Who Ought To Be In Pictures

What's the deal with these posters featuring Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, and Humphrey Bogart?  A local diner has several, as they seem to see them as the way to get their 50's vibe on. (That previous sentence involved a collision of the slang from at least three decades, I apologise for it.) I thought maybe it was one artist with a weird fixation, but I've found at least two artists making them.

You can get them playing poker, singing karaoke, even working on an anachronistic stock car. Which is at least less morbid than Dean with the car he died in.  And perhaps most famously, you get get them replacing the original subjects of Edward Hopper's classic Nighthawks.

But I have to wonder, why them?  If you want to evoke the fifties, there are plenty of other choices. Even if you specifically wanted to show bitter-sweet heroes embodying America's lost innocence, you could have used, say, Buddy Holly.  The page I linked to at the start of this post also included a number of suggestions.  I'm guessing that the reason is that descendants of celebrities may have a problem with how they are depicted, and perhaps these four have less legal problems.

I also wonder what people other decades might turn into poster stars.  I need to know for when I go into business with my retro 80's fast food joint.  Michael Jackson is an obvious choice.  Madonna and Prince have probably stayed around too long to represent the era. Duran Duran's Simon Le Bon would work as an 80's symbol, but is probably not well-known enough as an individual. Who else? How about:

• Michael J. Fox
• Boy George
• Corey Haim
• Molly Ringwald
• Cindy Lauper
• Mr. T
• Brooke Shields
• Pee Wee Herman
• Max Headroom

Those are my suggestions. Painters, get to it; I'll be by in a few years to pick up my painting of four of the above playing Trivial Pursuit.

Tattoo Who

I have no tattoos, and no plans to get any.  Yet, tattoos have become so common in our culture that I've asked myself what would I get.  I mean, what could there possibly be in the universe that is important enough to me that I would want to make a permanent commitment to it. (Why yes, I am single.)

I'm thinking about this because I saw something about a Walmart employee who got the Walmart logo tattooed on his arm.  You might laugh at him for that, but at least he's made a commitment to something that's important to him, which is more thought than usually goes into tattoos.  I'm not sure Walmart has as much commitment to him, but that could be part of his plan: it would be terrible publicity to lay-off the guy who got a company tattoo, so his job is safe.

Rarely have I ever felt that kind of unreserved belonging in a group.  And as I'm sure this blog has shown, I frequently end up disappointed in people and things.  I've never loved, say, a TV show enough to want to put it on my body.  Sports teams are out; I may allow them to play with my emotions, but I remind myself that they have no dedication to me.  Essentially, I treat them like cats.  I don't even feel a close enough affinity to a particular idea, as these people do with math. I had thought that the only thing I feel a complete love for is Lego, and now I see that they screwed over Ai Weiwei.

(Having said that, here are some Lego tattoos I just found.)

So that's it.  Unless I decide to just get a big question mark, I don't think I'll ever get a tattoo.  Or I'll just tell people that I got a tattoo of the blank space that represents my ultimate disappointment with modern society.

That's The News, And I Am Outta Here

“But I believe in this - and it’s been tested by research,
that he who fucks nuns will later join the church”

-The Clash, "Death or Glory"

Still the greatest line in the history of rock. In the song it was part of a critique of rebellious musicians, but I always associate that quote with either Joan Rivers or Dennis Miller, two great comedians who turned into the sort of people that their younger selves would have made fun of. When Rivers died, some younger people were genuinely surprised at what positive feelings she elicited from so many people. I guess that's understandable: to many adults today, she was known only for catty red carpet coverage and work on the shopping channel. I always wondered what 1970’s Rivers would have had to say about a person like that.

Miller turned off a lot of fans with his drift to the right in the last decade. Defenders have pointed out that he was never really lefty, and his SNL colleague Al Franken has said he doesn't find Miller’s current work surprising.

