reasonably entertaining, well written, and the acting is first rate. (BritBox)
• Gordon Ramsay's Ultimate Cooking Course: I'm not a big fan of Ramsay, but he does provide some worthwhile tips and interesting recipes. I do wish the show was slower paced; I may have to watch it more than once to make notes on the good bits. (Amazon Prime)
• Doctor Who 60th Anniversary and Christmas Specials: Unquestionably the best Doctor Who episodes in several years. I am very much looking forward to the next season. 
• Death in Paradise Christmas Special. This is episode 1 of season 13. Not the most Christmas-related plot, but enjoyable nonetheless. (BritBox)
• Beyond Paradise Christmas Special. This is episode 1 of season 2. With an interesting Christmas-related mystery to solve, this was a rather sweet episode. (BritBox)

Merry Christmas and All That

It's almost Christmas and it's time for me to take a break from blogging. Like last year, it probably won't be a white Christmas here in this part of the Great White North. That doesn't bother me at all because it means I might be able to get out and walk, which is not a good idea when there's snow and ice on the sidewalks. 

I also need to do something about my old WordPress blog which is still up on DotEasy. I've been getting messages from them that my site has been exceeding traffic limits. That's likely due to bots trawling the site and the stats table getting out of hand. I can fix that, but it's probably time to take the site down. I may be able to import it into Blogger, or I may set up a local copy for my own use (doable but more work).  

I may post something next week or maybe not. In any case, I should be back here after the New Year.

May you enjoy whatever holidays you celebrate and the company of your family and friends.

2023: The Year in Photography

It's the end of another year and our feeds will be full of "best of" lists in a plethora of categories. Here's a Flipboard storyboard of some of the best photography of the year. It includes photos from the Associated Press, the New York Times, The Atlantic, Scientific American, and more.

Here's one of my favourites from the Associated Press. 

Fisherwomen and men pull in a net of fish off the coast of Chuao, Venezuel

Featued Links - December 18, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about. It's a longer list than usual this week because I won't be posting next week. 

Birds in the hydro marsh

New Mind-Reading "BrainGPT" Turns Thoughts Into Text On Screen. "It offers new hope to people unable to communicate in other ways." I can see some dystopian uses for this technology: 'Strap him in and put the cap on his head. We'll find out what he really thinks.'

VIV Games Saves the World. "Win the game and save nature -- raise funds to save the Rainforest with VIV." An interesting approach to gaming and doing good things in the real world. See more about it from Karl Schroeder. 

Bill C-18 is Dead, Long Live Bill C-18: Government Rewrites Online News Act With Final Regulations. "The combined effect of this regulation should be obvious: excluding some smaller and ethnic outlets altogether while reserving most of the remaining money for larger entities such as Torstar or Postmedia who employ more journalist-adjacent personnel. I suspect many of the smaller players could see this coming, but they’ve been tossed under the bus in the effort to send more money to bigger outlets who stood to lose the most from Bill C-18 (and who incidentally lobbied the most for the legislation)." This will be a long-term disaster. 

When the New York Times lost its way. "America’s media should do more to equip readers to think for themselves." Meanwhile in the United States ..."

Doom’s creators reminisce about “as close to a perfect game as anything we made”. 'In 30th anniversary stream, Carmack and Romero recall a game dev "perfect storm."'

‘It’s all gone’: CAR-T therapy forces autoimmune diseases into remission. "Engineered immune cells, most commonly used to treat cancers, show their power against lupus and other immune disorders."

Some Limits to Global Ecophagy by Biovorous Nanoreplicators,with Public Policy Recommendations. An examination of some of the limitations of the "gray goo problem" and how it could be combated.

55 Books Scientific American Recommends in 2023. "The best fiction, nonfiction, history and sci-fi books Scientific American staff read in 2023."

The Red State Brain Drain Isn’t Coming. It’s Happening Right Now. "As conservative states wage total culture war, college-educated workers—physicians, teachers, professors, and more—are packing their bags."

Diplomatic, geopolitical and economic consequences of an impending asteroid threat. "The Planetary Defense Conference 2023 addressed an asteroid threat scenario as difficult to confront. This article examines potential actions of relevant stakeholders, including States, the International Asteroid Warning Network, the Space Mission Planning Advisory Group, Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, and the United Nations Security Council." 

Anti-LGBTQ+ Chill in Saskatchewan’s Unseasonably Warm Winter. "But hope still warms my heart." The poison from the south is seeping over the border. 

