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I ist un cosmopolitan twat

You know you're in a multicultural society when you (an Indian) have lasagne (prepared by a Korean cook) with your Chinese and Danish friends in your basement apartment in Toronto which you've rented from a Filipino family and watch some guy in Tokyo play English Christmas carols.

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On a broccoli.

On Vegetarianism

The inside of the TTC is plastered with a wide variety of advertisements, presented to the discerning viewer in a variety of ways ranging from the reasonable (Join Ryerson University!) to the desperate (Please, please visit the UK!) to the morbid (Thinking of suicide !?! Let us help!). Recently, the Vegetarian Society has put up a few ads which probably belong in the last of these categories. Each of these ads features two little animals sporting illegal levels of cuteness. One of them is a a puppy, or a kitten or some such pet wannabe. The other is a calf or a piglet or a similar aspiring main course. The poster goes on to talk of the cruelty of factory farming and exhorts the reader to turn vegetarian. Above the whole affair, in large judgmental letters is the question: Why LOVE one but EAT the other !?!

I suppose a lot of Koreans reading the ad ask the exact same question - WHY love one but eat the other !?! If you like dog, eat dog. Anyway, jokes aside, I do agree factory farming is cruel, unnecessarily so. And perhaps the kind thing to do is to stop animal product usage or convert to free range or whatever. The thing is though, that the ad is put up by the Vegetarian Society... Mark that. Not the Vegan Society but its softcore sibling. That brings me to my question:

I eat meat. I don't eat much pork or beef or even fish. Chicken is pretty much it on most occasions. A lot of my friends (especially the Muslim and Jewish ones), eat only beef and chicken. Now, would there be ANY benefit to the animals if we converted to vegetarianism !?!

The reason I ask this is thus: Beef and chicken are meats from 'dual purpose' animals. That is to say, they supply milk and eggs as well as meat. I would assume that the efficiency focus of factory farms would mean most of the cattle raised for meat are also milked. Similarly, meat chickens are, umm, egged. So, even if people stopped consuming their flesh, they would still be kept in similar numbers (if not the same) for their other products. Considering that the main objection of the Vegetarian Society is not how these animals are killed (which is a pretty highly regulated practice and which would be carried out by the egg and milk industry anyway; old animals would be killed to make way for younger high productivity ones), but rather the conditions in which they are kept alive, isn't vegetarianism going to make little to no difference to the animals in the poultry and beef industry !?!

In summary: would giving up all meat apart from beef and chicken be morally equivalent to becoming a vegetarian !?!

(The argument assumes that the most chickens and cattle are used for more than one purpose. I am not sure why I am assuming this when Google is at hand. Whatever - live with it.)

Bach In Space

There's a popular story, attributed* to Carl Sagan, where, when asked whether the music of Bach should be included on the Voyager Golden Record**, he replied, "No, that would just be showing off."

Well, apparently aliens did get to hear of Bach. And they like him too. Have a listen:

* Actually this little story features in an essay by a guy called Lewis Thomas

** The phonograph records that contained various sights and sounds of Earth and were sent out on the Voyager spacecraft

Disney Again

When done well, animated cartoons have always appealed to the engineer in me. I don't mean as childish entertainment, nor as films in their own right - though they are appealing in both these regards too. I mean as an expression of visual art. As drawings, as paintings. I suppose what really appeals to me is the fact that there is something like an objective standard to which I can compare each frame in the animation, viz., the immediately preceding and succeeding frames. Not only must each frame appeal by itself, it must also look almost like the ones on either side - thereby proving the ability of the artist to be consistent. It is a particular skill that most other visual art forms don't necessarily require. I know that, in this day and age of computerisation, that consistency is no longer so demanding as it once was. In many ways, it has even become trivial. But that doesn't diminish the impressiveness of the cartoonists of the pre-computerised animation era. And in that era, no one did it better than Disney.

