Double Blind

(News Story)

On the heels of a 1,680 pound silver theft in Chilliwack earlier this year, we have news of a person that was driving from the Lower Mainland and stopped off at Hope to have something to eat. He had purchased $30,000 of silver and had put it in his backpack. Apparently he left his door unlocked since when he returned five minutes later it was stolen.

At the existing market rate, this is approximately 50 pounds of silver. If he had just bought gold instead, this would have been one pound.

I guess the lesson of the day here is that if you buy $30,000 of silver and want to take it back home, don’t stick it in a backpack on your front seat and don’t leave your door unlocked. Also, if you get hungry along the way you may wish to use the drive-through.

I noticed from a link that I had read earlier that the magic to making a Starbucks-type frap that doesn’t separate after you blend the thing is to use Xanthan Gum. I finally tried the recipe. Xanthan Gum is cheap and easy to find – Galloways is a place where you can get it (amongst other great items). Superstore might have it in the baking isle (haven’t checked).

I brewed two shots of espresso with about 200mL of water. I let the espresso cool down for ten minutes in the freezer before pouring it into a blender, along with about 200mL of 2% milk. I put in a tablespoon of granulated sugar and a tablespoon of vanilla syrup (not vanilla extract, but the syrup) and a 1/4 teaspoon of Xanthan Gum. I finally put in a whole bunch of ice (I didn’t measure, but it was a tray and a few extra cubes) and gave it a blend.

The final product came surprisingly close to the real thing – except for the sweetness. Starbucks has to be a ton of sugar into their fraps since while I found a tablespoon of sugar to be sufficient, the ones you get at the store are positively sweeter. Also, I believe 1/4 teaspoon of Xanthan Gum was too much – next time I will try to reduce this by half. The texture of the frap after shutting off the blender was quite bubbly and I believe this was caused by having too much Xanthan Gum into the mix.

The other funny problem is that I am going to try to source some decaffeinated whole coffee beans so that way I can experiment by making more of these things (e.g. mocha, java chip, etc.) without getting all giddy with caffeine poisoning. Realistically if I had more than a double shot of espresso per day, the caffeine really becomes disruptive to the functioning of my sleeping rhythm.

When I watch this video, I think “ecodensity” is what came to my mind.

I am looking at Anthony’s article called Practice and proposition and the first thing that came to mind was not religion, but rather parenthood.

Everything that I academically learned about early child care was not fully appreciated until after the baby was born. Then it became a lot more easier to distinguish between the authors that embellished various issues that would happen along the way vs. ones that actually knew what they were talking about.

Everybody also knows about sleep deprivation, but until one gets to experience it and the stunning lack of productivity that occurs as a result of it, it is very difficult to truly understand what the clinical consequence is.

This analysis I thought was very coherent and accurate, except for the final barb about if the Canucks won the game that it would have never happened (which I believe was sarcastic and doesn’t detract from the article).

People are still trying to assign blame to the event, but I don’t think it will be pinned too heavily on any single group other than the die-hard professional hooligans that brought the Molotov cocktails to the game 7 festivities.

With the benefit of hindsight but without a formal investigation of the matter, I believe it will be shown that the Vancouver Police and/or City of Vancouver erred significantly in not bringing enough police to effectively control the crowd and enabling their concentration within a very narrow geographical proximity. However, I do believe that it will be shown that the perception of non-response by the Vancouver Police with respect to the looting will be shown to be a correct action that inevitably hastened the end of the riot. Assuming that the goal is to optimize operations for preventing the loss of life, the police were wildly successful.

The psychology of the crowd is very similar to what happens on uncontrolled internet forums – certain people writing with the veil of anonymity will have completely different personalities than when such anonymity is removed.

I am finding the campaign run by the bigwigs at the Chartered Accountants and the Certified Management Accountants to convince their memberships that a merger into a new designation is an amusing attempt at marketing something unpalatable. Approximately five years ago something like this was attempted and the Chartered Accountants’ membership were significantly against the merger, which completely killed the initial attempt.

The big-wigs, intent on not listening to their own memberships, are giving it another shot. They seemingly are employing the same strategy of “education” that the BC provincial government is doing with their HST campaign.

My own opinion is in general agreement with most of the other people I have surveyed about this, mainly that the CMAs stand to gain, while the CAs stand to lose. The sad reality is that entrance requirements have been dropped to the point that the quality of people receiving the designations has been continually dropping – both societies have been desperate to raise membership numbers to increase their revenues. This has been done at the cost of the quality of members admitted.

Even though an overwhelming number of CAs are going to be against this, it will be interesting to see how both societies proceed. It will be interesting to see if this gets political to the point where directors are voted out and replaced with people pledging to not pursue this course of action.