But to me the disappointing part wasn't his ideology, but his partisanship. Though he may have leaned right in the past - or more accurately, libertarian - the joy from his routines came mainly from his ridiculing the stupidity of society in general and politics especially. Now he's not really a conservative, but a loyal Republican. Or to put it another way, is hard to believe the guy who said of Reagan and nuclear weapons,

"There's no more frightening image in the world, than the finger having access to the button, having a string tied around it."

...later said,

“I’d like to thank George (W) Bush for allowing me to respect the American presidency again.”

But now we can add another to the list of those joining the church later in life, and that is Miller's former show, Saturday Night Live. They’ve announced that Donald Trump will host an upcoming show. Of course, this isn’t the first time they’ve had a politician on the show - Hillary Clinton was on just a few weeks ago. These appearances can be fun, even though they are usually awkward and even though everyone knows it’s just the politician trying to look human by displaying a sense of humour. But most importantly, politicians’ cameos are always short, allowing the show to go back to what it should be doing: making fun of things, often including those politicians.

I realize political satire has never been the focus of the show, but it’s always been a component. And we rely on political humour to puncture the egos and highlight the flaws of our leaders and candidates, rather than assist them. Having a politician host the show means softening the satire, and that’s really unfortunate in this case. Trump is the biggest story in politics at the moment, and someone who is pushing politics in troubling directions. He should be a target, rather than a performer.

But it’s not hard to understand why the show is doing this: As the focus of so much attention right now, Trump drags viewers wherever he goes. Whether it’s his supporters, or people who just can’t look away from a trainwreck, Trump’s SNL episode is sure to be a ratings winner. And that’s another difference from other political appearances on the show: instead of SNL assisting a politician in forming their image, here the politician is helping the show, which just emphasizes what a clear example of selling-out this is.

Historically, the Saturday Night Live bandwagon has had a widely-varying number of passengers. Many people may be jumping on for the Trump episode, but I’ll be leaving it.

I'll Do My Driving In The Rain

I've mentioned before that I don't think highly of Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone. I think it would be accurate to describe him as being like FIFA president Sepp Blatter, but without the selflessness.  So a few years ago, when he proposed making races more exciting by having sprinklers around the course randomly spray water on the track, I was neither impressed nor surprised.  Indeed, the idea got a lot of jeers from the racing community.

While that was a crazy idea from a terrible person, I can actually understand the thinking behind it. Today's American Grand Prix was one of the most entertaining Formula One races in recent years, and that was largely due to Hurricane Patricia, the edges of which dumped rain on the track in Austin, Texas. 

And that's nothing new: Formula One races have long been more exciting in the rain.  In perfect conditions, it's just a fast parade, with the cars ending up in order of who has the most money.  The lack of traction makes things unpredictable, cancels out a lot of the technology advantage, and rewards driving skill. In fact, today's race seemed to get noticeably less entertaining through the race as the rain stopped and the track tried out.

But sprinklers?  Surely there's a more sophisticated way to approach the problem.  Besides, I have the feeling that if all races were in uniformly wet conditions, the engineers would start to adapt and turn it into a predictable competition of technology again.

So here's an idea.  I have no idea if this makes sense or not, but I feel confident enough to put it forward, since it's already guaranteed not to be the dumbest suggestion anyone's made.  For a while now, Formula One has had just one tire supplier, currently Pirelli. They make a few different types of tires with different rubber compounds (crash course on racing tires: the tire compound is a trade-off, where softer rubber gives better traction, but wears out quicker.)  Currently they bring two different compounds to each race, and the teams are free to choose between them (aside from the rule that they have to use each type at least once during the race.)

So hows this: They bring just one type of tire to each race, but they don't tell anyone what it is. Qualification and practice could be done with standard tires, but the ones supplied for race day are a random formulation that no one knows until the race starts. Everyone has to figure out how much traction they have during the race, and adapt their driving and strategies to it. 

The Right Honourable Devil-You-Know

Can you stand one more election post? Well, this one isn't about this election, but about a pattern I've noticed. It occurred to me that the result of this election was actually pretty unusual, at least among elections in my lifetime.

