Life of Dread

Dead

2007-08-15T10:32:00.000-04:00

The blog is officially dead. A new blog will be coming soon: Necessary But Not Sufficient.

Rapper Names

2007-04-13T12:39:00.000-04:00

Rappers have made up names. This should come as no surprise; you can't have really thought that it said LL Cool J on the guy's birth certificate. Still, some people never consider quite what makes a great rapper name. I've identified a few themes:

Incorporating your real name or initials into your rapper name. eg. k-os (Kevin Brereton), Eminem (Marshall Mathers), Ludacris (Christopher Bridges)
For white rappers, the use of imagery which indicates whiteness, eg. Vanilla Ice, Snow.
Intentional misspelling of words and phrases, eg. Ludacris, k-os, Eminem, Mystikal.

In conclusion, if I ever become a rapper, I will definitely go by the name Kris-B-Kreme.

For more information on rapper names, see Cracked's 25 Worst Rapper Names of All Time.

Strange but True

2007-04-10T13:00:00.000-04:00

You know what the main problem with Cadbury's Creme Eggs is? They look too much like real eggs. The yolky appearance of their gooey, delicious insides turned me off for years as a child. But apparently, I'm not the only one who was fooled, as demonstrated by the cockatoo that adopted a clutch of the chocolate eggs as her own.

What happens when you take one of the world's best classical musicians, put a $4 million Stradivarius in his hands, and tell him to play some of the greatest classical pieces ever written, for change in a subway station? Hardly anyone notices that he isn't just your ordinary street musician. It really kind of makes you wonder about a lot of things. My favorite part, though, was the musician's reaction to pulling in $32.17 in 43 minutes (keeping in mind that his talents typically cost over $1000 a minute): "Actually, that's not so bad, considering. That's 40 bucks an hour. I could make an okay living doing this, and I wouldn't have to pay an agent."

And on a more personal note, I just found out that my best friend from high school, who mysteriously dropped off the radar about seven months ago, decided quite spontaneously to move to South Korea to teach English, without telling hardly anyone. Kind of a surprise, but very cool.

Facts

2007-03-06T09:47:00.001-05:00

I am happy to report that I've been accepted to law school, and I'll be a student of (probably) Queen's University Faculty of Law starting in September. Oh, did I mention I'm giving up engineering to become a lawyer? No? Well now you know.
Today I have my Automatic Speech Recognition midterm.
The weather today in Montreal: Overcast, blowing snow, -23℃, windchill -38 (that's -9℉ and -36 to my American readers).

The result is that, upon hearing the weather report on the radio at 7 AM this morning, my reaction was "Maybe I should just give up on this master's degree thing."

That said, I'm at the library right now studying, but longing for the day that I'm finished my master's.

Fidel Castro, the Straw Man

2007-02-28T14:46:00.000-05:00

Via the BBC:
I know it's just a reflection, but doesn't this totally look like Fidel Castro is snorting orange juice with a straw?

Rail-ing against bus transit

2007-02-25T19:00:00.001-05:00

Public transit, especially in North America, is dominated by buses. Whereas once, streetcar systems were commonplace (even in small communities such as my home town of Kingston, Ontario, which has a streetcar system from 1877 to 1930), they are now virtually nonexistent (Toronto being one notable exception). Heavier rail (i.e. rapid transit) systems are limited to very large centres, and even then, express buses are often used instead (such as in Ottawa). Whether or not you believe the conspiracy theories about bustitution, there are a few aspects of urban rail that I'd like to discuss. For clarity, I will refer to streetcars, light rail systems, etc. collectively as urban light rail (ULR).

The most often considered advantages of ULR have to do with how they function mechanically. ULR is typically electrified. This means it is zero emissions (not counting emissions used to generate the electrical power, but this can typically be done at substantially greater efficiency than in a diesel engine--and from a more diverse range of possible sources). Further efficiency gain comes from running on rails, since the rolling resistance is substantially less than that of bus wheels on asphalt. Both of these factors typically also make ULR quieter than the equivalent bus system.

Buses have a couple of substantial advantages though. The biggest is that the capital costs are a lot less. Buses don't require rails, of course, and buses are also a lot cheaper to buy than rail cars, due mostly if not entirely to economies of scale. Also, buses are a lot more flexible than ULR, since they don't need rails, making it much easier to alter routes and such.

That's the story everyone knows. If it just came down to these factors, I'd probably side with the status quo and say that buses are the best way to go, despite my personal preference for rail. However, I've recently thought of a couple of other advantages that ULR has over buses.

