Blessed by the Potato

I hate the biting wind of winter. The extreme cold, and the constant vigil to be prepared with warmth, and food, and a surfeit of time when attempting to travel.

But snow itself is amazing and magical. The world is so still and beautiful at night when the snow is falling. I cherish those really still early winter nights when the snow flakes are large and fall so gracefully, yet it’s so quiet you can actually hear them landing softly on the ground, piling up all around you. The interaction between a snowfall and light pollution to make everything glow orange and purple in a completely etherial way. The harsh, pale light of a full moon on the snow-covered fields of the countryside? Never will you see a more perfect illumination of the world, the sharp distinction between light and shadow. To look out over the Straight or Lake as the snow-covered ice cracks and booms. In my dreams of heaven, it is illuminated by the full moon on virgin snow.

A fresh blanket of snow is the only way to bring innocence back to the world. It covers and conceals all the unsightly bits; it softens all the hard edges. Looking out at the untouched purity, you can know that you can race out there and be the first to explore this strange new world; or you can stand guard, letting this one patch in the corner of the world carry on, never knowing the bootprint of humanity.

I welcome the coming of spring, it’s youthful exuberance; I will delight in the sheer bounty of life that summer brings, the late summer evenings, and the freedom from layers and jackets, mittens and scarves and static buildup that the warmth brings.

But I will miss the snow.

I’ve been grinding my way through Farscape Season 2, and came across the inevitable body switching episode. I find it amusing that it’s such a common theme in sci-fi shows (and with several movies where that’s the entire premise), especially considering how it’s a pretty tough plot device to swallow for even the most fantastic of fantasy settings. Of course, it often makes for an amusing exercise where you get to watch the actors try to impersonate each other. It’s often kind of neat for that alone, though the plots of these episodes are often quite… painful.

The Farscape incarnation of this was rather neat. First off, they mixed over the voices for the teaser part to partly make it seem more like the “transferred” character’s voice, and a little more unreal. I’m sure that would have gotten old fast, but it was a little strange that they dropped the effect for the rest of the episode after the opening sequence. What was best, though, was that when the male lead character was put into the female’s body, there wasn’t this dancing around the issue awkwardness of tripping in high heels or not knowing how to put makeup on or any of the other you-have-to-experience-it-to-really-know things. No: he found a corner, unzipped the top, and bounced.

Bounced.

Canada should be a world leader when it comes to issues of the environment, if for no other reason than because we have so much of it. Our record on Kyoto and greenhouse gas emissions has been rather shameful, though we do have a succession of uncaring minority governments to partially blame for that, as well as a relatively uncaring public (until quite recently, that is). It is long time past to fix that, though, and I’m surprised that while the election-hungry neocons have identified the environment as a key issue, they haven’t yet actually done a whole lot about it (the funding announcements of the last few days notwithstanding). Mostly, they’re throwing around as much rhetoric and mud as they can, hoping to survive the issue in the next election (which they’re desperately trying to bring for the summer, by all accounts). So the Europeans really showed us when they recently announced plans to go above and beyond their Kyoto commitments.

Of course, our leaders are always faced with tough choices. Global warming looks to be a very real threat, and could be potentially very devastating. However, it’s also a long-term, global problem, so it’s very difficult to face with our local, short-term perspective. After all, there’s tax cuts to be had, health care to bolster, and all manner of other problems to ignore, everything from homelessness to defense, space exploration to public transportation, basic research to primary education.

Something not a lot of people are talking about is that a lot of these initiatives are needed for another problem all together: peak oil. Thanks to advances in new technology, we aren’t going to run out of oil for a long time to come. Which is a good thing, because alternatives (hydrogen, biofuels, electricity, etc) are still uncomfortably far off into the future. However, we’re already starting to see evidence of tightening supply. The thing with something that is in such high demand, such as oil, is that even modest declines in supply can lead to huge swings in price, since demand is so very inelastic (and I may be abusing my economic terminology, so forgive me here). We saw this quite clearly recently in Ontario: a fire at an Imperial Oil refinery caused fairly widespread shortages, station closures, and an increase of roughly 20-25% in price. And this was at a time when demand was relatively low due to the bad weather keeping many drivers off the road. The thing is, that refinery was nowhere near responsible for 20+% of our refining ability (one report says it was just 6% of Imperial’s capacity, just one of several major companies operating in Ontario). So a relatively minor drop in supply lead to a relatively large increase in price. Imagine that sort of situation even just 10 years from now if world oil extraction drops just a bit… But if we have developed technologies at this point in time to battle greenhouse emissions and use less oil, then we will simultaneously tackle that problem.

