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25 July 2002 
Gotta Run
I'm outta here first thing tomorrow AM, on my way back home to Nova Scotia for a week. Sunday is the big day — my first marathon. (Brother Quent isn't running with me as planned. A certain little change to his life has left little time for a regular training routine.) If I have any energy left to type, I may post results next week from NS. If not, when I return to Toronto the next weekend. Ciao for now.
11:10 PM |
22 July 2002
Faith No More
In observance of the Pope's visit to Toronto for World Youth Day (a strange name for an event that lasts eleven days, dontcha think?), I give you the Quote of the Moment at left (stolen from N. Z. Bear).
09:55 PM |
21 July 2002
Rand Times Two
The New York Times has two pieces in today's Week In Review section mentioning Ayn Rand. The first is a passing reference in a story on what makes a great building. It calls a "myth" the view that
a great architect works best when left alone — think Howard Roark in "The Fountainhead" — and does not prostitute his ideas to a philistine corporate world.
The second piece, entitled "Greenspan Shrugged," points out how far the Fed chairman has come since the 60s, when he wrote:
[I]t is precisely the "greed" of the businessman or, more appropriately, his profit-seeking, which is the unexcelled protector of the consumer...to today when he blames "infectious greed" for the economy's ills. Of course, the writer of the piece believes Greenspan was wrong then and is right now. However, to make the point, both Greenspan's Objectivist-era writing and Rand's own works are quoted from extensively. And I won't argue with any motive that gets Rand's ideas, verbatim, a full 20 column-inches in the Sunday Times.
10:22 AM |
18 July 2002
Lomborg Lambasted
Damian gets an earful (2200+ words worth!) from a Lomborg basher. As Damian points out, the screed is rife with argument-weakening ad hominem, but what really reveals where this guy is coming from is these quotes:
[R]ight-wing government loves [Lomborg] because they see him as a good buffer for their stated aim of eviscerating what they see as costly regulations (in reality, like President Bush, they simply want to reduce regulations to help increase the profits of the industries that support tiem[sic])....and
The fact is that "truth" is an elusive concept in science; in my field (ecology) we hardly know how immensely complex systems evolve, assemble and function, thus we have little idea how much these systems can be simplified through the combined processes of paving, ploughing, damming, drilling, slashing and burning, dousing in synthetic chemicals, altering the chemical composition of atmosphere and soil, moving species freely about into non-native ecosystems etc. etc. etc. before they break down and fail to generate the life-support services that permit our civilization to exist in the first place and generate the wealth that makes consumption possible. Moreover, in a world where there is no democracy at the global level, the poor are never going to be a priority. Money from the immense arms trade, or that used by corporations to influence government policy (lobbying money) should be spent on more worthwhile causes too, but it never will.These excerpts say three things to me: 1. Scientists don't understand the environment enough to know what effects industrialization has on it. 2. The writer's philosophical and political biases cause him to assume that capitalism and corporations are evil and to think it reasonable to operate on the worst-case scenarios that can be imagined. 3. He has no hope of convincing any thinking Lomborg supporter (certainly not this one) with these kinds of arguments.
(Lomborg's responses to a Nature article co-authored by Damian's correspondent can be found here (pdf format).)
01:46 PM |
17 July 2002
Amazoogle?
A Google-ized Amazon interface. What a great idea. Web services are cool.
04:08 PM |
Literally
An article on language and the Pet Shop Boys. Even in the Guardian, that's a combination irresistable to me. (Via ALD.)
09:56 AM |
16 July 2002
Walk This Way
"Meanderthal" is a great word to describe those uncivilized people who are unaware of the rudiments of conducting themselves on a city sidewalk. And boy, do I run into a lot of them — literally. This NYT article describes the pinheaded pedestrian problem faced by New Yorkers. They could just as well be talking about Toronto.
"People no longer know how to walk on the sidewalk," said John Kalish, a television producer in Manhattan. "There was a time that any real New Yorker had a built-in sonar in terms of walking down the sidewalk, even a crowded one, and never bumping into someone. Now — forget it."All the forms of cluelessness outlined in the story are doubly familiar to me as someone who not only walks the downtown core, but runs it frequently. The worst are people walking four-abreast and blocking your way who, after you've made advance eye contact, look away and pretend they didn't see you while continuing on with no change in course. Argh! Makes a person want to mow the idiots down.
08:03 PM |
15 July 2002
July
Stærk, Welch, Layne, Reynolds, and now Lileks. All gone on vacation, leaving the blog-addicted multitudes to suffer. Has July become the blogosphere's counterpart to the mental health profession's August? If so, is there a Wellfleet analog in the weblog world, where all its brightest lights are relaxing en masse? And will they some day make a movie about a crazed reader stalking his favorite blogger on holiday?
