Quotulatiousness

April 9, 2012

The Royal Canadian Mint: now they’re just poking fun at US espionage agencies

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:44

Remember the last time that a Canadian coin was the subject of an espionage warning from the US Department of Defence because the poppy appeared to be “filled with something man-made that looked like nano-technology”? The Royal Canadian Mint may get a radiation warning for their newest coin:

The image of a dinosaur whose remains were discovered in Alberta’s Peace Country will be featured on our newest quarter — the first Canadian coin with a glow-in-the dark picture.

The quarter, being released by the Royal Canadian Mint April 16, features Pachyrhinosaurus lakustai, a large herbivore whose bone fragments were discovered by Grande Prairie, Alta., science teacher Al Lakusta in 1974.

He plans to pick up one of the new coins for his 10-year-old grandson.

“I think almost anybody who reads about it thinks, ‘We can’t wait to try this,’ ” he said Sunday from his Grande Prairie home.

April 7, 2012

Xander’s latest photos

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:45

I’m feeling remarkably lazy today, so when I got a couple of photos from Clive, I decided they’d be useful blogfodder for today. He was trying out a brand new (and very expensive) lens on his DSLR at our place last weekend:


He’d picked up the lens that morning, on his way over to our house. I didn’t want to deny him the joy of trying it out (even though we had business to get down to), so Xander was kind enough to be a model for a couple of shots.

I don’t remember the specifications of the lens, but it looks like the kind of thing that needs to be transported on its own railway car and pointed in the general direction of Paris.

April 5, 2012

Some practical travel tips from LegalNomad

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:45

She’s been travelling the world for the last four years, so she has some potentially very useful tips for you (not so much for you expense-account business travellers, but for backpackers and hikers):

2. Be a travel parasite.

No, this does not mean mooching off friends or family. What it means is learning how to use guidebooks to your advantage. While they are useful to have for the history of a place or the basics in itinerary planning, I rarely look to guidebooks for the name of a hostel or restaurant. Instead, I look at their recommendations as things to piggyback on. Lonely Planet recommends a place as “Our Pick”? Great, I go there, and walk two doors down to stay nearby. Rough Guides says “this is the best restaurant in town”? Perfect! Almost every one of those recommendations will spawn another restaurant within walking distance. Industrious entrepreneurs quickly learn that when these books recommend a place, they quickly get overcrowded and prices go up. The solution: they open a place right next door or nearby to handle the spillover. Without fail, those are the places that are cheaper, more delicious and not jaded. Being a parasite isn’t always a bad thing. (Having parasites? Not so much.)

[. . .]

6. Your taxi driver knows where to eat breakfast more than you do.

Swap this out for tuk-tuk driver, songthaew driver or rickshaw driver, where appropriate. When I go to a new place, I find the eldest cab driver possible and ask him where he ate breakfast. Once he gets over his shock that this is what I want to know, he tends to break into a huge grin and start talking about food. Eventually, he takes me there. And the food is almost always delicious, fresh and somewhere I’d have never found without his help. Taxi drivers: more than just getting from A to B.

[. . .]

15. Packing does not get easier.

I wrote a piece on long term travel and the things it doesn’t fix. In it, I talked about how, 2.5 years into my travels, I still hated packing. It’s now 4 years into my travels. Guess what? I still hate packing.

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

March 21, 2012

Converting teachers into pre-grief counsellors

Filed under: Britain, Health, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:51

Dennis Hayes on the recent trend in teaching: preventing children from having “best friends” because the emotional pain of losing a best friend is too much for kids to bear.

In some English schools, having best friends can now get you in serious trouble with teacher. At the weekend, it was reported that primary school children in certain areas are being discouraged from having best friends to avoid the ‘pain of falling out’. Gaynor Sbuttoni, an educational psychologist working with schools in south-west London, told The Sunday Times, ‘I have noticed that teachers tell children they shouldn’t have a best friend and that everyone should play together… They’re doing it because they want to save the child the pain of splitting up from their best friend.’ Sbuttoni is not the first to speak out against this trend in the UK, and ‘no best friend’ policies have been in place in some US schools for quite a while.

Reading the reports, it might seem like this is just a silly intervention by meddling teachers, which simply needs to be stamped out. But that underestimates what is going on in our schools. The teaching profession is being reformed as a therapeutic profession, often prioritising the delivery of therapy over education to ‘vulnerable’ children and young people. As this new therapeutic profession develops, more and more interventions like ‘no best friends’ will arise, either spontaneously in classrooms or as a result of conscious intervention by school heads, local authorities, government and, of course, Ofsted, which runs with every fad and fashion.

