Why Should Blind Dates Work?
Robert Spiegel’s obituary read in part ” He was accompanied on his move by his wife, Ursula, whom he’d met on a blind date under New York City’s Washington Square arch.”
That got me thinking, wondering about how many blind dates actually pan out.
I suspect blind dates are better-than-average at leading to a long-lasting marriage for one or more of the following reasons:
(1) People who agree to blind dates share a degree of confidence in themselves and a willingness to go a little bit beyond the ordinary limits to see what’s out there; such couples are likely to enjoy exploring life together.
(2) People who go on blind dates might feel insecure, or be too shy to go the normal route of courtship. In such cases, someone who feels desperate (whether or not they ought to feel so about themselves) is likely to hold on to that for which they feel grateful.
(3) People who agree to a blind date are ready to date and build relationships; they are not one hundred percent intensely focused on their career or hobby.
Tags: Blind, Chris, ChrisRewards, City’s, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Dates, Element, Google, Greaves, Loading, Robert, Spiegel’s, Square, Talk, Tweet, Ursula, Work
Police Announcement
Toronto recently witnessed an outpouring of grief for a woman crushed to death under the wheels of a truck.
The outpouring of grief is correct, for a life was snuffed out, and in writing this I highlight the lack of grief for another party, and hope to spare several lives in the future.
The original news story “Woman killed when bike collides with large truck” broke eight days ago and has been followed by a series of stories:
This is a time for mourning, not for blame
Dead cyclist Jenna Morrison was a yoga teacher, dancer, mom
I saw nothing but bike helmets for blocks
‘Perfect partner,’ devoted cyclist mourned
Cyclist’s death prompts call for mandatory truck side guards
Police rule out charges against truck driver in cyclist’s death
The common thread through these stories is that the police have not, and now will not, lay charges against the truck-driver.
What do you think that this means?
From the news articles alone we can draw no certain conclusions, but from the news articles alone it is easy to come to the conclusion that the cyclist was at fault.
Picture a scene where a truck is stopped at an intersection, waiting to make a right-hand turn. Traffic is flowing from left to right while the truck driver waits for a break in the traffic flow.
Meanwhile, unknown to the driver, who is looking to his left, a cyclist approaches from behind, sees a gap between the truck and the side of the road, and “squeezes through” to save a few seconds.
The truck driver might even make a last-second check of the right-hand mirror before beginning the turn, but by then the cyclist has passed out of view and is in the truck’s blind spot, near the front wheels.
Only the truck driver and the police know what probably happened; and since there are no recorded witnesses, no-one can know for sure what did happen.
But whenever I see the continual disclaimer “…the truck driver … will not be charged” I figure that there was not a shred of fault ascribed to the truck driver.
In a city where cycling is promoted as a healthy alternative to powered vehicles, this seems like a case of the cyclist being at fault.
- I am, as you may know, a driver, a cyclist and a pedestrian.
- In my youth I drove a large fully-laden wheat truck.
Tags: Announcement, Chris, ChrisRewards, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Cycling, Cyclist’s, Dead, Element, Google, Greaves, Jenna, Loading, Meanwhile, Morrison, Picture, Police, Talk, Toronto, Traffic
The Final Word
If there is one thing we all learn from reading, it is this:-
- Change is inevitable
- Change is permanent, until the next change.
- History repeats itself.
- What is new under the sun is stale under the moon
So whenever you hear the word “final”, be ready to tune out.
In the final analysis, the final frontier is not finally defeated.
There has always been, will always be, a final frontier.
Anglos heading west from the Atlantic coast thought that California (Oregon, Washington) was the final frontier.
There will be no Final Solution because there will always be Another Problem. Once you have solved your most urgent problem, what was your second-most urgent problem automatically becomes your most urgent problem.
There is no “All Sales Final”, in truth, because, in truth, anyone who sells you something for coin of the realm will agree to change if you offer them enough change (a.k.a. money). It’s what people who sell for money are used to!
I promise you this: Whenever you hear someone pontificate on “The Final Analysis”, you can be certain that they are focused on THEIR local interests, and want their interests to be satisfied above all others. To their mind, THEY are the centre of the known universe.
Finally: Check it out!