The harm caused by dehumanising language. "Sticks and stones famously break bones – but words can also hurt you. It is there in the charged rhetoric from both sides of the conflict unfolding in Israel and Gaza, just as it can be found in the language of clashes around the world: old tropes and name-calling that seek to paint whole groups of people as somehow less than human."

Canadian scientists are still being muzzled, and that risks undermining climate policy. 'Environmental scientists in Canada continue to be stifled in their ability to conduct and communicate their research. Interference in science, also referred to as “muzzling,” was a well-documented concern during the Conservative government of the early 2010’s, when it gripped the collective consciousness of Canadian federal public sector scientists. Our research sheds light on a broader understanding of the recent interference in environmental sciences in Canada.'

 

Photo of the Week - December 17, 2023

It was an unusually warm day on Friday (12C) so I took a late afternoon walk down to Frenchman's Bay and the lake. The sun was low, which made for some dramatic lighting. I took this picture with the Pixel 8 Pro and tweaked the lighting and colour slightly in Google Photos.

Late afternoon sun over Lake Ontario

Saturday Sounds - The Trans-Canada Highwaymen - Explosive Sounds Vol. 1

This week's musical treat is a tribute album of sorts. The Trans-Canada Highwaymen are a Canadian supergroup made up of Chris Murphy of Sloan, Craig Northey of Odds, Stephen Page formerly of Barenaked Ladies, and Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness. Explosive Hits Vol. 1 is a tribute to the old KTel hits collections that were a particularly Canadian thing back in the 60s and 70s collecting radio hits and packing them in cheesy albums. 

The performers are top-notch musicians and the songs will bring back memories for anyone who grew up listening to Canadian radio back int the day. And if you're not Canadian, you may discover some great songs.

We May Not Be Headed for Collapse After All

I've been posting about the possibility (even likelihood) of societal collapse for some time. (See the We're Toast topic on this blog). Many of the reasons for that originate from the research of Peter Turchin. He's just published a long article in New Scientist (archive.ph link) in which he says that we may not be as badly off as first thought, primarily due to the increasing resilience of modern societies. 

More than two decades ago, I began applying the mathematics of complex systems to history in an attempt to uncover underlying patterns. Using this approach, I discovered that violent political instability follows two cycles, one peaking every 50 years or so, superimposed over another that does so every two or three centuries.

Applying this to the US and western Europe, I was shocked to discover that these societies were well advanced on the road to crisis. In 2010, in Nature, I forecast that crisis would escalate and peak during the 2020s. A decade later, the evidence supported that prediction.

You might have come across some of these ideas recently, following the publication of my book End Times. Perhaps unsurprisingly, reviewers used words like “collapse”, “revolution” or even “doom” to describe my work. So, it may surprise you to learn that I don’t believe collapse is inevitable. In fact, my latest research reveals something fascinating and encouraging: human societies have evolved to become less prone to collapse. Better yet, this insight could help us weather the current crisis.

He goes into much more detail in his article and provides some suggestions about what we can do to avoid collapse. 

Western civilisation is in trouble, but an analysis of history reveals how we can avoid collapse (see main story). The trick is to bolster the right kind of social complexity – in particular, institutions and policies that boost the well-being of the majority of people and reduce conflict between elites:

1. Progressive taxation reduces the creation of too many wealthy elites and the economic impoverishment of the rest

2. A universal right to vote and the election of public officials constrain arbitrary and selfish behaviour by rulers

3. Labour-protecting institutions, such as unions, and a minimum wage decrease economic inequality

4. A welfare state equitably promotes the well-being of all citizens

5. International cooperation through the United Nations and its agencies, such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, helps address global challenges.

These are all good and common-sense ideas. I am not convinced that we have the will to implement them. I would also like to know how much has factored disruptions due to climate change into his research. So, for the moment, I remain pessimistic. 

Using the Accessibility Features in Windows 11

I've made no secret here of the fact that I'm very nearsighted. I'm sitting in front of a 32" 1440p monitor. I couldn't use a 4K monitor even at this large size. Even then, I scale up the text size to 150 percent. That works for most things I do on the computer.

As well as adjusting the font size, I use a large inverted-colour mouse cursor and a keystroke command to help me find the mouse, which I tend to lose when it's near the edge of the screen. But Windows has many more accessibility features to help users with special needs and not just vision. 

