Recently, I heard a news item talking about proposed legislation to crack down on schoolyard bullies. I think it was local to some school district. Under this proposal, bullies would be subject to harsher penalties and teachers would be required to be more vigilant in watching for bully behaviour. A proponent of the legislation made the comment that if we have laws preventing harrassment in the workplace, surely similar laws ought to apply in the schoolyard.

Initially, the proposal sounded fine and I didn't give it a second thought. But the story lurked there in the back of my mind, and as time passed I started to get more and more uneasy about it. Now I must confess to mixed feelings about the whole idea.

I don't for a second believe that bullying is a good thing. Of course bullies should be punished for their behaviour. On the other hand, the schoolyard bully represents an archetype of human behaviour, one that a child will encounter many times throughout their life. And no matter how many laws we hide behind, some people are simply assholes and we have to deal with them from day to day. Better that the child learn that early on and develop the skill and strength of character to cope with bullying. I'm sorry, but you can't shield children from all of life's difficult lessons.

The other thing that bothers me is the analogy with the workplace, the expectation that we can simply scale down laws of adult society and expect them to apply to children. I remember hearing of a boy in grade school who was sued for sexual harrassment for kissing a girl at school. Pardon me, but WTF? Children learn to function in society via trial and error, not lawsuits. The only behaviour this breeds is litigiousness. The reason we don't have the same laws for children is that they don't always know better.

As a major caveat, I want to say that I do not have any children. And while I can recall several times that I was bullied (more psychologically than physically), I believe that times have changed. Growing up is tougher on kids now, and it's not unreasonable to try to help them out.

Over the past week, my local grocery store had been changing. First, some random things were moved around: the lotto machine, the coffee stand, the newspapers, all reorganized in anticipation of... something. Then, midweek, two of the checkout aisles disappeared. Needless to say, I was a bit miffed, worried that lines would simply get longer. Little did I know what they had in store for my neighbourhood.

Remember the IBM commercial where a scruffy guy in an overcoat goes into a grocery store, loads his pockets with merchandise, and walks out? He passes through a scanner that appears to alert a police officer to the theft. The officer catches up with the alleged shoplifter. And hands him his forgotten receipt. Mr. Scruffy was shopping all along, and the checkout process was totally transparent. As an aside, I'm grateful for the implicit endorsement of the moral fibre of scruffy people.

Anyway, when I went to the store at the end of the week, the changes were complete. In place of the two checkout aisles were four self-serve kiosks. Self-serve aisles at the grocery! Huzzah! The station is a bit like an ATM with a built-in scanner/scale, a place for your basket, and a place for plastic bags. The four kiosks are watched by a single attendant. You scan items just as a cashier would. For produce, you place the item on the scale and press a button. The attendant looks at the item via a small camera on top of the scale and keys in the code for you (now this is an opportunity for computer vision research if I ever saw one).

The self-serve stations aren't really practical if you have a cart full of groceries. But hopefully all the people with small orders will use them and free up the lines for the larger orders, where employees can scan items with practiced speed. Result: general increase in shopper efficiency. And an efficient shopper is a happy shopper.

I spent most of Thursday and Friday and some of Saturday searching for a number. I tried many of the obvious ones; you know, zero, one, π, 343. But none of those was the right number. I devised a bunch of devious and clever schemes to derive the number, but none of them came to fruition. Finally I developed a magic formula that, after much swearing and debugging, yielded the number I was looking for. For the record, that number is approximately 1.027232 (I could tell you what it does, but would you really care?). If you want to obtain more significant digits, the formula I came up with is

For the love of Gauss, don't try to evaluate this formula and get back my number. I can't imagine how many errors crept in during the translation process from C++ code.

Here are some fun, if visceral, Thingo facts:

Cholesterol (TOTAL)	132, goal is <200	mg/dL
Triglyceride	48, goal is <200	mg/dL
Cholesterol (HDL)	48, goal is >35	mg/dL
Cholesterol (LDL)	74, goal is <130	mg/dL
Thyroid stimulating hormone	normal

The funny thing is that because I've spent the last two days reviewing graduate school applications, I expect these numbers to come with percentile rankings. You know, "your LDL level is 74, which is lower than 88% of the population." Might be amusing to know, though I doubt it would help me get into a grad school.

