Quotulatiousness

January 12, 2010

“You should not obey every sign you see”

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Liberty — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:03

I’m not even a skater, but I thoroughly agree with Rob Roberts Peter Kuitenbrouwer on this:

Toronto’s biggest skating rink is now (unofficially) open for your winter pleasure.

Please ignore the City of Toronto’s yellow plastic signs, fastened to trees and posts around Grenadier Pond in High Park, which read, “Danger. Ice unsafe. Keep off. Municipal Code #608.”

The affirmation on these signs is false, as hundreds proved this past weekend when we piled onto the city’s largest pond. Some cross-country skied. Some walked dogs. A photographer from a community newspaper got on to take pictures. One young man who had a thick Russian accent brought an ice drill and bored eight holes (the ice is about 25 cm thick) and sat down on his cooler to fish.

Mostly, we skated: people shoveled off five beautiful hockey rinks along the 1.2 km-long expanse of ice, linked by ice lanes. Shinny was never so glorious. Yesterday I skated again, joined once more by skaters, skiers and walkers.

Flaunting the municipal signs doesn’t bother me; I explained to my son (who is seven) that, “you should not obey every sign you see.”

Update: Corrected attribution to the actual author of the piece. I must say that the National Post author attributions are sometimes rather confusing. The page currently says the piece is by Rob Roberts, but elsewhere on the site, Chris Selley refers to it as Peter Kuitenbrouwer’s article. Selley also perfectly encapsulates the municipal government’s preferences: “Just do what the government says and no one gets hurt”.

January 11, 2010

Dystopia, here we come!

Filed under: Environment, Government, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:06

The State of the World 2010 report published by the Worldwatch Institute will find a large audience among the postlapsarian Left:

Ditch the dog; throw away (sorry, recycle) those takeaway menus; bin bottled water; get rid of that gas-guzzling car and forget flying to far-flung places. These are just some of the sacrifices we in the West will need to make if we are to survive climate change.

The stark warning comes from the renowned Worldwatch Institute, a Washington-based organisation regarded as the world’s pre-eminent environmental think tank.

[. . .]

“Habits that are firmly set – from where people live to what they eat — will all need to be altered and in many cases simplified or minimised… From Earth’s perspective, the American or even the European way of life is simply not viable.”

Of course, to enforce this new “way of life”, we’ll also have to give up our quaint, out-dated notions of liberty, civil rights, democracy, representative government and other relics of the Enlightenment. To save humanity, we’ll have to give up individuality: there’s no other way to eliminate the “wasteful” American or European lifestyle without massive employment of force. You can almost hear the hearts-a-flutter among the ranks of those who want to run your life for you (assuming you’re considered valuable enough to keep alive, of course . . . to save the human race, individual lives can’t be spared, comrade).

First to go would be the tourism industry: can’t have all those passenger jets flying to and fro, spewing all that evil carbon dioxide into the air. But don’t plan on driving anywhere . . . personal vehicles will be next. Mass transit will be the only allowable transportation. What’s that, comrade? Don’t live near a transit line? Get used to walking.

Oh, and better bone up on subsistence farming . . . that’s also in the blueprint. You’ll be expected to grow your own food as part of living the new “sustainable” lifestyle, along with only using “completely recyclable” goods.

Our would-be rulers appear not to have observed what happened the last time someone implemented this sort of radical policy. Or perhaps they have . . .

Coming to your area soon: the XHL!

Filed under: Europe, Sports — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:18

Remember that old joke about “I went to the fights and a hockey game broke out”? Apparently the Kontinental Hockey League thought that was a formula for success:

The Kontinental Hockey League may be taking the NHL’s bottom-tier and overage players for the most part, but one thing they’ve provided to the hockey world in their two seasons of existence is plenty of YouTube-worthy brawls. Just over a week ago Barys Astana and SKA St. Petersburg had a brawl that featured former NHL’ers Sergei Zubov, Oleg Saprykin, friend of Puck Daddy Kevin Dallman, commercial superstar Robert Esche, and even a goalie-on-defenseman scrap.

Sovetsky Sport writer Genadi Boguslavski tweeted out details of today’s punch-up that featured Vityaz Chekhov and Avangard Omsk. It didn’t take long for things to go from a line-brawl to the bench-clearing variety.

This first video features Jaromir Jagr in a bit of a tussle and apparently trying out some new Greco-Roman wrestling moves:

The game lasted four minutes, with 637 minutes of penalties handed out.

January 10, 2010

You can get too passionate about . . . fonts

Filed under: Humour, Media, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 22:23

H/T to Virginia Postrel.

