Sri Lanka: Confusing politics and people

The news out of Sri Lanka has been dire for weeks and I had been deliberately ignoring it. But, a few days ago, my wife and I watched the news of the protest marches in Toronto. We saw footage of a hospital that had been shelled 4 times.

Artillery shells slammed into the hospital in the northern district of Mullaittivu on Monday evening. Strikes on the hospital on Sunday — including one that hit the pediatric ward — left 11 people dead, including some children, according to an aid worker who spoke to witnesses.
Government forces and Tamil rebels are locked in a battle for the remaining rebel strongholds in northern Sri Lanka, where the the country’s ethnic Tamil minority has been fighting for an independent homeland since 1983.
Humanitarian groups say as many as 250,000 unprotected civilians are trapped in the area. The civil war has left more than 70,000 people dead.

It was disturbing to see the footage of the dead and injured, lying on the sand, with blood staining their faces and clothes. The camera captured some hands and arms before fading away. Only later I realized that there was no body to go with those appendages.

Green Almonds

I found something new at our local grocery store – green almonds. They were fuzzy, green-grey oval shaped nuts. Nuts came in fuzzy coats ? Apparently a lot of nuts “Nut (fruit) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia”) do come with an outer shell. Technically these fruits are called drupes.

In botany, a drupe is a fruit in which an outer fleshy part (exocarp, or skin; and mesocarp, or flesh) surrounds a shell (the pit or stone) of hardened endocarp with a seed inside.

Drupes, with their sweet, fleshy outer layer, attract the attention of animals as a food, and the plant population benefits from the resulting dispersal of its seeds. The endocarp (pit or stone) is often swallowed, passing through the digestive tract, and returned to the soil in feces with the seed inside unharmed; sometimes it is dropped after the fleshy part is eaten.

I opened the surprisingly thick shell to find a moist, tender unripe almond inside. The nut was quite soft and fluid filled. It had a subtle, slightly grassy flavour, very unlike the strongly flavoured ripe almonds.

I have been eating almonds for years, but I had no idea what they actually looked like on the tree. If I had been stranded in a grove of almonds I would have starved or at least gone hungry for a long time.

I simply do not have a great idea of what my food really looks like, where it comes from and how it is grown. I consider myself fairly well educated and informed, but the thing about ignorance, is that you are unaware of the depth of it. This is the great illusion of the modern food economy and modern life. As food is made a commodity for our convenience, we lose a visceral connection to the land, and believe in the god-like powers of human ingenuity, forgetting that it all depends on sun, rain and soil.

This is why talk of global warming does not seem to capture the imagination of most people. We are simply ignorant of the consequences of creating desserts of our farmlands. Food comes from the grocery store not farmland. The modern, city dwelling human living in the industrialzied world is so far removed from food production, that the concept of not getting enough food, seems as ureal as entertainment television.

Disconnect

We were watching “India Remade”, last night. There were two scenes that really made a connection. The first was the corpulent but incredibly wealthy owner of Kingfisher beer sitting in luxurious office sweet on his private jet. Dr.Vijay Mallyais also a member of Parliament. He was explaining how Indian farmers will eat a meal of ground peanut with some water, onions and a chilli for their meal. “They love it. But not one person in India starves to death.”

The next scene was of a thin, Indian farmer. He had had a surgery for a tumor and was now $700 in debt. He, his wife and mother were trying their best to raise enough crops on 3 acres of land to pay off the money. He felt ashamed that he had this debt over him. Farmers in India were committing suicide because they could not meet their financial commitments. So I suppose technically they did not starve to death, but they were dead none the less.

Dr.Vijay Mallya and the farmer lived in two different “realities”. The farmer lived in the real world of sun, crops and life and death by the arrival of rains. Vijay Mallya lived in a bubble of prosperity, shielded by money and power from the real harshness of the world. I think we in the west are stuck in the bubble of unreality, never really connecting with what it means to stay alive. That is why talk of global warming affecting rain fall patterns makes no dent on the public. Food is grown in magical places where the weather makes no difference; food just appears on the supermarket shelves.