"Architect" is a perfectly good noun. In its vaguest sense an architect is a "person who brings about a specified thing".

However, "architect" is not a verb. Systems are not architected. They are conceived, planned, designed, manufactured, distributed, sold, deployed, maintained, retired, decommissioned, forgotten and wistfully recalled, but not architected. Verbing architect stupids English.

I'm lucky enough to be spared from hearing this abuse of language on a regular basis; I do all my development work alone, and all my research meetings are on a high enough level that the implementation is rarely mentioned. Nath is not so fortunate. She has participated in many corporate design meetings where important people talk about architecting things. So she's more bitter about the word than I am.

The reason I bring all this up is that I was reading something today where the author actually managed to outdo the abusers mentioned above. In discussing a system, they mentioned that a person understood how it was "architectured". I'm happy to see that this isn't listed as a verb in the dictionary. What would is mean? Is the system adorned with architecture? Is it a prairie style chip? You should dictionary words like these in the future before you doofus yourself again.

Well, the four year Festival of Badness officially got underway today. In one of his first acts as president, W is reinstating a ban on federal funds to international family planning organizations (question: are these US-funded organizations in other countries?). Many groups that offer abortion counseling will probably have to close up. Last time I checked, abortion was still legal in many of these places, so I guess the goal is simply to help keep pregnant women underinformed about their choices.

I'm curious to see how far they will go to tear down the Choice edifice that has been so precariously erected over the past thirty years. Perhaps the best recourse for a woman with an unwanted pregnancy is to get their unborn child convicted of a capital crime -- the Bush administration would be happy to terminate its life in that case.

What do you get for the person who sports a sexy head of hockey hair? Why, puck shampoo, of course!

When we were in Ottawa over the holidays, we visited Lush in the Byward Market. They are fine purveyors of soaps, shampoos, powders and so on. We were particularly intrigued by their selection of shampoo bars, little puck-shaped pellets of sweet-smelling shampoo. Apparently, the bar is rubbed over the hair a couple times and lather ensues. I must admit I didn't see how this was going to work, but we decided to try it out.

Wow. I get in the shower, get my hair wet, rub the little puck thingy on my hair. It didn't feel like anything rubbed off. Then I started to work the stuff in. In seconds, a vast torrent of thick suds encased my head. My hair began to sing, to rejoice at this divine froth, this marvelous and downright voluminous lather. I had happy hair all day. Apparently there's a Lush in Vancouver. Another reason to visit, I guess.

For the record, I do not have a mullet.

In Thingo's world, you might think that Stingo refers to the hunky velvet-tongued former bassisto of the policeo, singero of such hits as "Roxanneo" and "Brand New Dayo".

Such is not the case. Stingo is the actual name of a character in the movie Sophie's Choice, which we watched the other night. This was a gripping, humourous and rather painful movie, one that I recommend for some quiet day. If you're a Kevin Kline fan, here's a chance to see his first performance. Also, note that Stingo is played by a very young-looking Peter MacNicol, who went on to play John Cage on Ally McBeal (but not before his brilliant performance as Janosz Poha in Ghostbusters II). And Meryl Streep is, of course, brilliant.

Nath is unimpressed with all things web. She scoffs at any seemingly novel use of the web I show her. When I told her about blogging and my intention to start up this site, I was greeted with even greater than normal skepticism. I believe that the word "narcissism" came up more than once, not to mention "waste of time" and "sandwich".

That's why I find it so ironic that she is thingo's biggest fan and most eager consumer. She harasses me and calls me a Bad Blogger when I go for more than twenty-four hours without posting anything. Most amusingly, she says she needs me to post often so she knows what's going on in my life. Which is odd because a large part of that life is spent in her company, and I give her an earful on the remaining parts already. When I helped Shawn onto the bus the other day, she got off the bus at the very same stop and heard the whole story at the time. And yet she still enjoyed the blog entry about it the next day.