American pundits have commented that Presidents rarely lose the election for their second term, despite the public's supposed hatred of politicians. During my life, the only Presidents to fail to win re-election were Carter and Bush Sr. (and Ford, though he wasn't elected in the first place.)

But Canada is much the same, if not more so.  This election, where a government ran for re-election, but lost, was pretty unusual, even though that seems like a pretty ordinary result for an election. In my forty-two years, there have been only four sitting Prime Ministers that have lost elections, and they generally haven't been like this one.

• John Turner and Kim Campbell got to be PM by the quirk of parliamentary system: they replaced long-time Prime Ministers, called an election, and lost, leaving office in just a few months.
• Paul Martin did slightly better. He replaced a long-time PM, then won an election with a minority. It fell after two years, and he lost the subsequent election.
• The only time a Prime Minister who served more than a longer than a Presidential term, then lost an election, was 1979 when Joe Clark defeated Pierre Trudeau, albeit with a minority. Clark's government collapsed after nine months, at which point Trudeau defeated him in the election, winning a majority.

So this election is the first time in my life that a Prime Minister with a majority lost an election to another party that won a majority. That says something about how we like to go with the flow in Canada.

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, # 28

They'll do a feature film based on the Peanuts comic strip.

• It will be computer generated
• It will be 3-D
• The ads will feature The Who's "Baba O'Riley."

Assessing Threats

Last week, Wilfrid Laurier University here in KW was locked down after someone online posted a threat of a shooting in the science building. Of course, locals were shocked: who knew Laurier has a science building?

Okay, that's just my UW, heritage talking, sorry Laurier folks.  Anyway, the person who made that posting was in London (England.) He got arrested, and just spent nearly three days in jail before posting bail. He was interviewed upon release, and it came out that:

• He didn't think this would happen, or that it would be taken seriously
• He doesn't know anything about Laurier, and was only copying it's name from another post.
• He assumed that freedom of speech covered this sort of thing

That last part jumped out at me. It's a concept that a lot of people online seem to think: that freedom of speech is absolute and allows any sort of speech in any circumstance. Most people - both inside and outside the legal profession - will know that there are practical limits on free speech. The classic (i.e., quoted on Law & Order) example is that you don't have the right to shout, “fire” in a crowded theatre.

But now we have a couple of problems: in the Internet age, you can yell “fire” from the other side of the planet, and there's a lot of people who think freedom of speech means freedom from consequences.  Actually, three problems: there’s also our increasingly fuzzy definition of irony.  Afterall, our perpetrator said he didn’t think his threat would be taken seriously, since it was on 4chan, a site known for pranks.  I can see how a person might assume that, since many things of questionable taste happen there without affecting the real world. But the flipside is that if a person were to plan a shooting rampage, an untraceable discussion board is exactly where they would talk about it.

We’re left with a big overlap between what people think is acceptable online, and what raises red flags for law enforcement.  So we’re going to have to create some new understandings about what is legal, and someone is going to be very disappointed.

Blue And Red

Oh, um, I guess I should write something about the election.  Let's see, I'll just insert a joke in which it seems like I'm commenting about the election, but then it turns out I'm talking about the Jays game.  I'll think of that later.

Anyway, about the election:

• Thesis: Harper's downfall was winning a majority in the last election.  Giving complete power to a controlling personality brought out the worst in his personality.  Discuss.
• People are still talking about the possibility of electoral reform, such as proportional representation.  But we're facing the same problem electoral reform always has: the government that just won with the current rules will be reluctant to change the rules.  Too bad it wasn't a Liberal minority depending on the NDP, that would have been the optimum result for reform.
• Speaking of the NDP, they had a pretty disappointing result, ending up with the sort of seat count you would have expected, well, the last time the Jays were in the playoffs.  It's like the clock struck midnight, and now the party has turned back into a pumpkin, or something.  Hmm, orange/pumpkins?  I should work out a joke for that and put that in later too.
• Lots of people noted that Harper was desperate if he was using Rob Ford for support (see the hilarious photo op here.)  But the NDP also made a late attempt to invoke the late Jack Layton in one of their final ads.  Neither of the last-second associations worked.

