Discontinuing the Penny

To the Hon. Pat Martin, MP for Winnipeg Centre

Dear Mr. Martin,

In regard to your private member's bill to discontinue the penny, thank you. This measure is about 5 or 10 years late and should have been entered into
consideration around the time the $2 coin, what I call the doubloon, was introduced. The cost of all that copper to Canada should give it all the impetus it requires. That force is only strengthened by the moral dubiousness of hoarding copper this way when there is not enough of it in the world for everyone in the world to enjoy our lifestyle. What should it matter that the bill comes from an opposition bench? Wisdom should be commended regardless of the source.

Retaining the $0.01-precision for wire transactions and rounding up or down to the nearest multiple of 5 cents on cash ones is at least a partial return to the common sense that BC exhibited before confederation. Back in the day, political rhetoric here said that BCers were not so niggling as to figure things out to the nearest 100th of a dollar and pennies were routinely discarded in the Rockies by BCers on their way home from the money-grubbing east. That such an attitude has taken this long to even begin to resurface is a sad commentary on the rarity of common sense.

I wish your bill safe and swift passage.

Sincerely,

Arthur N. Klassen etc. etc.

cc: Hon. xxxxx xxxxxx, MP for my home riding

I had a nightmare last night

I turned on the TV briefly last night to watch the beginnings of The Trojan Horse on the CBC and the sight of the Stars and Stripes over Ottawa's Peace Tower, even in a piece of fiction, felt like a knife through my heart. It got too violent for my taste in evening family viewing pretty quickly, but I confess I am both attracted and repelled by the idea of watching it. I'd like to see how the whole story plays out but if I do see it, I'm going to dread every view like that one, not to mention grieve its possibility in advance, even when the reality is still so very unlikely..

Headline Puzzle from January answers...

Maybe I should just give up. Oh well... here are the answers from January 5. The headlines were

OUR BAD MICROSOFT COMPENSATE FOR XBOX LIVE HOLIDAY PROBLEMS
HUCKABEE OBAMA CARRY MOMENTUM INTO NEW HAMPSHIRE
CALGARY MAN SUCCUMBS TO CARBON MONOXIDE POISONING
DEFENCE APPEAL IN PICKTON CASE A NO BRAINER
CANADAS WORLD JUNIOR TEAM GOES FOR GOLD AFTER BEATING US

The key was "STORAGE", the setting was "CDROM" and the hat was "RETRIEVE".

Peut-être je suis mais un poseur...ank

"The mercury in one CFL bulb can contaminate 1000 gallons of water"
Recently, in an internal company bulletin board, someone posted this link, citing the title and asking "Is it true?"

My answer was, let's do the math.

How much mercury is in a bulb? According to wikipedia, anywhere between 1 and 12 mg. The best models seem to have limited it to 1mg but there is a limit in place of no more than 6 mg, so let's assume that we're talking about 6mg.

1000 US Gallons of water is 3890 L, 1000 Imperial Gallons of water is 4540L. Typically gallons nowadays refers to US gallons, but let's make it 4000, just in case (makes the later math easier, even if it's not a fair mid-point).

4000L has a mass of 4000kg. 6mg in 4000kg is 1.5 parts per billion by mass.
According to this link, the American FDA's "Maximum Contaminant Level Goal" for mercury, a cumulative neurotoxin, in drinking water is 2 parts per billion.

So, as usual, this kind of a headline looks like a little late-breaking hysteria. Mind you, if enough of the bulbs have 12 mg, that would be 3ppb which would fail the (arbitrary?) MCLG. Where the "safety line" actually is is probably a matter for debate that gets very political very quickly. Like, did you know that crematoria are a prime source of airborne mercury pollution? Years of dental fillings, all going up in smoke...

All that said, ever since the fad of CFL bulbs started taking hold, aside from my complaint that they don't emit enough light and what light they emit tends to be too cold, I have wondered aloud quite often where the infrastructure for safe disposal of expired bulbs was. A rhetorical question, I know. But then, such infrastructure must grow fast enough to take up the slack. Given the likelihood that "incorrect recycling" of CFLs is going to mean concentrations of mercury in landfills, I wonder how the neighbours of the various dumps in the western world are going to feel about those dumps becoming mercury magnets, alongside all the other wonderful things they've taken in over the years?