Now, I'm not an artist, nor do I claim to have a connaisseur's fine sense of the artistic. But I do know what looks 'pretty'. And Disney's cartoons were that. In an age when the many competing cartoons' visuals were only functionally good, Disney was taking pains to make its cartoons really visually memorable. This is obvious even in films that are supposed to be a few minutes' entertainment for toddlers:

But when they were asked to let their hair down, as they were for Fantasia, Disney's artists were simply superb. Again, I don't know whether it is any 'serious' art critic's idea of art (by which I mean I know it's not), but it is mine. Have a look:

Disney's 'Snow White', which was shown first in 1937, was a landmark achievement in the history of cinema. As the first feature length, fully animated film, it showed everyone that such a film was possible and could be a commercial success too. And in an age without computer graphics, it must have been a Godsent revelation for movies that needed special effects. Upto that point, anyone wanting to depict a centaur, say, would have to show two chaps in half a horse suit. No matter how accomplished the actors, that's just not going to work for anything other than the most ribald of slapstick sketches. And I'm sure everyone will agree that it takes something of the gravitas away from a film when the devil in a Faust adaptation is seen wearing a rope up his arse for a tail and twigs for horns. Animated cartoons solve the problem beautifully. Since the mundane and ordinary is depicted using the same pseudo-realistic drawings that depict the fantastic, everything blends and nothing jars or feels out of place. Take a look, for instance, at this centaur courtship:

This begs a question:

Disney had a lot of rivals (HB, Warner Bros, etc...). Why did none of them make full length animated films as often as Disney, or with the same level of visual artistry !?! And why didn't people who wanted to make fantasies use full length feature films more often !?!

Charities

Here's a question to any economists out there. What the heck are you doing wasting your time reading this crap !?! Seriously though, the question is as follows:

Let us say that, tomorrow, all of a sudden, the thousand richest people in the world agree with all those Wall Street Occupants that they have far too much money. They decide that they will keep a relatively small part of it themselves (say $50 million each), and give the rest to charity. Let us also say that the average wealth of these 1000 people is $1.05 billion - implying that they will give a clean billion to charity... each. That's one trillion dollars.

What is the effect of one trillion dollars suddenly flooding the economy !?! Surely the impact on things such as inflation and devaluation of the dollar must be immense. It could perhaps cause more trouble than good. Even if this trillion dollar tidal wave does not materialise, smaller large acts of charity must be doing something similar on their own scales. Has anyone ever looked at the negative economic and fiscal impact of large scale charity !?! Furthermore, considering that taxes are, in a loose sense, charitable funds, would high taxes also have these side-effects !?!

I realise that the trillion dollars I mentioned above weren't exactly locked away in vaults. Also, a lot of that wealth of the hyper rich isn't really cash in the attic, it's largely an index of the value of their stock and whatnot. Nevertheless, I expect that the question stands in principle. 

YouTube And Copyright

Production houses have been making YouTube come down hard on a lot of copyright violations lately. They have been making YouTube take down the video entirely, or if the copyrighted material is just the audio bit of the clip, YouTube mutes it.

Now, I'm sure the ethical angles on the subject of piracy and copyright violations have been thrashed out in detail elsewhere. In this case though, surely the smart thing for the companies to do would be to tell YouTube to leave the clip up, but to degrade the quality of the audio and the video. Not so much that it would make the clip unwatchable, but enough to make the bad quality noticeable. People who then like the clip's content could pay for the full HD product - either just for the clip on the spot (say $0.15) in which case both YouTube and the production house get money, or by buying the DVD from which the clip was taken.

The thing is, we live in a world where there is absolutely no shortage of entertainment options. It isn't like the TV of bygone decades where you had a more or less captive viewership. If your show is hard to get, many of your potential customers will just go somewhere else. In the context of such a situation, the low quality video on YouTube just acts as free advertisement. People who like it a lot will probably buy the full HD version. People who don't like it much wouldn't have bought it anyway, so you aren't really losing any money by showing them the clip for free. And the stated free advertisement might get you quite a few new customers.  But if you just don't put up the clip, chances are that people just won't know what you have to sell. And with so many options to choose from, they aren't going to go through the hassle and cost of finding out what you have to show when your competitors are showing free content. Moreover, those who look for your stuff will likely find someone's pirated videos of your content which have managed to evade YouTube's sweeps.

