Tom West’s whiteboard admonishment to his team — “not everything worth doing is worth doing well” &mdash was quoted by Tracy Kidder in Soul of a New Machine.

I have always wanted to live by these words, but it is hard for me to do so. (q.v. what you learn from a Ph.D.)

My boss Kevin just sent me a link to a great rant that makes this point using a different quotation: Better is the enemy of Good.

Actually, Voltaire’s quote is “Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien,” which is pleasantly ambiguous: either better or perfect is the enemy of the good. You decide. Perhaps they are the same. To me, Voltaire’s quote actually illuminates West’s. West’s quote always had me wondering “should I do things poorly?” The truth is that good and done is better than well done but coming.

 › normative     2008-01-24 14:20   ...0 comments

I just found out about this cool non-profit site that fronts for microcredit institutions. You can lend $25 to someone, helping to back their microcredit loan. When the money is repaid by the person you get your $25 back to lend to a new person, or to withdraw from the system.

The site works with organizations that specialize in microfinance and who know how to recommend loans that are viable. The current default rate is 0.24%, on 23065 loans. There are currently 147525 lenders like you and me in their system. And if the loan does default, well a charitable donation of $25 is not going to break you, eh?

You don’t make any interest on the money, and the players along the way cover their costs with this interest. So it is more of a refundable charitable contribution than an investment. However, you are directly funding the person, so there is a social benefit.

I am thinking of getting involved in this.

 › cool     2007-11-22 13:16   ...0 comments

If you read people’s opinions about proportional representation in Ontario then you will very quickly find people arguing about whether it is democratic to vote blindly for a list of people, not knowing who or how many will get into power. They say that the list people will be beholden only to the party, and will not be accountable.

People in this debate are ignoring that we have a party system in Parliament in Ontario, and all the nitpicking about details is missing the big point. The party system will NOT change here, and once any MPP gets to Queen’s Park they will vote with their party almost always.

In our current “First Past the Post” (FPTP) system, the truth is that the “list” concept is here already. It’s called “who the parties are running in each riding”. Once people are elected they have to do what the party tells them to. The vast majority of people are casting a vote for the party, not the candidate. And even those who cast a vote for the candidate are truly casting a vote for the party in terms of where government decision making comes from once if they get to Queen’s Park. Once elected, all MPs VOTE WITH THEIR PARTY.

The proposed “Mixed Member Proportional” (MMP) system doesn’t stop you from considering a local person, you still do that, but it puts control of the party system into the people’s hands, whereas before the party was this murky thing that hijacked power in Parliament. It does this by putting in more MPs from a pre-defined, pre-ordered list, who then VOTE WITH THEIR PARTY.

Anyone who believes they are being disenfranchised by losing local candidates to list candidates is ignoring the fact that individual MPPs do not make decisions in parliament based on their local constituency. They ignore the fact that FPTP is the artificial reason that 40% of the public can elect a premier who makes all the decisions, and if that is not disenfranchisement then I don’t know what is.

A large number of ordinary people studied this to death and found MMP is better. I think it is too, so MMP has my vote.

Pledge to vote and learn more:

 › political     2007-09-15 10:42   ...1 comment

As we’re leading up to the last book of the Harry Potter series, I was recently scanning the website of JK Rowling. She has a section called “Extras” (click on her hairbrush) where she talks about scenes she liked that never made the books, and tidbits about little details that don’t get explained in the stories.

One of these extras concerns connections between the three main characters and the `Celtic Zodiac’. I use this term in scare quotes¹ because it seems that the celtic zodiac was basically made up from whole cloth in 1946. These things are always kind of amusing, though, so I say: why not enjoy it.

The celtic zodiac is organized around trees that hold sway over certain lunar months. The one for July 8 to August 4 is the Holly tree. This puts me in the same month as Harry Potter (bearer of a Holly wood wand) among others.

Excerpts from the Holly description linked above:

So there you have it, a total rundown of my personality according to the totally made up “traditional” celtic zodiac.

¹Someone famous once wrote an essay advising writers to have more intestinal fortitude than to use scare quotes. This writer essentially said if it’s worth saying something then take it on board. I wish I could remember who this was. I thought it was Orwell in “Politics and the English Language” but I re-read that and it’s not in there.

 › cute     2007-07-19 21:01   ...0 comments

A whole new way to travel. click here

Thanks Heather

 › funny     2007-03-30 19:11   ...1 comment

Should you wish to comment on what should be in the budget you can contact the ministry of finance before February 28.