The executives receiving bonuses at AIG are living in a further world of disconnect. They are receiving “bonuses” from the public purse for destroying their company. What a different attitude from the India farmer who was trying to do his best to recover from debt. It reminds me of a scene in “Animal Farm” where the pigs are in the house, living like the farmer and lives for the rest of the animals had not changed.

“Some animals are more equal than others”

Latex Bibliographies

I’ve been working on a paper and needed references. My tool of choice for writing is LaTex; there is a steep learning curve but once the text markup is working, it stays working. Unlike the precarious state of WYSIWYG wordprocessors (MS word in particular). But, finding out how bibliographies worked seem like an excursion through byzantine instructions.

My eventual solution was:

1. Write references in BibTex using BibDesk or JabRef
2. Save the BibTex file in the same directory as the source LaTex file

3. Include in the Latex file:

   \bibliographystyle{plain}

   \bibliography{name of bibtex file without extension}

   \end{document}

4. Using TeXShop:
   1) compile the Latex file using the Latex option
   2) compile the Latex file using BibTex(option in TexShop)
   3) compile the Latex file again using Latex option

That’s it.

Investments and the Mysterious 8 %

I was watching CBC news yesterday and saws a clip about investing in RRSPs. Apparently 40 % of Canadians will not be investing in RRSPs because of the economic climate.

The bank spokeswoman went on to say that this would be a good time to buy because the cost per unit is down. Then the reported talked about how not investing $2500 at 20, 30 and 40 years old could result in thousands of lost dollars at the time of retirement **assuming an 8 % rate of return**.

That was the kicker **”assuming an 8% rate of return”. Where am I going to get an 8 % rate of return ? Currently my RRSPs have had a negative rate of return, but I have gained slightly (not at 8 %) since starting. I don’t really understand this as I actually have less money in the account than I originally put in.

But, this is the funny math of the financial sector. This is the sector filled with Enrons and World Banks. A system rife with accounting fraud and collapsing in on itself because of outright greed. Yet, their best advice is to invest more.

I feel as if I have been sold an illusion of modernity. The numbers of finance and trade all seem to be smoke and mirrors, cooked up in many board rooms and designed to disguise and steal. It is a system built on greed and services only that end – the making of money. Respecting the social good, and the environment do not seem to be of concern.

Now as the cancer economy slows down, the immediate response is to keep the fires burning. Very little thought has been given as to why we have gotten here in the first place. I do not just mean the financial sector, but the whole of it. We are awash in pollution(chemical, plastic, and advertising), straining the earth’s ability to produce food, drinking up the last of cheap oil, sitting in cities that make us unhappy, and destroying the very foundations that feed, clothe and shelter us.

I wonder if we can actually make an 8% return of investments when the true costs of the modern system are paid. Of course the news story did not cover the wider concerns -they never do.

Celebrity Culture and Flight Crash on the Hudson

Last Thursday I was flicking channels and caught a segment on Entertainment Tonight about Flight US Air 1549 crash into the Hudson River. ET had its own take on the event by interviewing some celebrities who had been in air crashes, and apparently interviewing others just because they were celebrities.

It seemed inane to have all this celebrity talk on the news – most of it amounted to “The people must have been scared. I was really scared when…”. The program went to speculate which leading man would then play pilot Chesley B. Sullenberger.

In this instance I was not sure why the opinions of “celebrity” were of any value. They were the opinions of people who could sing, dance or memorize some lines in front of the camera.

Why not solicit some more valuable commentary – from pilots, or from the actual people involved in the crash, or perhaps even from witnesses. I suppose this is not the job of an entertainment show, but it typifies our culture’s fixation on “celebrity” for its own sake. I wonder how much closer we would be to zero carbon emissions, or eliminating world hunger, exploitation, or polution if the same amount of coverage would be given to real news.

Winter Tires

Last year I tried to find information on Winter Tires. Were they any good for Winter driving ? Would they actually perform any better than all season radials. In years past all season radials were just as good as winter tires. But, for all the looking I did, I could not find any information.

This year, my parents came up to help look after the new baby. Dad mentioned he always put on winter tires. This was news to me – I never recalled this sage advice before. But, after grumbling and complaining I decided to try them. In my role as a new dad, thoughts of and keeping the family safe was the driving motive.

