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Wind-powered server farms

I finally registered a domain for myself, but it was somewhat of an impulse buy.  The hosting company was having a sale ($2.95/month, domain included), but that wasn’t what sold me.  It was the energy source for the servers: wind power.  Perhaps they have backup fossil-fuel-burning generators and maybe their offices aren’t nearly as green, but the folks at FatCow are mooving in the right direction.  They lacked some features I would have liked to have and their servers sometimes seem slow to respond (shutting down servers due to lack of wind?), but we all have to make sacrifices, right?

Oh, and until August 24th, if you sign up at http://www.fatcow.com/secret with code AUG295, you, too, can get web hosting on a clean-energy-powered server for a year for $2.95 per month.  I get $25 credit if you enter heresjono.com as your referrer.  Please do!

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Car with MPD

On Wednesday at the corner of Wilcocks Ave. and St. George St., a car appeared to be confused as to whether it was playing red light/green light or baseball.  At first, it stopped at the red light.  Then it slowly crept forward a few centimetres as if stealing a base before stopping again, repeating the process as if to say, “Ha ha, Red-light Camera!  If I go slowly enough, you can’t see me!”  It was about half way through the intersection when the light for its direction turned green and it was clear to go.  VROOOM.

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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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Scientific reporting in the popular media

Reporting of science in popular media such as newspapers and magazines is, in general, of dubious quality.  Journalists that report on science, it appears, need no understanding of science.  Causation and correlation; statistical significance and knowing something for certain; hype and expectation: in the minds of many journalists, these appear to be equivalent.  Can we blame them, though?  Even if a scientist’s work is faithfully reported, can we expect readers to keep these things separate?  Probably not, but the blame can then be placed on science education and perhaps a lack of space for an article.  Approaching an article on the effectiveness of the suicide barrier on the Bloor Viaduct in the on-line version of the Globe and Mail with my low expectations, I was very pleasantly surprised to find an embedded copy of the original report.  Kudos to the author, Anna Mehler Paperny, and kudos to the Globe.  I hope more organizations learn from this example.

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2nd International Conference on Computational Sustainability

At the end of June, I was in Boston for the 2nd International Conference on Computational Sustainability.  I think it had to be the most interesting conference I’ve attended to date; not only did I attend all but one session, I also managed to stay awake for each.  The one session I skipped was to compose myself before the poster session — I was cold from the over-airconditioned space and tired from having arrived at my Boston domicile at 2 am that morning, more than 15 hours after leaving Toronto by bus (the driver for the last segment of my trip got lost…  twice).  During this time, I did manage to update the HTML5 version of Inflo (more about this in another blog) and get a fully-working read-only demo running (or another demo graph).

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Good presentations: Part II — Content or charisma?

When I first planned this blog post as a sequel to Part I, I had a different opinion of academic presentations than is presented here — the result of further pondering.

I’ve heard and read horror stories about the sinister slideshow spawn seen as a result of fancy presentation making software as a result of the temptation or perhaps desire to cripple content contained within a presentation.  How easy it is to mask the fact that the emperor has no clothes when all the razzle-dazzle one needs to misdirect and mislead an audience is available at the click of a button!  We hear about these things happening in the business world and the military.  If the PMO started using PowerPoints (or Keynotes or their brethren) to address the nation, you can bet it’d be happening there, too ((For now, politicians do not need it since they often possess the gift of the gab — oratory PowerPoint.)).  But is it happening in academia, a community that takes pride in its supposed openness and ability to challenge what it thinks it knows?  Are academics guilty of content concealment by PowerPoint?

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Good presentations: Part I — Fidgeting

When attending presentations, I seem to have one of two reactions. One is to become very drowsy. This is clearly a bad reaction. The other is to become fidgety. I suppose this is a bad thing from, too, but, at least in my case, I think it’s a good sign. Usually, the reason I become fidgety during presentations is because I feel inspired; such presentations make me want to go out and do something, not simply sit there. That’s a good presentation. So if you ever see me fidgeting during one of your presentations, take it as a compliment.

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The Paperclip Chronicles: Episode I — Alecia's Wardrobe

The Paperclip Chronicles document adventures involving the humble paperclip, a piece of office stationery so versatile that it has become a staple (no pun intended) of my day-pack.

A few months ago on a cold, wintery day, Alecia Fowler was afflicted by two wardrobe malfunctions.  One of them would have made a Victorian blush while the other one made Alecia blush.  We’ll save the bootie and zipper malfunction for last.

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The trump argument

Last week, I heard about a certain intellectually precocious third-grader whose ability to make persuasive arguments as to what he should and should not be permitted to do sometimes consternated his parents.  I pressed further neither into the nature nor subject of the arguments, but I was told that his parents delivered a solid “no” on account of still having the emotional age of someone his age.  The parental trump card.  This got me thinking about those skeptical of (anthropogenic) climate change (cf. climate change denialists and cf. climate change skeptics).

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