This stuff has all got to be solved a different way. Wish I knew what that way was...

The Return of the Headline Puzzle! #3

I missed last week's deadline in a good cause. My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary -- away from any computers, in a lovely place across some water from where we live (I'm being coy about it because I may want to use it for a future headline puzzle).

Two weeks ago, I posted a puzzle whose solution was...

PASS THE SCREECH CROSBIE IS NEWFOUNDLAND LT GOVERNOR
HOUSING DEMOLITION PROTESTERS CLASH WITH POLICE IN NEW ORLEANS
ZUMA SAYS NO WORD FROM PROSECUTORS ON GRAFT
QUEEN NOW OLDEST MONARCH IN BRITAINS HISTORY
EIGHT GLASSES OF WATER A DAY AND OTHER MEDICAL MYTHS

KEY = MONEY, SETTING = PURSE, HAT = WALLET

The new puzzle is this:

LTJ FKM ZWNJLDLXC CL NLZAIYDKCI XLJ EFLE PWOI VLPWMKG AJLFPIZD

QSMWILKK FLIYI MIHHR YFYKZDSY UZDF ZKT QIYECQUHK

JDWFDLB VDQ GZJJZVKG RI JDLKIQ VIQITNHC SINGIQNQF

FRMRPLR GYYRGN JP YJLHOCP LGBR G PC DIGJPRI

ZWRWYWN CXVEY ODRTXV MUWG QXUN AXV QXEY WAMUV PUWMTRQ DN

Happy solving!

Kenya :: Rwanda -- the comparison was inevitable

A newspaper in the cafeteria caught my eye, running this story from the Globe and Mail (our Ontario paper that tries to masquerade as a national one). I was wondering how soon people would start to compare Kenya today with Shake Hands With The Devil Rwanda. Ouch.

The Return of the Headline Puzzle! #2

Somebody game me a tuit (it was round. I got a round tuit, er around to it...) and here I am with the answer to the last Headline Puzzle and the new one. If anyone sees me doing this "wrong" somehow, please leave a comment!

So the headlines were...

US TONING DOWN PLEAS FOR HELP WITH AFGHAN MISSION GATES SAYS
AT BALI CLIMATE CONFERENCE SIGNS OF COMPROMISE
HAMAS POLICE ARREST AIDE TO PALESTINIAN PRIME MINISTER
LEBANESE ARMY GENERAL LAID TO REST IN STATE FUNERAL
MUSHARRAF LOOSENS ELECTION GRIP AS HIS POLLS SLIDE

SETTING = FORCE;  KEY = WEAPON;  HAT = MILITARY

So here's the new puzzle...

DSCC QXW CBYWWBX BYPCRZW ZC UWGEPIUMASUM AQ VPLWYUPY

VUFQEXB ZSKUYEJEUX IDUJSQJSDQ OYTQV CEJV IUYEOS EX XSC UDYSTXQ

JDQW GWSG PR HRAT ZARQ YARGKVDCRAG RP XAWZC

AQUUT TSI SHBUFL RSTXGEM OT WGOLXOTF MOFLSGV

OCDYX DJNUUOU EQ PNXOK N GNH NAG EXYOK VOGCINJ VHXYU

Solution to be posted in another week...

UPS Ground to Canada -- Seriously Busted

In the US, there's a wonderful service, more cost effective than the Post Office for almost all package-delivery applications. It's called UPS and referred to tersely and fondly as "UPS Ground". It's so addictive that given the similarity of addresses between the US and Canada for the post, US residents who have parcels to send to Canada naturally assume that Brown will get the job done.

Well, it will but... There's the little matter of a border between the two countries, and it happens that when you send things via Brown, your "gift" suddenly becomes a COD parcel, possibly challenging the value of the gift in the first place. The thought counts, and we Canadians are too polite to complain loudly to our generous friends, but seriously. For all the tackiness of "gift cards", suddenly a gift card at amazon.ca, for instance, makes a whole lot more sense.

Now, it used to be a whole lot worse. There used to be a several week delay while Brown tried to negotiate the border and send the package around in Canada using their then half-baked delivery network up here. They've gotten a lot better and are no longer a byword in bad delivery. But they are a bad deal, and if you're in the US, shipping to Canada, they're a bad deal that you probably won't hear about from your friends north of 49. We like you. The gifts you send are thoughtfully chosen and highly appropriate, 95 times out of 100. Why should we quibble about how you choose to send them to us? But there it is.