Tags: Analysis, Anglos, Atlantic, Change, Check, Chris, ChrisRewards, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Element, Final, Finally, Google, Greaves, History, It’s, Loading, Problem, Sales, Solution
Oxygen from Books
Margaret Atwood is one of my all-time favorite authors, not just for her position in promoting the fight against library cuts here in Toronto.
Today’s Toronto Star carries a quotation from a book printed on paper made from straw in which Atwood says “Human beings need oxygen, and forests produce it; printed books require paper, but paper need not be made from virgin forests.”
This strikes me as an odd statement to make.
My understanding of photo-synthesis is that almost all types of vegetable matter take in carbon di-oxide during the day and expire oxygen.
So straw, trees, carrots and rhododendrons all take part in creating oxygen. Swapping trees for grasses doesn’t add up to a hill of beans unless someone does the maths.
- For example, maybe grasses, pound for pound, per day, produce more oxygen than trees.
- For example, maybe grasses, acre for acre, per day, produce more oxygen than trees.
Discussing leaves leaves aside, of course, the whole arena of electronic books
Tags: Atwood, Books, Chris, ChrisRewards, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Discussing, Element, Google, Greaves, Human, Loading, Margaret, Oxygen, Star, Swapping, Talk, Today’s, Toronto
A Device that Will Limit the Maximum Speed of Any Car …
You’ll see articles like this every now and then in papers like the Toronto Star.
A well-meaning but slow-thinking member of parliament gets a bit of traction in the local press.
But we can stop and think.
Who are these young hoods who are blasting along city streets at 150 KM/hour?
They are not my little-old-widow friend who has run out of smokes and is desperate to get to the corner store.
They are not the harried businessman racing home with a full bladder.
They are young guys with spare time and cash, keen to get under-the-hood and fine-tune their vehicles.
For whom removing or adjusting such a device will be child’s play once someone posts instructions on the internet.
Installing such a device will be expensive – development costs alone – and won’t be retro-fitted to cars.
On top of that the device is aimed at perhaps 0.001 percent (that’s 0.00001 as a fraction of the population) of vehicles on the road.
- It’s a people problem, not a machine problem.
- So the solution must be a people solution.
Tags: Chris, ChrisRewards, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Device, Element, Google, Greaves, Installing, It’s, Limit, Loading, Maximum, Speed, Star, Talk, Toronto, Tweet
It’s Back to Driving School for Halton Police
Says the Toronto Star.
Me? I’d rather their editors started work.
The leading text of the article says it all:-
So many Halton police cruisers have been involved in crashes that the force has instituted mandatory driving training for its officers.
In the first six months of this year, police cars were involved in 70 accidents, …
Yep!
- In paragraph one they are “crashes”.
- By paragraph two they are “accidents”.
And note that it’s NOT about the number of events.
It’s the muddled thinking that allows us to drop into an irresponsible pit of reduced responsibility.
One again, cars don’t crash; drivers crash cars.
Paragraph three:-
Most of this year’s crashes, 41 of the 70, were classified as preventable.
I’m prepared to bet that, when the analysis is made, 100% of collisions are foreseeable and therefore preventable.
I understand the sometime-urgent nature of police calls.
I accept the speeds sometimes-necessarily above speed limits of regular prudence.
But always, police or not, they are crashes or collisions.
They are not accidents.
Tags: Chris, ChrisRewards, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Driving, Element, Google, Greaves, Halton, It’s, Loading, Paragraph, Police, Says, School, Star, Talk, Toronto
Another Satellite Set To Hit Earth In Coming Weeks
Didn’t we do this just a couple of weeks ago? The School bus fell in the Pacific Ocean, pretty good odds, 70% of the earth’s surface being covered by water (we are, after all, an ocean-planet with a half-dozen very large islands lying surrounded by water).
Now a two-and-a-half ton German research satellite (I suppose that that’s a school bus) is predicted to crash. And I suppose a significant part of it will burn up before it hits earth.
Two weeks ago I did some quick thinking, based on a refrigerator crashing to earth.
I have a refrigerator in my kitchen, and am in there far too often; I am supposed to be dieting to lose a bit of weight myself.
So I tend to park the car well away from the mall entrance and walk a bit extra across the shopping mall parking lot.