So over all, I got the result I was looking for.  Then the ballgame ended and I saw the Liberals won the election. Ha, that's the joke I should use.  Nah, that's stupid.  Maybe I could talk about "that guy who keeps talking but isn't as smart as he thinks he is" and it turns out I'm talking about both Rex Murphy and Harold Reynolds.

iVoted

With the election coming up, people are once again asking why we don't have online voting. Lots of people think making voting more convenient would finally stem the tide of decreasing voter turn-out.

Techie people seem to be of two minds when this subject comes up. Some will exhaustedly explain that, yes, we can do it without security problems. Others will shudder with fear at the mere mention of the possibility of online voting. I'm in that second group, so allow me to explain our case, and why people with the same knowledge can come to such different conclusions.

The problem is the difference between what can be done and what likely will be done. It's like at McDonald's: you might get a Big Mac that looks like the picture on the menu - there's no reason that it won't look like that. But in practice, it almost certainly won't.

And with software, it can be secure, but it probably won't be. One thing I've learned is that you can't assume software is safe. Because I'm all about analogies: let's say you're buying a car. If you're like me, you'd like a reasonably safe car. And yet, I probably wouldn't put much effort into ensuring the car I choose is safe. How does that make any sense? Because I know there's a lot of infrastructure making sure all cars are fairly safe. There are regulations, government testers, watchdog groups etc. Yes, I could do some research to make sure I get the safest car available, but I know that I can get away with not doing that research, because in our world even the least-safe car is still pretty safe.

But that's exactly the sort of assumption you can't make in software. There's little regulation and independent testing, so you can't assume anything. That's not to say that all software is insecure; but if you're getting custom software made and you want it to be secure, you'll have to specify that you want security, and pay extra for it.

And that's why I'm uneasy about online voting. That other group of techies is right: we can make a safe and secure online voting system. But it's unlikely that the bureaucrats and politicians that would have to oversee the project would know how much they'll have to push to get it made right. And in the world of government contracts, where it's either take-the-low-bid or take-the-lowest-bid-that-has-connections, it's pretty certain they won't be putting the needed money into the project. If you look to the U.S. and the low quality of their voting machines, I don't like our chances with online voting.

(Pause while I remove my computer geek hat and put on my amateur political pundit hat)

And I seriously doubt that online voting would even increase voter turn-out anyway. After all, voting is pretty convenient. Or at least, it’s as convenient as many of the other errands we run. The point is, if you care about politics, the act of voting is not asking a lot. There can’t be many people who truly care about the outcome of an election but can’t spare the fifteen minutes or so to take part. The fact is, the declining number of voters is due to people’s losing interest in, or knowledge of, politics. That’s what we have to fix; reducing the time to vote from fifteen minutes to one isn’t going to coax a vote out of someone with no concern for the political state of the country.

And that’s why I don’t want to see online voting anytime soon: It will be more dangerous than it has to be, and will not accomplish the results people want. Having said this, there are other premises for promoting it: After all, it would be a boon for people with physical challenges, or those in rural areas. On those grounds, perhaps we should weigh the costs and benefits. But if it’s just about enticing the elusive non-voter, then it’s not worth it.

Spirit of Radio

There's an ad on TV for Sportsnet, and it's trying to emphasize what a multi-media sports source it is.  They feature TV, radio, the web, apps, and a dead-tree magazine.  So to do this, they show a radio playing one of their stations, a TV showing sports, a tablet also showing sports etc.

What's weird is the radio they showed.  It's got a big round speaker and a big round dial, and I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be an old-fashioned radio, a modern radio that was trying to look retro, or a modern radio that was trying to be minimalist and accidentally looked retro. 

I guess what I'm getting at is that it's pretty much impossible for a radio to not look retro. No, it's not that radios are out of date, it's just that they no longer look like anything. When I tried asking myself what I would have expected a radio to look like, I didn't have an answer.  I have several radios, but they're just parts of a clock, stereo, car, even an MP3 player.  I don't really have a mental image of a radio.

