Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Death Sentences by Don Watson is a wonderful book – simultaneously funny, scary, and inspiring – that describes how “clichés, weasel words, and management-speak” are infecting public language.
The humour comes from Watson’s acerbic commentary and fantastic scorn for phrases like:
Given the within year and budget time flexibility accorded to the science agencies in the determination of resource allocation from within their global budget, a multi-parameter approach to maintaining the agencies budgets in real terms is not appropriate.
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Monday, February 23, 2009
After seventeen years as a vegetarian, I recently switched back to an omnivore. My motivation for not eating meat was environmental, since, on average, a vegetarian diet requires much less land, water, and energy. This is still the right motivation, but over the last year or so I’ve been rethinking my decision to not eat meat.
My concern was that I’d stopped paying attention to my food choices and a poorly considered vegetarian diet can easily yield a bad environmental outcome.
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Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Like most Canadians, I’ll be at the polls today for the 2008 Federal Election.
In the past several elections, I’ve cast my vote for the party with the best climate change plan. The consensus among economists is that any credible plan must set a price on carbon emissions. My personal preference is for a predictable and transparent price to influence consumer spending, so I favour a carbon tax over a cap-and-trade.
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Monday, February 19, 2007
My experiences helping people manage their data has repeatedly shown that databases are poorly understood. This is well illustrated by the rampant abuses of spreadsheets for recording, manipulating, and analysing data.
Most people realise that they should be using a database, the real issue is the difficulty of creating a proper database. This is a legitimate challenge. Typically, you need to carefully consider all of the categories of data and their relationships when creating the database, which makes the upfront costs quite significant.
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Wednesday, January 31, 2007
I like to believe that my brain is useful for analysis, synthesis, and creativity. Clearly it is not proficient at storing details like specific dates and looming reminders. Nonetheless, a great deal of my mental energy is devoted to trying to remember such details and fearing the consequences of the inevitable “it slipped my mind”. As counselled by GTD, I need a good and trustworthy system for removing these important, but distracting, details and having them reappear when needed.
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Thursday, November 30, 2006
Prior to general release, plantae is moving web hosts. This seems like a good time to point out that all of plantae’s code is hosted at Google Code. The project has great potential and deserves consistent attention. Unfortunately, I can’t continue to develop the code. So, if you have an interest in collaborative software, particularly in the scientific context, I encourage you to take a look.
Wednesday, November 29, 2006
I recently helped someone process a text file with the help of Unix command line tools. The job would have been quite challenging otherwise, and I think this represents a useful demonstration of why I choose to use Unix.
The basic structure of the datafile was:
; A general header file ; 1 sample: 0.183 0.874 0.226 0.214 0.921 0.272 0.117 2 sample: 0.411 0.186 0.956 0.492 0.150 0.278 0.110 3 .
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Tuesday, October 31, 2006
The Stern Review has been in the news recently for predicting that global warming could cost up to $7 trillion if not addressed soon. Of course, this has caused quite a stir as it offsets many of the, likely unfounded, concerns that fixing climate change will cost too much. The full report is available online and should be a quite interesting, if long, read.
Saturday, October 7, 2006
This article in the Guardian explores the use of public relations firms by big oil companies to fight against the science of climate change. Apparently, the same tactics and people even of the tobacco industry’s fight against the link between smoking and cancer are being employed by the oil industry.
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Choosing appropriate software tools can be challenging. Here are the principles I employ when making the decision:
Simple: This seems obvious, but many companies fail here. Typically, their downfall is focussing on a perpetual increase in feature quantity. I don’t evaluate software with feature counts. Rather, I value software that performs a few key operations well. Small, focussed tools result in much greater productivity than overly-complex, all-in-one tools. 37 Signals’ Writeboard is a great example of a simple, focussed tool for collaborative writing.
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Tuesday, September 19, 2006
An excellent presentation regarding the use of country statistics. The visualizations are particularly effective.
Sunday, September 10, 2006
Since I’m looking for work, I found this post rather interesting. They’ve applied a spam filter to resumes to automatically filter through candidates. The output is only as good as the reference resumes used to construct the filter, but still an intriguing idea. My results are below. Most importantly the probability of me not being hired is 1.15e-59, which is a very, very small number. Perhaps I should add this fact to my resume?
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