It’s a lot like hybrid cars in that regard: the combination of electric and gasoline power make hybrids more efficient in their use of oil, especially for stop-and-go city driving. Some people have slammed them as not solving the root problem of oil dependence, since they do still run on gas, however they are actually very good bridge technologies. Not only are they effective at saving gas right now, they also serve to develop the electric motors and batteries (and underlying manufacturing base) that will likely be needed for any future technology car.

I was glad to see the hybrid car rebate included in the federal budget, and the increased gas guzzler tax. One person recently was hailing the Cons for this move, saying that they’re clearly a pro-environmental party, and that this was a very pro-environment budget. To that I just have to say that this is, as many commentators are saying, a pre-election budget. It’s a pro-everything budget. The Cons have been very reticient to make any of these moves, and have only done so because currently these issues are at the forefront of Canadians’ minds. I have no doubt that if public focus shifts (as it does quite often), the Cons will stop all further progress. They haven’t lead us to these measures, they’ve been driven to them. A release today in the CBC has some good rhetoric, and it’s a lot further along than they were a year ago… but they’re still using this double-talk of a “balanced approach” and continuing to think that anything that’s good for the environment must be bad for our way of life.

Another environmental intiative making the rounds lately is the idea of banning outright the sale of incandescent bulbs. This is one move I can’t get behind. Taxing them is, in my opinion, an excellent idea: make some money for the government, and make the initial purchase price of an incandescent the same as a fluorescent — even short-term thinkers can then make better decisions about which to get, rather than having to try to weigh the costs against the long-term energy savings. That should help dramatically shift the usage away from the incandescents. Compact fluorescents are a good thing, and I’ve been putting them in a lot of rooms in the house here. However, they do have a few short-comings, and for these reasons it’s important to have incandescents as an option (though perhaps we should stop using them as our main source of home lighting):

• Compact fluorescent lights (CFL) are more costly overall if they do not manage to live out their whole life-cycle. They also contain trace amounts of mercury. Combined, these two issues mean that CFLs should not be used in areas where lights are more likely to be smashed than wear out from old age (places like batting cages, say, or where small children throw rocks at them).
• CFLs can not be used in enclosed light fixtures, such as some pot lights or other recessed/indirect lighting conditions.
• Many CFLs can not be put on dimmer switches (be sure to check the package before putting yours on one!).
• Some types of CFLs (I do not know if this applies to all of them) do not handle extremes in temperature well, and may not be suited to use in fridges, stoves, range hoods, or outdoor lighting.
• Almost all CFLs have a delay between turning on the switch and lighting up. There is a further delay between the first spark and full brightness. While this is not a problem for most applications, it is slightly less than ideal for some applications such as motion-detector-triggered security lights (compounded by further delays in cold environments), and lightswitch raves.
• A small minority of people find that the flicker from fluorescent lighting (including CFLs, though they don’t seem quite as bad) gives them headaches.
• CFLs have less-than-perfect colour fidelity. While it’s good enough for almost all uses, some specialized cases (certain science experiments, artists) may find that they prefer to use incandescents for their broad-spectrum output.
• Some sensitive electronics can experience interference from some types of CFLs (I believe the kind with magnetic ballast) due to proximity or being on the same circuit.

For the majority of cases, they are great ways to save tonnes of energy, but for these situations, we should aim to have incandescents as an option (even if it is an expensive one).