So radios are now invisible. I wonder what other devices could become invisible in the future by being consumed by other things. Say, an MP3 player, since most people probably just use their phones for that. For a while now, tech pundits have predicted that computers will become invisible as they start to use gestures or voice commands, and start to get incorporated into TVs, appliances, clothes or houses (and as I'm writing this, I see a commercial for Amazon's "Echo" voice-activated thingamajig.) 

So if you're reading this on some big, intrusive device, it's something to think about.  Or, if this is being read-out to you by a computer woven into your shirt, then it's something to look back and laugh at.

The Wishful Thinking Is Out There

The question of whether or not aliens exist is an awkward one. On the one hand, some people will answer that question with any number of bizarre answers:

“Yes, I sure hope they exist.”
“Yes, and the Loch Ness Monster too.”
“Of course. Why, my uncle Kenny’s been abducted twice in the last year alone.”

Because of this, many people who are sensible (but not particularly knowledgeable) will answer the question with an emphatic no, congratulating themselves on their sensibility. It seems to make sense: You haven’t seen aliens, and their existence seems to be far beyond anything we’ve actually experienced.

But then you’ll get a different answer from someone who is sensible and more knowledgeable. If take someone like myself - who saw Cosmos and now thinks he’s an astronomy expert - and ask them if aliens exist, they’ll tell you that they most certainly do. After all, space is really big. So yes, even though life is surely unlikely to arise on any particular planet, there are so many possibilities, that life must exist somewhere out there. And if you ask the follow-up question, where are they (smartass)? They will refer you back to the “space is really big” principle.

But there’s a problem with that space-is-big, many-possibilities argument. See, space is not only big, it’s also old. It’s about four times older than life on earth, or 70,000 times older than modern humans. On the one hand, that fact adds to the lots-of-chances argument: not only are there lots of planets on which life could have arisen, but there’s been plenty of time for life to arise on them too.

The problem is when it begs that follow-up: Where are they? If the universe is so old, then not only must there be lots of alien races out there, but some of them must have been around for a long time. So even though space is big, they’ve had plenty of time to spread out, explore, and build lots of things. Even if we’re assuming that there’s no way to travel faster than the speed of light, and it will take years just to get to the nearest stars, a race could spread throughout our galaxy in, say, a million years. When you look at it that way, it doesn’t make sense that we haven’t seen any evidence of alien civilizations.

That’s called Fermi’s Paradox. We can’t explain why we can’t find any evidence of aliens, but we also can’t explain how there could not be aliens. There's a long list of interesting explanations for the paradox.

Why rehash this? The Kepler Space Telescope has found a star that appears to have thousands of objects orbiting it. That’s not unusual: a newly created star would have that. Over time, the matter surrounding it would accumulate into bigger and bigger chunks which would turn into planets. Anyone observing our sun five billion years ago would have seen the same thing. But this isn’t a new star, it’s “mature,” like ours. So it should only have a few planets orbiting it. No one has seen anything like this, and we aren’t sure what we’re looking at.

So if science can’t explain it, why not try some wild speculation? People have speculated that a really advanced civilization, with tremendous technology and voracious energy requirements, might build a Dyson Sphere. (Named for physicist Freeman Dyson, not the vacuum cleaner guy.) Essentially the idea is to build a shell around the star to collect all its energy, rather than just settle for the tiny little amount that falls on one planet.

In science fiction, this is often depicted as, literally, a big shell, where your people would live on the inside surface of the shell, with the star essentially above them. Yes, that’s right, there was one on a Star Trek episode once. But there’s a bunch of reasons why that probably wouldn’t work. So if an advanced civilization really wanted to make maximum use of their star’s energy, they’d more likely build something closer to what Dyson actually specified: a “swarm” of small structures of planetlets. They would all orbit the star, absorbing as much of its energy as possible.