Perhaps right now, while TV is still going quite strong as a stand alone service, you may get away with sticking to the heavy handed model. After all, TV does this 'free advertising' bit for many people - and those who didn't watch the show on TV can stuff it. But the day when TV merges with the internet is not very far off. The amount of proper content on YouTube that is independently made (i.e. genuinely directed and produced stuff, and not just some shaky video off of someone's handycam of their dog farting) is increasing as is the amount of content with expired or deliberately unenforced copyright. YouTube IS TV for a lot of people. And they're members of a rapidly growing club.

Once Upon A Time

After a chat with my parents that bizarrely involved Ghadafi, Walt Disney and the snobbishness of literary critics, I ended up spending a good 45 minutes YouTubing clips of Disney cartoons. Of course there can be no denying that the main reason behind doing so was nostalgia - at least initially. But rather quickly, I genuinely got caught up in the madness of the clips. I was surprised, after watching many of my childhood favourites again, to find out just how batshit insane they were. Take 'Alice in Wonderland', for instance. I had recently watched 'Alice', Burton's take on Caroll's story. And it was slickly done, as you would expect from that guy. But for all that Burton is an undisputed genius of the weird and wacky, the film comes across as what it is - a polished attempt by an accomplished but sane filmmaker to tell you a trippy story.

Disney's take, on the other hand, genuinely has the feel of dreamlike insanity. It doesn't feel like the artists and scriptwriters were trying to tell you anything bizarre - it seems that, while they were writing the story, they were themselves in an altered state where their grip on reality was loosened. Put it this way, if Burton's film was an accomplished actor trying to portray an eccentric man, Disney's film WAS the eccentric himself. Of course, a great deal of the madness happens to take inspiration from the original story in Lewis Caroll's book. But while Burton tries to merely re-interpret that surreal quirkiness for today's generation, Disney uses it as a launching pad for bold journeys into the heart of good natured insanity.

And it isn't just 'Alice'. There are so many other films that have that streak of insane brilliance running through them that you have to wonder whether Disney forced his artists to drop acid regularly. I mean, just look at this:

I used to be terrified of this one as a child. I remember leaving the room while this bit was on and returning for the concluding hymn. And damn it, I was right to be freaked out. Good heavens, that's really not the sort of thing you show children.

'The Sword in the Stone' does its bit to haunt kiddy dreams. The battle between Madam Mim and Merlin isn't in the same category as 'Bald Mountain', but it's still quite scary in a surreal way. Have a peek:

OK, fine, that was a pretty bad example, that's just fun. But don't tell me they weren't on something pretty whiffy when they made it.

And anyway, while that wouldn't scare a child, the 'escape into the woods' scene from Snow White would:

Even when they were trying to be playful, many scenes would come out as just weird and surreal. This was from my first Disney film - "Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day":

I was going to go on and make some kind of serious point regarding Disney. But at this stage, I'm not sure whether I'm arguing for or against Disney, or for that matter whether this post even needs a point. I'm just busy enjoying someone else's acid trip. Shut up and watch.

Why We Panic

I had wondered in a previous post why humans have largely descended from people who panic rather than those who don't. Here's are two theories of mine. The first is less likely, but establishes panic as an actual survival trait. The second is more likely, but says that it was the reduction in the number of cool headed people that led to the current state of affairs.

Scenario 1:

Consider the following scenario: Six hunters go into the woods. They are attacked by a tiger. Three of the hunters faint. The other three now have a choice. They could turn and run - leaving their comrades at the mercy of the tiger, or fight the beast. The thing is, if they fight, they will quell the tiger with, say, a 30% chance that one of them will die in the attempt. If they turn and run, however, the tiger, perhaps more attracted by their motion, will chase them rather than stay and eat any of the fainted three. If that does happen, each fleeing hunter has a 33% chance of being the tiger's chosen prey. If chosen, that hunter's death is guaranteed.

