How do you tell a Canadian from an American? Accents may be deceptive but just
ask them to complete the following sentence: the beginning of the long dash...
This is a phrase that has been part of the canadian lexicon, the canadian psyche, perhaps, since the thirties. It is repeated daily on the national radio service (CBC, radio 1) daily, at 12:59pm eastern. It is the most pervasive and persistent demonstration of the work of research, and the National Research Council. It potentially does more for national unity than the railway once did - in its quiet, semaphoric way.
Sharon Theesen, in the late 80's wrote a collection of poems entitled the beginning of the long dash. it should have won the governor general's medal that year (it was nominated) for the title alone. it strikes a chord.
There's something particular about an event that happens everywhere at the same time each day in such a vast country, its people spread so far apart, as a nation synchronizes watches to the following (any canadians out there, feel free to chant along...)
Now for the National Research Council Official Time Signal. The beginning of the long dash, following ten seconds of silence, indicates exactly one o'clock" (EST).
peep peep peep peep peep            
peeeeeeeeeeeeeep
Are there culturally identifying nation-based events like this where you are?
Jazz, a gangland dance sequence, hair curlers, shower sandles.
A tailor, a baker, a coolie - with secret pasts.
A landlandy with a voice to shake the foundations of her tenament dwellings.
A need to find a "kung fu genius" to fight a kung fu master gone bad.
A hero in a hole with a stick.
Incredible kung fu wire fighting choreographer.
And it's a comedy.
See the trailer. If you can see the film, see it wtihout the subtitles.
The UK Government is in the throes of wrestling with
"control orders" as a way to manage terrorist suspects it can't just bring to trial because that might expose sensitive somethings or someones. So what can you do?
The govn't has been saying that it will use control orders to send these untriable, wicked, terrorist suspects to their living rooms. Of course it's not that these bad people will be subject to chintz prints and overstuffed furniture without the benefit of cell phone or internet that is at issue.
No longer at Belmarsh (what's been called the UK's Guantanamo), these "terrorist suspects" (so far, men only, foreign nationals only) will be sent to their UK homes.
The concerns expressed about control orders is that they can be invoked by the Home Secretary alone. As proposed, this means that up to 7 days after these orders have been put in place, a judge can review them and recind them (set the people free?).
Many MP's are calling for only a judge to be allowed to make such an order - no politician should have the privilege of recinding the rights of the magna carta (no house arrest without judicial process).
Other MP's and legal experts (as interviewed on Broadcasting House, BBC, Radio 4 Sunday Feb 27 05) point to the fact that such orders, which can now be applied to British citizens as well, might be used against political disidents, animal welfare activists, or anyone who could be, for the benefit of the govn't of the day, construed as a "terrorist suspect."
One MP, speaking from personal experience, said that this proposed legislation was reminiscent of house arrest in South Africa in 1968 to control people who spoke against the Government.
A responding MP said that the comparison could not be made fairly. Of course. It's always different when you're the one doing it, isn't it?
There's a
List of links covering the topic at the Guardian newspaper's site.
no pain, no gain.
All great art is born from suffering
etc etc etc
A friend of mine, however, once put it somewhat differently. We were staying in a cold basement flat in a house next to an illegal body shop, living on UI or student loans, speaking of life, karma, and our respective futures
"Well you know," he proffered, "no pain...no pain"
Welcome to no pain 2, read as "no pain, squared" as in
(no pain)^2 = "no pain no pain"
Where you can explore with your tray tables down, your seat backs reclined, and your seat belt unfastened. Please feel free to use electronic and portable devices such as laptops or personal stereos. Cell phones may continue to be used. nopain2 is a smoke free environment. In the event of turbulence, the fasten the seat belt sign will be illuminated.
Have been looking for a fast, robust usb2 flash drive. Reviews seem to point to Corsair's Flash Voyager drives.
They're cool. They're fast. They bounce. They can handle getting caught in the washing machine, or being dropped in a mug of ale.
The pictures on the web site don't do them justice: they are small, thin, and the rubberized coating is besides functional, just neat, if not unique in the flash market. They're also thin, which makes carrying them in you jean's coin pocket doable. Various reviews have pointed to the bounceableness of the drives as well as their leak-proofness (they survived bear dunking and washing machine full cycles)
And yes, they are fast. The reviews (many now linked to Corsair's site) show that they do manage their claimed throughput speeds.
A couple of design points: (1)no physical lock to make the device read only, but since the point of these is mainly to enable fast shared writes, that's not a major issue. (2) there's nowhere to put the cap: it does not stick on the end of the drive so you need to (a) put the cap somewhere safe and (b) remember where you put it. Not optimal.
Finally, Corsair also offers downloadable security software for locking out a partiction on the drive from access. They do not have a mac version, but their tech support (Ram Guy) suggests that such a product may be in the works.
In the meantime, i'm using a password protected disk image, created with osx's disk utility. Another colleague, Mauricio Varea, suggests that you can also partition the drive on a windows box, and then on the mac, reformat one of those partitions as an HFS+ (mac) formatted drive. Cool.
