If you’ve ever played ‘Chinese whispers’, what comes out the end is usually gibberish, and more or less when we speak to each other we’re playing this massive game of Chinese whispers. Yet our language can somehow retain its fidelity.
BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | ‘Oldest English words’ identified
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.
In finance, you can never reduce risk outright; you can only try to set up a market in which people who don’t want risk sell it to those who do. But in the CDO market, people used the Gaussian copula model to convince themselves they didn’t have any risk at all, when in fact they just didn’t have any risk 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent of the time they blew up. Those explosions may have been rare, but they could destroy all previous gains, and then some.
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 first rule of reading a federal budget is this: When a round number such as $1-billion appears, it means the government (a) picked the number from the air, (b) doesn’t know how or where the money will be spent, or (c) doesn’t have a process for making that decision. A round number, especially a big one, means the government is flying blind.
globeandmail.com: Getting shovels into the ground and money into more brains
The best readers are obstinate. They possess a nearly inexhaustible persistence that drives them to read, regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in.
Despite the ubiquity of reading on the web, readers remain a neglected audience. Much of our talk about web design revolves around a sense of movement: users are thought to be finding, searching, skimming, looking.
Physicists and mathematicians often stretch their imaginations by considering what the world would be like if some of their basic assumptions and principles were violated. This has led to new concepts such as non-Euclidean geometry, positrons, antimatter, and antigravity. At the least, violating basic assumptions is a useful mental exercise, but a surprising number of the resulting concepts have provided useful descriptions of the real world.
In this article, we explore the types of interfaces that could result if we violate each of the Macintosh human interface design principles. We focus on the Macintosh interface because it is a prime example of the current interface paradigm, and Apple Computer has published an explicit list of Macintosh human interface design principles.
So 2009 will be a squalid year, a planetary hostage situation surpassing any mere financial crisis, where the invisible hand of the market, a good servant turned a homicidal master, periodically wanders through a miserable set of hand-tied, blindfolded, feebly struggling institutions, corporations, bureaucracies, professions, and academies, and briskly blows one’s brains out for no sane reason.
The Arab states invest their oil fortunes in the craziest things, from the proposed Mile-High Tower in Jiddah to the indoor ski resort in dry-as-dust Dubai. Perhaps the craziest idea yet is Saudi Arabian wheat. Some 30 years ago, the lake- and river-less kingdom decided it should be self-sufficient in wheat.
It worked. But the subsidies to farmers at times approached $1,000 (U.S.) a tonne. Last year, the Saudis finally concluded that desert wheat made no more sense than Nunavut pineapples. The farms will disappear within a few years, after which the country will be entirely dependent on imports. But from where?
Answer: from any nation willing to sell or lease vast tracts of its farmland and-here’s the kicker-allow the Saudis to export most or all of the food grown there back home, bypassing the international market. Such “offshore farms” are a quiet, though burgeoning, form of neo-colonialism. And they have the potential to unleash a new food crisis.
CBC Tapestry interview of Sam Harris. He explains the dangers or religion, especially religious moderates. He’s always worth listening to.
The only agency that regularly finances large-scale science in Canada was shut out of Tuesday’s federal budget, putting at risk thousands of jobs and some of the most promising medical research, and forcing the country to pull out of key international projects.
For the first time in nine years, Genome Canada, a non-profit non-governmental funding organization, was not mentioned in the federal budget and saw its annual cash injection from Ottawa - $140-million last year - disappear.
globeandmail.com: Budget erases funding for key science agency
Scientists across America are celebrating the passing of the Bush administration as the end of a dark age, a bleak stretch in which research budgets shrank and everything — stem cells, sex education, climate change, and the very origins of the Grand Canyon — became a point of conflict.
But in Canada’s research community, Mr. Obama’s plans have sparked anxiety that if this country fails to keep pace, it will have a tougher time recruiting smart people and convincing talent not to flock south. In short, Canada could lose its competitive edge to the Obama advantage.
globeandmail.com: As U.S. emerges from dark age, Canada’s scientific edge fades
No one is suggesting Darwinism has all the answers to social questions. Indeed, with some, such as the role of hierarchies, it suggests there is no definitive answer at all—itself an important conclusion. What is extraordinary, though, is how rarely an evolutionary analysis is part of the process of policymaking. To draw an analogy, it is like trying to fix a car without properly understanding how it works: not impossible, but as likely as not to result in a breakdown or a crash. Perhaps, after a century and a half, it is time not just to recognise but also to understand that human beings are evolved creatures. To know thyself is, after all, the beginning of wisdom.
Darwinian answers to social questions | Why we are, as we are | The Economist
Ontario is taking its first baby steps to position itself for the coming revolution in electric cars by backing a California high-tech company that plans to build battery recharging stations. Better Place, based in Palo Alto, will unveil a pilot project at a news conference in Toronto today to build a recharging station in Ontario, sources said.
Instapaper is an integral part of my web-reading routine. Typically, I have a few minutes early in the morning and scattered throughout the day for quick scans of my favourite web sites and news feeds. I capture anything worth reading with Instapaper’s bookmarklet to create a reading queue of interesting articles. Then with a quick update to the iPhone app this queue is available whenever I find longer blocks of time for reading, particularly during the morning subway ride to work or late at night.
I also greatly appreciate Instapaper’s text view, which removes all the banners, ads, and link lists from the articles to present a nice and clean text view of the content only. I often find myself saving an article to Instapaper even when I have the time to read it, just so I can use this text-only view.
Instapaper is one of my favourite tools and the first iPhone application I purchased.
This country has an immense opportunity to reinvent itself with this budget and transform itself into a “green economy.” But if this metamorphosis is to take place, the budget cannot contain a bunch of giveaways to industry wrapped up in a nice green bow. Instead, it needs to hand out gift certificates with green strings attached that will help Canada’s economy grow while protecting its natural capital.
Yesterday I would have ranked country music as one of my least favourites. Now, thanks to CBC Radio 3, I’m a big fan.
Fantastic photos of the Sun, via The Big Picture
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief
Michael Pollan describes the upcoming food crisis in an open letter to the next President of the United States.
This, in brief, is the bad news: the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute. The good news is that the twinned crises in food and energy are creating a political environment in which real reform of the food system may actually be possible for the first time in a generation.
The core of his solution is:
… we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine
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. Enlightening discussions of these issues are available at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Jeffrey Simpson’s column at the Globe and Mail, or his book Hot Air
Until now this voting principle has meant a vote for the Green Party who support a tax shift from income to pollution. My expectation for this vote was not that the Green Party would gain any direct political power, rather their environmental plan would gain political profile and convince the Liberals and Conservatives to improve their plans. A carbon tax is now a central component of this year’s Liberal Platform with the Green Shift. Both the Conservative Pary and NDP support a limited cap-and-trade system on portions of the economy, with the Conservatives supporting dubious “intensity-based” targets.
Although I quite like the central components of the Green Shift, I’m not too keen on the distracting social engineering aspects of the plan. Furthermore, the Liberals have certainly failed to implement any of their previous climate change plans while in power. Nonetheless, I do think (hope?) they will follow through this time and I prefer supporting a well-conceived plan that may not be implemented than a poor plan. Despite my support for this plan, I think the Liberals have done a rather poor job of explaining the Green Shift and have conducted a disappointing campaign.
In the end, my principle will hold. I’m voting for the Green Shift and, reluctantly, the Liberal Party of Canada.