Viva Las Vegas

So this weekend I went to Paris, Venice, and New York, stopped overnight in the Middle East, visited the pyramids and oh, yeah, saw a medieval castle and a pirate ship.

Yep, I was in Las Vegas, Nevada. On "the strip", you can visit almost any fantasy world you want. Including the fantasy of winning a million.

Heading to Las Vegas over Easter weekend is sort of like creating a collision of worship: resurrection versus acquisition. (Although in Vegas, the desire to acquire can lead to quite the opposite effect - depletion. Or should I say donation - to the Gods of the corporate world).

Rice is nice

Apparently for every one degree increase (Celcius) in ambient temperature, rice yields decline by about 15%.

Pretty scary when you consider that the globe is supposedly warming due to climate change and that about three billion people on this here warm globe rely on rice to feed themselves.

Luckily, the folks at the IRRI (International Rice Research Institute) are on it. They're trying to develop rice that can handle flooding, drought, and with high temperatures. They've had some successes before - having developed a high-yield rice back in th '60s - so there is hope.
They're also trying to develop rice that's enriched with Vatamin A. By implanting two genes from a daffodil and one from a bacterium into a variety of rice called japonica rice.

Sounds wierd to me, but hey - whatever works.

Hurrah for raw sewage

In Oslo, they've started using raw sewage to heat their homes. Heat is extracted from the sewage and transferred to hot water pipes - which then send hot water back to homes around the city. The technology is basically the same thing that makes a fridge work, and the city is suddenly able to heat the equivalent of about 9000 apartments per year - and save about 6000 tonnes of oil that would have otherwise been burned..

It sounds as though the technology could be used all over the place, which is way cool. So far the only problem in Oslo seems to be the irregular water flows. As in, there's not much raw sewage available early on Monday mornings (4-6 AM) because most people go to bed early on Sunday night.
Tangentially, my favorite quote from the whole article is this:

"In Oslo, untreated sewer flows -- from toilets, bathtubs, sinks and rainwater from the streets -- runs into the system past a filter that keeps out big objects such as dead rats."
There's just something grisly about the "big objects such as dead rats" bit.

Reconciling Punk with what is corporate and superficial

I have always thought of people who are into the "punk" look as being rebellious, anti-establishment types. Yesterday I was walking up Yonge street behind a guy whose hair was carefully styled in a prickle of 2-inch spikes. His jeans were ripped acid wash, andI'd be willing to bet that metal studs featured somewhere in his attire, although I couldn't see any from behind.

The guy was carrying shopping bags from about three or four different stores that feature prominantly at the Eaton Centre. Huh? This guy shops at a mall that dilineates the centre of Toronto's corporate merchandising universe?

Also. It must have taken ages for him to style his hair, and really, achieving that punk look must actually take a bit of effort and require a very fashion-conscious approach to getting dressed. Which means... that what is superficial becomes important. Again..Huh?

The one time when fuzzy and sticky go together...

Remember when Canadian x-country skier Sara Renner snapped her pole during her Olympic race and a Norwegian coach handed her his pole from the sidelines? She went on to win a silver medal while the Norwegians finished fourth.

Yep, it was a great Olympic story. Apparently Canadians have been feeling all warm and fuzzy about it pretty much ever since.

Michael Page, of Montreal, started "Project Maple Syrup", asking Canadians to donate money for, or cans of, maple syrup for the Norwegians. When I read that more than 7000 cans, or 5.2 tonnes of the stuff was sent last week, I nearly fell off my chair. Who could ever get through so many pancakes. Or waffles. Or... or what else do you really eat with maple syrup?

(Is Canada secretly trying to destroy Norway's 2010 Olympic chances by inducing carb and sugar comas in their athletes?)

Thank goodness there are actually just a whole lot of people who contribute to sending a national team to the Olympics - the Canadian embassy is going to pass it out to a whole bunch of people, including the Norwegian Olympic committee and the Norwegian athletes, as well as volunteers and friends.

Bring on the pancakes.

Computer-centric

image from www.calculator.org/MediaKitImages/

Yesterday I started working on a calculation assignment for a class I'm taking. It's the sort of thing I haven't done in ages and I found myself trying to remember how to get started. It felt so odd to sit down with just a piece of paper, a pencil and a calculator and begin by listing all the variables at the top of the page.

