Burlesqued

Cycling deaths in the city

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 09:38:34 -0500

Dear Mayor Ford,Another cyclist has been killed in Toronto, this time a block from my house. I think it’s time to reverse your attacks on cycling infrastructure. Surely you don’t want your legacy to be a collection of cyclist deaths, do you?

Sincerely,
Isaac Quinn DuPont

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Review of Lasko 42" Oscillating Tower Fan (2554C) - Skip it.

Thu, 21 Jul 2011 14:47:17 -0400

The fan has decent build quality, and is not bad looking, but it’s actually quite large (where am I going to put this thing in the winter now!?). It has a nice array of settings, but they are deeply marred by the confirmation sound every time a key is depressed (a screeching buzz); this is especially problematic with the “sleep” function. The fan offers you the option of 30 minutes to 6 hours of sleep timing, but at the end of the timer it emits the loud confirmation sound—-easily loud enough to wake you from your sleep if you have the fan in your bedroom. Also, for such a large fan it really doesn’t move all that much air—small blower fans move much more (and it isn’t any quieter than those). So, skip this one. Purchased at Best Buy for $79.99

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scintillating scin⋅til⋅lat⋅ing /’sɪntɪleɪtɪŋ/ adjective 1. brilliantly clever •...

Sun, 10 Jul 2011 03:13:08 -0400

scintillating
scin⋅til⋅lat⋅ing /’sɪntɪleɪtɪŋ/

adjective

1. brilliantly clever • scintillating wit • a play full of scintillating
dialogue
2. marked by high spirits or excitement • scintillating personality
*syn: *bubbling, effervescent, frothy, sparkly
3. having brief brilliant points or flashes of light • the scintillating
stars
*syn: *aglitter, coruscant, fulgid, glinting, glistering, glittering,
glittery, scintillant, sparkly

Don't use Tao Effect's Espionage (OS X) encryption tool #dataloss

Mon, 04 Jul 2011 17:11:36 -0400

After looking for an encryption tool to properly secure Dropbox and Evernote I decided to take Tao Effect’s Espionage encryption tool for a spin. After about 30 seconds of use, I can strongly suggest that you do not use it. I had read on their blog that it was problematic to use Evernote and/or Dropbox with Espionage, which I thought a shame, since that’s my main goal. Nonetheless, I decided to try it out. Upon installation I discovered, to my mistaken delight, that it included an “application framework” for Evernote, and even Chrome (but not Dropbox)! I turned on both and then the fun began. Nearly instantly Evernote crashed hard, complaining about a database error. Then, trying to back out my encryption of the Evernote database Espionage went into a CPU lock (spinning beach ball), not stopping until I force-quit the application. Finally, after a restart of my machine I was able to get back in to Espionage and undo its disastrous work. It’s a near miracle that I didn’t lose all my data.

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I was totally going to make the website: theroyalweddingforgeeks.com

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 09:32:03 -0400

And it would be blank. There is no tech angle. Seriously. Don’t try.

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If programming languages were religions: http://www.itu.dk/courses/BPRD/E2010/religion.txt

Thu, 28 Apr 2011 11:35:30 -0400

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Stanley Fish takes a hit of ecology, and comes out hallucinating

Tue, 26 Apr 2011 13:50:00 -0400

Stanley Fish’s recent NY Times post suggests that our limited epistemic net prohibits us from sharing ethics with things that can’t communicate their agency, e.g., a tree’s desire to keep its fruit. Suspicious as it is with respect to a conception of ethics, it’s also an old concern. The Judicium Jovis, written around 1495, tackles this ecological question as well, but complicates the Christian response. Let’s call it a Tuesday old-meets-new juxtaposition.

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Determining Rdio's streaming music bitrate: a quick experiment & review

Tue, 05 Apr 2011 22:20:54 -0400

Rdio is my current (de jour) music streaming service . I was using Slacker Radio, but I’ve switched to Rdio and I vastly prefer it. Being located in Canada, the options for streaming music services are pretty limited, but generally speaking I’m quite happy with Rdio (although I get pretty annoyed with the number of albums not available in Canada… probably about 1/4-1/3 of the total I search for).

Rdio has been infamously cagey about what kind of quality they are delivering. They say that their iPhone app uses a higher bitrate stream when on WIFI, compared to 3G, and they claim that the web and Adobe AIr application have “CD Quality” streams. For comparison, Chris Breen suggests that many of the competitors offer between 128kB/s to 320 kB/s (320 kB/s LAME encoded MP3s are generally considered “transparent”, that is, indistinguishable from CD quality sound). NOTE: Chris Breen’s article says that Rdio uses 320kB/s streams, but my results (below) differ substantially.

