Snow and snow

 General, Vancouver  No Responses »
Dec 312008
 

We spent Christ­mas and a few days either side in Sakat­chewan, land of ‑27 C days and even colder nights. But, as it turns out, little snow. Driv­ing along High­way 1 you could see the stubble of plants stick­ing out of the slim white cov­er­ing, giv­ing the hori­zon a green-brown tinge. There was more snow in sheltered places, dry and feath­ery, the sort of snow that does­n’t get you wet when you fall in it as it brushes off so easily.

Com­ing home to Van­couver it was a dif­fer­ent story. We missed out on being there for the almost-record snow­falls (I gath­er we only need anoth­er 2 cm to beat the record set in 1964), but enough remained on the ground to require lots of snow-shov­el­ling. Maybe next year I’ll break down and get a real snow shovel with bet­ter ergo­nom­ics; my back muscles are groan­ing using our emer­gency fold­ing one with its too-short handle. Snow at tem­per­at­ures around zero C is wet and sticky, not at all feath­ery, and it does­n’t brush off eas­ily. In places the snow has the choppy look of whipped egg whites that have star­ted to break down, in oth­ers like smooth piles of icing sug­ar, 60 cm (2 feet) or more thick. On the roads it’s a dirty grey col­our, piled high in spots, inter­spersed with pock­ets of water that can­’t make it to the storm drain and pock­ets of ice where the sun can­’t reach. 

It was the first coast to coast white Christ­mas since 1971, and we’re in the middle of anoth­er snow­fall warn­ing with snow fore­cast for the next three days (which should eas­ily break that record). I’m glad I work from home.

Freakonomics

 Books  No Responses »
Dec 162008
 

Freako­nom­ics: A Rogue Eco­nom­ist Explores the Hid­den Side of Everything was pub­lished a long time ago, way back in 2005, but it took my book­club until this year to decide to read it. Hey, no point in being too fast, if a book is worth­while it will still be worth­while a couple of years later, right? In this case, it is. There is an updated ver­sion, but even the older ver­sion has a way of look­ing at the world that’s worth pon­der­ing. Wiki­pe­dia and the offi­cial book site have sum­mar­ies, and there’s now a related blog.

The most fam­ous part of the book is the one that asks how far the decrease in crime in the 1990s was due to the poten­tial crim­in­als nev­er hav­ing been born; there has rightly been a lot of dis­cus­sion about that (Wiki­pe­dia has a decent sum­mary of some of the points). That dis­cus­sion has ten­ded to over­shad­ow the oth­er parts of the book, some of which bear more think­ing about. One good example is the way that gangs were organ­ised So how did the gang work? An awful lot like most Amer­ic­an busi­nesses, actu­ally, which, if taken ser­i­ously by people try­ing to get rid of gangs, might lead to dif­fer­ent ways of tack­ling them. The dis­cus­sion about how the Ku Klux Klan was made ridicu­lous by incor­por­at­ing it into the Super­man radio show was good, even if who did exactly what when is unclear. 

Above all, the book appeals if you’re someone who asks wheth­er there are oth­er explan­a­tions for things, past the seem­ingly obvi­ous. Like the book says, con­ven­tion­al wis­dom is often wrong, and it’s refresh­ing to read about some of the ways in which it is. Nor­mally we don’t dis­cuss non-fic­tion books for very long at book­club, but this book was an excep­tion. Most of our dis­cus­sion was along the lines of “does it make sense that” or com­ing up with altern­at­ive hypo­theses to explain some of their data. It would have helped if we’d seen some more of the actu­al math­em­at­ics so we could have been a little more sure of how they did the regres­sion test­ing, but that’s a minor quibble and I’m sure most of the book’s audi­ence did­n’t miss it.

Auto Industry Musings

 General  6 Responses »
Dec 132008
 

In the on-again, off-again dis­cus­sions about bail­ing out three auto man­u­fac­tur­ers who are in large part respons­ible for their own prob­lems (which they admit), the major reas­on giv­en for not let­ting them go the way of any oth­er com­pany in fin­an­cial trouble is to cre­ate work and jobs for the people they employ. Surely bet­ter things can be found for these employ­ees to do than to cre­ate products that nobody wants to buy? Cre­at­ing man­u­fac­tured products con­sumes pre­cious resources ran­ging from metals and min­er­als dug out of the earth to power gen­er­ated to run the factor­ies. Then the res­ult­ing products will be stock­piled some­where, since nobody wants to buy them, left to rust and dis­in­teg­rate until they’re shred­ded to “recycle” the valu­ables left in them while the rest of the product is dumped in a land­fill. As make-work schemes go, this is, to my mind, not one of the bet­ter ones.

