Various Contrivances

Inspired by Coretex, I’m declaring Tangible as my theme for 2021.

I’ve chosen this theme because I want to spend less time looking at a screen and more time with “tangible stuff”. I’m sure that this is a common sentiment and declaring this theme will keep me focused on improvements.

Since working from home with an iPad, I’m averaging about 9 hours a day with an iOS device. This isn’t just a vague estimate; Screen Time gives me to-the-minute tracking of every app I’m actively using.

A generic day is something like:

1. Exercise via Zoom in the morning
2. Meditate with Waking Up on the iPhone
3. Read news on my iPad while having breakfast
4. Back and forth between Teams (almost 3 hours a day!) and Outlook on the iPad throughout the work day
5. Learning guitar on YouTube and reading books in the iPad in the evening

Throw in some Netflix, journaling in DayOne, social networking, and random YouTube videos and I’m spending an incredible amount of time looking at a screen.

I’m certainly not a Luddite! The ability of these rectangles of glass to take on so many functions and provide so much meaningful content is astounding. There’s just something unsettling about the dominant role they play.

So, a few things I plan to try:

• Although I’ll continue reading ebooks, since the convenience is so great, I’ll be rotating paper books into the queue regularly.
• I’ve lost my running outdoor routine. Getting that back will be a nice addition to the Zoom classes and add in some very much needed fresh air.
• As a family, we’ve been enjoying playing board games on weekends, just not routinely. Making sure we play at least one game a week will be good for all of us.
• My son is keen on electronics. We’re going to try assembling a gaming PC for him from components, as well as learn some basic electronics with a breadboard and Arduino.
• Our dog will be excited to get out for more regular walks with especially long ones on the weekend.

I’ll be adding much of this to Streaks, an app that I’ve found really helpful for building habits. I’ll also add a “tangible” tag to my time tracker to quantify the shift.

My hope is that I can find the right balance of screen time and tangible activities with intention.

Thank you to all the participants, donors, and volunteers for making the third Axe Pancreatic Cancer event such a great success! Together we’re raising awareness and funding to support Pancreatic Cancer Canada.

We’re hosting our third-annual Axe Pancreatic Cancer event. Help us kick off Pancreatic Cancer Awareness Month by drinking beer and throwing axes!

I’m certain that paying attention to where my food comes from is important. Food production influences my health, has environmental consequences, and affects both urban and rural design. Ideally, I would develop relationships with local farmers, carefully choose organic produce, and always consider broad environmental impacts. Except, I like to spend time with my young family, try to get some exercise, and have more than enough commitments through work to actually spend this much effort on food choices. So, I’ve outsourced this process to the excellent Mama Earth Organics.

Every week a basket of fresh organic and/or local fruit and vegetables arrives on our doorstep. Part of the fun of this service is that different items arrive each week, which diversifies our weekly food routine. But, we always know what’s coming several days in advance, so we can plan our meals well ahead of time. After over a year of service, we’ve only had a single complaint about quality and this was handled very quickly by Mama Earth with a full refund plus credit.

We’ve found the small basket is sufficient for two adults and a picky four-year old. We’ve also added in some fresh bread from St. John’s Bakery, which has been consistently delicious and lasts through most of the week.

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.

The book is scary because it makes a strong argument for the dangers of this type of language. Citizens become confused and disinterested, customers become jaded, and people loose their love for language. Also, as a public servant I see this kind of language every day and often find myself struggling to avoid banality and cliches (not to mention bullet points). We need more forceful advocates like Don Watson to call out politicians and corporations for abusing our language. This book certainly makes me want to try harder. And what’s more inspiring than struggling for a good cause against long odds?

The book also has a great glossary of typical weasel words with possible synonyms. So, I’m keeping the book in my office for quick reference.

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. In particular, modern agriculture now takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce a single calorie of food. This is clearly unsustainable. We cannot rely on non-renewable, polluting resources for our food, nor can we continue to transport food great distances – even if it is only vegetables. My unexamined commitment to a vegetarian diet was no longer consistent with environmental sustainability.

I think the solution is to eat local, organic food. This also requires eating seasonal food, but Canadian winters are horrible for local vegetables. This left me wanting to support local agriculture, but unable to restrict my diet. Returning to my original motivation to choose environmentally appropriate food convinced me it was time to return to being an omnivore. My new policy is to follow Michael Pollan’s advice: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.” In addition, I’ll favour locally grown, organic food and include small amounts of meat – which I hope will predominantly come from carefully considered and sustainable sources. I’ve also deciced that when faced with a dillema of choosing either local or organic, I’ll choose local. We need to support local agriculture and I’ll trade this for organic if necessary. Of course, in the majority of cases local and organic options are available, and I’ll choose them.

This is a big change and I look forward to exploring food again.

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.

An excellent presentation regarding the use of country statistics. The visualizations are particularly effective.

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?

I will now tell you what i think about this CV
The CV you entered fits better in the Hired group than the NotHired group.
CLASSIFY fails; success probability: 0.0000  pR: -58.9382
Best match to file #1 (Hired.css) prob: 1.0000  pR: 58.9382 
Total features in input file: 7478
#0 (NotHired.css): features: 61899, hits: 7125, prob: 1.15e-59, pR: -58.94
#1 (Hired.css): features: 794351, hits: 90156, prob: 1.00e+00, pR:  58.94
The CV you entered fits best into the Guru catagory.
CLASSIFY succeeds; success probability: 1.0000  pR: 8.1942
Best match to file #0 (Guru.css) prob: 1.0000  pR: 8.1942 
Total features in input file: 7478
#0 (Guru.css): features: 559355, hits: 66154, prob: 1.00e-00, pR:   8.19
#1 (Intergrator.css): features: 163555, hits: 17093, prob: 2.17e-29, pR: -28.66
#2 (Administrator.css): features: 241282, hits: 24729, prob: 8.45e-25, pR: -24.07
#3 (Developer.css): features: 485579, hits: 54104, prob: 6.39e-09, pR:  -8.19

A recent column in the Globe & Mail reminded me of our Federal Government’s plan for reducing greenhouse gas emissions: the One Tonne Challenge.

This campaign challenges each Canadian to reduce their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions by one tonne. The first step is to calculate your emissions and then implement recommendations for reductions. According to the online calculator, Kelly & I combined emit 4.23 tonnes annually. Fortunately, this is below the national average of 5.5 tonnes per person and significantly better than Alberta’s average of 8 tonnes per person. Still, we could do better. However, the suggestions provided aren’t much help. They largely concern implementing energy savings to our home — which we rent and have little control over. Here are the suggestions I could implement:

• Take a 5-minute shower instead of a bath.
• Turn off lights when a room is not in use.
• Use a cold water wash and rinse instead of warm or hot water to wash your clothes.
• Replace standard light bulbs with compact fluorescent light bulbs where lights are on for three or more hours at a time.

The website has a variety of good suggestions. The trick is convincing Canadian’s to assume some responsibility for climate change. Monetary incentives seem like the best strategy, but those are not currently under consideration.