Saturday 4pm is, perhaps, the most zoo-like time here; people are frantically getting shopping done before the world comes to an end (that is, the stores close at 6pm not to re-open until 8am Sunday!), and the parking-lot is about as crowded as it ever gets.
I visualized a refrigerator dropping from the sky from a jumbo jet that was coming in to land at the airport a few miles north of here.
Admittedly dropping from a plane flying at 4,000 feet isn’t quite the same as dropping out of orbit, but there is a terminal velocity for large objects dropping out of orbit.
In the case of an out-of-orbit object (as distinct from an it-came-from-outer-space object), the refrigerator will be dropping pretty well vertically.
So I imagined a refrigerator dropping from the plane, and looked around me in the parking lot.
Crowded as it was, I figured that the ‘fridge would probably render four cars as write-offs, but looking at people walking across the parking lot, the chances of them being hit appears minimal. Something like three dozen people in five acres of land.
People in cars would be shielded from much of the debris.
There’s be shock; a few fender-benders as people stared or panicked. Much horn-blowing, but then, that’s typical on a Saturday afternoon.
All in all it seems not a great cause for worry.
P.S.
Probably the worst place for it to fall would be on the 19-lane wide portion of highway 427 nearby, where most folks seem to be exceeding the 100 Km/hour speed limit, with attendant collisions when the unexpected occurred.
Tags: Admittedly, Chris, ChrisRewards, Coming, Crowded, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Didn’t, Earth, Element, German, Google, Greaves, Loading, Ocean, Pacific, People, Probably, Satellite, School
Deadly Impact of Earthworms
I’m still getting over Farting Worms, and now this:
Worms in the Woods in which Chris Wedeles claims that earthworms are damaging his woodlot in Erin, about 60 kilometres West of where I sit and type these words. I say West, but WNW might be more accurate.
This blog is about Clear Thinking, not biology, but I admit a sense of gratitude to earthworms for eating leaf mold and making soil. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation, I know, but Charles Darwin said that earthworms made our soil, and I think he had a pretty good grip on the matter.
But I digress.
In the article the following text caught my eye:-
“Slow-moving animals, such as earthworms, whose natural rate of spread is only about four to ten metres per year, remained in the south. Therefore, our Canadian forests evolved in the absence of earthworms.”
Now straight off, earthworms aren’t slow movers; they fairly gallop along; my Red Wrigglers ( Eisenia fetida ) go like greased lightning when they are trying to escape from light.
Secondly, the spread of a colony of creatures is mostly independent of the speed of the critter. If a herd of elephants or a jamboree of jaguars maintains its population numbers steady, it will have no need to colonize new areas. Only if the population grows and the excess males and/or females get pushed out will the colony spread by cloning.
But then this stuck in my mind:
“In virtually all of Canada and much of the northern United States earthworms were extirpated during the recent (well, recent in geological terms) Pleistocene glaciations of 11,000 to 14,000 years ago when the landscape was covered with ice sheets up to several kilometres thick.”
The Wisconsin ice-sheet crept as far as Pittsburgh, almost. The Ohio river makes two sharp turns at Rochester and at Wellsville, turned back by the ice-sheet, so we can take Pittsburgh as an good local edge of the ice-sheet.
Google Maps tells me the driving distance from Erin to Pittsburgh via Buffalo is 528 kilometres, but of course that’s not in a straight line, but of course now would the worms pack a lunch and make a bee-line for Erin.
To a first approximation we can take 528 kilometres over 11,000 years and come up with 48 metres per year, a not-impossible rate of colonization (not movement) for earthworms; well within the bounds of possibility.
But then I am struck by another thought, and it is the chicken-egg thing.
Trees grow in soil. If earthworms make soil, which came first, trees or worms? Or did they arrive together, accompanied by raccoons, robins and squirrels and … all the other things that crawl, climb, or slither in and around trees.
And where do the nematodes fit into all of this?
I have a problem with trees marching inexorably northwards, breathlessly trying to outstrip their rivals, the earthworms.
I have no problem seeing a slow and steady creep of an entire ecosystem expanding, bringing with it native hunter-gatherers.
The SUVs and shopping malls came much later, but until they did, these old-stand forests were doing very well, thank you very much.