So even though there’s probably some rational, boring explanation for this unusual star system, it does seem to resemble what we imagine a Dyson Sphere would look like. And it would provide an answer to Fermi’s Paradox, since this is the sort of thing we would expect to see, given how many really old, presumably advanced civilizations should be out there.

So please allow me to have my moment believing that this really is the sign of intelligent life we’ve always been looking for. Lots of people believe in things just because they want them to be true, and unlike them, at least I’m not voting based on it. And we could all use some good news: just when I was researching this, I found that most astrophysicists on social media were instead complaining about an astronomer given a slap on the wrist for serial sexual harassment. So let’s believe the aliens are there, and we have something better to aspire to.

We Don't Have To Take Our Clothes Off

It was a news story that caught just about everyone’s eye: Playboy is going to stop publishing nudity. So…

Things The Teenage Me Would Never Have Believed About Life In The Future, # 27

Playboy will voluntarily stop printing nude pictures of women. They’ll do this to try to increase circulation. Specifically, they’ll be hoping to get more younger readers.

Of course, the explanation for this new strategy was fairly obvious: porn is just too easy to get in this age of the Internet. I mean really, you’re on the Internet, why are you reading this now? You could be looking at porn. In that light, I really appreciate your readership.  Anyway, this is just another example of a new medium forcing old media to reassess what they do best. So non-nude Playboy is just like abstract art, when you think about it.

And it just might work. Playboy without nudity is essentially Maxim, which I see has about ten-times the circulation. They could position themselves as the more urbane version of the bro magazines. Strangely, Playboy would seem like the sophisticated version, and we could one day see someone reading a copy of Maxim, inside a copy of Playboy.

The lack of nudity would allow it to be sold in more places, so that would open up new markets. But perhaps more importantly, a lot of people will probably feel more comfortable buying it. That is, after all, the oddity of men’s magazines: Playboy has given up selling nude pictures of women - since you can get them for free on the Internet - yet Maxim has made a mint selling sexy but not nude pictures of women, which you can also get for free on the Internet. Essentially they are selling permission. It’s socially acceptable to look at a magazine from the local store, in a way that surfing for porn on the Internet is not. So Playboy is just looking for a little more acceptability.

How Soon Is Now?

I notice that a lot of people are focused on what kind of future we live in, and how far along we are in getting there. For instance, I’ve confronted the why-don’t-we-have-flying-cars question. And it seems as though more people are looking in amazement/frustration at how our world has changed from the world we were born into.

I'm wondering why we care so much about that. I mean, I don't remember in, say, the 80’s, people talking about whether or not they were living in the future imagined by people in the 30’s. I suppose that could be because, for people in the twentieth century, the future officially started in the year 2000.

Of course, that brings up the question of whether people in the nineteenth century looked to 1900 as "the future" and if so, how long after the turn of the century did people still think they were living in the future. They had certainly stopped by the time I was born.

It could be that 2000 was special because it was a turn of the millennium rather than just a century, but I suspect it has more to do with people's attitudes. If you remember the story of the patent officer who thought everything has already been invented, it seems people didn't really think they were living in an age of technological progress.

I just looked for a link to the story of the patent officer, and discovered that - surprise, surprise - it's a myth. Further, it turns out that the man in question was actually very optimistic about the many innovations coming in the future.  So that totally undermines my assumption.

Though I don't know if his certainty about the future of invention was shared by everyone at the time. Certainly, by my time in the late twentieth century were keenly aware of the movement of technology. In fact, we took it for granted, and were disappointed when it didn't love up to our expectations, or simply didn't go in the direction we expected. And that's exactly what happened: people of a certain age were promised flying cars, and instead got iPhones. Even someone like myself, who grew up after the period of greatest optimism about the future, still had his expectations coloured by those optimistic assumptions about the future.

Yearly reminder: unless you're over 60, you weren't promised flying cars. You were promised an oppressive cyberpunk dystopia. Here you go.