For sending parcels to Canada from the US, the post office is a better deal, if not for you, then certainly for the people you're sending to. And if their rates are just over the edge, maybe an over-the-web gift cetificate will work better. Last time I checked, those really were duty-free.

The Return of the Headline Puzzle! #1

A long time ago I tried to produce these periodically. Here's another try. I will post the solution to this headline puzzle a week from today, 2007-12-21..

ZW CKFVFM IKOF GUPDW HKY RPUG OVCR DHMRDF TVWWVKF MDCPW WDBW

JA GJMS DMSZJAB DHOKBEBODB NSUON HK DHZLEHZSNB

BVJVK TEAFSM VLLMKQ VFNM QE TVAMKQFRFVR TLFJM JFRFKQML

KNOPCNZN PSRW HNCNSPK KPMG YD SNZY MC ZYPYN JXCNSPK

IQRGWMMWP JBBRZER ZJZNVKBE DMKA WR GKR ABJJR RJKOZ

Instructions for solving should be here.

Still More Banking Woes?

A news story caught me by surprise yesterday: that the central banks of many industrialized countries, together with the American Federal Reserve have banded together to keep a money supply going, even in the face of further sub-prime mortgage meltdown red ink. The best explanation I've read so far (of course, it's from Big Brother) makes no attempt to estimate how much damage is still to come, only that the current losses add up to $60Billion and that the full extent won't be known until March 2008. The current loss is over half the amount of money that was ear-marked for easier loans this week, so I wonder if the banks have estimated the total loss already, privately, at that level. Or is this an artificial quantity, floated out there just to keep the banks liquid?

The whole thing sounds scary. Until I realize how lucky I am that I'm warm, fed and dry enough to worry about how this will affect my next re-mortgaging negotiations which aren't exactly happening in the next year.

How to keep blogging?

Find quotable things and link to them. Here's one:

"Real Men don't attack straw men."

I love it. This sort of thing gets done on all kinds of fronts. Here's the original. For the rest, the next time you hear someone's position on something get ripped apart in twenty seconds or less, go back and check what the victim really said. In their own words. Without even straining the brain I can think of four or five of these, many of them high profile enough they might be familiar to you.

Copyright amendment was a tipping point

It's been a long while since I posted to this blog last. It's not as
though I've had no opinions, it just seems that I've found so few gaps
in what I'm doing to post here. I'd like to write piercing coherent
things that people will want to read, that may change some people's
minds but fitting that into being a husband, Dad, a software
developer, a commuter and a member of my community -- not to mention
continuing to service my reading addictions has been hard.

Call it a New Years' resolution a few weeks early but I mean to post
here more often -- perhaps with a little less attention to hotlinks --
I do like to cross-reference what I'm writing to other things so that
if you haven't gotten access to the background materials that lead me
to my conclusions already, at least you'll have a chance to do so.

For now, here's a fun link for the holidays:
http://www.guessthiscity.com/ which is run by a friend of mine. Just
simple sets of 20 pictures or so for, as far as I know, for about 43
cities. Share and Enjoy (an oblique reference to heads and pigs is
purely coincidental)

One Small Victory for Fair Use

An open letter to the Minister of Industry and my MP

Dear Mr. Prentice,

Thank you for withdrawing the so-called "Canadian DMCA". I was and
have been deeply troubled by the readiness of the government to take
the part of the purveyors of creative content against the interest of
its consumers and often of its creators as well. I urge you to take a
different, more balanced view of the issues that are driving this
field.

The purveyors of creative content have received a surcharge from the
sale of blank media on the presumption of guilt on the part of
Canadians in contravening copyright law. As galling as the presumption
of guilt is, it is a small price to pay by the consumer. It should be
sufficient for all time to preserve fair use rights. It should allow
consumers of content to time-shift, media-shift, even share moderately
and for non-commercial purposes with friends without fear of
surveillance, suit, damages or imprisonment.