My first insight came when I was in Toronto almost a year ago. It goes something like this: if you get on a subway train or a streetcar, you know exactly where it's going. If you get on a bus, it might be going anywhere if you're not careful. Rail vehicles are very intuitive; they travel along the rails. Even in a hypothetical complex system in which multiple rail routes use the same track, there are still a limited number of places you might end up. With buses, if you don't know all the routes, you could literally end up anywhere! Thus, ULR has a certain appeal--especially to inexperienced users--that buses can't replicate.

My second insight took the same idea and extended it to a much more relevant level. A few days ago I was on the metro here in Montreal, talking about subway systems, and we got on to the phenomenon whereby dense development springs up along subway lines in order to take advantage of the convenient transport. As a result, after a sufficient period of time, demographics change in such a way that the routes actually serve the population in a nearly optimal fashion, even if they were poorly laid out initially. Thinking about Kingston (which has now gone the better part of a century with only bus service, and a poor one at that), I realized that this phenomenon doesn't occur with buses. The reason is obvious: because there is so little fixed physical capital, bus routes are easily changed to accommodate usage trends, rather than staying fixed and dictating those trends as rail systems do. Since the routes might change at any time, people and businesses avoid making long-term arrangements with those routes in mind, and as a result, development cannot go forward in a transit-oriented way. (By analogy, would you build a house on a street if you thought the city could tear up the street any time they wanted?)

So my conclusion? If we want to do away with auto-centered development in favour of transit-centered (which we should), replacing buses with more permanent systems is something we should give a bit more consideration.

P.S.- Before any smarty-pants economists get on my case about not accounting for discounting, don't. I know what you're going to say and I disagree. Some day I'll write about how the whole concept of discounting has been brutally abused by economics, and how it's been used to justify policies that are ruining the world. Er... I mean... comments are welcomed.

The Cost of Education

2007-02-10T16:34:00.001-05:00

I know the blogging has been slow recently, in my attempt to get my Masters done by the spring, but in honour of last Wednesday's Student Day of Action, I thought I'd say a few words about the cost of postsecondary education.

The primary purpose of the Student Day of Action is to protest rising tuition fees, and to urge governments to reduce or freeze tuition. I'm tempted to write it off simply as rent seeking (and certainly, to some of the protesters, it is), but to be fair, there's a little more to it than that. I'd like to examine some of the issues.

First, let's consider who benefits from university education. Obviously, the individual receiving the education benefits, primarily from increased status and future income. The status part is sort of zero-sum though, so I'll focus on direct economic benefits. Society as a whole also benefits from education. A more educated population creates more economic opportunities for everyone. In both these respects, extending education to more and more people has diminishing returns: very smart, creative, ambitious people benefit immensely, and create immense benefits for others, from education, while at some point the cost of educating less academically oriented people clearly begins to outweigh the total benefits.

The funny thing is, the people who protest high tuition are students. If the tuition is too high, why are you paying it? Shouldn't the people protesting be the people who choose not to pay it? So clearly tuition isn't too high for the people who choose to pay it. The question remains though: are tuition fees so high that we are producing a suboptimal number of graduates? (Or conversely: are they so low we are producing too many graduates?)

I've also heard the argument that university education makes people better citizens, and that this is another source of external, public good that comes from education. I think this is very hard to prove. It's more likely that people who are good citizens tend to go to university, but they would be good citizens even if they didn't. I don't even think this holds for many fields: most engineering students I know don't much know or care about politics or their communities. I think it may be true that social sciences do encourage good citizenship (through understanding of society), but I'm not sure about "liberal arts" either. I think widespread liberal arts education is probably a massive waste of resources, in which most of the benefits accrue to the student, who obtains no economically useful skills or knowledge but some degree of "status" and a great deal of satisfaction at thinking him- or herself more cultured than holders of science degrees.

Ideally, we want the tax-paying public and the student to pay in proportion to the benefits they receive at the economically efficient level. How do we calculate this? Well, it's tricky. Any estimate would have to be rough, but we could probably come up with something which is reasonable within a factor of two. That's not very good though. It's a hard problem. We can say for certain, though, that the correct balance is definitely not one in which the public bears the full cost.

