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July 22, 2020
It doesn’t get much more West-Coast-B.C. than Stanley Park’s Third Beach Tuesday night drum circles. Every version of Vancouverite is usually represented, if not as a participant, certainly as an observer. These things have been going on for years, typically May to September, always on sunny Tuesday nights. But the thing with these sorts of somewhat-organized events is that even when the organizers pull the plug on it, not everyone is convinced. Such was the case last night. The people claiming to speak for the event, back on March 19th, announced the thing is on pause till further notice. Sounds good.
But somehow, the “we’ve had enough of this crap” crowd decided it was time… and out went the word, and a lot of people showed up. Social distancing? Masks? Haha.
On sunny summer Tuesday nights, I often time my evening bike rides to wind up down there. It’s a really cool atmosphere, great energy and all the rest of it. But that was last year, and knowing what that space turns into, I wouldn’t consider it these days… because given the space and the crowd, it’s impossible for it to take place under the existing guidelines. And I don’t just mean participating… because when it’s going on, it’s crowded and difficult to walk (let alone, cycle) by on the seawall. The whole thing spills over wherever it can, just like it did last night; What’s been seen and described from last night is pretty-much exactly what you’d expect… especially some of the related attitudes, which are also very West-Coast-B.C…. “Whatever.”
That “Whatever” attitude partly led to today’s unscheduled news conference, which served up some not-so-great-numbers… and new restrictions.
Dr. Henry made it very clear, but here it is in my words: People need to understand and obey the spirit of the rules, not just the technical “here’s what’s written”. Yes, genius, you can get a group of 12 people to reserve two tables of 6 near each other and then table-hop… ohhh, aren’t you clever, being all technically law-abiding and everything. No, actually… you’re not. I feel bad for the servers in these situations, trying to enforce these regulations among people who are clearly too deserving and entitled to follow along like everyone else.
The whole idea of how many people with whom you’re … [Continue Reading]
July 21, 2020
It was Arthur C. Clarke, notable author, inventor and futurist, who’s quoted as saying, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Very true indeed. We all take for granted technology these days that would baffle even the brightest minds of not-so-long ago. The little phone you carry around (and perhaps with which you’re reading this) is a prime example. We get mad at it when “the stupid thing isn’t working”, but you’d think about it differently if you considered the complexity of the underlying infrastructure that makes it all work. Imagine someone 50 years ago watching you take a picture with your iPhone. OK, fancy tiny camera… very cool. But not impossible. And then they watch you AirDrop™ that picture to the person next to you. That’d be nothing less than magic.
I’ve been around long enough to see true innovative technology arrive, explode onto the scene, and then slowly drift from relevance as newer, more advanced technology took over. For example, CDs. They appeared literally overnight (from a consumer point of view) and took over the world. They were, for a time… magic. And they have since drifted into obscurity.
One interesting thing in the early days of CDs was both the marketing and technology of what was called “oversampling”. There’s more to it than what I’m going to describe, but basically it was this – the laser that’s reading what’s on the surface of the disc has about a zillionth of a second to bounce itself off a particular spot and decide whether it’s a one or a zero. And it’s not always right. Since that’s happening 44,100 times per second, it’s not a huge deal if it gets it wrong once in a while. But, that depends how wrong… your music quality would tend to degrade, and if it’s data, it has to be perfect. Data inherently is stored with what are called “CheckSums” – that verify the integrity of the data. For example, a simple version might be that after every 1,000 bits, it tells you how many zeros there were. And also how many ones. If those two numbers don’t add up to 1,000… there was a problem, so read it again. Credit card numbers also have a built-in sanity check… VISA numbers start with 4, MasterCard … [Continue Reading]
July 20, 2020
We will leave the “South of the border political bashing” for a day and focus on ourselves.
The little charts that I post below the numbers had become relatively useless, as we’re so far into this pandemic that the logarithmic representations no longer meant much. It would have taken some drastic movement to have made any difference.
So… what you see now is simply a representation of daily new cases, along with a moving average to smooth out the trend.
Looking at B.C., and listening to Dr. Henry… here’s the deal; we’re hearing pretty much what we were hearing the last two weeks of March, when I started writing these daily reports… so I will go back to saying exactly what I was saying back then: It’s up to us.
We flattened this thing out, and now, the nonchalance may be catching up to us, but it’s not too late. Summer, parties, The Interior™… I get it. Anyone who grew up anywhere in B.C. gets it. Except perhaps some of the younger people, who have come to the conclusion that being outdoors, and being young, mitigates the risk to an acceptable level. It doesn’t. You can catch it, and you can give it to others… and with more than 100 cases over the weekend and Dr. Henry warning that we’re at the edge of “explosive growth” – that should hit home.