— Kyle Marquis (@Moochava) July 10, 2013

I realize this is pretty far down the techno-cultural rabbit hole, even for me. But thinking about ourselves as living in “the future” is probably going to have a big effect on how we look at things. You’d think that would be good; if we think of our world as something we’ve made, perhaps we’ll take a more active and thoughtful role in crafting it well.

Cup Of Mudslinging

Here's an ad sent to me by my local Conservative candidate. 

I'm not even sure where to begin.  The first thing I noticed is the "Career Politician" label they've put on Mr. Mulcair.  So now the Tories are criticizing one of their competitors over his lack of experience, and criticizing the other for having too much experience.  And of course, Mulcair and Harper have spent about the same amount of time in elected office.

But more than anything, I keep trying to imagine the planning that went into such an ad.  For instance, you know that actual adults with a great deal of education actually had a conversation about whether the coffee stain would be over-the-top.  They asked, how can we make Mulcair look as unprofessional as possible? 

We could write it in crayon, but that would come off as mean.  Let's go with the coffee stain.

Oh, but could that hurt us, make him sound like a man of the people, someone for the Tim Hortons crowd?  

Good point, we'll have to make it look like it came from a coffee cup, not a Tim's takeout cup.

I'm not one of those naive people who believes that negative ads don't work. But I'm wondering why this is the one type of advertising where subtlety goes out the window.  Even that semi-racist Hyundai ad wasn't this vicious with its depiction of its competitors (for instance, they weren't shown wearing stained clothing.)  And that ad was about as vicious as normal advertising gets.  It could be that they have less time to get their message across.  But then, the ads the Conservatives run between elections hit just as hard. So maybe someday we'll have parties using long-term brand-building strategies.  I think it would be much easier to take elections if they were just like reliving the 1980's cola war.

Eat Locally, Rant Globally

I have a long history of trying to recycle things. I sorted through the blue boxes in our early recycling program in high school, I tried to get my roommates to recycle in university. Living on my own, I've done everything I can to divert as much waste as possible from the landfill.

So I know just how hard it is to get people to understand what is and isn't recyclable. Many don’t consider that there has to be someone somewhere who sorts everything you put in the blue box. Or they just assume that putting other stuff in there will somehow make it magically become recyclable. Or they have bizarre reasoning, like assuming that if paper is recyclable, then wood is also recyclable.

But now I find myself on the other end of things whenever I eat at a food court in a shopping mall. In a commendable effort to be responsible, they’re introducing recycling. And they’re doing the best they can in an industry - fast food - that doesn’t try to hard to minimize waste.

Having said that, whenever I try to throw things out, I feel like I’m taking a test. There’ll be several categories, like paper and plastic, but then there’s also a “garbage” category. There are pictures to give examples of each category, but the pictures of the garbage also include plastic and paper things, so I’m still confused. What about a straw? I have no idea what kind of plastic that is. And you have cardboard in the paper section, but does that include waxy paper cups? So there I am looking back and forth at the different pictures, nervously grasping my Subway cup, while people line up behind me. I’m sure they’re quietly cursing me, with the final judgement coming when I make a decision and become a terrible person for either adding to the landfill unnecessarily, or for making life harder for some sorter.

The frustrating part of all this is that there’s only so many types of waste at a food court. Waxy drink cups, sandwiches and burgers in paper or foil, paper napkins, plastic cutlery, cardboard boxes, and the segmented plates from the chinese place. So you could just have a photo of everything people are going to throw out, and it will be nice and simple. And I’m sure whoever empties the recycling will be glad to take the photos for you.

Split The Difference

There's an old statistician's joke that points out the average person has one breast and one testicle. Well, more likely it's a joke about statisticians. I'm sure the statisticians themselves hear that and go on about the difference between means and modes, and that not everything is a bell curve, do you even know what a distribution is, etc.

But the point is that we often assume that the average thing is a popular thing, when it may actually be exceptional. An example is in poor countries, where you might see the average income listed as $1000 a year. But that's because most people get by on next-to-nothing, while a small elite are millionaires, bringing up the average. In fact, there's virtually no one in the country who actually makes $1000 a year.