As for the long interval between posts, I've been pretty busy with research recently. This will probably continue for another month or so. I will either post less frequently due to lack of time, or more frequently due to the need for an outlet. Stay tuned.

Last night on the way home, I met a guy while waiting for the bus. He was nearly blind and asked for some help getting on and off the bus, which was fine because he was getting off at my stop anyway. Shawn (for that was his name) was probably about my age.

It turns out that Shawn was about a month from graduation at one of our local massage schools. This is an excellent twist on the usual stereotypes associated with blind people. The stereotypical profession of the blind is piano tuning, presumably because the sense of hearing has become highly sensitive to compensate for lack of sight. But let us not forget the remarkable sense of touch, fingertips that can read books. Imagine what those fingertips could do to your aching muscles. Convinced? Then seek out his services when he starts practicing in a few months.

I wanted to express all this to him, but I held back. Not because I was ashamed or shy, but because I believed he would probably have heard the "blind massage therapist" comment about 87 times since that morning. But I know that you wouldn't have heard it so many times, so I'm sharing with you.

It was a pleasure to meet you, Shawn.

Picture the following: two men get lost in the wilderness and stumble across a town that doesn't appear on any map. Eventually, they learn the town's dark secret. To protect the place and keep it safe from outside intrusion, every night the whole region zips forward one hundred years. Because they only interact with the rest of the planet for one day every hundred years, the residents of this town can live a happy, peaceful life free of the pressures of an ever-advancing civilization. Now add tap dancing.

This plot reminds me a bit of, say, Vinge's Marooned in Realtime (except for the tap dancing). But the movie is in fact Brigadoon, a 1954 musical starring Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse. We were inspired to watch it partly because of the third wedding in Four Weddings and a Funeral, where Simon Callow enters a room full of Scottish dancing and exclaims, "Bloody Brigadoon!". This is another lavish Hollywood musical, set in a foreign country but filmed on a sound stage with American actors. All the supposedly outdoor scenes feature enormous matte paintings of Scottish scenery suspended behind a small stage of recycled Star Trek landscape props. Very endearing, and very entertaining.

In an earlier post, I mentioned that Montreal bagels are the One True Bagels. In case you are part of the rabble that believes a bagel is just a bagel, let me take this opportunity to inform and enlighten you.

Let us first dispense with the vast majority of so-called bagels manufactured worldwide. Most are nothing more than bread with a hole in the middle. If you're not boiling the dough in a honey-water mixture, it's not a bagel. If you're covering the surface with anything fancier than sesame or poppy seeds, it's unlikely to be a bagel. Basically, with a few simple tests we can narrow the field of True Bagels down to two meaningful sources: Montreal and New York.

Now, there has always been a rivalry between these two cities over ultimate bagel superiority. And sure, there is something to be said about New York bagels. They are large and heavy, and taste vaguely bagel-like. But there is nothing quite like a Montreal bagel. Nothing like a St. Viateur bagel with sesame seeds, pulled recently from a wood-fired oven, slathered with cream cheese and strawberry jam. Or lox and onions. I'm going to stop before I short circuit the keyboard with drool.

I was reminded of this debate recently when my parents showed me an article in the Montreal Gazette about a scientific bagel-comparison study. A lifelong NYC resident taste-tested New York and Montreal bagels. The result?

I prefer the Montreal bagel for its balanced sweetness and chewiness, and perhaps most important, for its wood-fired oven taste.

I consider the issue settled.

Here's the latest update in the hackfest that is thingo.net.

A significant percentage of readers reported being somewhat put off by the layout of entries in the log. The problem is that each individual entry is read from top to bottom, but the log as a whole is read from bottom to top. This leads to lots of frustrated scrolling from entry to entry. Furthermore, it's somewhat difficult for a regular visitor to track entries they've read. I was taking this layout for granted based on my experience with numerous other log-based pages, so it was nice to receive a wake-up call. Yeah! It is annoying!