In Make Windows 11 easier to see, hear, and use the Ask Woody newsletter explains Windows 11's vision, hearing, and interaction features to help people with disabilities or limitations. It's a good article with clear explanations and lots of screen captures. I found several things that I didn't know about, despite having looked at the Accessibility settings several times. 

Windows has improved a lot in this area over the years, though there are a few things that still don't work the way that you would expect. Scaling of UI elements is one; I tried increasing the scaling size but had to go back to the default because of inconsistencies and issues with text overlapping fields and the like. Applications, even Microsoft's, need more work. I can zoom an Excel spreadsheet but the entry field below the ribbon doesn't zoom. Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom are horrible, even after using the limited scaling they provide, and lack the ability to control the colour or contrast of UI elements. 

I hope these limitations will be addressed in the future. We've come a long way but there's still much room for improvement. 

GigaBrain: A Better Way to Search Reddit

Reddit can be a great resource for finding obscure bits of information, especially if there's a subreddit devoted to the topic of interest. But it's built-in search is pretty basic.

GigaBrain is a new search tool for Reddit. It will summarize both the original post and threads and allows you to filter results by subreddit on one screen instead of having to switch between subreddits. It uses AI to summarize and filter results and will use your preferences if you link your Reddit account. 

It's now my default for search Reddit.

Using AI in Technical Writing and More

I've been messing around with the Copilot AI in Windows 11 and have been impressed with some of the results I've been getting. As an example, I was trying to find aerial photos of my grandparents' neighbourhood form the 1950s or 1960s. Copilot didn't find any photos but it did give me several suggestions on where I might look to find them, several of which I had not thought of. 

Tom Johnson, technical writer and publisher of the I'd Rather Be Writing blog, has been using AI tools, including ChatGPT, Claude, and Bard. He's just posted an article describing 33 of the ways he's used them in both his work and everyday life. 

For technical writing, here are a few of the uses:

• Get grammar advice
• Troubleshoot technical issues
• Fix a poorly written paragraph
• Write code for documentation-related processes
• Distill needed updates from bug threads
• Arrange content into information type patterns
• Draft glossary definitions

There's more, but that should give you an idea of the possibilities. I could definitely have used these tools when I was working; just the ability to write first-pass VBA or JavaScript code would have saved me a lot of time. Scanning design documents for definitions (and finding conflicting ones) is something that would have helped me. 

In everyday life:

• Create a readable version of a YouTube transcript
• Get ideas for what to eat from ingredients in the fridge
• Explain something in a simpler way

For each use, he includes example prompts for the AI tool. There are also links to several articles with more details. 

Featured Links - December 11, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

Cement graffiti

• The Stormy Age of SFF Magazines by Neil Clarke. "When people proclaim that we’re experi­encing a ‘‘Golden Age’’ for short fiction, I tend to look at them sideways. While we’ve seen an explosion of new markets over the last two decades, it’s never been a particularly healthy time for the overwhelming majority of them. For print editions, increasing postal and printing costs are eating away at profits. Those publishing online struggle face steeper challenges and often have unpaid or steeply underpaid staff."
• Behind the Scenes of the Most Spectacular Show on TV (gift link) "Months of preparation, hundreds of staff, convoys of cutting-edge gear: inside the machine that crafts prime time’s most popular entertainment." I hardly ever watch football (and if I do I prefer the Canadian variety), but I still found this article fascinating. 
• Google Rolls Out New Accessibility Features to Make Daily Tasks Easier. "New features in Maps, Search and Chrome are aimed at helping users with disabilities navigate their devices more easily."
• Here's a primer on the far-out sounds of free jazz. Some way out there music as an antidote to the onslaught of syrupy Christmas music I'm being bombarded with everywhere I go right now. 
• The High Life and Shocking Death of Beatles Sidekick Mal Evans. "New bio 'Living The Beatles Legend: The Untold Story of Mal Evans' tells one of the the strangest stories in all of Beatles lore." I have been watching Get Back and wondering what happened to him after the Beatles.
• There’s a crisis in the Yukon River. "Flowing from British Columbia through Alaska to the Bering Sea, the nearly 2,000-mile-long Yukon River used to teem with Chinook and chum salmon, sustaining a culture of harvesting fish to feed both Alaskans as well as sled dog teams vital for transportation during the winter. Now those salmon runs have turned into to a trickle, as climate change and other factors weigh against the fish. The result is a drastic cut to local food supplies in a region where store-bought food, shipped in from thousands of miles away, is expensive."
• Opinion: This is a pandemic of attrition. "It’s time for our society to admit that we’ve made a mistake and change course. The COVID-is-mild experiment, despite the wishing and the hoping, has been a tragic failure. We aren’t just accepting ongoing hospitalizations and deaths to protect the economy, but also ignoring the social and economic costs of continuing high levels of acute infections. Worse still are more cases of Long COVID, a condition that takes many people entirely out of the workforce. And with every wave, the staffing attrition worsens."
• Electric vehicles are better than gas-powered cars in winter—here’s why. "All cars lose range when the temperature drops below freezing, not just EVs."

