From the monthly archives:

June 2009

Appendix

by Rod Edwards on June 28, 2009

Mine ruptured, putting me in the hospital all of last week, hence the lack of commentary. Will be back eventually.

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Intelligent Design: Air-conditioning free desert living

by Rod Edwards on June 22, 2009

This desert house stays cool with an innovative design that uses shade and wind, and not air-conditioning. Efficiency through common sense: I love it.

airshed

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Flagging Pedestrians [Nanny State]

June 22, 2009

Here’s a particularly interesting take on the age old suggestion that one hold their arm out in front of themselves when crossing the street. In Lemoyne, Pennsylvania, that arm is now grasping a traffic-cone orange flag to increase pedestrian visibility. I would be fine with this as an option for pedestrians (especially kids), were it [...]

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Iran: Fewer than four in a hundred non-fraudulent elections would produce such numbers

June 22, 2009

The Washington Post uses statistics to show human meddling with Iranian vote counts: The numbers look suspicious. We find too many 7s and not enough 5s in the last digit. We expect each digit (0, 1, 2, and so on) to appear at the end of 10 percent of the vote counts. But in Iran’s [...]

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What does a modern work ethic look like?

June 22, 2009

InfoWeek: “Top Indian CEO: Most American Grads Are Unemployable” The article continues to point out that this is a reflection of work ethic, not intelligence, quality of education, etc.: Many American grads looking to enter the tech field are preoccupied with getting rich, Vineet said. They’re far less inclined than students from developing countries like [...]

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Deep Throat: The FBI vs. the Sexual Revolution

June 20, 2009

An interesting article on the battle fought by the FBI against “Deep Throat” – apparently the first “mainstream” pornographic film (I haven’t seen it). Fascinating from the standpoint of roles – i.e.: the degree to which policy shapes culture and empowers organizations like the FBI to become culture police. What’s your take: moral values through [...]

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Smart Move or Nanny State? Britain’s Anti-Stab Knife

June 16, 2009

Kitchen knives are apparently the most commonly used murder weapon in Britain, absent firearms. Fortunately, there’s now an alternative. Up next: blunting the “pocket terror” of stabby pens and pencils, and forest patrols to elimate pointy sticks. I’m on the “nanny state” side here: if someone wants to do grievous harm, they’ll find a way, [...]

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Who needs unions? Not Elon Musk. “Fire the [Expletive]s”

June 16, 2009

From Elon Musk, in Wired: Part of the problem with Detroit, he says, is the union system. “It’s not out of the question to have unions, but if there’s going to be a union, they’d better understand that they’re on the same side as the company,” he added. “I’m against having a two-class system where [...]

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New Democrats, Old Economy

June 15, 2009

In early 2009, I started trying to rally the political will to make Manitoba a globe-leading, high-tech, green datacenter hub. This post tells the story of how I quickly discovered that Manitoba under the NDP had had its chance to be just that – and let it pass by, missing millions of dollars in investment, [...]

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Why Density is a Conservative Value

June 15, 2009

I read Gwnn Dyer’s “Climate Wars” over the last weekend and will be posting on some of its sustainability themes over the coming weeks. In the meantime, I wanted to share a quick thought on “density.” In a sustainability context, density means increasing the number of people living & working in a given space. Density [...]

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