Category: Social commentary

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Send in the terrorists!

I’ve spent numerous summers abroad and missed Canada Day (July 1st) probably close to a dozen times.  However, this year I felt particularly unpatriotic despite singing O Canada in the Union Oyster House with some random Canadians from Kingston who were in Boston for the weekend.  However, after spending a few days in Boston as a tourist, I couldn’t help but become ensconced in feelings of American patriotism, feeling proud of America and its accomplishments, and a deep sympathy for its fallen heros.

Part of a memorial for those killed in action in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The memorial has one blank dog tag for each fallen American. They numbered 5400 when I visited.

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Let's scrap the long-form census!

The status quo for Canadian censuses is that one-fifth of households complete the “long form” of the census in its entirety and the remainder are given a much-abbreviated version of it.  The completion of the long-form census, until now, has been mandatory for those to whom it has been delivered under threat of fine and jail.  Census information is important to all Canadians; it is used by different levels of government, businesses, historians, scientists, and others for reasons as varied as planning infrastructure to creating employment opportunities.  The current governing party of Canada has decided, unilaterally, that punishing its citizens for failing to fill out some survey is unfair and that the penalty be abandoned.

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What keeps me up: Google Cloud Print

Google hopes to make printing from anywhere and any application — including “web apps” — simple using Google Cloud Print.  Printing from a browser typically includes many things that clutter the printout such as navigation bars and advertisements.  In the case of web applications, parts of the document may also be missing if scrolling is required.  Google Cloud Print promises to allow web applications such as Google Docs — or even conventional applications — to print “properly”.  Furthermore, Google will keep the software for your printer up to date (although you’ll still need to make sure the printer is properly configured to use Google Cloud Print).  Sounds like a good idea, doesn’t it?  Maybe on the surface.

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You're obsolete!

Isn’t the pace of technological advancement remarkable? For less than the price of a month’s worth of kitty litter, one can buy an 8GB microSD memory card that is smaller and lighter than a penny. That’s enough to store the text of all English Wikipedia articles as of March 2010 with room to squeeze in a minimal install of Apple’s current desktop operating system ((2 GiB is sufficient for a bootable disk image of Mac OS X 10.6)).  And that’s just one month’s worth of kitty litter.

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The Gospel According to the Scientific Method

In the beginning

My first encounter with the scientific method was in grade 4. Purpose? Check. Hypothesis? Check. Procedure? Check. Results and possible sources of error? Check. Conclusion? Check. Congratulations!  You’ve just done science! The approach seemed elegant and had rigour. Scientific rigour, if you will. The beauty of it all was that an 8 year old can grasp it.

Flash forward to the present. I hear phrases such as, “Oh, I don’t buy the results of that study” or its equally-evil twin, “Yeah, it’s true. I read it somewhere.” Do you see what I see? Alack! A lack of understanding of the tenets of the scientific method. Or perhaps some laziness in speech — that is more forgivable.  However, it often seems as though it is the former.

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