Quotulatiousness

November 23, 2012

The bridge that eats trucks

Filed under: Railways, Randomness, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:38

It’s a bridge so fearsome that it has its own website for breathtaking footage of trucks coming to grief at 11’8″:

If you’re paying attention this week when you drive that tall truck down South Gregson Street, you’ll get fair warning about the low bridge ahead.

A series of yellow diamond signs, starting a block in advance, will tell you about the 11-foot, 8-inch clearance.

Then the yellow lights will go crazy, the ones with an overhead sign that says: OVERHEIGHT WHEN FLASHING.

You’ll have one last chance to escape disaster. You can turn onto Peabody Street, just before Gregson runs beneath the railroad bridge that carries freight and passenger trains across downtown Durham.

But if you’re not paying attention — you dummy! — you’ll make plenty of noise as you crash into that low bridge. It will peel the roof off your moving van. It will scatter the hay bales or building supplies stacked much too high on your flatbed.

It might leave your box truck wedged beneath the overpass. The tow-truck driver will have to deflate your tires before he can haul your sorry self away.

You can watch a collection of truck decapitation clips here: http://11foot8.com/

September 7, 2012

Gender-identity: how (many) adolescents cope with the “what am I” problem

Filed under: Quotations, Randomness — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

This is from a discussion that took place on the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list the other day (list info here) that explored some interesting notions. I emailed Ms. Bujold to ask her permission to use a quote from one of her posts, and she asked me to provide a bit more context as she wasn’t sure the portion I’d asked to use was sufficiently informative. The topic of discussion was the anima/animus mental model of what is “right” about the opposite sex many (most? all?) young people use to determine what it is to be male or female. A subtopic of that was the use or misuse of that mental model to judge potential dates/mates and the problems that that might entail.

It seems to tie in with my own notions of gender-identity formation in adolescence being principally accomplished by heatedly deleting everything seen to be associated with the opposite gender, and maturity being the slower process of regaining or recovering same to once again become a complete human being.

[. . .]

I might direct your attention to the large preponderance of “alpha males” as romance novel heroes. Very much the embodiment of those very assertive or practical qualities that adolescent women delete (or repress, if you prefer) in themselves, much to their later sorrow when they have to cope with real life, alas.

Your typical bad-boy alpha-jerk high-achieving rich hero is pretty much a grocery list of survival qualities discouraged in women, in fact.

Granted, women need to be socialized as sharers to a high degree, or their infants would never survive un-murdered. It’s a near thing as-is. (Says the experienced mom.)

September 6, 2012

Esperanto: the easiest way to introduce a second language to children

Filed under: Education, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:58

I got interested in learning Esperanto in my early 20’s … and even though I never needed to speak the language in ordinary life, it was a very positive experience and I would recommend it to anyone as an easy way to limber up the brain for other learning tasks. It’s easy to learn, and success in learning helps to make the next learning experience a bit easier and more enjoyable.

August 29, 2012

The wine cellar: proper storage for your wines

Filed under: Randomness, Wine — Nicholas @ 11:23

Kelvin Browne in the National Post on the modern wine cellar:

I like wine cellars even more than I like wine, which is saying something. I used to have one in the basement of an 1870s stone house. This fantasy cellar had the ancient stone walls of the home’s original foundation, new rough-hewn granite floors and wine racks made from reclaimed oak by a perfectionist craftsman. It kept wine at the requisite 56F to 57F, with humidity about 70%. Who knew cellars were in basements for a reason, as temperature and humidity didn’t need much mechanical assistance here to be ideal for wine?

I loved the cellar and bought cases for it to make sure the room was picturesque — right out of a French château. The room had a 600-bottle capacity. Practically speaking, my partner and I would have been fine with a 24-bottle wine fridge, but antique chairs and an elaborate tasting table don’t suit such a setup.

After we sold the farmhouse, we disposed of the wine to friends, also indulging in a massive liquidation binge ourselves, starting with wine at breakfast.

The enduring lesson: If you like wine, you’re likely a sensualist who loves the total experience, and that includes where you store your horde.

I’ve always wanted to have a wine cellar like that, but the corner of my basement that serves as my wine cellar will have to do: I can’t even afford to keep that fully stocked (and it holds a lot less than 600 bottles). Instead of the custom-crafted redwood or polished glass and stainless steel that some high-end cellars can boast, I have a pair of wooden Ikea bottle racks. They may not have the look of the “good” racks, but they work just as well … and far less expensively.

