Blessed by the Potato

Canada should be a world leader when it comes to issues of the environment, if for no other reason than because we have so much of it. Our record on Kyoto and greenhouse gas emissions has been rather shameful, though we do have a succession of uncaring minority governments to partially blame for that, as well as a relatively uncaring public (until quite recently, that is). It is long time past to fix that, though, and I’m surprised that while the election-hungry neocons have identified the environment as a key issue, they haven’t yet actually done a whole lot about it (the funding announcements of the last few days notwithstanding). Mostly, they’re throwing around as much rhetoric and mud as they can, hoping to survive the issue in the next election (which they’re desperately trying to bring for the summer, by all accounts). So the Europeans really showed us when they recently announced plans to go above and beyond their Kyoto commitments.

Of course, our leaders are always faced with tough choices. Global warming looks to be a very real threat, and could be potentially very devastating. However, it’s also a long-term, global problem, so it’s very difficult to face with our local, short-term perspective. After all, there’s tax cuts to be had, health care to bolster, and all manner of other problems to ignore, everything from homelessness to defense, space exploration to public transportation, basic research to primary education.

Something not a lot of people are talking about is that a lot of these initiatives are needed for another problem all together: peak oil. Thanks to advances in new technology, we aren’t going to run out of oil for a long time to come. Which is a good thing, because alternatives (hydrogen, biofuels, electricity, etc) are still uncomfortably far off into the future. However, we’re already starting to see evidence of tightening supply. The thing with something that is in such high demand, such as oil, is that even modest declines in supply can lead to huge swings in price, since demand is so very inelastic (and I may be abusing my economic terminology, so forgive me here). We saw this quite clearly recently in Ontario: a fire at an Imperial Oil refinery caused fairly widespread shortages, station closures, and an increase of roughly 20-25% in price. And this was at a time when demand was relatively low due to the bad weather keeping many drivers off the road. The thing is, that refinery was nowhere near responsible for 20+% of our refining ability (one report says it was just 6% of Imperial’s capacity, just one of several major companies operating in Ontario). So a relatively minor drop in supply lead to a relatively large increase in price. Imagine that sort of situation even just 10 years from now if world oil extraction drops just a bit… But if we have developed technologies at this point in time to battle greenhouse emissions and use less oil, then we will simultaneously tackle that problem.

It’s a lot like hybrid cars in that regard: the combination of electric and gasoline power make hybrids more efficient in their use of oil, especially for stop-and-go city driving. Some people have slammed them as not solving the root problem of oil dependence, since they do still run on gas, however they are actually very good bridge technologies. Not only are they effective at saving gas right now, they also serve to develop the electric motors and batteries (and underlying manufacturing base) that will likely be needed for any future technology car.

I was glad to see the hybrid car rebate included in the federal budget, and the increased gas guzzler tax. One person recently was hailing the Cons for this move, saying that they’re clearly a pro-environmental party, and that this was a very pro-environment budget. To that I just have to say that this is, as many commentators are saying, a pre-election budget. It’s a pro-everything budget. The Cons have been very reticient to make any of these moves, and have only done so because currently these issues are at the forefront of Canadians’ minds. I have no doubt that if public focus shifts (as it does quite often), the Cons will stop all further progress. They haven’t lead us to these measures, they’ve been driven to them. A release today in the CBC has some good rhetoric, and it’s a lot further along than they were a year ago… but they’re still using this double-talk of a “balanced approach” and continuing to think that anything that’s good for the environment must be bad for our way of life.

Another environmental intiative making the rounds lately is the idea of banning outright the sale of incandescent bulbs. This is one move I can’t get behind. Taxing them is, in my opinion, an excellent idea: make some money for the government, and make the initial purchase price of an incandescent the same as a fluorescent — even short-term thinkers can then make better decisions about which to get, rather than having to try to weigh the costs against the long-term energy savings. That should help dramatically shift the usage away from the incandescents. Compact fluorescents are a good thing, and I’ve been putting them in a lot of rooms in the house here. However, they do have a few short-comings, and for these reasons it’s important to have incandescents as an option (though perhaps we should stop using them as our main source of home lighting):

• Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) are more costly overall if they do not manage to live out their whole life-cycle. They also contain trace amounts of mercury. Combined, these two issues mean that CFLs should not be used in areas where lights are more likely to be smashed than wear out from old age (places like batting cages, say, or where small children throw rocks at them).
• CFLs can not be used in enclosed light fixtures, such as some pot lights or other recessed/indirect lighting conditions.
• Many CFLs can not be put on dimmer switches (be sure to check the package before putting yours on one!).
• Some types of CFLs (I do not know if this applies to all of them) do not handle extremes in temperature well, and may not be suited to use in fridges, stoves, range hoods, or outdoor lighting.
• Almost all CFLs have a delay between turning on the switch and lighting up. There is a further delay between the first spark and full brightness. While this is not a problem for most applications, it is slightly less than ideal for some applications such as motion-detector-triggered security lights (compounded by further delays in cold environments), and lightswitch raves.
• A small minority of people find that the flicker from fluorescent lighting (including CFLs, though they don’t seem quite as bad) gives them headaches.
• CFLs have less-than-perfect colour fidelity. While it’s good enough for almost all uses, some specialized cases (certain science experiments, artists) may find that they prefer to use incandescents for their broad-spectrum output.
• Some sensitive electronics can experience interference from some types of CFLs (I believe the kind with magnetic ballast) due to proximity or being on the same circuit.