On the June 15, 2011 in riots Vancouver (there was a hockey game going on this day apparently):

0. A very failed prediction on my part:

A chat log with a friend of mine, just before the 5:00pm game:

Him: “Hey, my brother is going downtown to watch the Canucks game, is there going to be rioting in your opinion?”
Me: “Depends who wins!”
Me: “Let’s put it this way, the police will be much more aware of potential rioting so if any starts, it will get stomped down quickly”.

I totally blew that one.

1. Measuring the performance of the Vancouver Police Department depends on what your benchmark was. If the Vancouver Police Department’s mission was the prevention of death, they were very successful. Their strategy appeared to be about the lack of escalation rather than the confrontation of the anarchists. If your measurement was the protection of property, then they failed spectacularly. As usual, they were in a no-win situation. I have no idea whether it would have been feasible for them to charge the crowd that set the initial fire in front of the Canada Post building, but I highly suspect that other media commentators will become instant experts on crowd suppression.

2. The 2011 riots will be processed substantially different than 1994. Digital media was prevalent everywhere and unless if you were wearing a face-mask, facial recognition software will very likely be able to track most people in downtown. If you want an example of this software in action, get a copy of Picasa and get it to index your photographs and you will be very, very afraid. Finding (or at least indexing) the people will be a much more easier task for the police since they will be aided with so much digital media, in combination with recognition software, that will enable them to arrest known offenders (who likely are mostly already with police records).

3. For the first time, I finally “felt” the usefulness of Twitter. It’s sole function in internet life is to act as a global real-time comment aggregator. Gary Mason, former sports columnist turned political commentator, in particular, was quite good. Time to start a Twitter account again…

4. This riot is also a very good demonstration on how few people have to turn socially deviant in order for the fabric of society to be overturned. If they were more organized, they could have also done a lot more damage than they did. For example, just imagine if one of those vehicles got driven into The Bay downtown and then set on fire. The fire suppression systems would have activated, but they are likely not designed with the assumption that people will be lighting up vehicles inside the store. It could have been a lot worse.

5. People that were hanging out at the site of the riot while watching others smash windows and light cars on fire (and taking pictures of all the carnage around them) should be considered as complicit as the people doing the acts themselves, but this was not the case today. I am surprised no journalists got injured.

6. It will be approximately 12 hours before this incident will become political, but after that, you will try to have every politician trying to cash in on this event.

7. One can make inferences about this by looking at the people that participated in the riots. I will comment on the young demographic – if you asked why they were there (at least the people that weren’t smashing up stuff) and got a truthful response, the answer would have likely been a statement on how mundane life ordinarily is. You would have never seen this sort of thing 50 years ago.

The following is a very quick analysis of what the Vancouver Canucks’ chances are to win the Stanley Cup:

Vancouver Canucks: 58.8% chance to win
Boston Bruins: 41.2% chance to win

To give you an idea of what 58.8% is, it is about the chances of rolling two dice and getting a total of either 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7. (or if you like large numbers, the chances of getting 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 or 12).

From CKNW:

“Time of day” toll discounts are coming to the Golden Ears Bridge.

It’s a six week pilot project that starts April 15th. The 30% discount will apply from 7:00 pm until 5:59 am, Monday through Thursday evenings, all weekend beginning at 7:00 pm Friday and on statutory holidays.

The test will cover the Easter and may long weekends.

Just this past weekend, Delta Mayor Lois Jackson took aim at the Golden Ears, saying the number of vehicles using the span has never met expectations.

They are finally getting the message that variable pricing is the way to go with bridge tolling. They will be able to obtain more revenues this way than by having one flat-fee based option. They just need to stick to a consistent theme and not mess around with it too much – a temporary 6-week promotion may not generate enough data to be meaningful.

I suggested this back in May of 2010. Should I send these guys an invoice for one hour of consulting service?

I also suspect that taking 30% off the price is about 20% too small. It is much easier to promote “Half price after 7pm, and all of Saturday and Sunday” than “30% off after 7pm”.

Rogers’ shell, Fido, is offering a $35/month “unlimited” package for both voice and text messaging that allows people to use their phones within certain urban zones. This is undoubtedly a response to Wind Mobile and Mobilicity coming into the scene with similarly priced packages.

Since cell networks are virtually indistinguishable in terms of quality when you are connected to the network, the only avenues of competition involve geography (e.g. out in Chilliwack there is still no competition between Telus, Bell and Rogers since the new network providers have not expanded out there), but in the urban zones the competition is intense.

There also is data service competition, but this is lesser so because of bandwidth constraints on mobile equipment. Eventually when capacity is higher there should be price compression on the data side as well.

The government decision to only allow new companies to bid on certain chunks of wireless spectrum is allowing the consumers to win with the intensifying competition. Eventually the “party” will end when the new carriers will likely get eaten up by the old ones, but in the meantime consumers can enjoy the cheaper and better alternatives that are being offered amongst them.

Being the economical person that I am, I still think $35/month is too much to pay for mobile phone service – my monthly bill (assuming I don’t do any long distance) is about $25/month after HST.