The role of the Canadian government in this ought to be clear: to
balance the rights of ordinary citizens, creators of content and the
commercial entities that market and distribute that content. It is an
open secret that the commercial entities regularly abuse the creators
and they are doing whatever they can in any jurisdiction that will
listen to them to extend that abuse to the consumers of that content
as well. To have to pay some money every time a song is played --
especially to groups who manifestly do not have the best interests of
the artists at heart -- is untenable, unconscionable and an undue
intrusion into the lives of ordinary Canadians.

If the end result of "failing" to pass legislation like this in Canada
means that less and less large-company media comes to Canada that may
not be all bad -- but we all know that that end-game will result in
such widespread piracy that it will not be to anyone's benefit.

Do us all a favour and tell these extortionists (the MPAA, the RIAA
and others) to take their blank-media surcharge and be quiet. Once and
for all. The consequences of not doing so include all kinds of ills,
not least of which is the further disaffection of thousands of younger
voters who will get the message loud and clear if legislation like
this ever passes, that whomever the government of Canada is for, it's
certainly not for them. And that would be a serious breach of what you
were sent to Ottawa for: ultimately as the guardians of the
sovereignty of Canada, a trust too sacred for the kind of quick
sell-out a Canadian DMCA would represent.

Sincerely,

Arthur N. Klassen
(address & phone-number witheld)

An Open Letter to the BC Utilities Corporation

Here's a letter I just sent to the BC Utilities Corporation. Consider echoing your sentiments along the same lines to their complaints department.

Dear Sir/Madam:

My complaint about Natural Gas Marketing in BC is simple enough you may find it easy to write off as some crank. Please do not. It consists of no more than five words.

REGULATE RETAIL NATURAL GAS SALES.

I remember seeing a flakey survey go by that was worded in such a way as to elicit more yes than no responses and did not do anything to lay out the potential repercussions of deregulating natural gas sales in BC. Salespeople for these marketers have come to my home and those of several of my friends. The offer presented to us would have seen an immediate 12.5% jump in our gas rates, at least. Others have been told "Just sign here. You're not really committing to anything."

Deregulating phone service is not a bad idea since telecommunications bandwidth is practically infinite, totally fungible and easy to do without. Natural Gas, though, while being mostly fungible is neither infinite in supply nor easy to do without. Deregulating its distribution at all exposes the citizens of this province to the speculative vagaries of the marketplace in a way that government for the people ought not to do.

As for the advertising campaign unleashed at the same time, it is abusive in the extreme, implying that if you don't want choice on your natural gas, you must be a boring person who always wears gray socks, always eats turnips and always reads the same books. It looks to this citizen (not just customer!) distinctly like an attempt by yet another multinational corporation (Kinder Morgan) to use governmental agencies (the BCUC) to gain an opportunity to gouge its customers at will (through gas marketing proxies) and deflect the responsibility for the debacle back on the customer ("if only you hadn't signed that piece of paper..."). In all probability, what we are seeing is not such a nefarious conspiracy but it tastes bad. Really bad.

So I return to my five simple words. Get rid of this stupid situation and go back to doing your duty to the citizens of BC:

REGULATE RETAIL NATURAL GAS SALES.

Expect to get more letters like this in the coming days. I will be sending the above letter to my local newspapers, posting it to my blog and forwarding its contents to a number of my friends. With any luck (my luck, that is), some of them will forward similar sentiments to you. I hope there'll be enough to reverse this silly decision, whose public process I do not remember seeing any timely publicity on.

Sincerely,

name and address blinded, Aldergrove, BC

David Remnick's book, Lenin's Tomb

A friend loaned me this book a few weeks ago and I completed it this morning. I can only quote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in the "Vintage Edition" Afterword: The heart is not yet glad. So much waste, so much betrayal, so much accusation of "you moved too fast!", "you moved too slowly!", "you betrayed our trust!" (in every possible direction). And yet, the book is out of date already because Boris Yeltsin has been out of power some time now -- died just this year -- and in his place the former KGB officer, Vladimir Putin, looks to be establishing himself as the next long-term autocrat. Of course he has some semblance of legitimacy but it is hard, in the face of his relations to politically interested oligarchs (e.g. MIkhail Khodorkovsky), Belarus and Ukraine (with regard to natural gas pipelines) to accord him more than the semblance.

