I’ve implemented a comments RSS feed, should anyone want to see reader comments to my weblog…
“http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/comments.xml”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/comments.xml
Enjoy :-)
Well, we broke last year’s record of $400. Our family just spend $600 at the annual school fundraiser at Chapters. Of course, $200 (before discounts) of it was the new Far Side collection :-)
I would have spent more, but they didn’t have some of the books on my “wish list”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/static/wishlist-books.html in stock, the bums…
Fast Company | The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know
An interesting (if long) article describing the effects, good and bad, that Walmart is having on the US (and probably Canadian) markets.
Wal-mart is an 800 lb gorilla, and can force its suppliers to do pretty much anything. Wal-mart is using that clout to relentlessly lower prices. There’s nothing wrong with that; Wal-mart is a business, and has a mandate from shareholders. Shoppers like lower prices, and so Wal-mart is doing brisk business. (Remember, Wal-mart is really in the business of selling shelf-space, the same way that TV and magazines really sell eyeballs to advertisers).
As always, there’s a downside. The push for lower-prices is accelerating the movement of manufacturing overseas, closing down American businesses and putting people out of work. Well, except for the management shell; see an earlier “How to Save the World entry”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/11/04.html#a504). This also leads to the destruction of most small retail businesses in any area with a Wal-mart. Small businesses cannot compete on price, because Wal-mart gets such huge concessions from suppliers, and/or gobbles up all available supply. For many retail businesses, there are no other effective differentiators; too few people are willing to pay for quality or service these days. This is not because they don’t want quality or service; it’s because they don’t have the cash.
Ironically, the very same people who shop at Wal-mart for its lower prices are the ones losing jobs (or businesses) as a result of the cycle. It becomes a vicious cycle. Which brings us to “Dave Pollard’s comments”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/11/18.html#a520 on the same article. He explains it better than I, so go read his entry :-)
Jeff K says: I had prepared a long response to this, but Pollard’s comments are so obviously flawed, there is little chance of his “economics” ever being implemented, and besides, Wal-Mart is a fait-accomplis so any arguments about a “cycle” are also flawed. Heck, even my 7 year old knows that. I ask her, “Where is your toy made” and she responds correctly every time. (China).
A humourous rant about english vocabulary and the use thereof:
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: Words and Expressions Commonly Misused by Insipid Brothers-in-law
It doesn’t cover BRING and TAKE; I’ll have to get “Michaéla”:http://blog.cfrq.net/mnrk/ to write that one.
I’m on my third copy of _All the Myriad Ways_, because I lent the first two to people who didn’t give them back. It’s one of my favourites, in part because of “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”:http://www.rawbw.com/~svw/superman.html. The story is now available online legally; go check it out.
H: gas is 66.5 cents a litre?
M: That’s almost beastly!
Jeff K says: Speaking of numerology, did you know they crushed B-52 #56-666 but left #56-665 for display in the Wright-Patterson Airforce Base museum?
Think of all the jet fuel wasted on 24 hour alerts through the 50’s and 60’s. The B-52 was quite the beast.
The first, “Atkins-like Diet Shows Promise for Heavy Heart Patients”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/hsn/20031112/hl_hsn/atkinslikedietshowspromiseforheavyheartpatients
bq. Recent studies show the Atkins approach is effective for short-term weight loss. A key question is whether the diet will achieve results over a longer period of time while avoiding a harmful buildup of artery-clogging fat that could boost patients’ risk for cardiovascular disease.
The second I actually heard first on the radio: “Diets work, *if* you follow them”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/nm/20031109/sc_nm/health_heart_diet_dc
bq. After two months 22 percent of the dieters had given up. After a year, 35 percent dropped out of Weight Watchers and the Zone diets and 50 percent had quit the Atkins and Ornish plans.