09:25 PM |
14 July 2002
Supermarket Sighting
My grocery store celebrity sightings continue. Today it was Designer Guy Steven Sabados, looking unbelievable in a muscle shirt with US-flag design.
06:15 PM |
13 July 2002
Vacillation Vaccination
I can't decide if I agree with this or not.
12:40 AM |
DDT Disaster
A thorough, fact-filled, yet readable article on the tragic legacy of anti-ddt forces such as Rachel Carson.
Much of the scientific community opposed the ddt ban, pointing out that there was no evidence that ddt was particularly harmful to human health. Yet the ban still took effect. Now, 30 years later, it is apparent that the banning of the domestic use of ddt led to its diminished production in the usa, meaning less availability of ddt for the developing world. The results have been disastrous: between one and two million people die from malaria every year.
12:35 AM |
12 July 2002
Knot sought. Naught got. Fought. Knot wrought. Crackpot lot distraught.
Justice Robert Blair wrote in [an Ontario Superior Court] decision that marriage "must be open to same-sex couples who live in long-term, committed, relationships — marriage-like in everything but name — just as it is to heterosexual couples."Thank you, Joe Varnell and Kevin Bourassa.
But the fight's not over yet.
“This case is going to the Supreme Court of Canada,” insists Derek Rogusky of Focus on the Family Canada. “We'll be continuing to argue for maintaining the traditional and what we believe is the proper definition of marriage. We'll be continuing to do that in the courts. Such a sacred institution to our society such as marriage, if we are going to change it, should be changed when there's overwhelming consensus. And there certainly isn't at this time.”Sorry, Mr. Rogusky. What's right is changed neither by tradition nor consensus, "overwhelming" or otherwise.
09:33 PM |
8 July 2002
The Importance of Being Earnest
I found this article on Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol fascinating. It ends by pointing out how superficial and cynical Wilde's outlook was prior to being jailed and how that experience changed him.
The sheer callow, shallow, spoilt-child silliness of all this [i.e., maxims such as "The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible" and "No crime is vulgar, but all vulgarity is crime."]—upon the propagation of which the brilliantly gifted Wilde wasted so much of his life and energy and which ruins so much of his work—must have been obvious the very moment he passed through the prison door. Wilde was never a wicked man. It was nevertheless only in prison that he learned the value of truth, sincerity, and goodness, and by then it was too late.I think there's a parallel to September 11th's effect on our culture in there somewhere. I just hope the "too late" part doesn't apply. (Link via ald.)
01:19 PM |
4 July 2002
It's Curtains for Global Warming
What do fluttering shower curtains and global warming have in common? Well, as this article notes, it's a hard enough task "simply to understand shifting climate patterns in the space of a bathtub." Doing the same thing on a planetary basis — to determine whether there is a long-term warming trend and, if so, what is causing it — is immeasurably harder.
If there is one thing more remarkable than the level of alarm inspired by global warming, it is the thin empirical foundations upon which the forecast rests....There is no evidence whatsoever showing that man-made emissions are the principal source of global warming; cyclical radiation effects caused by sunsposts make for an equally plausible cuplrit. And where there is evidence of global warming, it appears to be happening in cooler places, thereby making temperatures more mild, not more insufferable.
All this stands to reason. Currently it is impossible — and it may yet prove fundamentally impossible — to make sound predictions about global weather patterns.
08:18 PM |
Happy Fothajulai!
Happy Independence Day to my American readers! Between your picnics and fireworks, try to find a few minutes to read Lileks' great Fourth-themed Bleat today.
09:54 AM |
2 July 2002
Pride Pix
OK, I think the gallery is working now, after much futzing with UNIX permissions and arcane error messages. What year is this again? Grrrr.
11:46 PM |
1 July 2002
Pride Weekend
In addition to being Canada Day weekend, it was Pride weekend here in Toronto. I'm don't agree with a lot of what the whole "gay pride" thing stands for, but it's a great excuse for a big party and fortunately that's how 99% of the participants treat it. (I really hope no one paid attention to those morons — or young "idealists" — marching in the parade with "People Before Profits" and anti-war signs.) My participation in the weekend's festivities consisted of attending the parade yesterday and running the Pride 5K on Saturday (almost broke 20 minutes, and did get a PR). Here's a brief report on the latter. I took some pictures at the parade and will post those as soon as I can get a newly-installed photo gallery program working.
07:40 PM |