For the majority of cases, they are great ways to save tonnes of energy, but for these situations, we should aim to have incandescents as an option (even if it is an expensive one).

Finally, another recent story said that because conservation efforts have started working so well, Toronto Hydro is losing money, and wants to hike electricity rates. I don’t know what to say to that. On the one hand, more expensive electricity encourages people to conserve, and brings it closer to the true cost to produce. But I don’t want to see peoples’ bills go up because they were conserving (the net bill will go down, but you know many people won’t see it that way). I’m also not so sure Toronto Hydro is really too hard up if they’ve got the cash to spare to get into the telecom business…

I hate the way he yells randomly. I hate the way he thinks saying things louder make them funny. I hate his penchant for male nudity. I hate his terrible, forced acting style. I even hate his awkward, lanky stance.

But I loved Stranger Than Fiction. In it, he played a mostly straight character: a mildly bumbling, obsessive-compulsive IRS agent… who hears voices. Specifically, one voice narrating his life. Aside from the odd bit of yelling at the sky, his usual shtick was happily absent.

The movie itself was actually really well done: surprisingly in many aspects. The pacing was very good and even, which is a bit surprising since as a comedy/romance/drama coming in at two hours there was undoubtedly pressure to cut it down to one and a half. The writing was also quite good, a welcome surprise since quite often movies about authors have rather terrible narration. With this one though, I think if you closed your eyes and listened to some of the narration, you could easily see it working quite well in a novel. Even the effects were well done, somewhat unusual for a film that really didn’t even need them in the first place.

I really like the weathernetwork.ca, the website of the Weather Network. Their forecasting is about as accurate as you can expect weather forecasting to be, and they have a bunch of other neat utilities like the highway forecast or current highway conditions. However, lately they’ve been getting really anxious about issuing weather alerts that often don’t pan out, but that’s not what’s been getting me lately. What I really find bugs me is that while you can go back and look at past weather predictions with their site, they never tell you what actually happened. So, for example, if we were to go back and look at December 8, 2006 (or the band of days 6th-9th), London got hit really bad with a huge snowfall that was way above what they were calling for — 30 inches in front of our place (760-odd mm of snow). However, the archives on the Weather Network show a measly 25 mm of precipitation. Now, they might not count a mm of snow as a mm of precipitation, since snow can be quite fluffy and volumous, but still, 760 is nowhere near 25, and I don’t think they discount snow that much (perhaps a factor of 10, and they were calling for 25 cm of snow that night).

I had the same problem this weekend: they were calling for freezing rain, ice, and snow to hit London through Toronto, which was going to make my drive home miserable. Then in the early evening they started changing their prediction: Toronto went from getting a mix of ice and snow (up to 20 cm) to a predicted 5-7 cm of snow. They were still calling on London to get iced in: basically the weatherpeople were wailing “But if you have any friends or relatives in London, it may be too late for them, as they’re already encased in their icy tombs. There may still be hope, however, as scientists ten thousand years from now may thaw them out and ask what it was like to hunt the Woolly Mammoth that was briefly resurrected from extinction by genetic engineering; they will, of course, have to sheepishly admit that they were frozen in the London ice storm just a few decades before that actually happened…”

The snow in Toronto was pretty gentle, and we only got about 2 cm, which wasn’t going to stop me from driving. It made me wonder what London actually got, because I’d hate to get halfway down the 401 just to find the driving impossible. Did we get spared the full wrath of the weather network’s predictions, as Toronto had? Or was Toronto merely spared because the clouds had dumped their load in London? The weather network’s site was pretty much useless for trying to answer that question. Their highway conditions page said that the roads were slushy and awful all along the 401, including through Toronto, but it didn’t look that bad out my window. I kept hitting refresh hoping to get an update, when I noticed that the information was several hours old and not getting updated. At that point I just decided to get in the car and risk it. I’m here now typing, so everything turned out fine: in fact, Toronto was the worst part of the drive, with a tiny bit of slush on the roads and the snow still falling. London’s roads are wet, but clear of snow (I guess it was largely regular rain, as opposed to ice — or the city put down a lot of salt) though there is some slush on the sidewalks.