The difference between finding the optimal price for a university degree and finding the optimal price for some other product, such as a litre of gasoline, is that because the price is so high (tens of thousands of dollars directly, maybe hundreds of thousands when opportunity cost is taken into account), the some of the standard assumptions about economic decision making don't apply. (Incidentally, last semester for my Behavioural Economics class I wrote a paper on the effects of price scales on risk preferences, so I can happily say I know what I'm talking about). If you really can't come up with the money, you won't be able to pay your tuition, even if you know it is a good investment in the long-term.

Fortunately, we have a partial solution to that: student loans. The student loan system is good, because it means people can afford university even when they can't afford university. Sure, it sucks to be starting your adult life with thirty grand in student debt, but hey, you decided it was worth it. I say it's only a partial solution though because it doesn't account for one thing: risk. There's always a risk that your university degree isn't going to pay off in the way you thought, especially since a lot can happen to the economy in the four years you're in university. On average, this should produce too many people with "safe" degrees, because potential students have to compensate for the risk.

Ideally, we'd like to balance this risk by shifting it to the something like the government, which can afford to be fairly risk neutral due to scale. One possible solution to this problem that I considered is, rather than making people pay tuition in advance, have them agree to pay an increased income tax once they graduate. More thinking leads me to believe this is a dumb solution because (1) all the deadweight loss of income tax would still apply, (2) there are serious enforcement issues for people who move out of the jurisdiction, and worst of all, (3) it encourages people to pursue degrees with little economic value, since they would only pay in proportion to what they earn, not to the cost of their education.

So I have to conclude that the present system is actually pretty good--or, at least, it's hard to come up with a much better system. A few moderate reforms would be good (such as not tying student loans to parents' income--I know a lot of people who have been seriously put off by that one), but overall, I don't think there's much to complain about.

Disclaimer: I was one of those lucky people whose education was entirely paid for by his forward-thinking parents. So far, my formal university education has been a massive misallocation of resources.

On the Subject of Beer Bottle Deposits and Sunday Wages

2007-01-15T14:03:00.000-05:00

As you may know, I'm not a big fan of capitalism in general; but I do think that it can have a lot of good points, if it's done right. Unfortunately, it's not done right, due to both well-meaning but stupid market intervention on behalf of citizens, and due to downright selfish and hypocritical interventions on behalf of capitalists.

The inspiration for this post comes from something that happened to me yesterday. I finally got around to returning some empty beer bottles. After hauling my load of 36 bottles (worth $3.60 in deposits--much less than they should be worth if you ask me) two blocks to the grocery store, I find out that they don't accept bottle returns on Sundays. I was sort of pissed.

Two things bother me about this. One is that I had to haul the bottles two blocks to the nearest grocery store and not just half a block to the nearest dépanneur. The reason for this is that stores only buy back bottles of brands of beer that they sell. Why? It doesn't make a lot of sense, really; the bottles are all the same. What it must come down to is that the stores lose money on accepting returns, and therefore have an incentive to turn away any returnees that they can, legally. The incentives are all wrong. They need to re-engineer the system so that accepting bottle returns is profitable for vendors.

The other thing, of course, is that they don't accept bottles on Sunday. I suspect this is due to another stupid Québec law. Of course, even if it were legal to return bottles on Sunday, it would be even more costly than usual for the vendor to accept them, due to another stupid Québec law that restricts the number of employees on the floor on a Sunday.

If I were an employee of somewhere (which I'm not--I'm a freeloading student), I'd be asking myself: why is the government preventing me from working on a Sunday if I want to? And furthermore, if I can only find a job for which someone is willing to pay me $5 an hour (less than the minimum wage), why is the government preventing me from taking that job?

The answer, I think, is that the government means well. Lots of people don't want to work on Sundays, so by restricting the number of employees, we can ensure that not too many people are inconvenienced. The minimum wage prevents employees from paying unfairly low wages. These measures work, but not very well. Market economics would suggest, instead, that fair wages would be determined by what people are willing to work for (i.e. as long as employees choose to work for that wage, it's fair). If people prefer not to work on Sundays, then they will demand higher wages on Sundays, and the number of workers on the floor on a Sunday will reflect the economic optimum according to this preference.

That's the theory, and in theory it works. In practice, however, markets are not free. Employees are not paid the market rate for their labour; at best, their wage can be thought of as an aggregate, while at worst it can be thought of as having little relation to the market value of their labour, due to the severe restrictions placed on them. Employees in, say, supermarkets, can't just negotiate their wages from shift to shift unless they want to be fired.