August 19, 2012

The end of the world is nigh

Filed under: Books, Environment, Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 00:07

Sell all your posessions! Live for the now! Repent your sins! Or, as Matt Ridley suggests, keep calm and carry on:

This is the question posed by the website 2012apocalypse.net. “super volcanos? pestilence and disease? asteroids? comets? antichrist? global warming? nuclear war?” the site’s authors are impressively open-minded about the cause of the catastrophe that is coming at 11:11 pm on December 21 this year. but they have no doubt it will happen. after all, not only does the Mayan Long Count calendar end that day, but “the sun will be aligned with the center of the Milky Way for the first time in about 26,000 years.”

When the sun rises on December 22, as it surely will, do not expect apologies or even a rethink. No matter how often apocalyptic predictions fail to come true, another one soon arrives. And the prophets of apocalypse always draw a following — from the 100,000 Millerites who took to the hills in 1843, awaiting the end of the world, to the thousands who believed in Harold Camping, the Christian radio broadcaster who forecast the final rapture in both 1994 and 2011.

Religious zealots hardly have a monopoly on apocalyptic thinking. Consider some of the environmental cataclysms that so many experts promised were inevitable. Best-selling economist Robert Heilbroner in 1974: “The outlook for man, I believe, is painful, difficult, perhaps desperate, and the hope that can be held out for his future prospects seem to be very slim indeed.” Or best-selling ecologist Paul Ehrlich in 1968: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s [“and 1980s” was added in a later edition] the world will undergo famines — hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked on now … nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” Or Jimmy Carter in a televised speech in 1977: “We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade.”

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.”

August 14, 2012

Anecdotes are not data: Demise of Guys based on anecdotal evidence

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

Jacob Sullum on the recent ebook The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan.

Zimbardo’s thesis is that “boys are struggling” in school and in love because they play video games too much and watch too much porn. But he and his co-author, a recent University of Colorado graduate named Nikita Duncan, never establish that boys are struggling any more nowadays than they were when porn was harder to find and video games were limited to variations on Pong. The data they cite mostly show that girls are doing better than boys, not that boys are doing worse than they did before xvideos.com and Grand Theft Auto. Such an association would by no means be conclusive, but it’s the least you’d expect from a respected social scientist like Zimbardo, who oversaw the famous Stanford “prison experiment” that we all read about in Psych 101.

[. . .]

One source of evidence that Zimbardo and Duncan rely on heavily, an eight-question survey of people who watched Zimbardo’s TED talk online, is so dubious that anyone with a bachelor’s degree in psychology (such as Duncan), let alone a Ph.D. (such as Zimbardo), should be embarrassed to cite it without a litany of caveats. The most important one: It seems probable that people who are attracted to Zimbardo’s talk, watch it all the way through, and then take the time to fill out his online survey are especially likely to agree with his thesis and especially likely to report problems related to electronic diversions. This is not just a nonrepresentative sample; it’s a sample bound to confirm what Zimbardo thinks he already knows. “We wanted our personal views to be challenged or validated by others interested in the topic,” the authors claim. Mostly validated, to judge by their survey design.

[. . .]

Other sources of evidence cited by Zimbardo and Duncan are so weak that they have the paradoxical effect of undermining their argument rather than reinforcing it. How do Zimbardo and Duncan know about “the sense of total entitlement that some middle-aged guys feel within their relationships”? Because “a highly educated female colleague alerted us” to this “new phenomenon.” How do they know that “one consequence of teenage boys watching many hours of Internet pornography…is they are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects”? Because of a theory propounded by Daily Mail columnist Penny Marshall. How do they know that “men are as good as their women require them to be”? Because that’s what “one 27-year-old guy we interviewed” said.

Even when more rigorous research is available, Zimbardo and Duncan do not necessarily bother to look it up. How do they know that teenagers “who spend their nights playing video games or texting their friends instead of sleeping are putting themselves at greater risk for gaining unhealthy amounts of weight and becoming obese”? Because an NPR correspondent said so. Likewise, the authors get their information about the drawbacks of the No Child Left Behind Act from a gloss of a RAND Corporation study in a San Francisco Chronicle editorial. This is the level of documentation you’d expect from a mediocre high school student, not a college graduate, let alone a tenured social scientist at a leading university.

August 12, 2012

Wendy McElroy on the Myth of the Greater Good

Filed under: Liberty, Randomness — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:12

Have you been punked by your philosophy professor?

In entry-level philosophy class, a professor will often present a scenario that seems to challenge the students’ perspective on morality.

The argument runs something as follows: “The entire nation of France will drop dead tomorrow unless you kill your neighbor who has only one day to live. What do you do?”

Or “You could eliminate cancer by pressing a button that also kills one healthy person. Do you do so?”

The purpose is to create a moral dilemma. The questions pit your moral rejection of murder against your moral guilt for not acting to save millions of lives.

In reality, the questions are a sham that cannot be honestly answered. They postulate a parallel world in which the rules of reality, like cause and effect, have been dramatically changed so that pushing a button cures cancer. The postulated world seems to operate more on magic than reality.