Therefore:

Fleeing - 33% chance of death

Fighting - 10% chance of death

Fainting - 0% chance of death

I admit the tiger going after fleeing prey as opposed to just devouring the fainted hunters is a big assumption. I am, however, basing it on the advice we've all been given as children about pretending to be dead when approached by bears (and I presume predators in general) since, apparently they only eat fresh. However, if the assumption is valid, then, in such circumstances, fainting seems to actually work well as a survival trait. Obviously, it would be disastrous for everyone to faint (predators might prefer fresh, but are unlikely to look a gift corpse in the mouth), so I suppose that over time the fainter - fighter ratio will stabilise so that there are just enough fighters to see out the danger. If that number is a small fraction of the overall population, we end up with a society comprised largely of panicky people. 

Scenario 2:

Alternately, over time, only the level headed hunters are trusted to go out and do the dangerous (but necessary) stuff. Since they are exposed to all sorts of dangers, it is obvious that their numbers - relative to the panicky ones - will do down. Again, at stabilisation, the cool thinkers will be a minority.

To be fair, scenario 1 seems pretty far fetched. But it was fun to think up, so what the heck.

On The Late Rise Of Modern Medicine

It took people some thousands of years to make remarkably simple connections in the field of medicine. Consider how long it took them to find out the link between, well, shit mixing with food and food poisoning or shit in drinking water leading to cholera. For some reason, medicine took astonishingly long to reach the level of 'common sense' that we seem to take for granted and see in other fields of science from a lot earlier. I wonder why.

March Of The Machines

When Gary Kasparov finally surrendered humanity's supremacy over the sixty four squares to Deep Blue, there was an air of finality to the whole affair. After all, Kasparov had reigned supreme among humans for over fifteen years before this encounter and went on to stay on top of the human pyramid till he retired some six years later. And he still has the highest rating ever achieved by a human player - which means that he is still the best we've ever had. On the other hand, in terms of raw computing power, Deep Blue probably had less power than, well perhaps even my netbook, for all I know. And I have no doubt that the algorithms have been refined tremendously in those intervening years. It would be interesting to use Kasparov - or the current world number 1 at chess (Magnus Carlsen, I believe) as one qualitative benchmark to see how much computers have progressed in the past fifteen years. Hold a tournament with the world's top 5 grandmasters and about 10 computers of varying power and chess sofware and see where the humans end up after a round robin tournament. I know there are much better ways of quantifying the progress of computing power than this - but this provides a direct comparison with humans and that too in a competitive, combative way. As a child of the '80s and '90s which were so gripped by the whole 'machines taking over' thingy (Terminator, Matrix) I would like to see this. In a masochistic way, I guess.

Beer Ad

I don't really drink. And so, I have to judge beers purely based on ads. And to be honest, shit is par for the course for most beer ads I've seen (though by no means all - some are really good). But I believe a company called 'Coors' has really broken new ground in shittiness. All of their latest ads are pretty dreadful all round. But what really gets me is that the 'theme' around which the whole series of these ads centers is how cold their beer is.

What the heck!?! How shitty does your beer really have to be in every other way (taste, body - whatever that is, alcohol content) that even you have to admit that its strongest selling point is a factor that is beyond your control !?!

A Note On E-Readers

After work, I often go to the Starbuck's that's on the upper landing of the Chapters Store in the Eaton Centre. To get there, I have to pass a display of Kobo Ereaders. I have been intrigued by these for a while and recently, I stopped and tried one of them out. They are cheap, but that's all I am really prepared to say in their favour. In fact, I will even retract that - the model on display costs $139 which is as much as a cheap tablet of the same size - and I happen to know that some Sony models cost almost twice as much. The points that are supposed to be in their favour are that they are clear, that you can read them easily in very bright sunlight and that they last for many weeks, even a couple of months, on a single charge.