Paradoxically, the minimum wage, an institution that is meant to protect workers, is actually one of the institutions that prevents workers from negotiating their own wages, and thereby shifts the balance of bargaining power to the management. It means that at times when fair market labour prices would be low (high supply and low demand), employers must pay at least the minimum wage, and thus when natural labour prices are high, paying the market price would lead them to pay an average of more than the market aggregate.

What if we ditched the minimum wage, and instead introduced legislation that prevented employers from requiring workers to work a given shift at a fixed wage? Employees could, in effect, "bid" on shifts, offering to work a given shift for a specified minimum wage, and then the employer would choose to hire the n employees with the lowest bids at the wage of the n^th lowest bid. This would ensure that the economically optimal number of employees work a given shift (according to the employer's decision of how many to employ), and conversely that they get paid the economically optimal wage. Sure, there would be some employees with high standards who might not get many shifts, but they could take other jobs as well (there is a slight problem of combinatorial auctioning here, but it probably wouldn't be too huge).

The government has a lot of power to make markets work better, to make them more free. If only it did so more often.

Spiders on Drugs

2007-01-07T13:19:00.000-05:00

Via The Swamp, the funniest thing I've seen in a while.

Web 2.0 goes ironic

2007-01-06T11:14:00.000-05:00

I've commented before about how Internet communications are destroying local communities and replacing them with virtual communities. I didn't say so explicitly in that post, but I'm going to make the claim ex post facto that I predicted a backlash (heh). Well, it turns out I was right! (heh) However, what I didn't predict was the rather bizarre and ironic form that the backlash would take.

French site Peuplade (in French, of course) is a social networking site with a twist: instead of linking people by more conventional criteria--shared interests, where they went to school, etc.--it links people by where they live. Specifically, it's aim is for people in Paris to get to know their neighbours, who they might not meet otherwise.

If the irony is lost on you, here it is: a hundred years ago, say, these people would have gotten to know one another naturally, through interactions with their local community. Today, with all the technology we have for quickly traveling over long distances and even more quickly communicating over them, the reasons for these local interactions have disappeared, and we are now free (!) to be strangers in our own communities. So "free," in fact, that we now need to go online in order to meet our neighbours at all!

Here's the article that inspired this post. Expect to see similar social networking sites to pop up for other big cities around the world. You heard it here first.

Oh, and Happy New Year!

Mice on a Plane

2006-12-15T12:04:00.000-05:00

The BBC is reporting on a Saudi Arabian Airlines flight on which approximately 80 live mice were accidentally released in the cabin. You know what the best way to take care of a mouse problem on a plane is? Snakes.

Top Ten Albums of 2005

2006-12-13T15:36:00.000-05:00

Hello all, and welcome to my third annual retrospective on the best music of the year before. (See also: 2004, 2003). 2005 was a great year for music, and 2006 looks set to be even better. Here it is:

10. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema
More goodness from Vancouver-based New Pornographers. It's not a great advancement on their first two albums, but it still has lots of memorable, catchy tunes, and a few really good ones too, like "Use It" and "Streets of Fire."

9. Spoon - Gimme Fiction
I have to admit, I probably would have forgotten all about this album if so many of its songs hadn't been featured in the movie Stranger than Fiction, which was probably my favorite movie of 2006. Spoon is consistently awesome.

8. Gorillaz - Demon Days
Yeah, I know: they're cartoons. But they're cartoons who perform songs by Damon Albarn. It's full of great songs.

7. My Morning Jacket - Z
My first reaction upon listening to this album was "WTF? This doesn't sound like MMJ!" It took a while to grow on me, but I eventually took it for what it was: innovative and high quality music by one of my favorite bands.

6. Magnolia Electric Co. - What Comes After the Blues
The Magnolia album before it was better. The Magnolia album after it was better. But this one was still pretty darn good. I just can't say anything bad about Jason Molina.

5. Matt Sweeney and Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Superwolf
A collaboration between two of my favorite musicians, Matt Sweeney of Chavez (probably the most underrated band of the '90s) and Bonnie Billy, a.k.a. Will Oldham. Good, country-ish stuff.

4. Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary
I'm always a bit skeptical of the up-and-coming trendy local band, but these guys really have it. Not to be confused with another up-and-coming trendy Montreal band, the absolutely awful AIDS Wolf. Gee, I hope none of the wolves in the parade have AIDS.