 › political     2007-02-21 09:14   ...0 comments

In 1998, Andrew Wakefield published an article in the Lancet asserting that vaccinated children had a higher prevalence of autism, an assertion later shown to be false.

At the time, vaccination rates dropped from 92% to 78%, and there have been cases of children dying from these preventable diseases.

It now appears that Dr. Wakefield was paid over £400 000 by lawyers who were trying to trump up lawsuits against the makers of the vaccines. Wakefield’s co-workers were also paid hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Parents who chose not to vaccinate their kids should be suing everyone in sight right now.

Full story

 › normative     2007-01-16 14:06   ...0 comments

Just sent this to the NDP in response to their email titled Meet the new face of Liberal arrogance and inaction.

 › normative     2006-12-03 21:19   ...1 comment

The nablopomo image stream is interrupted today to allow me to make a point about cluster bombs.

Cluster bombs are large weapons that are dropped from bombers. Upon landing (or just before) they open up and scatter tiny bomblets around an area. Large numbers of these bomblets are dangerous duds that fail to go off — until they are disturbed.

These bomblets can lie dormant for years until they are discovered by children. Their bright colours, meant to serve as warnings, make them look like toys.

This pattern has been repeated over and over around the world, but perhaps the most notorious bomblet fields are in Northern Laos, where more bombs were dropped by the US between 1964 and 1973 than were dropped on Germany and Japan combined during world war II. An estimated 90 million cluster bombs were dropped on Laos. 12 000 civilians have died in Laos since the end of this so-called “secret war”. Thirty years later 2-3 Laotians are killed every month, and 6-7 are maimed.

These appalingly bad munitions are still in active use today in Iraq & Afghanistan. In Lebanon, the UN estimates up to 1 million are left unexploded. The cluster bombs dropped upon Afghanistan are yellow packets. The first 100000 food rations dropped by the Americans were also yellow packets.

One of the reasons I have such little respect for militaries around the world is the existence and apparently wide use of these weapons. When will we realize that wars end and we shouldn’t mine every available square inch of land within an inch of returning residents’ lives?

A UN official has today called for the banning of cluster bombs and a Canadian NGO has suggested that Canada should repeat the mine-ban treaty with cluster bombs.

 › normative     2006-11-07 14:49   ...1 comment

One of the things going on on the internet today is anonymous secrets.

It all started with PostSecret which involved people making artistic postcards and mailing them anonymously to a website.

Since then, all kinds of secret sites have popped up, like the ljsecret community on LiveJournal.

Amongst all of these is a site that lets you phone up, leave a message and the message is posted anonymously to the site as an audio file. This might be unremarkable except that the phone end of it is our PhoneValet application.

(The guy is providing an applescript to PhoneValet that is called after the message is left. The script post-processes the audio into MP3 format, then uploads it to his webserver.)

Cool to see a public use of PhoneValet, trivial though it may be.

ETA: The OneDaySecret site is here. Forgot that part. Click on the weird circle shapes to hear the secrets.

 › cool     2006-10-23 15:47   ...0 comments

Here’s an article about the stalemate in Afghanistan that I both buy and roughly agree with.

I don’t believe in the Team America: World Police mentality that says western troops can drop into a country, pop off a few assholes and leave rainbows behind. I am concerned that once again western troops, including Canadians this time, believe that a semi-permanent occupation is enough to right wrongs.

What is the objective of this war? Is it to eliminate the Taliban to a man? If so, it is doomed to fail. I am not a student of history, but in this war torn region I believe few, if any, foreign armies have ever prevailed.

More importantly, though, a “might makes right” attitude is not a crowd pleaser with the local population. Without the widespread support of the Afghani people, the project cannot succeed. As long as the Taliban (if that really is a single group… is there an organization chart out there?) have a stronger claim on local government than the central Afghan government, then that support will not occur. Even if the Taliban do threaten and abuse local people, they also pay some of them and most importantly protect their cash crop. The Taliban may not be friends of ordinary Afghans but the situation is far too complicated to say that the Taliban are the enemies of ordinary Afghans.

The only reason foreign troops are in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban and not in Colombia fighting the FARC is that George Bush wanted to kick some people after September 11th. And then there’s that nasty question of religion, which I’m steering away from.