Generally speaking, I think Rdio streams are acceptable. I’ve got something of a tin ear, and a decent but by no means audiophile setup (T-amp with Mission 700 Leading Edge speakers, streamed through Apple Airport Express), and I don’t feel like I’m missing much. Yet, in the interest of science, I conducted a quick real world bitrate test. Using Wild Nothing’s Gemini album, on my Rogers 25mB/s cable connection, over WIFI (B/G class) I monitored my network traffic using Codebox Software’s BitMeter OS application.

Here’s the results (I’ll continue to monitor the stream, and if it looks like these are unusual results I will post an update):

The bitstream spikes and then drops way down, pretty consistently, and averages just under 40kB/s!

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Jobs for PhD (are there any?) Two articles

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 19:24:07 -0400

They’re Mad as hell <— That’s PhD students.

The article gives sage advice, which mostly sounds like re-adjusting your own sense of worth, under a patina of blaming those encouraging professors. Viz, “When I got a good job, it felt less like an achievement than an improbable success in the lottery”

And the follow-up, noting that PhD students may be bright, but they can also be delusional: “But I think his mind-set is typical of a lot of graduate students these days: They know the odds are long but continue to believe they’ll be among the lucky ones.” He goes on to suggest that a kind of internship program might help out recent graduates, so that they can gain experience and such, while working at low-level colleges. Great, except everyone knows that the PhD is either a) an exercise in top 1% excellence, or b) an exercise in convincing yourself into thinking that it’s an exercise in top 1% excellence. And, yes, we all think we’re in that top 1% (personally I waffle between “I’m the best” and “I’m a horrible, stupid, ugly good for nothing person”).

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Well well, it looks like Google is copying me again

Thu, 24 Mar 2011 13:08:23 -0400

Seriously guys, this Posterous blog has been running intermittently for well over a year now,

and you think it is wise to name your new Quarterly (oohh la la, we post slowly) the same as my excellent blog?

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Easy ways to get around the New York Times paywall

Sat, 19 Mar 2011 06:16:17 -0400

The New York Times paywall has arrived for us Canadians, and it will be arriving stateside shortly. There is already considerable discussion on the Internet about it, and how it is generally fairly easy to evade. For example, of the total 20 free articles/month, any links from social networking sites don’t count, and any links from Google are counted seperately to a total of five.

But, there are a number of easy ways to get around the paywall without searching around Twitter for links

Cookie blocking or cookie clearing. Yup, New York Times tracks your clicks in a cookie. If you delete the cookie periodically (or block it in the first place) you can read articles without restriction. Choose your favourite Firefox or Chrome extension to help with this.
Read on Instapaper (Read it Later or Read it Now). Once you reach your 20 article limit the screen is blocked with a large advertisement asking you to sign up. You can click on links back to the home page, or press your browser’s back button, either of which will allow you to browse the New York Times webpage, but any time you click in to a link you will see the text momentarily, and then the advertisement will swoop in and block everything. The blocking, however, leaves the underlying HTML untouched, so if you use a tool that reads the HTML instead of the rendered version you can still get the article. Instapaper’s bookmarklet adds a POST form to the page which is used to scrape the HTML and send it back to Instapaper for viewing, so if you use either the Read it Now or the Read it Later bookmarklets you can view the page without problem (in Instapaper’s clutter-free rendition of the page).

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I don't think the posters add much

Thu, 10 Mar 2011 00:01:39 -0500

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Article: Into the Friar [great punchline]

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 17:05:56 -0500

Into the Friar | Our Town | Chicago Reader
http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/franciscan-friar-profile-cliff-doerksen/Content?oid=2935899

“Actually, I can tell you a funnier story than that,” Welle went on. “I used to volunteer at a place called the Port Ministries in Back of the Yards—they run a soup kitchen, a homeless shelter, a wide range of social services stuff. One day I was walking in my habit at 51st and Ashland—kind of a rougher neighborhood, you know? And a woman with a very small son came up to me and stopped me, saying ‘Hey brother, brother, brother! I just want to thank you for wearing your habit today, because I know that you don’t have to, and our neighborhood is starved for signs of hope. I want my five-year-old son to meet a man who’s living his life for God.’
“And I was just shocked! I stopped and prayed with them for a second, and blessed her son, and it was the sweetest thing that anyone has ever said to me.
“So they leave and I’ve got the warm fuzzy butterflies. I keep walking down the street. I don’t take more than ten steps before I run into a teenager who looks at me and goes, ‘Who the fuck are you, Harry Potter?’”

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Adorno and false consciousness, or, freedom for bad people.

Sun, 06 Mar 2011 15:42:28 -0500

In Negative Dialectics, Adorno gives the weakest hint that some people may experience occasional glimpses of real freedom:

If a stroke of undeserved luck has kept the mental composition of some individuals not quite adjusted to the prevailing norms - a stroke of luck they have often enough to pay for in their relations with their environment - it is up to these individuals to make the moral and, as it were, representative effort to say what most of those for whom they say it cannot see or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see. Direct communicability to everyone is not a criterion of truth.