3. David Thomas Broughton - The Complete Guide to Insufficiency
This was one of those albums that makes your jaw drop with its originality. It makes your jaw drop a lot more when you actually see DTB perform live, and quickly realize that the album was recorded live, in one take, without any backing musicians. It's a little hard to explain: he sings and plays acoustic guitar, and he samples himself and then uses his own previous performance as the backing track, slowly building from a lone voice to a chorus. If you get a chance, see him live! As well as being innovative, the music is also beautiful.

2. Death Cab for Cutie - Plans
This is probably my most mainstream choice of the year, but it had to go in here because it's one of those albums that's just good. Every song on it is good. I don't even care if you make fun of me for being emo.

1. Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy
If this band is the only good thing last.fm ever suggests to me (which, so far, it is), signing up will still have been the best investment of time I've ever made. I haven't been this excited about a band in years. This record is not just a collection of fantastic songs, it also holds together as a fantastic album, the best I've heard since Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea from 1998 (which is one of my three favorite albums ever). Listen to it if it's the last thing you do. Sad and beautiful.

Year's Biggest Disappointment:
Beck - Guero
I was hoping for something as good as Mutations. I thought at least I'd get something as good as Sea Change. Instead, I got something that tried to sound a lot like Odelay and came off just plain unoriginal. Other than the first single "E-Pro," this album is totally forgettable.

Honorable Mentions:
Sufjan Stevens' Illinoise! made everyone else's top 10 list for 2005. I think it's a good album, but after a year of hindsight, it didn't quite make the cut. Billy Corgan's The Future Embrace was a hell of a lot better than I'd expected, but still not top 10 material. And Holopaw's Quit and/or Fight was also pretty freaking good, but there just wasn't room.

It's not just a crime against animals, it's a crime against fashion!

2006-12-08T12:07:00.000-05:00

Via the BBC, here we see a controversial photo of an apparently stoned-off-her-ass Madonna wearing an un-PC and hideously ugly Chinchilla fur coat. Aside from pseudo-eco-terrorists PETA and the fashion police though, who really cares? If Madonna had paraded around decked out in leather, would anyone have even noticed? If she had gone to a restaurant and had a steak dinner, would we care? This last point is a bit disturbing from an animal rights perspective: meat from a cow (or a chinchilla) can be eaten once, but a coat made out of a cow (or chinchilla) can be worn for many years! Protesting the manufacture of durable goods from animals is a waste of time as long as people eat meat. (Don't get me wrong, I say wear leather and eat steak.)

I'll tell you why: chinchillas are cute and cows aren't. This is the same reason Paul McCartney was out on the Gulf of St. Lawrence ice floes protesting the seal hunt instead of the cod fishery: Baby seals = cute. Cod = ugly.

Are economists a higher life form?

2006-11-30T23:28:00.000-05:00

I just read this article from the Philadelphia Inquirer, which is about the work of an anthropologist who has come up with what I think is a very insightful model of human relationships. Relationships can be divided into four types: communal sharing, equality matching, authority matching, and market pricing. Social conflicts mostly arise from confusion over which relationship mode is being used. (Just read the damn article!) As I said, I think this is a great idea that explains a lot; however, I have a few issues, mostly not with the model but with the article.

First of all, market pricing doesn't fit in with the other three relationships. The other three are things that people do; market pricing is something which arises indirectly from what people do. Namely, in an "ideal" market, prices arise from people acting "rationally;" that is, being as greedy as they can get away with. The fourth paradigm would be better called something like "rational trading."

It also neglects, as far as I can see, all non-peaceful relationships. Where does robbery fall, I wonder? Could it be that the fourth paradigm would better be expressed as "greedy exploitation," and that it is only expressed in modern society as trading because we have laws and police that discourage people from just killing me and taking my stuff? The author of the article goes on to suggest that the reason people have a hard time understanding economics is that the fourth paradigm is the newest in the development of human culture. In light of what I just said, I think this is wrong for two reasons.

First, if we see that market pricing is really just greedy snatching, it becomes apparent that it is not the newest social form, but the oldest. It is only because the other three have arisen that it is now expressed in a more civilized way.

Second, the article's claim that people have a hard time understanding economics is because they don't truly understand the "market pricing" paradigm is completely backwards. The standard model of economics considers only this paradigm; two centuries after Adam Smith, economists are only now beginning to incorporate other, "irrational" behaviours into their models, and with limited success. As social relationships go, "market pricing" is actually the simplest to understand! The fact that greed is the only motivating instinct that we have a thorough economic understanding of is precisely why the author can erroneously mislabel this as something abstract like "market pricing." The fact is, people just don't understand the far-reaching effects of large numbers of social interactions; even the science of economics has only managed this for situations in which some very particular assumptions hold, and I postulate that it is this limit that prevents widespread intuitive understanding of market pricing.