Fear not, gentle reader, your salvation is at hand. I've created an alternate view of the log that is more diary-like than blog-like. The diary view and the traditional blog view are accessible from the two new links under the "thingo log" heading in the sidebar. You'll see a summary of just the subject lines, each of which links to an entry on its own page. That page also has next and previous links. Readers can now enjoy a pleasant scroll-free thingo experience. As usual, play around with the new features, and let me know if you have comments or suggestions.

A couple of years ago, I decided that I would broaden my horizons by occasionally purchasing a magazine about a subject with which I was completely unfamiliar. This turns out to be a worthwhile exercise -- it immerses you in the inner world of some (from your point of view) obscure corner of human knowledge.

One magazine I eventually came to was Mercator's World, a magazine about maps and exploration. It features articles about famous maps, cartographers and collectors, but also delves into the history of exploration, charting, scientific discovery, religion, and the rest of the human endeavour that has led to the maps we can take for granted today. Through Mercator's World, I developed an interest in antique maps, in the way they hint at who we were and what we knew.

Today, I got a call that my birthday present from Nath was ready for pickup, and ran over to grab it. We had picked it out over the weekend. It's a 1762 French map of North America, a printed engraving with light hand colouring. This was before the United States or Canada existed, and in fact before most of North America had even been explored. Accordingly, the map is almost completely blank west of the Mississippi and west of Ontario, all the way to the Pacific coast. Montréal is there (and had been for 120 years at that point) but Seattle would not be born for almost a century.

Because we are forever traveling with the frontier of the Present, it's easy to view a piece of knowledge as a finished product, an easily-digested morsel of information that travels with us. A map like this allows us to contemplate the process and evolution of knowledge, the lifetimes spent in its pursuit.

Yesterday's rumours are true: American Airlines will buy all of TWA and a large chunk of US Airways. This isn't altogether surprising. Airlines are horribly unprofitable companies and in the race to a single Everything Corp., they'd be the first to go.

What really bothers my about these mergers, however, is the spin. The press release always claims that the change will benefit consumers, offering more choices at reduced cost. Is there anyone left out there who still believes this line when they see it? This lie is so plain and undefended that it's embarassing, and it's disrespectful to expect us to buy it. It's simply offered to us so that we don't take our business elsewhere. But don't worry -- pretty soon there won't be an elsewhere.

In my neighbourhood, there's a small house-like structure being offered for rent as office space. This is a recent development; I remember not too long ago when the building housed a small, gloomy-looking real estate office. The only remnant of that office is the sign over the door, which reads "Custom Realty".

Whenever I pass by this office, I have a little wordplay-inspired daydream. By inserting a single letter, you can make the sign read "Custom Reality", which sounds like a great name for a transhumanist, ultramodern software company. I dream of renting the space, hand editing the sign, and opening such a software company. It would have a futuristic but understated feel, and aggressively push the frontier of software design.

There are only two problems with this scenario. First of all, I don't have any transhumanist software to write. I leave that in other hands. But more importantly, the customreality.com domain is already taken. This spells immediate death for any proposed software company name.

I've added a few more features to the site and changed the look slightly. There are now links for accessing archives of previous months (since there's only one such month right now, the links aren't very interesting). I've also created a page for showing individual entries. This is useful for linking to a specific blog entry reliably from off-site. You'll notice the little [link] at the top right of every entry. Use the URL provided there as a reliable target (if, that is, you find anything I say worth repeating).

On the cosmetic side, I've tidied up the sidebar a little bit, removing the white boxes and compressing things down. I found that with everything in boxes, the site was starting to look more like a newspaper (or slashdot) and less like a place for personal contemplation. Overall, the change is minor but I like the result.

I can see from the recent past that I haven't managed an entry a day yet. The present prattle about the design of the site is partly an attempt simply to have said something today. I'd much rather have interesting observations on the world (or better yet, diary entries), but I'm still learning the mindset of writing anything at all. Stay tuned.