Because my moral code is based on the reality of the existing world, I don’t know what I would do if those rules no longer operated. I presume my morality would be different, so my actions would be as well.

As absurd as they are, these are considered to be the “tough” moral questions. In grappling with them, some students come to believe that being true to morality requires the violation of morality in a profound manner; after all, there is no greater violation than the deliberate murder of another human being.

But how can the life of one outweigh those of millions in your hands? At this point, morality becomes a numbers game, a matter of cost-benefit analysis, rather than of principle. This is not an expansion of morality, as the professor claims, but the manufacture of a conflict that destroys morality. In its place is left a moral gray zone, a vacuum into which utilitarianism rushes.

August 9, 2012

KittyCam project proves they are cute, cuddly … and deadly

Filed under: Environment, Randomness — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 08:40

Do you let your cat out into the great outdoors? If you’re fond of other small creatures, you may want to reconsider that policy:

Those cute kittens whose faces are peer from endless posts on Pinterest are actually predators, and a third of those trailed in a county in Georgia are wandering around outdoors capturing and killing other animals.

The army of assassins was discovered by folks from the University of Georgia and the National Geographic Society, who strapped video cameras around the necks of 60 cats to record their atrocities for a year in a project known as KittyCam.

[. . .]

“In Athens-Clarke County, we found that about 30 per cent of the sampled cats were successful in capturing and killing prey, and that those cats averaged about one kill for every 17 hours outdoors or 2.1 kills per week.

[. . .]

“If we extrapolate the results of this study across the country and include feral cats, we find that cats are likely killing more than four billion animals per year, including at least 500 million birds,” Dr George Fenwick, president of American Bird Conservancy, cried indignantly.

“Cat predation is one of the reasons why one in three American bird species are in decline.”

June 27, 2012

It was abusive, but it wasn’t bullying

Filed under: Media, Randomness, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:54

On the sp!ked website, Nancy McDermott analyzes the “bus monitor bullying” video and the reaction to the situation:

By now, millions of people across the world have viewed ‘Making the Bus Monitor Cry’. For those of you who haven’t, it is a video of a slew of vile, verbal abuse against 68-year-old Karen Klein, a bus monitor from Greece, New York, from four 13-year-old boys. It is hard to know what is more shocking: the methodical cruelty with which the children ply their insults; or the grandmother’s inability to respond effectively to the humiliating onslaught.

Childish cruelty is allegedly old news, but, recorded and broadcast across the world, it is still jarring. Not only is the video footage completely at odds with the way we usually like to regard children — as innocents in need of protection — but their willingness and, more disturbingly, their success at targeting an adult is unsettling.

Yet, in reality, the video tells us less about the nature of children and more about the erosion of adult authority in American society. When adults are too timid to enforce basic standards of behaviour in public, and when other adults (in this case, the bus driver) are willing to stand by and tolerate bad behaviour aimed at a fellow adult, it’s no wonder children run wild. The depths of this problem are nowhere more apparent than in the confused reaction to the bus-monitor incident.

[. . .]

It is easy to forget in an age when so many adults find it hard to keep children under control that adults are inherently more powerful than children. Adults bear both rights and responsibilities for making and acting on their own decisions. Children, in contrast, have no real autonomy. To the extent that they have any limited independence, it is entirely conditional on the adults in their lives. And rightly so: children lack both the experience and the maturity to be held legally or morally accountable for their actions. Although we all hope children will learn to behave responsibly, we should be under no illusions as to their capacity to assume responsibility in the same way that adults do.

[. . .]

The seventh graders who taunted Klein did not do it because they lacked empathy or awareness of bullying, or because they were overcome by a claustrophobic mob mentality, or because they are worse than children anywhere else. They behaved the way they did because none of the people or institutions responsible for guiding them in their journey to adulthood set or enforced clear standards of behaviour. It is a pattern that repeats across America, not just in this little corner of New York state. The sad truth is that unless we wake up and recognise this phenomenon for what it is, and start letting children know where they stand, behaviour like that on the bus will continue.

(more…)

June 13, 2012

Wine: drink what tastes best to you, not what the experts tell you to

Filed under: Europe, France, Randomness, USA, Wine — Nicholas @ 09:30

Yet another blind taste test that didn’t come out the way it was “supposed” to:

At the Princeton tasting, led by George Taber, 9 wine judges from France, Belgium and the U.S. tasted French against New Jersey [TC: that’s the New Jersey] wines. The French wines selected were from the same producers as in 1976 including names such as Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Haut Brion, priced up to $650/bottle. New Jersey wines for the competition were submitted to an informal panel of judges, who then selected the wines for the competition. These judges were not eligible to taste wines at the final competition The results were similarly surprising. Although, the winner in each category was a French wine (Clos de Mouches for the whites and Mouton-Rothschild for the reds) NJ wines are at eye level. Three of the top four whites were from New Jersey. The best NJ red was ranked place 3. An amazing result given that the prices for NJ average at only 5% of the top French wines.

