Thought for the Day

The crux of solving a problem is first to invent a problem that needs to be solved.

Dancing the Demons Out

La Guitare

I am the head held high, the invasion
of aspirations to become part of the world, to
catch up with its spinning; I will the mysticism
of movement, the self-love of grace, the lovesick
bliss of moons too subtle to behold; I move
not only bodies, but souls, the emotions
in them kicking and straining to the sound
of fingers sea-sawing across ore dredged
up from the earth and stretched into strings
that sing into the anti-matter of the universe and draw
out its anti. The air
holds the memory of each of our positions
for a moment before it disappears
into the warm sheath of metabolism. I am the pleasure
given unto people by the empty body
of trees sacrificed to the health of a community, the dark
cloud spreading around the head
of the player, on which we can dance
to remember the reasons we are.

Jellybeans are the keys to the soul and other nuggets of wisdom

Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.
- H.L. Mencken

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
- H.L. Mencken

You can tell a lot about a fellow's character by his way of eating jellybeans.
- Ronald Reagan

It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Voltaire

The Joys of Bureaucracy

This is a still relevant re-post.

The Ontario government has started a pilot project of installing new smart meters that tell you how much electricity you use for activities such as laundering clothes, showering, and lighting so that you can reduce your electricity usage and therefore save yourself money. Their established targets are to have 800, 000 smart meters installed by December 31, 2007, and to have all residents using them by December 31, 2010. This plan also serves the purpose of bailing the Ontario government out because they have not planned out our increasing electricity needs enough. To their credit, they have stuck to certain goals of shutting down coal-burning generators, but they have not sufficiently planned to replace the lost megawatts. Investing more heavily in nuclear is an idea that has been bandied about, but really, who wants radioactive waste that takes tens of thousands of years to become harmless in their backyards?

To count myself among the fans of wind-generators (pun intended) is an honour, but there are naysayers who say they are eyesores. How can such a clean energy source delivered by such elegant structures be so maligned? The lines of a contemporary windmill are understated, and they are rounded rather than squared; as such, they contrast beautifully with the sharp corners of the modern citiscape. In large urban areas, skyscrapers form natural wind tunnels that might be areas ripe for smaller windmills, attached to the sides of buildings. Engineers should grab their Cray supercomputers and do some feasibility studies and cost-benefit analysis. The aesthetic eyesore argument is more of a parody of the NIMBY perspective, rather than a legitimate expression of it. The nuclear waste NIMBY argument is far more persuasive.

There are those bleeding hearts who worry about the birds who fly into the blades of windmills and die. Thousands of birds a year already die by flying into skyscrapers. To deny the value of birds in and of themselves as life forms, their value to people to brighten the visual and sonic atmosphere, and their value as key links in the food chains or threads in food webs that compose ecosystems is foolish. But what is worse: a few hundred birds dying per year, or billions of birds, people, and other animals suffering from air pollution caused by coal or gas-burning generators?

The concept of smart meters - another ingredient in the recipe of living sustainably - is sound, yet they have only made this meters available to the people involved in the pilot project. Therefore, those of us who already understand the benefits, both personal and environmental, of such meters, cannot get them because of this bureaucratic procedure. If this is what they mean by snail's pace, I'm looking for a solar-powered shell.

posted by Trevor_Cunnington @ 9:58 AM 0 comments

Thought for the Day, Coming Soon to a T-Shirt near you

If you think the world is full of assholes, try to be 3-ply toilet paper.

Rules governing the Road to Success: Part 1

1. Always read the last page of a contract first. People who write contracts often put contractees in pressure situations to read the contract quickly. They put the stuff that you will like least at the end in the hopes that you will not finish reading the entire contract and sign it with partial knowledge.

2. Learn to deliver information that you know people won't like with a smile. It is more difficult to take issue with a smiling fool than a hesitant person who makes disclaimers like nurses before they "drop the needle"

3. Find novel ways to promote yourself. A couple strategies I have found novel: putting stickers on $2 coins, putting cardboard flyers in the leaves of hedges in park settings.