I contemplated Michelin X-ice and $173/tire. But, as they were not in stock went with General Altimax Winter Tires at $130/tire. So seven hundred dollars later, I am glad I did. The car handle much better on the snow. I wish I had done it years ago.

Upgradeitis

“If it ain’t broke, don’t upgrade it”. This is an interesting article from Macworld. Artist Bob Staake has been using Photoshop 3 since 1994.

The idea of using such outdated software is foreign to many technophiles who, in this era of instant gratification when songs, movies, and software updates are never more than a click away, rarely seem to use programs that are older than a couple of months. So when Staake posted a video of his process for creating the cover of The New Yorker’s recent politics issue, the news that he was using software over a decade old spread faster than celebrity gossip.

Of course, Staake has upgraded some of his equipment over the years, despite his use of Photoshop 3.0 and older versions of Adobe PageMill and FileMaker Pro. “Believe me, I am anything but a technophobe,” he said. “I rarely ever upgrade because I’m usually inundated with work and simply don’t have the time to learn new versions. For me, it is simply a matter of pragmatism.” The 7100 has now been replaced as his workhorse by a PowerMac G5 running Mac OS X 10.4.11, necessitating that he run his beloved Photoshop 3.0 in Mac OS 9.2.1 via the Classic emulation environment (and not, as several blog posts about his New Yorker cover erroneously stated, in System 7).

This is not something that you hear a great deal about in our consumer culture, where new is always better and if you want to remain competitive, beautiful, accepted you’ve got to get with the latest and greatest. This is the great lie of the consumer culture – the constant need to upgrade. Mr.Staake did not fall for the fallacy of needing the constant upgrade to keep producing successfully.

Learning new versions of photoshop might make his work easier or faster. But for this artist, it did not really matter. He tried newer versions and simply found them lacking. He knows his tools inside and out and they do what he wants from them. Knowing the quirks of your tools and the things you need to do to work around them is the productive side of not upgrading. Any perceived adavantage of a novel system is negated by the fiddle time – that is the time it takes to get productive again. I have lost years to fiddle time.

There is nothing wrong with the upgrade or learning something new. But, I think it becomes counter productive when you assume that an upgrade is needed to keep producing or to keep competitive. To fully evaluate an upgrade or product, you need to divorce it from the glamour of “newness”. I am always thinking that the newest version will have that much “needed” feature or just be that much whiz bang better. But, what does the new software or hardware deliver that can not be done now ? Is this ability worth the time and monetary cost ? I find that if I do ask this question I am much less likely to decide to upgrade (unless it is free-then what the heck).

I like learning new systems and I like playing with new toys. I think one can get more creative learning novel systems. But, if the goal is to create and one just keeps learning new tools, is that any different than procrastinating by any other method ? Mr. Staake solved the problem by sticking with his original goal – just making his art.

The Price of Oil:Solutions for Children

Yesterday I saw a news clip about G8 Asian powers urging an oil production hike

AOMORI, Japan (AFP) — Eleven nations that guzzle nearly two-thirds of the world’s energy called Sunday for an urgent hike in global oil production as host Japan warned the world could plunge into recession….
In a joint statement, they called for boosts to their own production and asked major oil producers “to increase investment to keep markets well supplied in response to rising world demand”.
The European Union’s energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs warned that high oil prices were a fact to be reckoned with and that major economies needed to come up with alternative energy.

“The era of cheap energy seems to be over and no economy should gamble on a potential return to low prices,” Piebalgs said.

What incredible wisdom-if there is not enough – ask mom and dad for more. The “end of oil” has been a long time in coming. Peak oil production had been predicted, ridiculed and discovered again. But,none of this wisdom reached politicians or car manufacturers. Standards for emissions were relaxed as the new gas guzzlers (SUVs) came into being.

Dead Ducks:The Envirornment and Making Clean Oil

Title: Dead Ducks: The Environment and Making “Clean” Oil

500 hundred ducks landed in a Syncrude toxic tailings pond 75 km north of Fort McMurry. Only 5 were strong enough to even try saving, of those, 3 have survived. The tailings pond contains water that is used to wash the oil from the tar sands. The contaminated water contains a mixture of heavy metals, sands and residual oil. Birds that land on the pond are quickly coated, loose their waterproofing and drown.