The article ends with the idea that to have an intuitive understanding of market pricing is to "take a step or two up the evolutionary ladder." While I don't disagree that understanding standard economics is useful, and is an indicator of intelligence, the implication here is grotesque! An "intuitive grasp of economics" here can be taken to mean an ability to act without any motivation other than greed! And to suggest that this represents some kind of advancement of humankind is pathological. There's more to life than stuff!

Other minor gripes: the whole idea of an "evolutionary ladder" is a bit silly, even as an analogy. Whether you're a human or a worm, you're either alive or you aren't; there is no other objective measure of evolutionary superiority. Also, the quotation "From each according to ability, to each according to need" should properly be attributed to John Smith of the Jamestown Colony, not to Marx.

Of Mice and Men...and Keyboards

2006-11-29T12:36:00.000-05:00

A little over two years, I got a Logitech Cordless Desktop Pro keyboard and mouse combo. I regret to inform you that it is now dead.

A few weeks ago, I started to notice that the mouse was acting up a little bit. Not properly releasing from clicks, not tracking as smoothly as usual, etc. Then this morning, I dripped some coffee on my keyboard and it's totally fubar. Given my track record, two years is a remarkably long time for a keyboard to last in my hands, so I'm not too disappointed. For now I'm using my spare keyboard (yes, I'm a geek, I have a backup keyboard and mouse), and I'm shopping for a new keyboard and mouse.

The problem is that I can't get what I want. I have a few issues with the ergonomics of standard keyboards. A lot has been said about the retardedness of QWERTY keyboards, and I won't even get into that; besides, QWERTY is the standard and it's not something I can change. A lot has also been said about how stupid it is to put the Caps Lock key where it is. But that's not my main issue. My main issue is with the numeric keypad: it should be on the other side. Having the numeric keypad on the right means that you have to have the mouse even further to the right. That means that you have to do one of two things that are both ergonomic no-nos: you either have to sit slightly off center of the keyboard and reach to the left to type, or you have to reach to the right to use the mouse. This might be excusable if there were some reason for it, but there isn't; the numeric keypad would work perfectly well on the left side of the keyboard.

Another thing that bugs me about keyboards is size. Why do all decent keyboards these days have like 150 keys and take up your whole desk? It's retarded. I don't need a "Shopping" button for God's sake! I just want the basic 104-key layout with maybe a volume control, that's all, and I want it the keyboard to be about the size of the keys, not surrounded by a 3-inch plastic border.

I think the closest thing to what I want would be the Logitech diNovo Cordless Desktop, with its sweet detachable numeric keypad. The only problems are that the mouse is ugly and uncomfortable and it costs a whopping $180. So, sigh, I'll probably just get something fairly cheap (I saw a cordless desktop from Microsoft on sale at Bureau en Gros for only $80--I'm a little bit afraid it will self-destruct if I try to use it with Linux though) until they come out with my dream keyboard.

Oh, and if you want to get me a Christmas present, I wouldn't mind one of these. Drool!

Calgary (The first in a series: things I said I would post about and didn't)

2006-11-21T14:46:00.000-05:00

Back in August, I went to my friend Eric's wedding in Calgary. At the time, I said I'd write about my impressions of Alberta, and I never did. Until now. I'll start by saying that one thing I noticed about Albertans (especially compared to Montrealers) is that they are unbelievably nice. The mountains are beautiful, and the mountain towns like Banff and Canmore are really nice (Banff is a bit of a tourist trap though). I don't think anyone will dispute me saying that the rest of the province is a bit boring scenery-wise though: almost perfectly flat, nothing but grain fields, and roads so straight that driving around the slightest bend is an event.

Now to tell you what I think of the city of Calgary. Proud Calgarians can skip the rest of the post; I'm not trying to be mean, but that's probably how it'll come out.

I think the problem with Calgary is threefold: for one, there are no constraints to its outward growth. Two, that growth is very rapid. Three, almost all of that growth has been in the age of the automobile and cheap energy. The result is less of a city than an isolated concentration of suburban sprawl. The one exception to the sprawl rule would be the downtown, which seems to be something out of one of Jane Jacobs' worst nightmares, a dense cluster of phallic monuments to oil and finance companies that turns into an urban wasteland come six o'clock.