In the UK, these are available at scan.co.uk and dabs.com
Why not just say "go to the light...to the light"?
The safety films on aircrafts always explain last that you should not inflate your flotation device until you are outside the plane. It then shows the emergency exit as a white, glowing light, towards which the camera (in place of the imagined you, exiting) is moving as if what? what is that white light? where are we all supposed to be going? why is the theme music so cheerful? do they know something we don't? think happy thoughts think happy thoughts...
There is a famous NFB cartoon called "the Big Snit" (made by Winnipeger Richard Condie) which features an older couple and some of the things that drive them crazy about each other. Famous scenes include the husband complaining of a wife during a scrabble game "stop shaking your eyes (she does take her eyes off and shakes them - they occaisionally get stuck the way a toy's eyes do from time to time) -" you shake them over here you shake them over there"
She retorts that he is always sawing. His favorite TV show is sawing and when watching he gets out his saw and saws along - sawing the furniture as soon as the show announcer says "begin to saw"
This inspired a new possible ending for the safety video: in the event of an emergency rather than having oxygen masks drop from the ceiling, and life jackets retrieved, drills would come down on their power cords and passengers would be instructed to "begin to drill" to take the plane apart before it crashed.
The Royal Ontario Museum has had one of the best presented ranges of Asian collections anywhere. Korea, Japan, China.
The British Museum is a grand place, with a masterful range of artifacts, but when it comes to the Asian artifacts it can't hold a candle to the ROM for presentation. Where the ROM sux, unless this has changed in the past couple years, is the lack of explanations for its displays. Here places like the British Museum come first every time.
Still, it's the display, the sense of mood, that the ROM creates. There's one room that has a set of wood carved statues of Chinese deities that is remarkable. The near life-sized carvings are on a raised platform with a wooden railing running round it - as if you're looking into a forest. Around the walls of the room are massive tapestries depicting scenes of enlightenment, and more carved sacred figures. The tone of the room is hushed, dark, deep. It's a wonderfully soothing space, with rich wooden benches for resting.
There's another gallery that had the statuary of a funereal garden or temple (forgive me, i do not know the terms). A model explains how the complete layout works. Two favorite pieces are larger than life grey statues of two guardian-like figures. one a warrior and one if i recall aright a scholar.
It was always disturbing that the museum hosted functions in this space (the gallery has large windows and you could see it from the street). Weird karma, that. Have a toast by someone's guardian of the dead?
The ROM also has a great rock/mineral collection. Here the explanations are better, and the flow of the displays are more tractable than the overwhelming number of cases at say the Natural History Museum in London.
Unfortunately, right now it seems that
most of the first floor (where all these galleries are) is closed (the page on closures is updated regularly) for a whopping renovation: the new facade is to have the museum appearing to come forth
from a giant crystal. Only hope this doesn't wipe out the great stuff that's been there like the last renovation did!
Royal Ontario Museum
100 Queen's Park
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 2C6
http://www.rom.on.ca
If you like Sushi and are in Toronto, the best deal and best sushi in town has to be at Sushi Time.
They have two locations: one up around bloor and spadina, and one on the trendy queen street west.
They have great lunch specials and great combos. My favorites are the sashimi combos, which come in baseball, hockey and basketball sizes. Combos come with miso soup and green salad. All this for around 10$ Canadian for the baseball size.
The staff is also excellent, and seem to float between both locations.
Sushi Time
394 Bloor W, 416-323-2288
339 Queen W, 416-977-2222
My preference is for the location up on Bloor.
Yesterday (fri Feb 18 05), mSpace was slashdot'd. (Thanks to Marko Daniel for pointing out the significance of this).
My first experience with the slashdot community. As Spock would say, "Fascinating."
Interesting to me how ready people there were to hold forth - some at length - about their assumptions about the system without actually exploring beneath a cursory glance at the article the set off the steam release: an article in
the Register, http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/17/semantic_web/.
Most of the entries for instance seized on the fact that currently the demo only supports mozila-based browsers. There was a tussle over whether or not it was right to ignore Microsoft's Internet Explorer. Judgements were flying about this - happily assuming or assigning intent, one way or the other, about goodness or badness of this decision.
Interestingly again, based on the likely number of developers on the site, i don't think anyone suggested Time as a possible factor in terms of deciding what to support: working with w3c standards compliant DOM manipulations gives us multiple browser support. Trying then to figure out how to adapt this for IE is possible, but for a research team, takes extra cycles that, in a time-limited project, were really much better spent elsewhere.
Even more interesting, that great discussion could largely be seen as a tangent to the issue at hand.
Don't mean to sound down on the slashdot exchange: met some cool folks the team wouldn't otherwise have encountered, and learned about some related projects that were new to all of us. That was great. Thank you to the person who kicked that off.
Also learned that we may need to do some work to expose more about the underlying part of the work so people at a glance can see what the semantic-webness of the project is.