This suggests that the anecdotal evidence is true; Atkins works, but it’s harder to stay on a highly restrictive diet (Atkins == low-carb, Ornish == low-fat) than it is to eat a low-_calorie_ balanced diet. My personal experience matches; I know people who have “failed” at both Weight Watchers and Atkins, but I know more people successful on WW than on the others (and not because I’m a member; I’m not counting the people I know only through WW).
Weight Watchers works for me; I was able to follow their “eat fewer calories” system fairly easily (all I needed was a system to follow), I’m still keeping it off after six months; I have good weeks and bad weeks, but they average out. I don’t think I could manage an Atkins diet; I like bread and honey too much :-)
I think that using Atkins for controlled weight-loss, and then switching to something else, might work for some people, but for others it would be too many different eating rules in a short period of time. People already tend to “bounce” at the end of a weight-loss program, as they go back to their old eating habits.
Actually, that might be an interesting experiment. Does changing the rules at the end of a weight-loss regimen increase the success rate (because it’s easier to follow a new program than to stick with an existing one), or does it reduce the success rate (because introducing another new set of rules is too confusing)?
Anyway, “Chuq’s commentary”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/000989.html for the second link was bang on, and worth repeating:
* All diets effectively work by dropping your calories below your usage rate. You can play with biophysical issues all you want, but the bottom line is more calories than you use, you gain weight, fewer, you lose weight.
* Any well-designed diet will help you lose weight if you use it.
* No diet will help you lose weight if you don’t.
* Choosing a diet that you can keep to is more important than choosing a diet for any other reason. Atkins might sound good, and might work for your friends, but if you can’t live without carbs, you’ll fail. Ditto in the other direciton with the Ornish diet.
* basically, diets don’t work because people can’t stay on them.
[ both links via “Teal Sunglasses”:http://www.plaidworks.com/chuqui/blog/ ]
valencia simpson says: i would like to participate in a weight loss study.
Jim says: There have been a number of studies that have shown that Atkins definitely causes weight loss – in the short term. But as you’ve said – it is a very difficult diet to sustain. Could you imagine being low/no carb your whole life??
The other thing is that weight loss doesnt necessarily mean fat loss. A number of Atkins dieters showed drop in lean muscle mass as well as fat loss.
It’s difficult to lose weight without dropping _some_ muscle mass; that’s just the way it ends up working. Weight Watchers members lose lean muscle mass too.
On the other hand, regular (non-strenuous, non-body-building) exercise only _adds_ a few pounds of muscle mass, according to the writings I’ve seen, so I can’t see the loss side being significant either.
bq. Most dieters are so concerned about second-order effects, such as daily fluctuations in weight and changes in metabolism, that they lose track of the first law of thermodynamics: conservation of energy.
bq. Want to lose a pound of fat? You can work it off by hiking to the top of a 2,500-story building. Or by running 60 miles. Or by spending 7 hours cleaning animal stalls. […]
bq. Exercise is a very difficult way to lose weight. Here’s a rule of thumb: exercise very hard for one hour (swimming, running, or racquetball)– and you’ll lose about one ounce of fat […]
bq. If you run for an hour, you’ll lose that ounce of fat and also a pound or two of water. By the next day, when you’ve replenished the water, you might think, “the weight came right back!†But you’d be wrong—you really did lose an ounce. It is hard to notice, unless you keep running every day for a month or more, and don’t reward yourself after each run with a cookie.
bq. There is a much easier way to lose weight, as we can learn from the first law of thermodynamics. Eat less.
The rest can be found at “The MIT Technology Review : The Physics Diet”:http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/wo_muller111403.asp?p=1
Jeff K says: The conservation of energy? I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous. Chemical energy is stored in chemical bonds, which are goverened by E=mc^2, or more precisely, the conservation of mass-energy. ..and anyway even that is irrelevent. That’s BAAAAD science. You want to know what the body does with the results of combustion of x calories in an ounce of fat (mass is conserved (- the E=mc^2 part, which can be ignored on the bathroom scale))
I propose a new title for your diet science: The conservation of crap. If crap is conserved, one is full of sh.. er, I digress.