The only reason that we are in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban is because we were sold a reconstruction mission in a country that was growing more stable by the day. I am not happy with the devolution of that mission into random melées and open war.

It looks like the West keeps trying to salvage the old Afghanistan plan through a few more choppers, or another load of tanks and troops. This is not going to work. We need to chuck the old plan, and start a new one.

A new plan needs to consider specifically what a foreign military presence can do on the ground to support the afghan government in its internal struggle against extremists and poppies. We can’t just be their army for them, and certainly not their generals. President Karzai has criticized the “reconstruction team” for its focus on dealing death: “It is not acceptable for us that in all this fighting, Afghans are dying. In the last three to four weeks, 500 to 600 Afghans were killed. [Even] if they are Taleban, they are sons of this land.” This remark was widely panned in the west, but if Karzai sees another way, shouldn’t that be reason enough to question what we’re doing?

It’s about time we chucked the paternalistic crap that we are in Afghanistan saving the day and faced up to the fact that what we’re doing — if well intentioned — isn’t helping.

 › political     2006-09-16 11:02   ...0 comments

I know this blog has been trending toward the political issues lately, and I’m loath to continue the trend, but I’ve got something I think is good.

It’s the upcoming report on the media from the senate. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: a healthy democracy depends on a large and healthy media that features several points of view. That means that you need independent editorial boards and independent news gathering.

Happily, the senate agrees with me and will say we need independent news sources in every market. Yeah. Go senate!

Of course, we’ve ignored royal commission reports in the past, so I won’t hold my breath. Still, it’s nice to see that someone up there is thinking about these issues…

 › political     2006-06-20 23:37   ...3 comments

The impending test launch of a missile that can hit the U.S. from North Korea kind of makes Bush look dumb for having focused exclusively on the non-existent threat in Iraq, no?

 › political     2006-06-19 13:26   ...1 comment

The U.S. congress is today debating the allocation of a further $94.5 billion for the war in Iraq. This has led me to speculate about how this breaks down in terms of the U.S. taxpayer base. Lots of americans are in favour of the war, but the huge budgetary numbers being tossed around seem disconnected from their actual tax payments.

(Of course, the U.S. is funding this war on debt, but that debt will one day need to be repaid, so for the sake of this back-of-the-envelope calculation, let’s just divide the cost by the number of taxpayers.)

First, we need to know how many taxpayers there are in the states. The IRS publishes tax stats. I used table 3.3 from the “Individual Income Tax Returns Publication 1304” for 2003 (the latest year available). There were 130 million returns, of which 88 931 904 actually paid income tax in a total amount $748 017 488 000.

Regarding cost of the war, getting a good estimate is tough. Very tough. That is because there is politicization of the amount. We know that Bush originally said the war would cost $50 billion. The amount I’ve seen in the news today, seemingly a total of labelled war spending to date is 320 billion dollars. Former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz has put the ultimate cost, including long term effects on the US economy at 1.026 trillion dollars (839 billion direct costs, and 187 billion in economic damage).

So, how does this work out per taxpayer?

Let’s put this in perspective. The CBC reports the $320 billion US is about 1.5 times the total expenditure of the Canadian government in 2005.

Prefer an american example? According to the US Department of Education there were estimated to be 1 343 000 undergrads graduating in 2006. The money spent to date on the war could have paid for their entire cost of 4 years of education including tuition, room and board.

And you know what? You could do that 4 times over before you ran out of cash… 5.6 million students could be put through their entire 4 year degree for free with just the obvious money that’s been spent so far.

(How did I come up with that? The average tuition room and board cost for a year is $14283, multiplied by a four-year college degree is $57132 per student. The 320 billion divided by $57132 is 5.6 million students put through their entire 4 year degree for free.)

Imagine the effect on the US economy of 5 million highly trained citizens with NO student debt.

I could go on, but I’ve made my point. What would you do with $3500-11000 dollars? Spend it in Iraq?

 › normative     2006-06-15 19:49   ...2 comments

Well, Weebl and Bob’s toons site has gone far far downhill since the days of Magical Trevor, but their new posting called Animator vs. Animation is awesome.

 › funny     2006-06-14 12:21   ...0 comments

The advocacy group Environmental Defence has just released the results of testing six adults and seven children for 68 toxic chemicals (at a cost of $2000 per person).