May the heart yet be glad! Still, it's easy to ignore, in the Anglophone west, what a long hard struggle the progress from autocracy to civil, responsible government was. The French might still remember that Bastille Day was followed by the terror, Napoleon, the return of the Bourbons, another Napoleon or two before things settled down, decades after the ouster of the WWII Quisling government, to the (largely) civilized government we see today. But in the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, the memory has to be a little longer -- okay, so the Americans have fought more recent wars, but their progress was accelerated by their English heritage and the Lessons Learned from the conflict by England helped the others along. These countries all mostly inherit the results of the Magna Carta (1215 or so) and the ensuing developments over the next 500 years until the last time (Queen Anne, 1707) a monarch over-turned an act of the Commons, outright.

These things take time, lots of time. It may not be in our lifetimes but there is still reason to hope that tyranny will come to an end some time in Russia (and the former SSRs). They are not doomed forever to swing from autocrat to autocrat, from corrupt bureaucracy to corrupt bureaucracy. We can hope and pray that it'll be sooner rather than later but we need not despair that it'll likely be never.

Northern Ireland

Today was the biggest day in Ireland's history since I was born. Rob Gifford's analysis made the most sense of past failures and current success that I've heard: Before the agreements were between moderates and the extremists on either side of them were always out-flanking them. Today, the extremists got together. Wonder of wonders, they found that they could understand one another and there was nobody left to out-flank them. May peace come to the 6 counties! Today was a glad day -- may there be many more like it.

According to Michael Geist, as reported on slashdot, something like DMCA may be coming to Canada this spring. Please, anyone who reads this, who lives in Canada, find your MP here (look for "Find your M.P. using your postal code") ou ici (à "Trouvez votre député au moyen de votre code postal") especially if Conservative, and write to them, by post, by e-mail, phone them and ask them to reconsider. We're already paying a piracy tax on blank media, so a law like this is unjust. It may be a little bit odious to pay a surcharge on media in order to maintain fair use, but to have paid the surcharge and then to have fair use hemmed in with severe consequences for attempting to retain it is just plain wrong. Not as wrong as withholding cheap vitamins from 3rd world children but wrong as in collecting fire insurance on a box of cigars you just finished smoking.

Some of my latest favourites

Cosmology: The Many Directions of Time -- I blogged this some time ago and tried to find it again talking to my Dad last night. Of course, when I wanted it, I couldn't find it. And then I see the guy's won a Pritzker Fellowship. Cool! I got excited, and so did some other people who could be expected to know better. Good-bye Dark Matter, good-bye tuning-fork model of classification of galaxies, hello possible explanation for quasars and Seifert Galaxies. This looks like it could be the next revolution in cosmology and physics. But it comes with a caution for anyone who hooks Genesis 1 and the Big Bang theory too closely. As usual, marrying theism too closely to one scientific hypothesis can always bite back later.

Literature: I feel like a kid again. Tomorrow, a brand new book by one of my favourite authors, now passed-on for 30+ years, is coming out. Christopher Tolkien has left publishing all of his Dad's doodles and scribblings and put the Narn î Hin Húrin out in book form. It's coming out tomorrow. I'm so excited. Time to go revisit Neldoreth after Nirnaeth Arnoediad, Nargothrond after Finrod's departure, to see what a real friend Beleg Strongbow was. Children of Hurin, coming out tomorrow. This one I think I'll bother to buy hardback.

Auditory pleasure: I am so enjoying the Drew Marshall Show, even if I wind up listening to most of it delayed over a week -- how can you justify spending four hours on a Saturday (1:00PM-5:00 PM EST/EDT Saturday) glued to your computer with a family and a house to deal with? I don't know. Check out the site, check out his (first and probably only ever) appearance on Huntley Street. If Joe Molson-Six Pack can relate to any Canadian Christian personality out there, it'll be Drew. Interviews of special interest to Canadians with Stephen Lewis, Roméo Dallaire, Bruce Cockburn, Stephen Harper, Valeri Bure (Pavel's brother), Don Cherry, Paul Henderson -- and most of them are archived for on-demand listening later.

To Gord MacDonald, presenter and host on CKNW

Dear Mr. MacDonald,

As a member of the news team for CKNW, I'd like to thank you for all the work you and your colleagues do to keep British Columbians informed about what is going on here. You are, overall, a rich source of information, and in general you discharge your responsibility to do so admirably, as your team's steady stream of awards appropriately confirms.