I’m not usually a concert-going guy: I typically figure that the added experience of seeing a band live, once, along with the between-song banter and special live-only covers/ditties/version is usually not worth the hassle of sitting in a packed hall/stadium with lots of screaming people and the very high admission. I’d rather have the CD and listen to it a number of times all by myself in the car, thanks. Nonetheless, I’ve heard that the Barenaked Ladies are a fun band to see live (and I like almost every song out of their catalog, so there won’t be embarrassing moments like when Robert Smith tried to pass off his newest song list as worthy of playing in front of people) so I decided to go. Plus it made for an awesome you-know-what-day present for Wayfare. (No modesty needed).

Now, we had tried to see BNL in concert once before, a few summers ago at the Molson Ampitheatre for their day-long “Barenaked circus” concert. That, my friends, was not a very good concert. It was basically Mama Page going up and smacking Stephen over the head and forcing him to let his whiney kid brother do an opening set for the now wildly popular BNL (though to be fair, his kid brother was one of the best of the acts). And of course, once that happened everyone wanted to let their cousins, friends, or people who play in the subway station on their morning commute do a set. It could have worked, if they had tightened up the set changes a bit lot more — it was pretty ridiculous, since we could see the stage hands wheel everything out pretty much preassembled on the rolling platforms, then take 40-45 minutes connecting stuff up and doing sound checks. I really thought a professional group of stage hands sould have been able to do that in less than say, 10 minutes. I think they did too, since Sean Cullen, who was entertaining us between groups, only had about 10 minutes of material at a time, then lots of dead air. It was also a little unfair that they didn’t really tell anyone that was the way the concert was going to go: we were not prepared to spend nearly 8 hours in our seat in the sun. Also, the actual BNL set (while fairly good) was really short, due in part to the crazy noise restrictions at Molson/Ontario Place (why they don’t just start concerts an hour earlier on a summer saturday afternoon, I don’t know). Of course, that concert did give us “Wood, Cheese, and Children” so not all was lost.

This concert was better. One opening act, as the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the good doctor Funkenstein intended. It wasn’t just that they had a curling song (though, really, that was the highlight of the whole affair, right up there with Lovers in a Dangerous Time for you-know-what day), it just seemed like a better concert. They were a little… cold at first, and there were some issues in getting the volume balanced between the instruments and the vocals. But it was smooth with very little downtime.

It’s much nicer seeing concerts in London. For one thing, the tickets are (a bit) cheaper. We were in the cheap seats, up in the nosebleeds, and we were about as close as the sort of second price tier seats would be in Toronto (for the Molson Ampitheatre, about where the seats turn to grass). It was also a breeze to get there: if the weather had been even remotely decent, we would have walked. Instead, we took a cab for $8, and afterwards walked like 4 blocks to get on a bus to come home — all in all, a much more enjoyable experience IMHO.

The record companies (or more properly, the artists) really haven’t seemed to see some of the strengths of digital music with respect to their concerts. There are almost always unique one-off moments in a concert: a different version of a song (even if it’s just more vibrant with cheering fans), or a new cover, or some little throwaway ditty that didn’t seem worth putting on an album. But there are quite often fans who would like to have that song: the BNL live version of “Brian Wilson” is now the definitive version of that song; personally, I’d love to have a copy of “Canada Curling Stone” that they played tonight, or “Bounce to This“, a really good, catchy song at the George Clinton concert that I’ve never heard before or since. Sometimes, they’ll release a concert CD or DVD, but it’s often of a representative night of a particular tour, and still misses some of the jokes, local flavour, and audience reaction. So, my point is: wouldn’t it be great if bands sold recordings of each stop of their concert tour? Of all their songs, in all their many flavours? It seems like it should be trivially easy to record and sell MP3s once you already have the infrastructure to do so for full studio album versions. Plus it would be a great way to extort more money from the die-hard fan who has to have everything, and cut down on the desire to record performances: if you knew you could go and buy any particular song you really liked live afterwards, why even bring the tape recorder? (And I think I like Pinch Me better when the line is “take a drink right from the hose, and change into my sister’s clothes”). This is the kind of way that digital media scales: it’s just as easy and profitable to sell a thousand different songs/versions as it is to sell 26 off two albums. Shelf space is no longer a concern: the only issue remaining is the customers’ ability to sort through it, find what they want, and absorb it.

Well, it looks like in the future Rogers is going to try to break into the home security market (if you’ll pardon the pun). This is kind of interesting because not too long ago we were debating about whether or not to get a security system for the house here. Part of the issue is that it is a pretty safe neighbourhood. There are a lot of students around, but that also means that there are people out and about at all hours of the night and day. It’s also a rental house, so we don’t have quite as much of a home insurance burden that this would help with, and it would also mean paying an installation fee to improve our landlord’s property…

Anyhow, all that aside I find it funny that I find out about these moves by Rogers not by their press releases, or leaks from within the company, but by being invited to take surveys asking how much I’d be willing to pay for this new service from Rogers (it’s the exact same way I found out about Extreme and Elite before they were announced, though the survey for home phone didn’t come around until after that service had already launched).