The thing is, I'm not sure I've much to complain about the displays of most of the other devices. I mean, my Ipod Touch has a pretty clear display that's pretty easy on the eyes and for those who need a larger screen, I'm sure the Ipad or any other good tablet will more than suffice. Also, I'm not sure how critical the clarity of the e-paper in bright sunlight actually is. I know professional photographers love to show students lounging about on lawns reading novels, but it is something that I have seen done fairly rarely in practice and even then only in the summer, which is a somewhat narrow slice of the year in most of the Western world. Most reading is generally done in the shade. Moreover, from personal experience, unless the sunlight is directly aimed at the screen, I can read off my IPod quite easily even when I'm outside. Similarly, while the ability of the device to go for months without needing to recharge sounds really good, in practice most people are always in fairly easy reach of a power outlet. A device that can hold its charge for about 8 hours is quite adequate. After all, I have yet to read a book that is simultaneously so huge and un-put-down-able that I would just have to read it without stopping (even to plug in the device it's loaded on) - for weeks.

Now consider the various flaws of these ereaders. The first is that they are pretty useless for any other purpose and that's a huge drawback when you consider that many tablets cost the same. But much more importantly, even for their designated purpose they are pretty rubbish. Most of them have an intensely irritating habit of doing a slow white to black to white again flicker you turn a page. If you have to turn many pages, and you do, this gets on your nerves pretty quickly. More irritating is their sheer slowness when it comes to turning the pages. This probably isn't such a big issue when you're reading novels and are not really going to go back and forth often. But if you're reading a technical journal article studded with equations, you will want to do just that. And in that case, these devices are really bad. Furthermore, as more and more journal articles are read online, and representing colour online costs nothing, many papers now use colour in their online formats to state their points more vividly. If you're reading such an article on an ereader, well you can suck it.

The thing is, these devices are very popular. In the past few months, especially, I have seen a huge increase in the number of people on the subway and the streetcar reading from them. So, my question is this: Why have they spent so much money on these devices, especially when better options are available !?!

My personal, cynical take on it is this: they are objects to show off with. Since they can only be used to read books, having one of them on the bus advertises the fact that you are the sort of person who reads. Also, the fact that you have spent so much on the devices proves that you value reading very much. Furthermore, an ereader implies that you read A LOT, and you need such a device to manage your huge collection. And by having an ereader instead of a tablet, you proclaim that such modern distractions as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook are beneath you. You sir (or madam) are a serious, cultured, refined and educated individual.

Ereaders are the new phrasebooks.

Accounting For Time In Cost Of Public Transport

Here is one reason why people select the much more expensive option of driving a car over using public transport:

I'm going to make numerous ball park assumptions here because I'm lazy and besides, it's not as if policy depends on this blog's rantings anyway, so what the heck.

Canada's average per capita income - ~$46000

Average hours worked per year (assuming full time employment): 1820

Average pay/hour: ~$25.27

Based on my experience it takes about 50 minutes to get to work.

Google Maps claims that a car would make the same trip in 20 minutes.

Assume this is representative.

Hence, the daily work commute takes one hour longer on public transit. Let's assume that we consider a person's time to be worth their wage rate (this is a big assumption and not really accurate, but let's assume so anyway).

Therefore, public transit would cost ~$6317.5 (Don't ask me why I bothere with a .5 after saying the figure was approximate.) in terms of hours spent.

Hence the total yearly "cost" of public transport (the actual money you shell out for a transit pass + this cost) = ~$7817

That brings the cost a lot closer to the $8500 figure the CAA mentioned as the yearly cost of an average car.

This makes the decision of people who buy and drive cars a LOT more sensible. And this is not counting the innumerable small trips one would have to make as a parent to satisfy the demands of kids, little trips to the grocery store, etc...

In conclusion, time matters to people. So if you want more people to hop onto a bus, you have to make the bus commutes a lot faster.