In regard to the one year anniversary of the sinking of the Queen of the North, there was one aspect of your coverage in the open line session that disturbed me, and if you were to give second thought to the things you were saying, perhaps they would give you pause as well. Before saying more, let me state that I share your frustration, that of all other BCers, even more those of the families of Mr. Foisy and his companion, and of the community of Hartley Bay who face an environmental disaster in the making with the 240,000 L of various oils still at the bottom near Gil Island, at the utter lack of candor on the part of the standing watch at the time of the sinking. It seems unthinkable that with two lives lost and a large cache of underwater diesel the consciences of these folks would not drive them to saying clearly and distinctly what was going on. But that is the state they are in, and if they persist in that state, ultimately they will be reprimanded by their employer and who knows but that they will face charges of negligence causing bodily harm or death eventually.

My concern is the zeal with which you were enjoining the Fourth Officer and the Quartermaster to abandon their rights to due process, implying even a moral obligation to doing so. I would remind you that if you yourself were accused, truly or falsely, of acts that could conceivably result in your imprisonment or significant loss of opportunity to earn income in your trade, that right to due process might be your only safeguard against unjust application of any penalty, or in the case guilt of a lesser offence, of an excessive penalty. These rights to due process are one of the most precious benefits we receive as citizens and we should not encourage others to abandon them, nor make them seem ridiculous or unduly cumbersome. I know individuals who have lived in regimes where these benefits are not bestowed on citizens -- some as citizens who have escaped, some as expatriates who saw co-workers harassed and were themselves expelled unjustly.

Your station's status as the primary source of local news in Vancouver give you a special responsibility, not just to hold the feet of the powerful to the fire when wrong-doing has been done (as seems clearly to be the case in this instance at some level or other), but also to honour and safeguard, in every possible way, these freedoms which keep us from living at the mercy of authorities who are free to assume that we are guilty at their whim and are already under serious threat in the low-level insanity North America has bought into in the aftermath of 9-11 as well as in the face of regular perceived breaches of justice that trouble the public when otherwise guilty persons get let off on technicalities. Those technicalities could very well defend one of us, you or me, from false accusation on some other occasion and we would do well to remember that when we -- and especially you, in this position where thousands of people listen to you and take what you say very seriously in forming their own opinions -- are tempted to deride these protections when they seem to obstruct us from finding out "what really happened" in some contentious situation.

Two Earthquakes -- Ireland and Québec

Yesterday was a huge day. I woke up to pictures of 11th hour meetings with Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley at the same table promising to form a power-sharing executive in six weeks. In this matter I have more praise for Sinn Fein and Gerry Adams than for Paisley, but not very much more. For the unionists, I understand that thirty years of conflict make them gun shy, and I understand that there's less of an official connection between the DUP and the so-called unionist, so-called militias than there was between Sinn Fein and whatever body the "volunteers" became in the last decade, but... It seemed petty to me that in the face of a hard, legislated deadline, the DUP could dig their heels in and threaten further unrest in the face of what some folks in the six counties could only interpret as double-charging on water. Good on Sinn Fein for acting to prevent the collapse. But both these parties are still working off of very different dictionaries. Until they can agree on what the end game will be (and their founding documents contain absolute contradictions there -- to join Ireland or to remain a province of the UK), any agreement will be in constant jeopardy. But I have more hope for Ireland than I did. No matter who holds the reins, all parties have to feel that they are full citizens in their own country, not systematically discriminated against regardless of how they identify themselves.

And then, in my own country, I had no idea what to expect in the results of Québec's provincial election. I turned on the telly just before supper and saw the ADQ in the lead and I've been shaking my head ever since. No sovreignty referendum for the next little while I think. Whew! What Mario Dumont is going to do with his huge rump is anyone's guess: echoes of the Reform Party sweep of the west after Mulroney stepped down as Prime Minister of Canada. It also remains to be seen what "Autonomism" (Dumont's idea of what Québec's relationship with Canada should evolve into) means and how easily it may transform, transmute, revert to "Soverigntism" (the Parti Québécois's position that the province should separate from the rest of Canada). I wonder, too, what this means for electoral results in Québec in the next Federal election which can't be that far away.