This site has existed for a couple of weeks now. I can tell it's going big-time because (a) approximately three people read it on a semi-regular basis, and (b) the log now has more entries than the script is willing to display all at once. I consider this a bit of a milestone, and intend to use this point in time to evaluate the layout and design. If nothing else, I'll need to create some buttons to navigate the archived log entries. But be on the lookout for a new design, new features, and a fresh lemon scent.

To mark the start of this transitional period, I'd like to introduce the first new feature: a contact address! If you would like to reach me, just send email to thingo@thingo.net. Operators are standing by.

I used to watch Ally McBeal and occasionally enjoy it. Of course, the court cases they present every week are not of this universe, always worth a good laugh because of their utter absurdity. At least that's usually the case. I get even more enjoyment when these oddball cases seep into real life. With that in mind, here's the latest installment in The Docket of the Absurd.

The case at hand involves a former cocaine addict in British Columbia who is suing his drug dealer for "personal harm". Apparently, the dealer had an obligation to uphold the safety and well-being of his clients, and in failing to do so is reponsible for the financial and physical harm caused by the product.

There's a precedent, I suppose, given that many individuals and groups have sued cigarette companies for harm. This new case is a little different, more like suing the corner store that sells the cigarettes. I guess it would be sort of hard to sue the syndicates that manufacture the cocaine. In any case, our plaintiff will have to establish that he was unaware of the dangers of cocaine and crack when he started using them. This might be possible for smokers who took up the habit thirty years ago. But crack? Good luck.

My brother sent me some quotes from Exploring New Ethics for Survival: the Voyage of the Spaceship Beagle, by Garrett James Hardin. Here's a telling one:

To the person living on a spaceship the sight of a smokestack is intolerable. Implicitly, every smokestack shouts aloud, for all to hear: "We have noxious fumes to get rid of, so we're going to throw them away."

But there is no "away" to throw things to.
Not on a spaceship.
And that's where we're living.

Why did it take us so long to discover this elementary truth? There are several reasons, not the least of which is that we didn't want to see the truth. We didn't want to see it because the worst of the filth was produced by industry. Industry produced wealth. And we wanted the wealth.

These words ring ominously today, as an oil executive prepares to assume leadership of the USA. His policy makers are set to "reduce our dependence on foreign sources of energy", i.e. to dig up more unspoiled US wilderness to get at the oil. Sorry, but I just don't think Bush means that he's going to invest heavily in fuel cell research.

We can't put the genie back in the bottle. The industrial revolution has happened, followed closely by the information revolution. Our civilization relies on heavy industry and electricity at the bottom of its technological food chain. We are generating a tide of filth and waste that threatens to overtake and annihilate us. To escape it, we must innovate in new ways with technology that's subtle, gentle, graceful. But are we smart enough? It's gonna be a close one, folks.

And so began 2001. My last post was over ten days ago, so I suppose I owe thingo.net some serious exposition by now.

The holidays were split between Ottawa and Montreal, and alternately featured far more silence, cigarette smoke and television (though not all at once) than I get during the entire rest of the year. Wow -- I'm not sure why my first comment on the holidays should be mostly a complaint (note that I do enjoy the silence part). In fact, I had a wonderful time everywhere we went. I ate some delicious food, the most impressive of which was a 37 pound turkey. I visited with my grandmother who was very nearly eighty (and now is eighty), and my old family cat who is very nearly twenty. I saw relatives and friends, and visited a one-stop sporting goods and fetish shop. I ate a Tim Horton's doughnut, the One True Doughnut. I ate a Montreal bagel, the One True Bagel. I saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the One True Movie. I also saw State and Main, and it was good.

Here's one last holiday observation. It doesn't matter how funny I am or could ever become. I could be trading punchlines with Robin Williams and cracking wise with Robert Klein. I could be the fourth stooge or the ninth Marx brother. I could have Seinfeld episodes coming out of my butt. And even then, my brother would still fix me with a blank stare whenever I tried to say something clever, just to make me feel like a dork. The best part is that it works, because he's had a lifetime of training in the art of Not Giving Me the Satisfaction. But that's okay -- there's no shortage of entertainment in the room when he's there. Heh.