Meddling in young children’s emotional lives is the worst feature of contemporary schooling. Children are now trained to have ‘appropriate’ emotions through emotional literacy classes and so-called subjects like SEAL — the ‘Social and Emotional Aspects of Learning’. The training on offer in such sessions is nothing short of emotional manipulation. Children are taught to be moderate; empathy is good, anger is bad. They are taught to be emotionally dead, out of touch with all the emotions that make up human relationships, passion, anger, jealousy, hatred and even love, which is sentimentalised and sanitised. This is the anodyne therapeutic ethos that now dominates education at all levels.

March 20, 2012

New Zealand facing “Marmageddon”

Filed under: Health, Pacific, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:18

Oh, the Marmanity!

An announcement by New Zealand’s leading manufacturer of the black sandwich spread, Marmite, has sparked “marmageddon” fears among Kiwis.

Food company Sanitarium said on its website that supplies “are starting to run out nationwide” after “our Christchurch factory was closed due to earthquake damage”.

Even Prime Minister John Key said he is rationing his personal supply.

[. . .]

“Supplies are starting to run out nationwide, and across the ditch in Australia. We know that we will be off shelf for sometime but we are doing everything we can to minimise how long,” the company said.

“Don’t freak. We will be back soon!”

Of course, the announcement set off a buying-and-hoarding frenzy, making the situation all the more dire. But not to worry: supply and demand has already set in — prices are rising to help even out the distribution of the remaining stocks.

March 16, 2012

Last night’s storm

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:31

I had to shut down my computer last night as a thunderstorm rolled in. After the typical flashing and booming, the rain started. After a couple of minutes of rain, it changed to hail. The entire house was ringing with the impact of the hailstones. It continued off-and-on for about an hour and a half. It was so loud that both our dogs were huddled up to me, shivering. Once the worst of it was over, I went to bed.

This morning, I got up and noticed there were still drops of rain sitting on top of the gazebo in our back yard. A few minutes ago, I got up to let Xander out and noticed that the raindrops still appeared to be sitting on the gazebo roof.

They’re not raindrops:

A bit closer:

The entire roof of the gazebo looks like a “No Hunting” sign up north: riddled with bullet holes.

March 11, 2012

The creativity switch

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:08

As a life-long non-creative person, I found this article to be of interest:

Creativity can seem like magic. We look at people like Steve Jobs and Bob Dylan, and we conclude that they must possess supernatural powers denied to mere mortals like us, gifts that allow them to imagine what has never existed before. They’re “creative types.” We’re not.

But creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.

The science of creativity is relatively new. Until the Enlightenment, acts of imagination were always equated with higher powers. Being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the gods. (“Inspiration” literally means “breathed upon.”) Even in modern times, scientists have paid little attention to the sources of creativity.

But over the past decade, that has begun to change. Imagination was once thought to be a single thing, separate from other kinds of cognition. The latest research suggests that this assumption is false. It turns out that we use “creativity” as a catchall term for a variety of cognitive tools, each of which applies to particular sorts of problems and is coaxed to action in a particular way.

March 8, 2012

The “SteamPunkiest” railcar ever

Filed under: History, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:21

A few pictures from RR Picture Archives by Marty Bernard, showing the most Steampunk-appropriate railway vehicle, the McKeen Motor Car. This example is painted in Virginia & Truckee markings:

Click to see full size image at RR Picture Archives

(more…)

Woolley: We need power tools (and cars) for girls

Filed under: Economics, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:59

Over at the Worthwhile Canadian Initiative blog, Frances Woolley marks International Women’s Day:

Goods are becoming ever more specialized. Everything from baby diapers to multivitamins is now dispensed in gender- and age-appropriate models. Yes, it makes sense to have his and hers jeans. But gender appropriate soft-drinks? Does the average guy’s masculinity really need to be bolstered by buying Coke Zero instead of Diet Coke?

The profitability of his and hers products is partly due to price discrimination. The local hair salon charges women more than men because women are prepared to pay $50 or $60 to get their hair cut. Men asked to pay that price would just walk across the road to the barber shop that charges $15 for a short back-and-sides.

[. . .]

Second, gender differentiated power tools. I have small hands. My palm sander doesn’t fit into my palm — it’s more like a two-handed sander. I’d love to get a new drill, but most have such a large grip that I can barely hold them. It’s not just a gender issue — men’s hands come in all sorts of different sizes, too. How can women be expected to share equally in home repair duties when every power tool is the wrong size for their hands?