Photo of the Week - December 10, 2023

Here's a grab shot with my Pixel 8 Pro, taken with the 5x zoom. Good exposures at night are easier to get with this phone than my Fujifilm camera although obviously the resolution isn't as good.

Tis the season

 

Saturday Sounds - Meet Me At The Creek Jam - Billy Strings

This week's musical treat is from the amazingly talented bluegrass guitarist, Billy Strings. Actually, calling him a bluegrass player is a bit of a disservice. While he is the most talented player to come along in a generation, he takes his music into a whole different plane. It's reminiscent of the jamming that Jerry Garcia and David Grisman used to do, but even more out there. I love it.

This post is a pre-release from a forthcoming live album: "Meet Me At The River > Pyramid Country > Must Be Seven > Meet Me At The River", and is 38 minutes of pure musical bliss. 

If you want to find out more about this track, Jambands.com has a good article.

We're Toast 46

This post is a collection of links that support my increasingly strong feeling that the human race (or at least our technological civilization) is doomed. It is part of an ongoing series of posts.

Carrington Event-Sized Solar Storms Are More Common Than We Thought. "The effects of these events would be much more devastating today." Our electrical grids are not ready for a geomagnetic storm of this intensity. 

An Invasive Tick That Can Clone Itself Is Spreading Across the U.S., Threatening Livestock. "Researchers documented three cows in Ohio killed by Asian longhorned ticks, which can lay up to 2,000 eggs without needing to mate. The ticks pose a serious threat to livestock, because they congregate in the thousands and can drain an entire animal of blood." 

Zooplankton in ocean and freshwater are rapidly escalating the global environmental threat of plastics, finds study. "A collaborative research team lead by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has recently revealed that rotifers, a kind of microscopic zooplankton common in both fresh and ocean water around the world, are able to chew apart microplastics, breaking them down into even smaller, and potentially more dangerous, nanoplastics—or particles smaller than one micron. Each rotifer can create between 348,000–366,000 per day, leading to uncountable swarms of nanoparticles in our environment."

We're in a Global Health Emergency Warn Leading Medical Experts. "Climate Change and Biodiversity Loss a Human Health Emergency."

Deep warming. "Even if we ‘solve’ global warming, we face an older, slower problem. Waste heat could radically alter Earth’s future."

Earth on verge of five catastrophic climate tipping points, scientists warn.  "Humanity faces ‘devastating domino effects’ including mass displacement and financial ruin as planet warms."

What’s the big deal about Earth getting 2°C hotter? "The increase may sound inconsequential, but scientists say there are serious ramifications for life as we know it if the planet exceeds the climate target."

From Niagara Falls to Texas to Gaza, a horrifying look into the abyss of a post-truth future. "A New York car crash falsely propagandized as 'a terror attack'  symbolized our increasingly Orwellian post-truth world."

Some Interesting New Physics

I've recently come across some articles about interesting new physical theories. If you're interested in astrophysics, black holes, or unified field theories, these will be right up your alley.

• New theory claims to unite Einstein's gravity with quantum mechanics. "A radical theory that consistently unifies gravity and quantum mechanics while preserving Einstein's classical concept of spacetime has been announced in two papers published simultaneously by UCL (University College London) physicists."
• “Singularities don’t exist,” claims black hole pioneer Roy Kerr. "The brilliant mind who discovered the spacetime solution for rotating black holes claims singularities don't physically exist. Is he right?"

In university, I studied honours math and physics for two years before switching to English Literature, but the physics discussed in these articles is way beyond my dated and limited understanding. But I still find it fascinating and exciting and maybe you will too. 

Urban-Rural Political Conflicts Are the New Normal

Last week Jay Kuo's excellent newsletter, The Status Kuo, published an article called "Blue Cities Under Red State Rule" with the subhead "Red-state legislatures exerting anti-democratic control over blue cities is the latest Republican power grab." In it he looks at how three  US cities, Houston, Nashville, and Jackson, all Democratically controlled, are coping with right-wing Republican state legislatures. 