Kunstler famously described suburbia as the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world, and Calgary is a stunning example of this. The vast wealth generated by the city is being sunk into suburban infrastructure with no future. Everything in the city depends on the ability to drive. The public transit system seems to be something of a city-wide joke. There seem to be no local shopping streets in the city at all; just malls and strip malls, and the requisite gigantic parking lots that go with them. The diminishing returns on this style of development are readily apparent; it takes ages to get anywhere, and you have to drive, and the traffic is just as bad as in downtown Montreal. I seem to recall reading something once about how in modern cities, the space devoted to cars is more than the space devoted to people; I would guess that somewhere like Calgary, the ratio is dramatic! The thing that shocked me most of all about the city is that it has no passenger train service! VIA Rail now only serves the Edmonton branch of the line, and the only rail traffic in Calgary is freight.

I really worry about places like Calgary. What will happen there when gas costs $2 a litre? $3? $5? $10? I can't imagine. They can't help but become slums. If you think otherwise, that more oil will be found in time, or that technology will come along to rescue our happy motoring existence, you're fooling yourself. Don't believe me? Here are a few places to start:

The End of Suburbia - a 50-minute documentary available on YouTube.
The Oil Drum - the most comprehensive site on the web for information about oil and energy. See their introduction and their response to last week's CERA report that the mainstream media so unquestioningly reported as the end to our energy worries.

Too Little, Too Zune

2006-11-20T10:51:00.000-05:00

I know the other day I was picking on the approach that Apple was taking with the iPod, but I have to give Apple credit for not doing anything nearly so stupid as what Microsoft is doing. The new Microsoft player won't play tracks purchased from Microsoft's music service and won't work with their new operating system out of the box!

This whole DRM thing is really getting out of control. Nothing makes me more hesitant to buy music (or books, movies, etc.) from a legal source than the thought that I'm not going to be able to use it when and where I want. It's one thing to expect people to pay for something they can get for free; it's another to expect them to do it when the free version is better!

Centrist? We'll See About That!

2006-11-18T14:25:00.000-05:00

I recently took the World's Smallest Political Quiz, only to learn that I am a centrist.
Now, anyone who knows me and knows anything about my politics knows this is a load of crap. I admit, the answers I gave on the quiz might lead someone to believe I was a fairly moderate person, but it's the questions the quiz didn't ask that make the difference.

It turns out that I'm not the only one who has criticized this particular political quiz, unsurprisingly. The quiz is run by a libertarian advocacy group, and the main criticism is that it overclassifies people as libertarians (and that it is Americentric, which I can forgive). My opinion is a bit different though; I think that a large number of Americans genuinely are libertarians, even if they don't identify themselves as such; the traditional dichotomy of left vs. right has made them confused about their political identity.

My problem is not that the two-dimensional characterization of people's political beliefs is one more dimension than we need, but that it's too few dimensions. Obviously, if you want, you can characterize a person's political beliefs in an indefinitely large number of dimensions, limited only to the number of things people can have political opinions on. Obviously though, people's answers to many political questions are highly correlated, so it is possible to reduce this to a lower-dimensional characterization. The traditional system attempts to map this multidimensional space of political beliefs onto a one-dimensional line of left vs. right. The system used in the quiz, and in other models I've seen, extend this to a two-dimensional manifold. But why one dimension? Why two? Do we really know what an appropriate number of political dimensions is? Has anyone ever bothered to find out? I'm thinking I might be the person to do it.

Here's what I'm thinking of doing: 1) making a very large survey of political questions, as many and as varied as I can reasonably expect people to answer, say n. 2) collecting the answers from a large number of people, say m. I now have a collection of m points in an n-dimensional space. 3) Performing a principal component analysis on the results. For those readers who haven't studied statistical pattern recognition, basically what this does is figure out what are the sets of issues that are most strongly correlated. Essentially, it finds the best way to sort people's political beliefs. It might be that our traditional views of left vs. right are completely wrong, and that there is another set of issues that more meaningfully divides people.

So this is a big project I'm thinking about working on. Maybe in the summer. It's time to finally sort out this left vs. right nonsense. I'd appreciate any feedback from people regarding what sorts of questions to ask in the survey, or any other thoughts.

Democracy Now!

2006-11-11T14:41:00.000-05:00

By now I'm sure we all know that the Democrats had a field day in the midterm election on Tuesday, taking over both the House and the Senate and sending a message to the hawks in the administration. The most important result of the election, though, went completely unnoticed in the media, except for one little map from the BBC website. See if you can spot it:

See it? Yeah, that's right: New Hampshire is now the 11^th Canadian province. Hooray! It's a Remembrance Day miracle!

