Double Blind

This article by Scott Adams (who is just as gifted a writer as he is a cartoonist) is a gem.

My recommendation is to introduce eight-ball into school curricula, but in a specific way. Each kid would be required to keep a log of hours spent practicing on his own time, and there would be no minimum requirement. Some kids could practice zero hours if they had no interest or access to a pool table. At the end of the school year, the entire class would compete in a tournament, and they would compare their results with how many hours they spent practicing. I think that would make real the connection between practice and results, in a way that regular schoolwork and sports do not. That would teach them that winning happens before the game starts.

Yes, I know that schools will never assign eight-ball for homework. But maybe there is some kid-friendly way to teach the same lesson.

Other than the fact that the current public school system has nothing to do with teaching students real-life skills, this would be a great idea.

The other component not mentioned in the article is the art of data collection – learning what to collect data on, and learning how to analyze it (using whatever statistical methods) is also a good life skill.

I forgot to post this a month ago, but I visited three confluence points around the Edmonton, AB area in early July. Because of the flat topology of the land, they were rather easy to get to other than sitting in a vehicle for the time.

The three points were 54 North, 114 West; 54 North, 113 West; 53 North, 114 West.

Of note was the 54 North, 113 West point; while Google Maps at the time I visited the place (but not now!) shows that was is nothing there. Now there is a horse racing training facility, which was pretty cool.

I still want to reach my “backyard confluence” of 49 North, 122 West, which is in the southeastern depths of Columbia Valley. Me and a couple other friends attempted this three years ago, but made the mistake of hiking up an actively flowing creekbed, and got stopped when there was a three meter waterfall. We had then climbed up the 45 degree slope about 5 meters above the creekbed and tried to go parallel to the creek, but it was getting ridiculously dangerous before we decided to just tuck our tails in, turn around and go back home. More important to survive and then come back to fight another day than drowning in the water below!

… is that you forget to remember what characters represent what it is that you are thinking. If you wanted to remember what the character was for “teapot”, you’re hooped without using some sort of external reference.

Apparently (link) cell phone culture is making a lot of younger people forget how to write in Chinese or Japanese.

A rough analog is that younger people in English-speaking jurisdictions are forgetting how to spell words correctly without the aid of spell-check and other tools.

However, the Chinese character system is much more complex and has much more depth than the 26 characters that we use in English-speaking Canada; it is likely one of the reasons why computer technology did not originate in east Asian countries – during the time when bytes mattered (compared to the 1,000,000,000,000 byte hard drive I just bought for $80 recently), there is no way you could have incorporated Asian character script into the systems back then. Computers used the 7-bit ASCII system, which had 128 characters to work with. A later development was the double byte character set, which used two characters to represent an Asian-script character.

There are a whole host of Asian-script character representations in digital systems, which makes this whole topic incredibly confusing. When I see people type Chinese onto a computer, I am just amazed how it goes.

I think the Department of Fisheries and Oceans should give up trying to count fish in BC.

How come when they predict a high return and a monumentally low amount of fish return (such as in 2009) that it makes the news and an inquiry is launched over the matter, while in 2010 when the DFO lowballs their number and an abnormally high return comes that there isn’t equal uproar at the complete inability of the DFO to predict the fish count?

The one obvious conclusion that I can come to is that DFO’s models are likely the modeling equivalent of snake oil.

I wonder if you started pinning the salaries of people on the accuracy of their projections whether you’d get better projections.

That said, I am grateful for a large harvest – wild sockeye salmon is the absolute best fish on the planet to eat and I am getting my fill in since it is likely that I will have to wait four years before this cycle comes back again.

Australia will likely become the third western country with a minority government after their 2010 election. The Labour party will have around 73 seats, the Liberal/National coalition will have roughly 74 seats, and 4 independents (3 right, 1 left).

So this now makes Canada, the United Kingdom and Australia with minority governments. Is this a trend?

I think it rather reflects polarization of the typical left-right factions globally in the western world, plus the distrust of the public – minority governments are inherently much more accountable to the public than majority governments.

I don’t know what it is about this bridge that crosses the Vedder Canal (map) – but every year you read about somebody that crashes on what is otherwise a straight and very short bridge. This year was no different – a trucker crashed on the bridge and fell over the side railing.

The bridge itself serves its purpose – two lanes in each direction, and the curve after the westbound portion is quite smooth. There are sometimes police waiting in the median of Highway 1 just southwest of this location catching speeders around the curve.

But why people choose this part of Highway 1 to get into accidents is a mystery – there would be an excuse in winter driving conditions since the deck might have ice, but in the middle of summer there is really nothing to cause what seems to be an extraordinary large incidence of crashes.