The keyboard that sits in the middle of the desk kept getting in my way, and I didn't have a functioning calculator around so I had to use the one on the computer.

Eventually I ended up typing out the whole calcuation assignment, which seems odd since it's kind of a pain to insert a bunch of equations into a Word document... but at the same time, the idea of handing in anything written out by hand seems... archaic.

The technology takeover of my life is apparently complete.

Care to discuss global warming?

Global warming - is it happening or not? Considering the winter Toronto just had, with little or no snow and warm temperatures throughout January and February, it's not hard to feel a little concerned about the weather.

There is lots of evidence to suggest that us humans are affecting the climate of the earth, and there are also several coherent expressions of skepticism out there - like Bjorn Lomborg's book, The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Scientific American is promoting a bit more discussion. They have a blogger, George Musser, on the job, answering queries from skeptics about climate change.

Although you have to click through a few screens to get to the good stuff, it's an interesting read.

Maybe this shouldn't bug me, but it does

Apparently the Royal Canadian Mint, in co-operation with the Breast Cancer Foundation of Canada, is releasing a pink-ribbon quarter.

It is truly fantastic that there is so much awareness and fundraising about breast cancer - there were those 'target" T-shirts, there's the weekend to end breast cancer, and there are all sorts of pink ribbon-driven cooking, yard-sale, and craft-related fundraisers.

Whoever's running the Breast Cancer fundraising program is a genius.

It also gives me the feeling of being a slick, corporate, marketing machine. And I'm wary of that.

With respect to the quarter... there are other chronic diseases that should be important to Canadians that we rarely hear about: heart disease, for example... and all of the other cancers. Or what about diseases that are not commonly thought of as killers, but which have a profound effect on the lives of many Canadians: asthma and COPD, diabetes.
See this graph? It's mortality rate vs. year for Canadians of all ages. I made it using public data online at Health Canada.

Starting from the top:

• Turquoise: Circulatory Disease
• Purple: Ischeamic Heart Disease
• Green: Lung Cancer
• Red: Colorectal Cancer
• Blue: Breast Cancer
• Dark Green: Asthma

So I'm curious as to when we'll be seeing the heart, the bloodstream, the lungs, and the gastrointestinal tract on our quarters.

Symbolizing an intersection of worlds

World #1:

Any world created in literature, through clever and skilful use of words and phraseology. Literature is a way to express themes and make arguments through use of metaphor, and simile, and above all, requires creation of a damn good story...

World #2:

The outdoors - the kind involving wilderness and self-propelled adventure, escaping from roads and man-made structures and boundaries, testing your own limits, and seeing the beauty of nature while in it.

So what actually happened is that yesterday I was at Mountain Equipment Co-op... and so was Margaret Atwood, grand dame of Canadian literature.

Cool.

School translocates to my blog

So I'm writing this term paper about nanoparticles. These are teeny tiny particles of around a billionth of a metre long. In some ways they're really cool becuase they have wierd and wonderful properties that make them useful in industries like aerospace, computer, electrical, and of course, cosmetics. (If you use sunscreen that goes on clear, you have put nanoparticles onto your skin.)

If they get into the air, they are not-so-cool because they seem to be able to create more inflammation in your lungs than bigger air pollutants. In general they're kind of scary because they can translocate out of the lungs and into the bloodstream, thereby reaching every organ in the body. They have also been found capable of crossing the blood-brain barrier and the blood-testis barrier in mice. And to top it off, they seem to be able to get into cells as well.

So theoretically, they could do a lot of damage. Or be really useful in developing drugs that targeting diseases like Alzheimers.

Most nanotech industries aren't producing huge amounts of these things yet - they're still in the R&D/preproduction phase of things. But the future is coming... and these things are also not regulated yet. At all. Anywhere.

It all feels a bit sci-fi...

Leah stole my post

Today in the Globe and Mail, Leah McLaren clearly expressed exactly what I was thinking last night while I was watching the news:

Stephen, what the heck are you wearing?

I mean, honestly dude. Look at yourself:

(photo stolen from some Mexican website)

What on earth were they thinking?!

Apparently Reebok decided a while ago that it would be a great idea to do a giveaway with some of its shoes... so they gave away this cute little charm bracelet:

What's very not cute about this is that it's 99% lead - and a four-year-old boy recently died in Minnesota after swallowing the heart piece of the charm. The bracelets are apparently "only dangerous if kids chew on them, suck on them, or swallow any part of them." Well gee, isn't that the sort of thing kids usually do?