Why I Like Canada

I was walking along Marlee Avenue (which is close to where I live) when I saw an elderly lady struggling with a couple of grocery bags. I asked her where she was headed and whether I could help her with the bags. She thanked me and told me that she was going to the bus stop. So I carried her bags to the stop and, since the bus arrived even as we got there, I put the bags on a seat inside for her.

Anywhere else in the world, I would have been thanked by the lady. This being Canada, I was thanked not only by the lady, but also the bus driver and two of the nearer passengers :).

Made my day.

Told You So - Part 2

I have said before that commuting in Toronto sucks, and now StatsCan agrees with me - so there.

On Panic

Why do people panic !?! Or perhaps more accurately, why do they turn into brain frozen, jelly limbed wrecks when they do !?! I mean, surely it is a disastrous trait to become functionally useless at the precise time when danger is clearest (and presentest). I realise that there are some people whose response to danger is to become very level headed - to stay calm and cool in the midst of a crisis. But these people are very clearly in a minority. Moreover, in our long evolutionary path to the present day, humans must have been put in panic inducing situations many, many times and it is more or less obvious that in such situations, the calm ones must invariably perform better than the gibbering twits. And by perform better, I mean survive. How is it then, that most have descended from the flailing, simpering gits and not the brave, calculating icemen !?! How does evolution account for this!?! Conversely, since this trait has obviously withstood the test of time, what purpose does it serve !?!

Told You So

"Six months after Mubarak surrendered to millions of Egyptians, the same generals still rule. Arbitrary detention and allegations of torture are commonplace, if less widespread than before. State media still demonises critics of the junta, and the military – without public consultation – will decide exactly what process is supposed to lead to democratic elections and a civilian government. Reformers and revolutionaries fear the military, stronger now than under Mubarak, will outmanoeuvre them. And they fear Islamists will sweep the elections and control the writing of a new constitution, leading to a democratic Egypt that's neither secular nor liberal."

(Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/aug/12/future-of-egypt-thanassis-cambanis)

As I said, democracy without a strong legal structure and tradition which protects basic human rights will lead to a hell of a lot of trouble .

Not that I have any pretensions to political punditry, of course.

A Possible Project For A Sociology/Psychology Grad

While on the topic, I was really surprised to know that cars cost $8500/year. That means that, even accounting for the occasional cab ride, taking the public option saves you about $6500/year. That's a lot of money. It sort of reinforces my earlier claim - there must be something genuinely important that cars provide that public transport currently doesn't, otherwise people wouldn't spend so much money on them.

How To Save The Planet

Maybe, instead of spending all their (or rather the tax-payers') millions on projects that look for viable ways to harness alternative energies, enviro-activists should spend some of their time and money looking for something else. I mean, consider my friend (call him Dick).

My friend drives a Honda Civic. It's old, and not in the vintage way. It cost him a fair amount to buy, costs him a fair amount to maintain and insure - and then of course, there are the fuel costs. Let us consider a basic, ball park estimate of things:

Yearly costs: $8000-$9000 (source: CAA)

Yearly public transport cost: < $1500

Also, while buses are just as likely to get caught up in traffic jams, subways aren't. Also, even if your bus is in the jam, you aren't driving, so you could read, chat, sleep or do any number of other things.

So, of course, my friend, and millions like him, are silly to drive cars when they could go public right !?!

Well, maybe. But here's the thing. My friend, and many like him, is not rich. The money invested in the car is a hefty chunk of his annual income. The car he drives is nobody's status symbol. And he is well aware of the public option. And yet he persists with the car. As do millions of others like him. There must be something that the cars provide which public transport doesn't. And perhaps, instead of just calling these people irresponsible, enviro-activists should try to find out what exactly that something is. Finding that and then providing it in a public transport facility will do a lot more to help drivers switch than any amount of emotional blackmail.

To me, that seems like a much more immediate way of helping cut down on greenhouse gas emissions and fuel consumption. I'm not saying we shouldn't keep searching for greener energy alternatives - of course we should. But maybe, in the meantime, this could help.