The cliche – you can bring a horse to the water trough, but you can’t force it to drink is so true with this story:

Consumers are utterly confused by the nutrition facts table on the back of prepackaged foods meant to help shoppers make healthier food choices, a new Health Canada survey has found. The government introduced mandatory nutrition labelling rules for all prepackaged foods in 2003 so consumers could make informed food choices, but focus groups have delivered a blunt message to Health Canada and the food industry. In addition to “virtually ignoring all the information on the right-hand column” that details what percentage of a day’s worth of nutrients the serving gives, “consumers are also perplexed by information relating to serving sizes, which often don’t seem to be realistic.” Consumers are also irked that some nutrients, such as sodium and cholesterol, are measured in milligrams, while others — like fibre and sugars — are measured in grams, according to the report. Health Canada enlisted Strategic Council, a market-research firm, to hold eight focus groups in Calgary, Toronto, Montreal and St. John’s earlier this year to determine the effectiveness of nutrition labelling rules. The results are being used to help craft an upcoming nutrition-facts education initiative. According to the results, most people surveyed felt consumers would need more “personalized, customized information” on the packaging to interpret what the daily percentage value actually means. The respondents also wanted to know for whom the nutritional information was calculated — for men or women, the elderly or the young, people of average height and weight or otherwise? Many participants in the focus groups also shot down a labelling proposal under consideration for larger- and medium-sized packages, indicating “that they would be highly unlikely to read the dense text shown in the options under consideration”

It won’t matter.

This is like labeling tobacco products with skulls and crossbones and renaming them “death sticks” – you will still have people buying them.

What is most ridiculous is that the information on these labels aren’t even authenticated – you have to take the various companies at their word that there is the required amount of nutrition on the label. I remember drinking this raspberry drink that claimed to have 0% Vitamin C, even though it should have had some.

I laugh at the groups that want to try to force their solutions through with “bigger labeling” and “custom labeling”, deluded into believing that it will actually have any impact when nobody will care.

That’s not to say that consumer labeling is a good initiative – it is, but there will be a huge amount of the population that won’t care, and it won’t matter how large the font is on the side of the box.

From CKNW:

A hunting outfitter is headed safely back to the south after an Arctic trip in which he saved his life by punching a polar bear in the nose.

Wes Werbowy says he was in his tent outside of Whale Cove, Nunavut, in the early morning of July 16 when the large male polar bear stuck his head inside.

Werbowy says the bear was standing on his rifle and he didn’t know what to do until he recalled the words of an Inuit elder who once told him a polar bear’s nose is very sensitive.

Werbowy wound up, yelled “Get Out!” and swung his fist into the bear’s nose, with the sound of smacking a slab of wet meat.

The bear scampered off, leaving Werbowy and his fellow hunters safely alone.

I have worked with First Nations before, and the ladies I was working with said exactly the same thing – if you are attacked by a bear, running away is going to be useless. They will stomp you and then rip your skin off with their teeth, resulting in a painful death. Your only chance (assuming you don’t have a gun with you and even then you have to be pretty damn accurate in your shooting in an adrenaline-soaked situation) is to be able to punch the bear in the nose.

Good advice for hikers – never mind the bear bells.

Throughout my hiking travels I have only directly encountered a black bear once in my life. And this wasn’t out in the backdoor-boonies of BC, rather it was between Mission, and Agassiz, near Echo Lake. My companion and I were scouting out a location for a future camping trip, and we parked outside a locked and gated forest service road. We took a 15 second walk past the metal barrier, and turned the corner and saw this black bear sitting there! My companion yelped and ran in the other direction, and I quickly followed and got back in the car and boogied out of there.

Fortunately the black bear was just as startled as we were and ran away as well.

It was kind of funny in retrospect, but I guess the theme is that you’ll never know when you’ll be running into a bear.

Just hope that you don’t have to punch it in the nose.

… Elizabeth May will be their leader in the next election. Anybody actually caring for the electoral welfare of the party should be mourning right now the loss of a couple lost seats had they replaced the leader with somebody that isn’t American and has some charisma to get people to believe that they are not protesters.

Dear Google Mail,

By virtue of my past work experience I have appreciated what constitutes a good user interface, I respectfully submit that this subtle change in Google Mail is detrimental.

First of all, the primary purpose of Google Mail is for Email. It does offer secondary features such as a contact manager, task list, etc., but these are of lesser concern, and therefore should have less prominence than the e-mail composition functions. I notice that in prior editions of Google Mail, the “Compose Mail” function, in text and not in a fancy-dancy “button” which clashes with the rest of the options on the left. It looks ugly.

How will I be able to explain to my grandmother the new user interface? She will give me a call and tell me that some virus has infected her computer, and I will have to navigate her through the message-creation interface once again, politely explaining to her that you click on this big blob. It might be bad enough that she will quit using the computer.

My advice is to put the “Contacts” and “Tasks” function below the “Trash”. Also, create a function that enables users to “freeze” their interface to whatever it is presently, since it is clear that the engineers working on Google Mail now don’t actually care anymore as to how clean and/or functional their user interfaces are.

I do note that last February, I wrote the following:

… specifically my most vulnerable point electronically is my reliance on Google Mail and I want to be able to make sure that I can operate properly if something “stupid” happens to it.

While the “something stupid” is a very benign change to the system, it still is detrimental to my overall Google Mail experience and I wonder if this trend to gumming up the user interface will continue. I guess this is what I deserve for outsourcing my email needs to Google, and I should finally get my act together and finally run a separate mail client on my own domain.

Sincerely,
Sacha Peter