Les Bonnes Choses

A few days ago, I was complaining about the way that life begins with a Social Security number down here. You can't do anything without it, and just about everybody asks for it (though with the exception of your employer and banks, both of whom pay you money, your are not obliged to give it out to anybody). Thus, millions of Americans trust their key piece of identification in the hands of minimum wage employees every day. So there's a certain amount of schadenfreude that I experience when I read that the chairman of the fed was a victim of identity theft. It's not quite irony, because Ben Bernake doesn't administer the Social Security office, but it's kind of poetic nonetheless.

You know, there are methods, known to cryptographers, of devising sets of numbers, one publicly known and the other private, that might be useful in this sort of situation, Using something like RSA would require an overhaul of how SSNs are administered, but maybe the savings might be worth it.

I like news headlines because their lack of critical parts of speech, such as prepositions, makes them prone to comical misinterpretation, and general hilarity. For example, today The Ceeb had the following:

Stunning 82-year-old hospital patient with Taser was justified.

Now, you might click on the link with eager excitement at the prospect of reading about an elderly invalid in a fabulous black evening gown who's got a good excuse to be carrying around a non-lethal sidearm -- but you'd be disappointed. Instead, you'd read about how Canadian law enforcement means business. Forget that polite stereotype. Around here, laying on a gurney (or wielding a stapler) is a good way to get yourself zapped, my friend.

Of course, we could also be defined by what we don't do. For example: fund research. My thin envelope from NSERC arrived in the mail today. I didn't have to be Johnny Carson to know what it said. One thing I did forget about was that it had a brochure about applying for the Industrial R&D Fellowships program.

Dear Canadian Funding Agency Purseholders,
If I wanted to work for a large multinational conglomerate, I would have spared myself the last 6 years of graduate work and tens of thousands of dollars of tuition and applied to work at a bank directly out of my undergraduate career. Then I could have been doing something that the business community finds useful for the last several years. Like help run the world's economies into the ground, for example.

A few years ago, when I held an NSERC Doctoral scholarship, it was appropriate to put a little NSERC logo on the posters when I presented my research. Because, you know, they supported me so I could do the research. I regret that, for the time being, I will have to put an unacknowledgement on my conference posters: the Canadian government had nothing to do with this discovery or innovation. Is embarrassment effective at influencing policy?

I just read a headline on the CBC website:

Hundreds to be hired to process EI claims, says HR minister ...

... and promptly find themselves out of work.

See, nobody out there gives me feedback except for good old K, and maybe the odd nudge from C (I have taken to using initials because that's what K does, though in my line of work, when people are referred to by their initials, it's usually because they have brain damage). As a result, that's who's calling the shots. However, I'm going to try to swing the topic around to a proto-rant that's been forming in my head. I think you'll find it flows nicely, though.

A bunch of whiners have recently petitioned Ottawa to try to get their hands on some Can-con funds for internet media. As the argument goes, there is such a fund to ensure that Canadian music and TV gets produced, so why not require ISPs to pony up some cash to fund Canadian-made content that appears on the internet? Please allow me to outline why I think that's a stupid idea:

• Canadian media producers have repeatedly demonstrated an inability to produce anything that people might want to watch. Our niche seems to be derivative works from the Anne of Green Gables mythology and Just For Laughs specials.


• Who exactly would qualify for this money? I'm Canadian. I'm writing original content to appear on the internet. I'd never see a dime. This fund would just get tacked on to your monthly internet bill and either get frittered away by some bureacracy, or else fund Wind up my Backside: the Flash game


• Most damningly, we all know that the internet is really just a vehicle to deliver porn. A Wall Street Journal piece reported that 69% (yes, this was the real figure) of all paid sites were porn related. How much of this porn was created in Canada? Like, zero. And you know why? Because it's too bloody cold. Regardless of how well funded it may be, Canada will never be a porn superpower as long as we have to contend with goosebumps and shrinkage for 8 months of the year.

QED.

I was reading this article on Wired the other day, which was timely because it touches on a number of things that bug me about North America.

I tried to find some clips of the 1950's future of transportation spots that I think coincide nicely with where it really started to get out of hand. Disney seems to have been pretty diligent at keeping them off youtube. Some marketers got the funny idea in their heads that people would just love to take a nice long ride in their convertible to their nice suburban home in a quiet neighbourhood of well-manicured lawns. Urban planners must have seen these films because they went kind of nuts designing sprawling cities with miles of concrete to link all these neighbourhoods. (North America was born on the notion of land ownership - much to the chagrin of the aboriginal people who lived here before us - which I think is why we use land so inefficiently). So from about midway through 20th century, North America has been designed around the car. Most people are effectively obligated to own a car because there's no other practical way to get to work, do groceries for your family, etc. (it takes me 40 minutes by bus to get from home to the school; it takes me 25 minutes door-to-door by bike).

And so our economy revolves around the automobile in so many ways: oil is a big one, and we'll even go to war for it; 1 in 7 jobs are tied to the automobile industry; every kilometer of asphalt has to be maintained with taxpayer dollars as do the sewers and water delivery pipes that follow all those roads to newly developed suburbs. Not only do sewers crumble, but water pipes are not actually water tight, and I learned from a former neighbour who worked with a regional utilities managing company that something like 25% of the water pumped in from the lakes actually leaks out into the ground as it flows through those pipes: longer pipes mean more leakage.

So I'm somewhat ambivalent about the situation that car manufacturers find themselves in lately. On one hand, unless cities were radically redesigned, we're still screwed without them. On the other hand, for the reasons I outlined above, I think 'good riddance'. That's why I want my own planet. I think this one is a do-over.

I already expressed these sentiments in a comment on my own note on Facebook, but that was before I made the return trip home. I just got back from a trip to San Diego where I am a candidate for a postdoctoral position at UCSD working with Jeff Elman and Marta Kutas -- though I quickly figured out that, in saying you work in so-and-so's lab, all you are really doing is indicating where your mail should be routed, because everyone works with everyone down there. It's like some kind of research orgy or something. Probably pays something like $88/hr (see Carrie's note if you can).

I don't travel quite as much as, say, John, or Chris, but I have made a decent number of trips into the US over the span of my postgraduate career. I can truly say that I have never before had a more pleasant trip. Sure, on the way down there was a brief period of panic when I was unsure whether I would catch my connecting flight out of Detroit. But in all my interactions with the various incarnations of what is now the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, everyone was pleasant and non-confrontational on both ends of the trip. Compare this to the last time I went through the border crossing, coincidentally for the purpose of my first meeting with Jeff Elman. Back then, the inquisitor at the Ambassador bridge gave me quite a rough time. When asked what the purpose of my trip was, I replied that it was for a meeting. The moron actually asked, "So why doesn't he come up there to meet you? Why do you have to come here?" I still fantasize about smacking him in the face and calling him a dipshit, but that fantasy always comes to a grinding halt when I get charged with assault and barred from entry into the US in response. Apparently, my ability to fantasize is impaired by my mind's insistence on imposing realistic constraints, and so unlike most people, I fantasize about being able to fantasize.

Sandra Pupatello (pronounced poop-a-tell'-o), Ontario's trade minister who has recently gotten into a bit of controversy over the timing of her visit to China, has a most unfortunate name. Naturally, we use it as an adjective to describe Jude's diapers...



...as in "I think Jude smells a little pupatello. Better change him."

I am not a mature parent. But I'm good at sticking with the theme of politics.