Some people believe and hope that fat is converted to muscle. I can only go by my own experience, which is that
1. Excerise produces more muscle and less fat and a 20 minute regime each day can change the body drammatically in 6 weeks.
2. I eat the same as thinner people.
Anyway, I invoke Newton’s first law of motion, according to my calculations, a body in motion stays in motion, so running 60 miles should consume 0 calories.
Isn’t science great?
The “physics” side of the article is over-simplification, perhaps; it was intended as humour. But the point of the quoted section is simple: exercise alone isn’t going to lead to weight loss, especially if you’re treating yourself after workouts.
The vast majority of the food calories you consume get used merely keeping you alive (the so-called basal metabolic rate). The more you weigh, the more energy you need (and yes, fat cells need energy too). This is why many people on weight loss programs “plateau”; they have to reduce the amount they consume as their weight drops. Also, overweight sedentary people can eat as much as skinny active people; the excess body mass consumes more energy than the exercise.
Ignore all the fancy diets; the weight-loss equation is simple. Consume fewer calories than you expend, and you’ll lose weight. Consume more, you’ll gain weight. Everything else is management.
One advantage to administering your own weblog: when you make a typo in a comment, you can correct it :-)
“David Brake” mentions an “Interesting row underway about the ethics of private schools”:http://blog.org/archives/cat_current_affairs_uk.html#000935 in the UK. I was going to add a short comment, but as it got longer and longer I decided it would work better as a blog entry of my own :-)
David and I met at private school (St. George’s College in Toronto), so maybe we’re biased. He ends with:
bq. I and my wife have no children but if we did and could afford it we would probably send our kids to a private school if the local public school was not good. I know she would insist on it and precisely because private schooling has not been banned I would have a hard time penalising my own child in order to benefit his or her classmates at a failing public school.
That’s pretty much where I sit. I support the public school system in principle, and yet my children attend private school. In fact, we chose the school _first_, and then found a house reasonably close by…
Unfortunately, 30 years of political agendas have systematically gutted the Ontario public school system, and even if the majority of motivated parents were involved, it would take at least a decade (if not two) to fix it. Now it can be argued that private schools don’t do any better than public schools at teaching the basics (the “three-Rs” of education). There are certainly still pockets in Toronto where the schools are extremely good.
The important differences for me (and our school) is in other areas:
* “soft” subjects like music and languages, and critical thinking skills
* smaller class sizes (compared to Toronto)
* more adult supervision and encouragement
* a good physical education program (including skating in kindergarten and skiing for grade 1 and up!)
* many extra-cirricular and after-school activities
* a high level of community involvement.
* compacting (something I’ll blog about later, probably)
These are all things that for various reasons have diminished or disappeared in our public schools. We decided that since we had the resources to do otherwise, we were not going to make our children “test subjects” in the current political scrap over public education. And so our children attend private school.
Jeff K says: I feel like there’s a debate here, and I don’t have my own blog, so I’ll have to comment here.
My public school education was quite mediocre, bordering on irrelevant. I’m just glad it was poor enough that I had time to pursue my own interests and reading.
Um, what was I debating, again?
It was very windy Wednesday night and all day Thursday; it sounded like the “new roof” was going to lift off and disappear!
I didn’t put my garbage out on Thursday morning, because I knew I’d probably find my garbage can about a mile away. I came home last night to find two recycling boxes on my front lawn! I’ll leave ’em there for a couple of days, and see if anyone claims them…
“Greg Wilson”:http://www.third-bit.com/~gvwilson/ now has a “weblog”:http://www.third-bit.com/~gvwilson/blog/.
Movies for me to see this winter season, in no particular order:
* “Peter Pan”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/universal/peter_pan/
* LotR:Return of the King
* The Maxtrix: Revolutions
* The Cat in the Hat
* Master and Commander
* “Looney Tunes: Back in Action”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/wb/looneytunesbackinaction/trailer/
* Alien: The Director’s Cut
* “Timeline”:http://www.apple.com/trailers/paramount/timeline/ (I loved the book :-)
Too many to see with my hectic schedule, ’tis true…
Are you an Accidental Techie? I know a few of them.