The results? A ten year old girl had 18 carcinogens, 14 chemicals that disrupt hormones, 19 that affect reproduction and 9 neurotoxins. Some of the chemicals have been banned since 1977, almost 20 years before her birth. In her words: “How fair is that?”

It’s a small study, and I haven’t reviewed the results and compared them with “acceptable limits”. However, it looks like Health Canada is going to start doing this kind of testing on 5000 volunteers, some as young as 6 years of age. This is a positive development.

Chris says that many federal government ministers are getting tested too… that bodes well for political will. Apparently this happened in the past and it resulted in the government moving on the issue for a short time. Perhaps it should be a requirement for all politicians to get these tests…

 › normative     2006-06-02 11:49   ...0 comments

I’ve had several discussions with people recently on the topic of equalization in the Canadian federation. Here is an excellent resource on equalization. The historical information is interesting, but the three sections on how it works, current issues and myths are excellent.

 › political     2006-05-30 17:50   ...0 comments

Aficionados of my political views know that whenever a problem rears its ugly head, I look to the media.

Want to know why global warming is not on the agenda? Ask the media. Want to know why we have gay marriage? Ask the media. Want to know why Canadians believe health care has been in urgent crisis only in the 3 months before each election? Ask the media.

The media sets the agenda, tells us what’s cool. It tells us who is the voice of reason and who is a “special interest group”. The media is extremely important.

In order to have an effective Canadian society we need to have a diverse media, one that questions all the issues, raises all the points of view, and that has reasonable diversity in editorial control and opinion. If you don’t have this, then the media becomes big brother and skews the agenda. In the extreme you have the american media where liberal has ceased to be a position and has become an epithet. If the media does not question everything (either because it can’t or won’t) then we lose the basis of our democracy.

The media in this country has already been eviscerated by years of mergers and acquisitions. There are fewer editorial boards than ever, and many are under the thumb of right wing editors. Despite the fact that the news media are hugely right wing, Conservative supporters continue to whine that the Toronto Star and the CBC are unfair to them, and in fact that the media in general has it out for them¹.

All of this is secondary to what Harper’s new view of the media is. Harper believes the media should basically reprint what he says verbatim, and should not ask tough questions. He now has descended to the point where he believes questions should be asked only by his crony reporters who will not embarass him. He apparently does not realize that politics is about communicating your message and ideas to the people. Where is the sense of openness and accountability he promised us in the last election?

Yesterday, two dozen or so parliamentary reporters walked out of his press conference. They did so after refusing to sign a list from which “authorized reporters” would be selected by Harper handlers for question-asking rights. Harper announced that since no-one was on the list, no-one would ask questions. The best coverage of this event is here².

The Toronto Star, long a Harper-bashing paper³, did not walk out. Here are the comments from their bureau chief (reprinted on a Toronto Star blog). It explains the role and benefits (to journalists and politicians) of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. The comments are interesting too.

This is all going to be very damaging to Harper. It will be interesting to see how this plays out. His attempts to muzzle the media are highly offensive to me (see also the exclusion of reporters from covering military coffins, an aping of the U.S common practise… beacon of light that it is in this regard.) Really, though, it is a problem that will take care of itself. Much is being made right now that Harper could cruise to a majority. Of course he can, who would be running against him? It will be much more interesting to see what happens in the fall.

ETA: There is good material, with lots of interesting links, in this blog entry.

¹If you believe this, you should check the facts (look at the cumulative report) that shows Martin vs. Harper).

²Note that this Calgary-based source was Harper-biased during the election as per note 1.

³According to note 1, the Star really was egregious for this.

 › normative     2006-05-25 15:42   ...1 comment

An AT&T technician who worked at a San Francisco switching station has revealed the existence of US NSA technology that splits a major network backbone interchange at the physical connection level.

This sort of thing, done at only a few well-placed sites, can provide the US government with effectively full access to telephone calls and all data communications. Of course, in the case of encrypted data traffic the government then has to decrypt it. But they have plenty of computer resources to do so. (The risk analysis for the light encryption used on the internet basically assumes that the person who would like to crack your data does not have the resources of a major government.)

Compared to a few FISA wiretaps, this is the big time.

The US government has stated it will hide the facts from Americans by shutting down the lawsuit into this matter. The US government can basically end any civil lawsuit on demand due to a legal precedent, and the Bush government has been the most frequent user of this power in history. It was recently used to quash Maher Arar’s civil suit.

 › normative     2006-04-29 20:00   ...1 comment