Yeurgh. What were they thinking? Lead is a well-known neurotoxin. That's why we got rid of lead-based paints and why we've been trying to switch to unleaded gasoline, y'all!

And young children will actually absorb 50% of ingested lead whereas us adults only absorb about 10%.

Reebok has recalled the bracelet and says they're going to try and find out what happened. I'm not sure if that's good enough in the face of such obvious risk and stupidity.

I'm addicted

I think I might be developing an internet addiction. OK, maybe I'm past developing it. Maybe I have a full-fledged addiction. Is it a bad sign that I check my email before breakfast sometimes?

Or that I've posted a thread in a message board about the time I spend online and googled "Internet Addiction"?

It turns out that there are even such things as help and resource centres for online addiction - although when I read the descriptors of addiction, they seemed to relate more to people who spend endless hours searching for pron, rather than people who maximize their internet outlook screen every five minutes and click on "send/recieve"... (in case you weren't sure, I would fall in the latter category!!)

Oh, excuse me. I have to go now and check my email.

Boob-related, but not mine, by Toutatis!

Apparently a young Newfoundland girl recently died of toxic shock after having her nipple peirced. According to Marla Shapiro's article in today's Globe and Mail, fatal outcomes from bacterial infection of piercings are rare, but I was surprised to learn that nipple piercings can take up to 16 weeks to heal.

Not that I'm planning on piercing either of mine, thank you very much.

Despite the disturbing main content of this article, what caught my attention was actually the sentence, "In ancient Rome, for example, centurions used piercings through their nipples to hold their capes in place."

Um... OWW!

Okay, admittedly, my only knowledge about centurions' capes comes from Asterix comics (perhaps not a great reference book for actual facts), but weren't those capes HEAVY? They were long enough to reach the ground behind the centurions (what if they snagged on something..?). And they probably blew in the wind..!?

Good-bye, old turtle

Last week a tortoise that might have been 250 years old died.

It was in a zoo in India - they can't prove that it was actually more than 150, but have bits and pieces of information from what they term "authentic sources" indicating that it might have been around for quite a bit longer. It must have been an imporessive old creature, since these turtles often weigh in at about 265 pounds.

Before coming to the Kolkata zoo, it was the pet of Robert Clive, a famous British military officer in colonial India around the middle of the 18th century.

Its name was "Addwaitya" meaning the "The One and Only" in Bengali.

Headliner

This has to be one of the most ironic headlines in a while:

How 200 soldiers saved 3 pacifists

The article appears in today's Toronto Star and is about the rescue of three members of the Christian Peacemaker Teams who were captured and held hostange in Iraq. They were captured on November 26, 2005 and were rescued on Thursday of this week.

The Christian Peacemakers Teams are committed to non-violence. And soliders... are usually well-trained in the art of war.

my boobs ...

So I've been checking out my boobs lately.

Apparently having asymmetrical breasts is a predictor of breast cancer. By the way, I think we're talking in terms of size here, not location

A recent study predicted that the risk of getting cancer rose by 50 per cent for each 100-millilitre increase in breast asymmetry. According to this study, pretty much every woman has asymmetrical breasts to some degree... and of course, we don't know what the baseline risk here is - which has huge importance for what this actually means at a population level.

So, back to my boobs. It's hard to picture what a 100 mL difference in volume would actually look like. But I think I'm probably okay...

A light at the end of the tunnel...

Yesterday my PhD advisor told me he thinks I've done enough analysis and can start to write up my results!

So now all I have to do is compile and make sense of the hundreds of figures and graphics I seem to have filed all over the place... and, um, wite a bunch of text to go before, in between, and after them all. It will be a big job and it will take a while, but man, oh man, I feel GOOD!

I'm awake! (and still no free TV)

I just learned that there's more caffeine in a regular cup of coffee than in an espresso! I always thought that the liquid in those cups looked so opaque that it must be absolutely loaded with the stimulant.

Perhaps this explains why I've been having trouble sleeping ever since Tim Horton's started their "roll up the rim to win" contest.

We suck

Humans Spur Worst Extinctions Since Dinosaurs

'nuff said.