My wife started out doing document processing in the 80s, and became a sysadmin out of self defense (read: no one else would do it; they were afraid of the computers :-). Then she had to teach everyone else… She discovered she was good at it, and eventually went into “business for herself”:http://www.qa-consulting.org/ doing technical training and training development. It turns out that she has two related talents; understanding technical gibberish, and translating it into realspeak so that it can be taught to others. Ask her to explain IP netmasks sometime…
My friend Michelle (who hosts persephone.cfrq.net) is currently a syadmin, and also more-or-less fell into the job; now she’s responsible for a large, geographically dispersed corporate network (and is currently in London, England setting up a brand new office :-). Her formal training is in environmental sciences…
There are others. I think it is the case that I know more women than men are “accidental” techies. However, we have even more women with formal technical educations. I’m not quite sure what to conclude from this :-)
There’s me certainly (though of course I am not much of a techie I am more techie than my UK peers by some distance!). And aiabx. And dmo, I imagine…
I haven’t been counting the physicists (Andy, Geoff, Seonaid, etc.) as accidental techies, because modern physics is pretty heavily computer-based already. The road to perdition is much shorter than for, say, a fine-arts graduate :-)
[ _update_: the article is “now available online”:http://www.moneysense.ca/planning/education_planning/article.jsp?content=20031107_143425_800 ]
Back in June, my wife was approached by a journalist, writing an article on ”how to get value for money when you send your kids to private school” for “MoneySense”:http://www.moneysense.ca (a Canadian personal finance magazine). My wife agreed to be interviewed, and she and the author had several conversations. Over all the experience was quite positive. The author was genuinely interested in the subject, and was friendly and helpful.
In early August, MoneySense asked if our family would agree to appear in photos accompanying the article. My initial inclination was to say “No”; as (with good reason) I do not trust the mass media. My children attend a small school; all of the staff, and most of the parents, know my kids. I was concerned that associating our family with a potentially controversial article might cause problems within the community.
However, our experience with the author had been excellent; I like the magazine (I’ve been a subscriber since it was launched); and we thought it would a cool experience for the kids to appear in a magazine, and have a nice picture to frame and hang up. So in the end, I decided to take a chance and accept the invitation.
Sadly, my worst fears were confirmed. When the “issue”:http://www.moneysense.ca/magazine/columnist.jsp?content=20030924_140642_4024 arrived, I opened it to find a beautiful, 1.5 page photo of my children next to the sensational headline:
p(center). “10 Things Private Schools *Won’t* Tell You”:http://www.moneysense.ca/planning/education_planning/article.jsp?content=20031107_143425_800
(Won’t was highlighted in red). I was shocked. Then I was angry; what a completely ridiculous title! The article itself is even-handed and thought provoking; it certainly does _not_ contain an exposé! As far as I can tell, nobody was hiding anything! I have no idea what the editors were thinking when they chose the headline for the article.
Any positive experience this might have been for my family was completely destroyed by that one decision. I certainly can’t display it that way; I don’t even want to give out copies to the grandparents! Staff at the school feel betrayed; they went out of their way to be helpful to us and to the magazine (including allowing the photo shoot on school property). Thankfully people in the community have mostly been sympathetic; they understand that the editorial process was out of our control. And for what little it’s worth, the kids liked having their picture in a magazine; at this point they are too young to understand my frustration.
I made the mistake of ignoring one of my personal rules of life: never, _ever_, have dealings with the media. The best intentions will always be corrupted; the correct answer is always “*No Comment!*”.
I will remember that in the future.