Finally, I’d like to see more cars built with features that appeal to women. I’ve heard — but I don’t know if this is true — that as soon as a particular model of car is perceived as being “girly,” men won’t buy it. Since men still constitute the majority of car buyers, sales collapse. I’ve heard this offered as an explanation of the lack of cars like the Smart car — two person vehicles that use hardly any gas, and are easy to drive and park on city streets. Smart cars are just too cute, and cute=girly, and girly is the automotive kiss of death. But what is the cost of this pursuit of masculinity?

Cool little crossbow you wear on your wrist

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:16

Tom Kelley sent me a link to this article on a neat little device that I suspect violates weapons laws in most jurisdictions:

Last October, after hurting his knee playing hockey, Patrick Priebe was holed up in his apartment near Cologne, Germany, with nothing to do. He was sitting at his computer, staring at his keyboard, when the “Y” key caught his eye. Priebe didn’t see a letter. To him, it looked like a crossbow. Immediately he knew what his next project would be.

[. . .]

To fire, he pulls back the wire, hooks it around a brass block, and places an arrow in the groove. When he flicks the thumb trigger, the brass block drops, the wire pops forward, and the arrow flies.

March 6, 2012

That’s not a cool business card. This is a cool business card

Filed under: Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:00

The Trebucard is a business card sized mini trebuchet. It is designed to fire jumbo paper clips and uses 16 pennies as a counter-weight. Unlike a traditional trebuchet the Trebucard uses the surface it is resting on as a pivot rather than being mounted on a frame.

Meme replacement for “… is my next band name”

Filed under: Humour, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:10

(Remember to mouse-over for the rest of the joke, or click the image to see it on the xkcd site)

March 4, 2012

Tilt-shift and time lapse turns Rio’s Carnaval into a complex animated model

Filed under: Americas, Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:50

Tilt shift of the Carnaval party in Rio de Janeiro 2011
Made by Jarbas Agnelli and Keith Loutit
Both Jarbas Agnelli & Keith Loutit were finalists at YouTube play, a Biennial of Creative Video at the Guggenheim.

February 23, 2012

Timelapse footage using tilt-shift makes everything look like a model

Filed under: Randomness, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

A time lapse of action in and outside the Port of Napier filmed mostly from the Bluff Hill lookout. Edited in Sony Vegas11 with Magic Bullet Looks 2 using the Swing Tilt pre-set that makes the machinery and ships take on a model toy appearance.

H/T to Nelson Kennedy for the link.

Wikipedia says:

“Tilt-shift photography” refers to the use of camera movements on small- and medium-format cameras, and sometimes specifically refers to the use of tilt for selective focus, often for simulating a miniature scene. Sometimes the term is used when the shallow depth of field is simulated with digital post processing; the name may derive from the tilt-shift lens normally required when the effect is produced optically.

“Tilt-shift” encompasses two different types of movements: rotation of the lens plane relative to the image plane, called tilt, and movement of the lens parallel to the image plane, called shift. Tilt is used to control the orientation of the plane of focus (PoF), and hence the part of an image that appears sharp; it makes use of the Scheimpflug principle. Shift is used to adjust the position of the subject in the image area without moving the camera back; this is often helpful in avoiding the convergence of parallel lines, as when photographing tall buildings.

January 26, 2012

The Crazy Years: today’s exhibit – the junction between bad parenting and bad nutrition

Filed under: Britain, Health, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:21

May we present Stacey Irvine, 17, the new poster girl for neglectful parenting and test case for even more Nanny State intervention:

A teenage girl who has eaten almost nothing else apart from chicken nuggets for 15 years has been warned by doctors that the junk food is killing her.

Stacey Irvine, 17, has been hooked on the treats since her mother bought her some at a McDonald’s restaurant when she was two.

[. . .]

Miss Irvine, who has never eaten fruit or vegetables, had swollen veins in her tongue and was found to have anaemia.

[. . .]

Her exasperated mother Evonne Irvine, 39, who is battling to get her daughter seen by a specialist, told the newspaper: ‘It breaks my heart to see her eating those damned nuggets.

‘She’s been told in no uncertain terms that she’ll die if she carries on like this. But she says she can’t eat anything else.’

She once tried starving her daughter in a bid to get her to eat more nutritious food – but did not have any success.

Miss Irvine, whose only other variation in her diet is the occasional slice of toast for breakfast and crisps, said that once she tried nuggets she ‘loved them so much they were all I would eat’.

Of course, this is reported in the Daily Mail, so the story’s relationship with reality may be a bit looser than one might hope.

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