It’s becoming a disturbing trend. Within many red states, there are often blue urban areas that wish to enact progressive policies and ensure things like access to the voting booth. Yet they find themselves increasingly stymied by state officials. In some cases, the state governments have completely preempted local ordinances, and in the most extreme cases have replaced local officials with state level ones, removing local control entirely.

Unfortunately, the political polarization outlined in Kuo's article is also a factor in Canadian politics. It's particularly evident in Ontario, which currently has a right-of-centre Conservative majority government that has rode roughshod over the less conservative government of the City of Toronto. In the most notorious case, the provincial government slashed the size of Toronto's city council from 47 to 25 seats, to "promote more efficient government". 

Recently, the provincial government tried to remove land from the Greenbelt surrounding the Greater Toronto Area, in a bid to promote more housing development. This proved so unpopular that it was forced to reverse its decision and there are now investigations into potential corruption. 

Currently the provincial government seems hell-bent on redeveloping Ontario Place on the waterfront, again against the wishes of the City of Toronto, and causing concerns about the cozy relationship between the Province and big developers. 

At the provincial level, most City of Toronto ridings went to the NDP or Liberal parties. Suburban and rural areas surrounding Toronto are largely Conservative. 

As the CBC points out, this disparity also exists at the Federal level. 

According to Elections Canada, the metropolitan areas of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver — the country's three biggest cities — account for 116 of Canada's 338 ridings. And the results in those ridings help to tell the story of both the Liberal victory and a fundamental split in federal politics.

Of those 116 ridings, the Liberals won 86 — more than half of their national total. The Conservatives won just eight.

That Liberal strength in cities is part of an urban-rural split that now defines the electoral map in Canada. New research suggests the urban-rural divide between the Liberal and Conservative parties has never been wider.

This article from the National Observer examines the consequences of this disparity in more detail.  

As the University of Calgary’s Jack Lucas and Western’s Zack Taylor noted after the last federal election: “The urban-rural gap between the two parties was greater in the 2019 and 2021 elections than at any point in Canada’s history.” This means both parties are effectively incapable of forming a truly representative national caucus, and that has a bunch of negative knock-on effects. “As parties become durably uncompetitive on each other's turf, they lose touch with the concerns of significant portions of the population,” Lucas and Taylor write. “The portion of each party’s caucus that comes from safe seats increases. [And] as the parties increasingly represent different social and economic worlds and speak different policy languages, conflicts will only become more entrenched.”

This entrenchment of conflict in our politics is glaringly obvious right now, and nowhere more so than on the issue of climate change. The Liberals, who represent the parts of the country where the economy doesn’t depend on resource extraction or agricultural activity, have implemented a suite of policies that clearly favour people living in urban Canada. Conservatives, on the other hand, seem almost proud of their refusal to take the issue of climate change seriously, a stance that mirrors the view held by many rural Canadians. In that sort of polarized environment, a true and lasting consensus on almost anything, never mind something as contentious as climate policy, seems virtually impossible.

Given that current polling suggests that the Conservatives are likely to form the next federal government, this does not bode well for Canada's longer term prospects in combatting climate change or in resolving the many issues confronting Canadian cities.  

Getting Long COVID from an Asymptomatic Case

I've been wondering what happened to Gill Deacon, the host of Here and Now on CBC  Radio One in Toronto. It turns out that she is on medical leave, suffering from long COVID. Her case is unusual because she didn't know that she had had COVID until having a blood test months after developing debilitating symptoms that had no apparent cause. A blood test confirmed that there were COVID antibodies in her blood. (The nucleocapsid test that she had can detect natural COVID antibodies, even if you have been vaccinated). 

Medical authorities (mostly) have been saying that only people who have severe COVID get long COVID. I've been seeing reports that suggest otherwise, but this is the first time I've heard of a person getting long COVID from an asymptomatic case. 

Yet another reason to keep masking and avoid crowds. 

Here's an article from the AMA discussing recent research into long COVID.

And here's one about a study that showed that administering monoclonal antibodies could cause remission of long COVID symptoms.

Featured Links - December 4, 2023

Links to things I found interesting but didn't want to do a full blog post about.