Shootout in Arizona, shoot-down in Foxboro

Filed under: Football — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 21:29

Just watched the Baltimore Ravens do horrible things to the guys wearing the New England Patriot uniforms. Following that, the Arizona Cardinals had a scoring fest against the Green Bay Packers . . . who also had a scoring fest.

I don’t know what happened to the Patriots, as they looked as though they’d never seen a football before. The game was already looking out of reach by the end of the first quarter. Final score, 33-14. Baltimore tried a couple of trick plays — having the quarterback throw the ball in a “forward pass” rather than handing off to the running back. It’s a legal play, and some teams do a lot of it, but Baltimore didn’t need too much of that exotic stuff to grind New England down.

Arizona appeared to have an insurmountable lead over the Packers, but somehow (perhaps by not playing any significant defence) they let Green Bay tie the game at the end of regulation, forcing an overtime period. This was one of the highest scoring games in playoff history (at one point, the game announcers said it had already tied for second highest combined score, and the game wasn’t over yet). The game was decided on a defensive TD early in the overtime period, finishing 51-45.

January 9, 2010

QotD: The awfulness of airports

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Over the weekend, an idiot walked the wrong way through a secure exit for arriving passengers at Newark airport. An entire terminal was shut down so that everybody on the “sterile” side of the security barriers could be herded back out and rescreened. The entire process took just under seven hours. The cascading delays disrupted air travel worldwide. They didn’t even catch the doofus who caused the ruckus. No doubt, if they’d announced his location over the paging system, he’d have been drawn and quartered by a mob of traveling salesmen from 3M and a gaggle of middle-school girls returning from a volleyball tournament.

Now, I should back up. When I referred to the “sterile” side of the security barrier, I was using the term narrowly, to refer to folks who’d been through the metal detectors. Because to use the word “sterile” in its usual context in a sentence with “airports” — those belching Petri dishes of bathroom effluence and unidentifiable noisome miasma — would be a grotesque abrogation of journalistic trust.

According to the latest epidemiological research, airports reside somewhere between no-frills Haitian brothels and Penn State fraternity bathrooms when it comes to hygiene. USA Today recently surveyed the health-inspection records of airport restaurants and found that serious code violations were as commonplace as rat and mouse droppings; 77 percent of 35 restaurants reviewed at Reagan National Airport had at least one major violation.

I could go on, of course. The petty humiliations, the routine deceptions from airline employees desperate to rid themselves of troublesome travelers (“Oh, they can definitely help you at the gate!”), the stress-position seats, the ever-changing rules for what can and cannot be in your carry-on, being charged for food that the Red Cross would condemn if it were served at Gitmo: Air travel is the most expensive unpleasant experience in everyday life outside the realm of words ending in -oscopy.

Jonah Goldberg, “A No-Fly List? Count Me In: Flying before 9/11 was already awful, and it has only become worse”, National Review, 2010-01-08

January 8, 2010

Agent Smith was right after all

Filed under: Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:47

Remember that little scene in The Matrix where Agent Smith is sharing some of his philosophy with a captured Morpheus?

I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and we are the cure.

Well, he was close: we’re apparently part-virus:

People may not be quite the humans they think they are. Or so suggests new research showing that the human genome is part bornavirus.

Bornaviruses, a type of RNA virus that causes disease in horses and sheep, can insert their genetic material into human DNA and first did so at least 40 million years ago, the study shows. The findings, published January 7 in Nature, provide the first evidence that RNA viruses other than retroviruses (such as HIV) can stably integrate genes into host DNA. The new work may help reveal more about the evolution of RNA viruses as well as their mammalian hosts.

“Our whole notion of ourselves as a species is slightly misconceived,” says Robert Gifford, a paleovirologist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, affiliated with Rockefeller University in New York City. Human DNA includes genetic contributions from bacteria and other organisms, and humans have even come to rely on some of these genes for basic functions like fighting infections.

In the new study, Japanese researchers found copies of the bornavirus N (for nucleoprotein) gene inserted in at least four separate locations in the human genome. Searches of other mammalian genomes also showed that the gene has hitched rides in a wide variety of species for millions of years.

Second career for Jeanne d’Arc?

Filed under: Europe, France, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:06

Due for retirement from the French fleet later this year, the helicopter carrier Jeanne d’Arc may have a civilian career ahead of her:

For the past 50 years, the venerable Jeanne d’Arc has had a career worthy of her name. She has toured the world, sailed to the rescue of populations in need and become a symbol of French military might.

But, if a bellicose group of activists get their way, the distinguished helicopter carrier could face a very different future when it is retired in May. Driven to distraction by private helicopters whirring above their homes, St Tropez residents are pushing for the icon of seafaring glory to become a landing strip for the international jet set.