Finally, another recent story said that because conservation efforts have started working so well, Toronto Hydro is losing money, and wants to hike electricity rates. I don’t know what to say to that. On the one hand, more expensive electricity encourages people to conserve, and brings it closer to the true cost to produce. But I don’t want to see peoples’ bills go up because they were conserving (the net bill will go down, but you know many people won’t see it that way). I’m also not so sure Toronto Hydro is really too hard up if they’ve got the cash to spare to get into the telecom business…

Last year we had to deal with BEMs selecting a hurricane-devastated area of Mexico to hold the conference. We had deep fears all along that the hotel would not be ready (2 weeks of margin-of-error for their opening was not a lot of time for repairs that stretched out over 8 months) — and indeed, it wasn’t. We had to go with the hotel next door at the last minute, which over-charged us, and was suffering from some residual damage itself (periodic hot water and air conditioning outages, and the internet never worked in the rooms).

This year, we’re going to an undamaged part of Japan, so there shouldn’t be any of this nonsense. However, we’re still having issues being confident that this meeting will actually take place, so we haven’t booked flights or anything yet. For one thing, the deadline to apply for student travel support was last friday. As part of the application, they wanted your paid conference registration and a copy of your airline ticket (so they could estimate how much money they needed to find from sponsors for the travel awards). There was no registration form yet, so we couldn’t do that. And since there was no registration form, we hadn’t booked our tickets yet — they said that was fine, nobody had yet. Instead, they just wanted us to send in the page of the application with our contact information so that they could get an idea of how many students there would be.

I find this a little troubling, but even more troubling is that they haven’t yet picked a hotel to host the event. I don’t know about Japan, but in many other cities where we try to have conferences, you can’t leave booking out 150 rooms to the last minute. At least, not if you want a decent rate and/or to be close to where the conference will be. And not having any hotel information makes us cautious about booking flights. Despite not having anything done yet, we’re pretty sure the conference organizers will eventually book rooms for the conference itself, but what about the days before and after? Many of us from Canada are planning on arriving a day or two early to get over the jet lag before the conference begins. Many people are planning on staying afterwards for a bit of vacation, but if it turns out the rooms are a few hundred dollars a night, those plans might have to change, so we can’t very well book flights until we know how many days we can afford to stay in-country.

Two solid days of travel (24 hours in a plane or train, each way!) for 5 long days of work. I don’t know why I didn’t just outright refuse to go long ago. I don’t need the stress of worrying about this nonsense for two months in advance… not to mention the flying halfway around the world to be bored to tears by smelly, unwashed scientists. Though a really good suggestion was to try to get Febreeze to sponsor the conference, and we could mist everyone down as they entered…

I haven’t had time to digest the latest federal budget yet. It does look very much to be the pork-barrel pre-election vote-buying budget many people thought it would be. The only really surprising thing about it is that the BQ was actually bought off by the money thrown their way. Ah, well, I guess Harper’s government has been exceedingly good to the Nation of Quebec.

One thing I did like was the new, stiffer fuel consumption tax/rebate on cars and trucks. Ontario has had a similar system for quite some time now, and I thought it was a good idea, but just an order of magnitude too small — $100 is not really enough to shift someone’s buying behaviour on a car that costs $25000 or more. The federal one is now a larger, more meaningful tax (or rebate), offering up to $2000 back for fuel-efficient hybrids (or ethanol/biodiesel, etc), and charging up to $4000 for the worst of the gas-guzzlers (though because trucks and cars are taxed at different rates, this may play out like the Ontario version, where a Hummer pays $400, but a Mustang Shelby pays $1200).

There’s no guarantee that this plan will stick though, if the government does manage to call an election this spring. However, this means that in Ontario at least, there is no longer a premium for buying a hybrid car. You simply go out, buy one, and then just keep saving money by using less gas. None of this payback-period stuff. I, of course, will be driving my gas-only Accord until it gets decrepit enough that I’m too afraid of it breaking down in the middle of nowhere (Guelph) before getting a replacement, but if I buy new then (I might not), then it’ll probably be a hybrid (and even if I buy used, it might be a hybrid)…