A faded burning bush

• Towards an Optimal Diet. "In aggregate, several recent publications, two very popular books, and a new, large $189 million NIH clinical trial, may help to provide an objective basis for what we should eat to be and stay healthy."
• Google Rolls Out New Accessibility Features to Make Daily Tasks Easier. "New features in Maps, Search and Chrome are aimed at helping users with disabilities navigate their devices more easily."
• How ‘Skeuomorphism’ Is Making U.S. Roads More Deadly. "After you read this, you'll never look at a "frunk" the same way again." Trucks of that size should only be available for commercial use.
• Spirals inspire walking aids for people with disabilities. "Engineers design a special shoe that may improve gait and a skateboard that rocks and rolls." 
• The real AI fight. "Effective Accelerationists and Effective Altruists are both in vigorous agreement about something genuinely stupid."
• The Secret Language of Ships. "Signs and symbols on the sides of ships tell stories about an industry few outsiders understand."
• Our fragile moment: how lessons from Earth’s past can help us survive the climate crisis. "In this sweeping work of science and history, the renowned climate scientist and author of The New Climate War shows us the conditions on Earth that allowed humans not only to exist but thrive, and how they are imperiled if we veer off course."
• 'What I want are recovery narratives': CBC Radio host Gill Deacon on life with long COVID. "CBC Here & Now host is among the 10-15% of people who will get long COVID, research suggests." After suffering for months with long COVID symptoms, she had a blood test to confirm that she had had COVID-19 because her case was completely asymptomatic. 

Photo of the Week - December 3, 2023

Here are some boats bundled up for the winter at the Frenchman's Bay Marina. This was taken with the Pixel 8 Pro 5x zoom.

Winterized boats at the marina

Saturday Sounds - Rush - Time Machine Live In Cleveland 2011

Despite living in Southern Ontario for most of my adult life, I never got around to seeing Rush live until their Clockwork Angels tour in 2012. That's something I rather regret. The sound at the Air Canada Centre was muddy as hell even though I had a decent seat, which made the string orchestra mostly inaudible. The Clockwork Angels songs just didn't work well live, with a couple of exceptions like "The Wreckers". Having a cup of beer accidentally poured over my head didn't help. 

Much better would have been the Time Machine tour from the year before, if this convert video is any indication. It's a Blu-Ray rip, so the audio and video are first rate, as is the performance. Play it LOUD!

 

Movie and TV Reviews - November 2023

Short reviews of what I watched in November. 

Movies

• The Meg 2: The Trench. This was marginally better made than the first Meg movie, but every bit as stupid. If you like giant monster movies, this one is for you. (Amazon Prime)
• Searching for Sugar Man: A 2012 documentary about Rodriquez, a Detroit musician who faded into musical obscurity after releasing two albums in the early 1970s. But he sold half a million albums in South Africa and didn't know about it until a couple of fans tracked him down in the 1990s. Highly recommended and the music is great. (TVO)
• Half-Life: 25th Anniversary Documentary. Half-Life is my favourite computer game and it's held up pretty well after 25 years. If you've played the game, you'll enjoy this documentary. (YouTube)

TV Shows

We finished watching Payback, Bosch Legacy season 2, Antiques Road Trip season 24, and single episodes of Fake or Fortune, Human Footprint, and Impossible Engineering. 

• The Cleaner: A British comedy about a forensic cleaner. It didn't work for me, probably because I couldn't follow the dialog because of the strong accents and the lead character was an ass. (BritBox)
• Ghosts (seasons 1-4): A young couple inherit a British mansion that turns out to be haunted. It's funny and sweet (as one of my family described it) and a nice antidote to the grim British dramas we've been watching a lot of. (CBC Gem)
• The Changeling: I've heard good things about this but it's another show where we watched two episodes and decided it wasn't for us. (Apple TV+)
• The Art Detectives (season 5): We both enjoy shows about art and art history and this has the benefit of showing the detective and forensic work involved in tracking down the attribution of old paintings. (TVO/Tubi)
• Antiques Roadshow (season 27): We decided to take a break from Antiques Road Trip for a while and catch up on some Antiques Roadshow (the US version). (PBS)
• Irvine Welsh's CRIME (seasons 1-2): A grim, intense police procedural with an emotionally tortured detective and a nasty villain. It's set in Edinburgh, so we had to turn on closed captioning. (BritBox)
• For the Love of Dogs (seasons 9-10): When we were taking care of Nancy's mom, we watched this a lot. The late Paul O'Grady is funny and charming but the dogs are the real stars of the show. (CBC Gem)