This is, in many ways, a more snobbish version of the Marxist idea of ‘false consciousness’. I can’t help reading the Adorno quote above and seeing it as a euphemism for “if, like me, you’ve been reading Kant and playing Beethoven since you were five”. ‘False consciousness’, meanwhile, may not have quite the patronising implications that liberals accuse it of, or that vulgar Marxists lend it. Amartya Sen’s The Idea of Justice includes a defence of the idea, on the basis that a false consciousness may be ‘objectively’ correct, in terms of the knowledge and theories that are available to an individual in a given time and place.

via potlatch.typepad.com

The entire article is quite interesting too.

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Article: The Gravity of Pure Forces [on Heidegger] | Jenkins | continent journal

Sat, 05 Mar 2011 03:15:54 -0500

The Gravity of Pure Forces | Jenkins | continent.
http://www.continentcontinent.cc/index.php/continent/article/viewArticle/17

Heidegger writes, rather beautifully,

This speaking names the snow that soundlessly strikes the window late in the waning day, while the vesper bell rings. In such a snowfall, everything lasts longer. Therefore the vesper bell, which daily rings for a strictly fixed time, tolls long. The speaking names the winter evening time (197).

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"The violent fringes of the 1968 movement eventually even invoked the name of Auschwitz to justify lethal attacks on Jews"

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 00:28:01 -0500

n+1: A Moral Baseball Bat
http://nplusonemag.com/a-moral-baseball-bat

The violent fringes of the 1968 movement eventually even invoked the name of Auschwitz to justify lethal attacks on Jews

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Trust me, it's all plaid and horizontal stripes

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 04:22:28 -0500

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Please send me links to good journalism/stats about poverty

Sat, 12 Feb 2011 14:11:36 -0500

A recent Hacker News discussion made me realize that many people
(ahem, Americans… and far too many Canadians) don’t understand
poverty. In fact, what became obvious in the discussion is that many
people don’t even believe that poverty exists (a galling belief). In
an effort to bring some reality to the discussion I attempted to
locate some links of good journalism and good statistics showing just
how pervasive poverty is (globally, but especially, in North America).
The Hacker News discussion was only the most recent dispute I’ve had
about the issue—-evidently the Horatio Alger myth is pervasive and
not slackening despite the recent economic meltdown (shedding jobs
from at-risk/poor people, but not the wealthy). Although I’ve read (and seen) many compelling examples of poverty and
economic disparity, I found it difficult to come up with really
provocative accounts on the fly, so I decided that I needed a
ready-reference for information about poverty and economic disparity.
My hope is that the next time some unethical jerk tries to tell me
that poor people (if they even exist) should just try working harder
(because, you know, *so-and-so* grew up “poor” and managed to become a
wealthy ), I can give them a handy link with lots
of great references! There’s no end to the bottomless pit of the
wealthy denying cold hard facts, but at least this gives them
something to read while progressives can attempt to actually change
things.

So, with this in mind, please send me any good accounts (stats,
journalism) of poverty and economic disparity. I hope to have a nice
diverse mix that cuts across race, gender, ability, etc (as poverty
does), everything from first-person accounts to theory to quantitative
measures. I’ll post the links for your use too! Check out
http://bit.ly/povertyisreal

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Toronto's appalling bike infrastructure (my response to BlogTO)

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 14:27:20 -0500

Rob Ford doesn’t need to work very hard to ensure the city stays without bike lanes—-the previous (NOT-left wing) mayor Miller did a fine job.In 2001 the City of Toronto created the Toronto Bikeway Network (PDF), realizing that residents wanted safe bike routes. At the time, only 35 km of bike lanes existed. Now, a decade later, there are 117 km of bike lanes, 378 km short of the projected 495 km. Mayor Miller managed to put in a paltry 82 km of bike lanes, only 17% of the projected total. Rob Ford wants to ensure that number does not increase, and (likely, if we are being honest) to decrease.

BlogTO remarks that Toronto has not done quite as poorly with shared lanes and off road bicycle paths, but these simply do not count for an active, cycling city. Shared lanes, as anyone that has ridden a Toronto street knows, are never recognized by motorists, and usually, simply covered with parked cars (hello College St.). Shared lanes are obviously and manifestly a political maneuver to boost sad bike infrastructure numbers. Off-road paths are great for bike enthusiasts or the family going for a weekend jaunt, but they are not intended to carry people around the city. Including off-road paths in the calculation is rather like including forestry areas in the calculation of city parks.

Toronto gets to keep its image as the SUV-driving, Bay Streeting, “center of the universe”, bike smoke city.

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Oh SNAP! Even Greenspan and Citibank recognize a radical disparity between elite and "everyone else" (article)

Thu, 10 Feb 2011 00:07:02 -0500

The Rise of the New Global Elite from The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/01/the-rise-of-the-new-globa…

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