The pressure group Halte Hélico sees the ageing 180m-long hulk of the carrier as a potential solution to the problems they have been fighting for years. Jean-Claude Molho, its president, said: “We thought it could be a good solution as there are already many landing strips for helicopters and we could also transform it into a hotel and restaurant to combine tourism with the practical issues.”

Snow, 1963

Filed under: Britain, Railways — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:21

What would happen if you took a typical Canadian snowfall and dumped it on Britain? In 1963, this is what happened. As you can see, it must have been the “right kind of snow”.

H/T to Roger Henry for the link.

Great satire . . . at least, I’m assuming it’s satire

Filed under: Economics, Education, History, Humour — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:47

In the comments to this post at the Library of Economics and Liberty site:

I think American econ textbooks were pro-Soviet for the simple reason that the Soviet system was indisputably superior to the unforgiving ‘free market’ American system.

Make whatever claims about ‘economic growth’ or ‘relative poverty’ or ‘lack of freedom’ you want but the Soviet Union created a large-scale, modern nation state dedicated to providing everyone with a solid, equitable lifestyle. Everyone had access to food, clothing, shelter, health-care, education, meaningful work and other necessities of life. It was guaranteed right there in their constitution. That is still not the case in the US, though with the recent passage of the landmark Health Care Reform bills we have at least made the first tentative steps towards correcting one of those desperate problems.

The thing that economists need to realize is that life is not all about economics & money. Having a satisfying life planned for you with no uncertainty and no crucial needs left unfulfilled is necessary too. The Soviet Union went a good a way towards providing that.

Someday we will realize what a loss it was when the vile, venal capitalists of the West arranged its downfall. After all, no amount of material wealth provided in the willy-nilly, dog-eat-dog, all-against-all ‘free market’ will ever be able to match the simple pleasures of a life dedicated to the betterment of the community, guided by the best & brightest from their commanding perch in the government.

That was commenter “blighter” either doing a pitch-perfect parody or showing that the textbook wars were won by Soviet intelligence services.

January 7, 2010

10 Downing Street: the coup that wasn’t

Filed under: Britain, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:48

A rather odd week for Britain’s embattled Prime Minister, with members of his cabinet seeming to be working on his ouster, yet still publicly supporting him. I suspect it’s a case of timing — few expect Mr. Brown to win the next general election, but potential leadership contenders don’t want to push him out of the top spot until after the coming debacle. If he gets replaced before the election, the new leader will take a lot of blame for the polling results, while the Brown team can take Parthian shots at the new leader’s supporters.

This the most likely reason that the “coup” never happened. All the key players in the next act want this act over properly, with Gordon Brown facing his doom at the hands of the voters, and a new leader in place (theoretically) untainted by the outcome of the election.

Tracking the effectiveness of bloggers by arrests

Filed under: China, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 07:30

2009 was a tough year for journalists, with at least 76 killed and arrests and physical assaults increased over last year. In a back-handed way, the effectiveness of bloggers and other informal journalists could be measured by the ways in which they get harassed, intimidated, or otherwise interfered with as they tried to report on the news:

Meanwhile, the spotlight is increasingly falling on bloggers, as 2009 was the first year that more than 100 bloggers and cyber-dissidents were imprisoned.

In a number of countries online dissent is now a criminal offence: authorities have responded to the internet as pro-democracy tool with new laws and crackdowns. A pair of Azerbaijani bloggers were sentenced to two years in prison for making a film mocking the political elite.

China was still the leading Internet censor in 2009. However, Iran, Tunisia, Thailand, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam and Uzbekistan have all also made extensive use website blocking and online surveillance to monitor and control dissent. The Turkmen Internet remains under total state control. Egyptian blogger Kareem Amer remains in jail, while well-known Burmese comedian Zarganar has a further 34 years of his prison sentence to serve.

However, the Report also notes that democratic countries have not lagged far behind, instancing the various steps taken by European countries to control the internet under the guise of protection against child porn and illegal downloading. It also notes that Australia intends to put in place a compulsory filtering system that poses a threat to freedom of expression.

Marmite versus Vegemite

Filed under: Australia, Britain, Food, Humour, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:25

Charles Stross has run out of things to post that will rile up the reader base, so he finds another way to get the chattering masses chattering — by declaring his unnatural love for Marmite and Vegemite:

Note to American readers: Marmite is what I (being a Brit) grew up with. If you brew beer on a commercial scale, when you drain the fermenting vessel you end up with a scum of dead and dying yeast cells on the side. Some time in the late 19th century, rather than treating this as waste, some nameless genius had the idea of tasting it. It turns out that brewer’s yeast, once you lyse the cells by adding salt, tastes remarkably savoury — somewhat like soy sauce, only thicker (with much the same consistency as non-set honey). Marmite, the product, is mostly yeast extract, combined with salt and a few additional spices. It’s what belongs on toast, or cheese, or in gravy and sauces to add body to them. And the stuff’s addictive. I get through it in catering-tub quantities, alas: it’s my one real high sodium vice.