Election Day U.S.A.

2006-11-07T11:00:00.000-05:00

I just came across an interesting article from the last U.S. election about election politics. It's a bit disheartening, but it rings true: it's all a failure, not enough people have a clue to really vote properly. One quotation I found particularly salient:

Most Americans simply do not make a connection between tax policy and the over-all economic condition of the country. Whatever heuristic they are using, it is definitely not doing the math for them.

So true, unfortunately. Of course, it's really not much of a surprise that most people don't know much about politics, since most people are completely absent from the political process except for one day every couple of years.

Headline News

2006-11-02T22:36:00.000-05:00

Another one for the "BBC needs to try reading their headlines out loud to themselves" file: Former bandmates slam Boy George.

Another one for the "Japan is fucked up" file: Faking it as a priest in Japan.

Halloween Update

2006-10-31T12:41:00.000-05:00

I haven't blogged in a while, so I thought I should write a little update.

This week is that week that every semester has. The Crazy Week. Two midterms, assignment, essay, and lots to do on my project.
Speaking of my classes, I don't think I ever mentioned that in a pathetic attempt to escape from engineering, I'm currently taking two random courses which have nothing to do with my degree. Behavioural Economics is fun but easy. Political Philosophy is interesting, but isn't really doing it for me in some ways. I just find myself wanting to start every essay with "Almost everything that Philosopher X said is wrong, because..." but then that would require writing a whole book, rather than a 900-word essay.
The winter is coming. Boo-urns.
I submitted my law applications on Sunday. I'm applying to Toronto, Ottawa, Osgoode, and Queen's, roughly in order of decreasing preference. I'm also probably going to apply to one or two places outside of Ontario, but they all have their application deadlines at sensible times.
I finally gave in and joined facebook after realizing that I knew some professors who were on it and feeling out of touch as a result. The funny thing about facebook is that it seems like all your friends are on it, until you join and realize that hardly any of them are.

I hope to start blogging a lot more once this week is over, and maybe do a minor redesign.

Oh, and Queen's is gonna Kill McGill this weekend in CIS Hockey.

Recursive Definition of the Day

2006-10-17T12:38:00.000-04:00

In game theory, a rationalizable strategy is a strategy composed of actions which are best responses against players who are playing rationalizable strategies.

It makes a lot more sense than it sounds like it does.

The Personal Statement I'm Not Sending In With My Law School Applications*

2006-10-15T22:59:00.000-04:00

Thanks to the Admissions Committee for considering my application, even though it's your only job. My application to law school comes at a time of great change in my life: a time when I realize that I wanted to be rich, and that I wasn't going to get rich in my current field. Thus, I said "screw it" to my degree and applied to law school, where the real money is.

I would love to be a lawyer, because a lawyer's job is to be evil and I like being evil. I eat kittens for breakfast, just to demonstrate how evil I am. And I don't mean strays, I mean people's pets! Some people think I am really fond of playing the devil's advocate, but really I just hate everything they believe and want to tell them how wrong they are. I also run the 100 m sprint for the varsity track team, so I would make a really good ambulance chaser.

In regard to my academic standing: I think it would be fair for you to add 20 to 30 percent to all of my university marks, since I was drunk off my ass for almost all of my lectures and exams. The reason I drank was that I have glaucoma, and since smoking medical marijuana in class is prohibited by Ontario's anti-smoking laws, I had to do the next best thing. You should also add about 40 points to my LSAT score because I did so much coke that day that I couldn't properly grip a pen and kept falling out of my chair. Oh yeah, and the part in my writing sample about the talking hamburgers? That was just the LSD talking.

In conclusion: I am a genius who is perfectly suited to being a lawyer. And I will send somebody over to break your kneecaps if I don't get in. The End.

* In case anyone is reading this who actually is reading my law school application: this is humour.

Those Evil-Natured Robots...

2006-10-02T11:40:00.000-04:00

I just discovered longbets.org, a site on which people make predictions about the distant future (at least two years) and then make bets on whether they will be correct. Many of the predictions are stupid, most are somewhat interesting, though not many are very exciting (a lot have to do with such blasé subjects as global warming and machine intelligence. My personal favorite prediction?

By the year 2150, over 50% of schools in the USA or Europe will require classes in defending against robot attacks.