Elections follow a similar pattern. When you're electing a national leader or ruling party, the people are essentially finding someone whose views are the average of everyone in the country. That sounds easy enough, but you could find that, like that gender-ambiguous average person, the average politician is hard to find.

So far in the American political process, we're seeing anything but the average. From the perspective of winning the election, it seems bizarre that both parties are ignoring strong candidates and fascinating themselves with far-from-mainstream folks that wouldn't do well in a general election.

Hillary Clinton is the best-known on either side. And Republicans don't seem to have noticed that a Jeb!-Kasich ticket would have one centre-sellable candidate from each of the main swing states. Trouble is, those folks who would come close to representing all of America don't have the passionate supporters needed to get them into the White House.

That means the election would end up being an all-or-nothing choice of the candidates that have a vocal minority with passion. Some would say that’s a good thing, but I don’t like it. Sure, I’d like to see a left-leaning guy like Bernie Sanders win the election, but I wouldn’t want to bet Western Civilization on an apocalyptic election against Donald Trump. I’d rather have a boring old election between candidates nearer the centre. Such an election would also offer the more moderate majority of Americans a choice of candidates closer to their ideology. So the election system is really messed up if it’s threatening to give us candidates that no one will be happy with.

But seriously, remember: Bush-Kasich ’16, I called it.

(Accurately) In The Zone

With the Blue Jays as the hottest sports property in Canada all of a sudden, their broadcaster, Sportsnet is trying to take advantage.  Normally at this time of year, the Canadian sports media would be covering the pre-season NHL with all the seriousness and analysis usually reserved for regular season games.  But instead, Sportsnet has been showing more classic (that is, 20+ year old) Blue Jays games. 

I've mentioned in the past some of the strange things I've noticed in these old broadcasts.  But recently I've noticed another couple of things: one is the absence of the pitch-tracker, that radar-or-whatever thing that tracks where the pitch crosses the plate, relative to the strike zone.  I kept looking over to the right side of the screen expecting to see a diagram of where the last pitch was.  Then I look down to see the count, and it's not there either.  How did people even understand baseball then?

But that leads to the other thing I noticed.  It really seems like balls and strikes are called much more accurately now.  Obviously, there are still mistakes, but for the most part, when you look at the pitch tracker, you see that incorrect calls are nearly always so close you can hardly blame the umpire for getting it wrong.  That's in sharp contrast to the wild calls we used to get, like when they first installed that camera in the SkyDome roof that showed the plate from above, and you could see that some strikes were six inches out of the zone.

So I was going to write a post about how it seems like strikes are more accurate, and I wonder if the new technology has anything to do with it, I'm probably the first person to wonder about this, but just in case, I'll Google it to find out.  Sure enough, fans of the most statistically-analysed sport on earth have been discussing this, arguing about it, and going full Chicken Little on the topic.

In short, yes they are better, yes it is because they've been training with technological feedback, and of course, some people have found a reason to believe this is a bad thing.  The problem is that now that the strike zone is being called accurately, it's increased strike-outs, and making it harder for hitters.  (Pause while Blue Jays fans laugh at the idea that modern baseball is too difficult for the batters.)

This is another example of one of the strange aspect of sports: The way officials and players settle into informal understandings of what is and isn't legal, which is often different from what is in the rule book.  Hockey is surely the most extreme example of this, where the rules are only sort-of enforced, yet fans and players have very specific expectations of how they're going to be sort-of enforced.  I've never understood this whole concept; if the rules are not good, surely it makes sense to change them, rather than ignore them.

The new accuracy of the strike zone puts baseball in the position where they may have to be formally changing the rules, rather than informally.  If there are too many strikeouts, they'll have to change the size or position of the strike zone.  That's especially true if they - as some suggest - drop the umpire altogether, and have a machine call balls and strikes.  I think that would be a good thing: if sports officiating could be made completely accurate, it will force leagues to confront aspects of their sports that they've ignored for a long time.  It would be good if basketball had to consider its problem with favouritism to star players, or if football had to actually define "holding."