The headline and blurb was almost certainly not chosen by the original journalist (who might well be as annoyed as you are) and was a simple attempt to get people to read the article. That said, if the article itself is “even-handed and thought provoking” you’ve come out of it a lot better than most people who encounter the media ;-) You should encourage the school staff to read the actual article before they complain too much. I’m more annoyed by the fact that the moneysense people didn’t put it up on the website (could you scan a copy and send it? I’d be interested – and don’t have recent pix of Charlotte and Gareth!)
Jeff K says: 10 Things Private School Won’t teach you
1. You can only nurture so much
2. The curriculum is a crock public or private
3. The media is a crock
4. Psychology is a crock
5. Psychiatry is a crock
6. Economics is a crock
7. English/literature study is shallow
8. Art programs are lame
9. Physics ignores measurement
10. History is written by the victors
…and you can’t teach any of that because (drum roll please), you create cynics. Cynicism is the enemy of the state. ..and besides, you don’t need to be cynical about that stuff. Well, at least if your school library is not as desolate as Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s. :)
Which brings me to maybe a number 11: If they load you down with Crap at private school, when does one have time to pick up the Alternate Readings at the school library?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Jeff K says: I was in a rush this morning. A search on the Web turns up that a private school called “Ridley” in Ontario has an interesting physics program actively dealing with measurement.
Most of the others, however, offer “Centuries old liberal arts” educations. i.e. crap.
Jeff K says: They just put the article online:
http://www.moneysense.ca/planning/education_planning/article.jsp?content=20031107_143425_800
G: “Yu-Gi-Oh is _last_ year!”
Population: One: Stats and figures
This weblog entry is cute. Reminds me of a book I own, “How to Lie With Statistics”…
Heh, as my stats prof at UofT always said, never trust a graphj that doesn’t show a zero point.
The latest meme traversing the blogosphere is The Political Compass, which calculates out a two-dimensional political orientation that is supposed to be more useful than the uni-dimensional “Left/Right” measure. My results:
Economic Left/Right: -7.38
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -5.18
Which came out a little more Libertarian than I think of myself. Either the test is slightly off, or my self-image is slightly off. Some introspection is in order :-)
“Job Cuts More Than Double in October”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&ncid=&e=5&u=/ap/20031104/ap_on_bi_ge/job_cuts_1
bq. Job cuts announced by U.S. companies more than doubled in October from the previous month, providing more evidence that the nation’s economy is in a period of jobless expansion
(via “Halley’s Comment”:http://halleyscomment.blogspot.com/archives/2003_11_02_halleyscomment_archive.html#106798164757107862 again).
And today “How to Save the World”:http://blogs.salon.com/0002007/2003/11/04.html#a504 brings us:
bq. What is left of the large corporation though? A small management team and an army of lawyers who contract all of the risky functions of the company to outside organizations. Assets that are all intellectual — patents, trademarks, contracts, etc. Essentially no front-line employees, no liabilities, and no risks. And no direct contact with those pesky customers.
bq. In a world of ends, where the network is everything and all the knowledge resides in the network at these ends, there is no longer any need for a middle-man, especially one as costly as the executive in today’s large corporation.
This is starting to sound eerily like the cyberpunk novels I was reading a decade ago…
Hey, there’s a Lunar Eclipse on Saturday November 8th!
All times eastern standard time, for the city of Toronto:
| 16:54 | moon rise |
| 18:32 | moon enters earth’s shadow |
| 20:06 | totality begins |
| 20:31 | totality ends |
| 22:04 | moon exits earth’s shadow |
| 07:35 | moon set (November 9th) |
The current weather forecast is:
bc. Saturday : A mix of sun and cloud. 30 percent chance of morning showers.
Sunday : Cloudy. 40 percent chance of showers.
Excellent; I’ll be at a party, so I won’t have a chance to play with the camera, but I will stick my nose outside to check the moon…
Hm, Amazon.com has it for ~ $110 CDN
(ISBN: 0740721135)
Apparently there’s a $25 (list) premium for buying in Canada, probably because the exchange rate has dropped so much recently. Anyway, I still got it for 40% off, I didn’t have to pay shipping, and it _was_ for a fundraiser…