Vegemite . . . it’s the antipodean antithesis. Invented in 1922 by Dr Cyril P. Callister in Australia, it was designed to plug the strategic gap opened by unrestricted U-boat warfare against the vital British Marmite convoys that had kept the colonies supplied during wartime — or something like that. Kraft popularized it, pushed it into military rations during the second world war, and over a decade clawed back sales from Marmite until it’s now the favourite toast topping down under. The recipe differs somewhat from Marmite, as does the flavour — just enough that if you’re used to one, the other tastes slightly “off” — too flat, or too astringent.

If you want to really liven up a party, pour a small jar of Marmite into the fruit punch — or add Vegemite to the dog’s bowl (as long as you don’t mind being asked to clean up afterwards). Hours of friendly discussion and informed debate can be provoked by discussing the relative merits of the two products! And it’s always a good idea to introduce visiting American guests to what they’ve been missing all these years, by exhorting them to spread it on their bread “just like peanut butter”.

January 6, 2010

Why Avatar might not appeal to soldiers

Filed under: Media, Military — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:52

After watching Avatar, Gregg Easterbrook wonders at the gaping plot holes in the story, especially the military ones:

Then there’s director James Cameron’s view of military personnel. If I were a military man or woman, I would find “Avatar” insulting. With one exception, the helicopter pilot played by Michelle Rodriguez — her character is twice referred to as a Marine, suggesting the military personnel are regular military, not mercenaries — all the people in fatigues are brainless sadists. They want to kill, kill, kill the innocent. They can’t wait to begin the next atrocity. It’s true that the U.S. military has conducted atrocities, in Vietnam and during the Plains Indians wars. But slaughter of the innocent is rare in U.S. military annals. In “Avatar,” it’s the norm. The bloodthirsty military personnel readily comply with the colonel’s orders to gun down natives. No one questions him — though in martial law, a soldier not only may but must refuse an illegal order. Plus the military personnel are depicted as such utter morons — not a brain in any of their heads — that none notice the TOTALLY OBVIOUS detail that Pandora’s unusual biology will be worth more than its minerals. Yes, movies traffic in absurd super-simplifications. But we’re supposed to accept that of the deployment of several hundred, every soldier save one is a low-IQ cold-blooded murderer.

What does “Avatar” build up to? Watching the invading soldiers — most of whom happen to be former American military personnel — die is the big cathartic ending of the flick. Extended sequences show Americans being graphically slaughtered in the natives’ counterattack. The deaths of aliens are depicted as heartbreaking tragedies, while the deaths of American security forces are depicted as a whooping good time. In Cameron’s “Aliens,” “The Abyss” and his television show “Dark Angel,” U.S. military personnel are either the bad guys or complete idiots, often shown graphically slaughtered. Cameron is hardly the only commercial-film director to present watching evil U.S. soldiers slaughtered as popcorn-chomping suburban shopping mall fun: in the second “X-Men” flick, U.S. soldiers are the bad guys and graphically killed off. Films that criticize the military for its faults are one thing: When did watching depictions of U.S. soldiers dying become a form of fun?

Behold the awesome power of Facebook groups

Filed under: Cancon, Government, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

The editors at the National Post poke some fun at their opposite numbers over at the Toronto Star:

We know about the Star editors’ foray onto the big exciting Interweb because of the newspaper’s front-page headline on Monday: “Grassroots fury greets shuttered Parliament.” The breathless story suggests Canada is on the verge of some kind of violent 1917-style revolution — a “growing public uprising” no less, complete with “protest rallies” from coast to coast, and young activists full of unhinged, wild-eyed rage. The evidence for all this: 20,000 people joined a Facebook page called “Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament,” which urges Parliament to “Get back to work.”

[. . .]

For all we know, that 20,000 figure is up to 50,000 now, thanks to the Star publicity. Or maybe even 100,000. Who knows? But for the sake of context, let’s look at some other causes that also got a six-digit response: Almost 300,000 people have joined a group encouraging rocker John Mellencamp to quit smoking. Another hundred thousand people have joined a group encouraging random people to move to Finland. A whopping half-million people have used the power of Facebook to declare that they enjoy the television program 90210.

And then there’s our personal favourite: A group called “If 100,000 people join this group, Laura will name her son Megatron” recently met its goal. Congratulations, Laura, on the birth of your Transformer. We bet you didn’t know that he’d become the subject of — what does the Star call it? — oh yes, a “growing public uprising”!

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