Bangkok 8

 Books  1 Response »
Dec 122008
 

Bangkok 8: A Nov­el, by John Bur­dett (his site, Wiki­pe­dia) was the latest book­club read (yes, I know I’ve skipped a few in the middle, I got this one out of the lib­rary and it’s due back next week, which does con­cen­trate the mind won­der­fully). It’s prob­ably not a book many of us would have picked, but all of us enjoyed it, which is rare, and for many of the same reasons.

It’s a detect­ive story set in the pros­ti­tu­tion area of Bangkok, with a hero (Son­chai Jit­plee­cheep) who is the child of a pros­ti­tute, a half-caste who does­n’t fit into Bangkok soci­ety for a num­ber of reas­ons. The story itself was a little weird, with some weak spots, but Son­chai is inter­est­ing. I’ve only ever spent a few days in Bangkok, and that some time ago, but the author obvi­ously noticed some of the same things I did and incor­por­ated them very nat­ur­ally into the story. This includes such things as the Thai belief in anim­ism, as well as some cul­tur­al expect­a­tions that dif­fer between for­eign­ers (farang) and Thai. 

There are lots of amus­ing pas­sages, par­tic­u­larly when Son­chai is talk­ing to and about an Amer­ic­an woman who works for the FBI (so he calls her “the FBI”), and when he senses who or what vari­ous for­eign­ers were in pre­vi­ous lives, which he gen­er­ally does not both­er to tell them, fig­ur­ing that they would­n’t believe him any­way (this is an example of how nat­ur­ally those aspects are brought in, as in gen­er­al West­ern­ers don’t believe that you can look at a per­son and tell what they were in a pre­vi­ous life). 

Over­all it’s a good read and, if you have some famili­ar­ity with Thai anim­ism and have heard of yaa baa, it isn’t too hard to under­stand what’s going on. Hav­ing vis­ited Bangkok helps, but isn’t a pre­requis­ite (for­tu­nately).

Another WP Update

 WordPress  No Responses »
Dec 122008
 

Hav­ing just updated my blog to the latest in the 2.6 series, it was time to go for the 2.7 series. Nor­mally I wait a couple of days for oth­er people to flush out the bugs, but I figured I’d be big and brave on this one, giv­en it’s Fri­day afternoon. 

As usu­al with Word­Press, the upgrade went flaw­lessly, even the few plu­gins I use installed without com­plain­ing. If you notice any­thing, let me know; it might take a while before I stumble on it. 

The new admin dash­board will take some get­ting used to. I don’t know yet wheth­er I prefer it to the old one or not, it looks more com­plic­ated but that could just be because it’s unfamiliar. 

And I’m try­ing out Mint for stat­ist­ics. I wrote a small plu­gin to add the code to the right place on the pages which seems to work. Now all I have to do is fig­ure out how to dis­reg­ard the spuri­ous vis­its.

Creating or Consuming

 General  4 Responses »
Dec 042008
 

Fig­ur­ing out how best to spend “spare” time (that not alloc­ated to work­ing, sleep­ing, eat­ing, and the oth­er neces­sary daily activ­it­ies) is always a conun­drum. Do I read blogs, or write my own entries? Do I knit, or surf Ravelry? Do I watch TV, or read books? The pen­du­lum has recently been swinging too far in the wrong dir­ec­tion; I’ve been con­sum­ing more than cre­at­ing, tak­ing the easy, pass­ive way out to filling those spare minutes rather than think­ing about what I really want to achieve with them. It’s so easy to just “check what’s out there”, intend­ing it to be for a few minutes only, and find­ing the time stretches, like some ver­sion of Par­kin­son’s law, so that I’ve accom­plished noth­ing at the end of the even­ing. If I can­’t remem­ber what I’ve browsed, then was it worth read­ing? How much time should I spend on catch­ing up on what people I don’t know think? 

So, my plan is to think about my activ­it­ies more. If surf­ing, or read­ing feeds or tweets, then to do so delib­er­ately, rather than drift­ing along for lack of think­ing about what I’d really rather be doing. I’ll try to use my judge­ment more often, in oth­er words, to close the com­puter and spend more time with the world that’s phys­ic­ally present. Unless I decide that I feel like aim­lessly drift­ing through the Web, of course. 

I won­der how long I’ll keep this up?

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