A statistical evaluation of the tasting, conducted by Princeton Professor Richard Quandt, further shows that the rank order of the wines was mostly insignificant. That is, if the wine judges repeated the tasting, the results would most likely be different. From a statistically viewpoint, most wines were undistinguishable. Only the best white and the lowest ranked red were significantly different from the others wines.

There are good wines and bad wines. There are good wines and better wines. But my experience has always been that there’s a point of diminishing returns beyond which you’re paying more money for no appreciable improvement in the quality of the wine. In other words, beyond that point, you’re paying for the prestige of the label or the mystique of the brand not for anything intrinsic to the liquid in the glass. As I wrote last year:

We’re in a golden age for wine, as more and more producers of inexpensive wines adopt better techniques and equipment for even their vin extremely ordinaire.

Wine isn’t a simple product: people buy wine for lots of different reasons, and one of those reasons is to signal higher social status by buying more expensive wine. As you get above a certain price level, the quality increases more slowly but the “prestige” makes up the difference (for those interested in the social signalling, anyway).

I’ve discovered that my palate isn’t highly developed enough to detect and appreciate the additional quality that a $100 bottle of wine is supposed to display over a $40-$50 bottle. It may be that I lack the ability to discriminate sufficiently between the two … or it may be that the primary difference is in the “prestige” and not in the palate.

If you’re buying wine to have with a nice dinner, find your point of diminishing returns and don’t go beyond it: you’ll save yourself a lot of money over time and still enjoy your wine. If, on the other hand, you’re buying wine specifically to impress then go as expensive as you like.

June 8, 2012

A Gen-X lament: “none of these “experts” … even agree on when we were born”

Filed under: Media, Randomness — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:46

By any reckoning, I just missed being in Gen-X, as the earliest date anyone seems to use is 1961 (so my sister is a Gen X’er, but I’m a very-very-very-late boomer, apparently). In spite of that, most of my friends seem to identify much more with Gen X than the plutocratic fat cats of the early Baby Boom generation. Kathy Shaidle explains the three biggest myths about Generation X:

… the term “Generation X” was popularized by our contemporary Douglas Coupland’s titular 1991 novel. (And Coupland swiped his title from the name of Billy Idol’s old pop-punk band; my fellow ex-punk Kinsella should know that, too.)

There are lots of things “great minds” got wrong about Generation X since they started writing and worrying about them. (I mean, us.)

After Coupland’s novel — about over-educated, underemployed pop culture addicts who’ve formed an ad hoc “family” of friends – swept the planet, countless “consultants” (including, briefly, Coupland himself) started marketing themselves as experts on my demographic.

These consultants made a whole lot of money, keynote-speaking to job-for-life CEOs about why we Gen-Xer’s were all so broke and unemployed.

And the most irritating (and yeah, ironic) thing is, none of these “experts” (“X-perts”?) even agree on when we were born.

[. . .]

The takeaway for pundits and other “experts” is:

“Generation X” isn’t synonymous with “young people today.”

I’m gonna be 50 soon. Dammit.

[. . .]

Like the Y2K “experts” who came after them, all those demographic gurus and futurists who got rich theorizing about Generation X ended up looking pretty foolish. (But never had to give their money back.)

When we Gen-Xers were trying to get our first jobs out of college or high school, we did indeed contend with an economy burdened by a triple-feature of double digit horrors: inflation, unemployment and interest rates were all way over 10%.

We blamed those damn yuppie Baby Boomers. They’d beaten us to all the good jobs and were never gonna give them up.

(In the same way hippies had used up all the safe-ish drugs and free sex, and left us with crack and AIDS.)

Allergy season strikes

Filed under: Health, Randomness — Tags: — Nicholas @ 07:43

I’ve had fall and spring allergy issues since I was a teenager. They’re pretty predictable in symptoms: dry, itchy eyes and full sinuses followed by sneezing and/or coughing (depending on which direction the sinus overflow headed). Over the last several years, the intensity of the allergy attacks has steadily declined, which has been great. This week, however, I got the worst symptoms I’ve had in at least a decade and it came on with little warning.

I tried to tough it out for the first couple of days, but as I really wanted to be awake and de-symptomized for the GW2 Beta Weekend Event kicking off later today, I figured I’d better take some allergy medicine. It turns out the only package of Claritin I had is past its use-by date. The unopened package expired in October.

Of 2009

I guess I really have been doing well in the allergy line recently.

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: Food, 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.

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