She made it a point of mentioning the younger people, and even made a plea to all of those younger people so adept at managing their social media; get the word out. Take this seriously. Social distance. Wear a mask.
Hopefully many of them do exactly that. My daughter will be blasting something out to the 10,000 or so followers that she has distributed among her social networks, and hopefully from there it’ll further propagate when all of those people do the same.
Indeed, getting the word out exponentially isn’t that hard to do. And that’s the only exponential thing we should hope to see around here. Or anywhere.
If you look at the now-more-useful graphs, you’ll see some definite trends… Quebec had a huge problem, resolved it, but needs to be careful… there’s a slow, gradual uphill in the making. Ontario seems to be trending downward and holding. And B.C…. well, you can see it pretty … [Continue Reading]
July 19, 2020
A note about the numbers… B.C. hasn’t published numbers since Friday, so tomorrow I will update my guesses and align them with reality. Also… it’s like magic… ever since the White House took control of the numbers away from the CDC, the U.S. numbers have been dropping. It’s like magic.
You know, there’s a good reason why rain dances always work… 100% effectively, and it’s that when you do them right, you don’t actually stop until it starts raining. It could happen right away… or it could take weeks. Maybe months or even years. Either way, it doesn’t stop until it “works” – and then everyone is happy and congratulates each other on a job well done.
I worked with a guy in the 90s… a real contrarian, who was sure the markets were going to crash and burn. The NASDAQ composite index was around 800 in those days. It slowly crept up over the months and years, and every time it would slip a bit, he’d say “this is it!!”… and he was wrong. Until one day, in early 2000, I guess he was right… the NASDAQ, which had crept up to close to 5,000… crashed. It never came close to the lows of 800, but it fell steeply enough that I’m sure he went around saying (and I can’t confirm, because I was out of touch with him by then)…. “I was right!! See?? Told you!”
I guess if you wait around long enough and refuse to be wrong, perhaps in your mind the world eventually catches up with you. And sometimes it’s real.
For those who follow baseball, the name Bartolo Colón might ring a bell. He’s retired from MLB, but still playing in Mexico (if any playing is going on these days…)
Bartolo is famous for many things, but here are a couple… one, he broke into the league in 1997 and was the last remaining player who’d played for the Montreal Expos. And two, while playing for the Mets in 2017, almost 20 years after he’d been at it, he hit his first career homerun, at the fine old age of 42. Even if you’re not a baseball fan, that’s worth finding on YouTube. His team went crazy. The announcers went crazy. Even most of the fans, notable because … [Continue Reading]
July 18, 2020
The year 2010 was only 10 years ago, but wow, does it ever feel like a long time ago. That was when the Winter Olympics were here; the memorable Iginla to Crosby gold-winning goal… also the year I should’ve been generating and holding Bitcoins… but, who knew.
It was also the year of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Notwithstanding the catastrophic uselessness with which British Petroleum managed their little “faux pas”, there was an interesting footnote to the whole thing… which was that the environmental impact was far less than people imagined.
Don’t misunderstand; it was brutal, among the worst environmental disasters in American history. Almost 5 million barrels of oil leaking into the water over a period of months. The impact was felt for years, and BP ended up paying close to $20 billion to make it right; the largest corporate settlement in U.S. history.
But that interesting footnote of a lesser impact was due to… microbes. Little bugs that actually ate the oil and broke it down. While there had been some talk of trying to infuse the water with some sort of oil-eating bugs, and arguments whether the benefits outweighed the risks… and perhaps some little tests to sanity check it all… well, in the midst of that, mother nature came along and provided its own version, on top of what the humans were throwing at it. And surprisingly successfully.
Over the last couple of years, a lot of research has been done with respect to microbes and bacteria that eat plastic. And really, by “eating”, we mean consuming it and breaking it down… literally bio-degrading landfill waste. There’s that huge 600,000 square-mile garbage patch swirling in the Pacific Ocean, halfway between California and Hawaii… which some people think will be there “forever’. It won’t be… far from it. For now, it keeps growing, because we keep adding to it. But one day, when man is no longer around, that thing will start shrinking on its own… a far cry from “forever”.
A few days ago, scientists announced finding a bacteria that oxidizes manganese…and there are other microbes that can create conditions on other metals, leading to their breakdown.
The summary of all this is not that we shouldn’t care about our planet and the environment… we certainly … [Continue Reading]