Tags: Buffalo, Canadian, Charles, Chris, ChrisRewards, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Darwin, Deadly, Earthworms, Eisenia, Element, Erin, Farting, Google, Greaves, Impact, It’s, Loading, Maps, Pittsburgh, Pleistocene, Rochester, Secondly, Slow, States, SUVs, Talk, Therefore, Thinking, Trees, Tweet, United, Wedeles, Wellsville, West, Woods, Worms
It’s Back to Driving School for Halton Police
Says the Toronto Star .
Me? I’d rather their editors started work.
The leading text of the article says it all:-
So many Halton police cruisers have been involved in crashes that the force has instituted mandatory driving training for its officers.
In the first six months of this year, police cars were involved in 70 accidents, …
Yep!
- In paragraph one they are “crashes”.
- By paragraph two they are “accidents”.
And note that it’s NOT about the number of events.
It’s the muddled thinking that allows us to drop into an irresponsible pit of reduced responsibility.
One again, cars don’t crash; drivers crash cars.
Paragraph three:-
Most of this year’s crashes, 41 of the 70, were classified as preventable.
I’m prepared to bet that, when the analysis is made, 100% of collisions are foreseeable and therefore preventable.
I understand the sometime-urgent nature of police calls.
I accept the speeds sometimes-necessarily above speed limits of regular prudence.
But always, police or not, they are crashes or collisions.
They are not accidents.
Tags: Chris, ChrisRewards, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Driving, Element, Google, Greaves, Halton, It’s, Loading, Paragraph, Police, Says, School, Star, Talk, Toronto
Another Satellite Set To Hit Earth In Coming Weeks
Didn’t we do this just a couple of weeks ago? The School bus fell in the Pacific Ocean, pretty good odds, 70% of the earth’s surface being covered by water (we are, after all, an ocean-planet with a half-dozen very large islands lying surrounded by water).
Now a two-and-a-half ton German research satellite (I suppose that that’s a school bus) is predicted to crash. And I suppose a significant part of it will burn up before it hits earth.
Two weeks ago I did some quick thinking, based on a refrigerator crashing to earth.
I have a refrigerator in my kitchen, and am in there far too often; I am supposed to be dieting to lose a bit of weight myself.
So I tend to park the car well away from the mall entrance and walk a bit extra across the shopping mall parking lot.
Saturday 4pm is, perhaps, the most zoo-like time here; people are frantically getting shopping done before the world comes to an end (that is, the stores close at 6pm not to re-open until 8am Sunday!), and the parking-lot is about as crowded as it ever gets.
I visualized a refrigerator dropping from the sky from a jumbo jet that was coming in to land at the airport a few miles north of here.
Admittedly dropping from a plane flying at 4,000 feet isn’t quite the same as dropping out of orbit, but there is a terminal velocity for large objects dropping out of orbit.
In the case of an out-of-orbit object (as distinct from an it-came-from-outer-space object), the refrigerator will be dropping pretty well vertically.
So I imagined a refrigerator dropping from the plane, and looked around me in the parking lot.
Crowded as it was, I figured that the ‘fridge would probably render four cars as write-offs, but looking at people walking across the parking lot, the chances of them being hit appears minimal. Something like three dozen people in five acres of land.
People in cars would be shielded from much of the debris.
There’s be shock; a few fender-benders as people stared or panicked. Much horn-blowing, but then, that’s typical on a Saturday afternoon.
All in all it seems not a great cause for worry.
P.S. probably the worst place for it to fall would be on the 19-lane wide portion of highway 427 nearby, where most folks seem to be exceeding the 100 Km/hour speed limit, with attendant collisions when the unexpected occurred.
Tags: Admittedly, Chris, ChrisRewards, Coming, Crowded, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Didn’t, Earth, Element, German, Google, Greaves, Loading, Ocean, Pacific, People, Satellite, School, Something, Talk, There’s, Tweet
Girl, 15, Killed By Train
The headline reads “Girl, 15, killed by train in Melbourne while crossing tracks” and I don’t believe that trains kill.
Trains are large chunks of metals and plastic driven by humans.
Further I don’t believe the driver of the train killed the girl. My sympathies go out to the driver who is, no doubt, traumatized for ever by this incident.
Assuming that the newspaper article tells the truth, then the girl killed herself, for we read “The girl walked around a pedestrian boom gate and attempted to cross the tracks at a level crossing …”.
So there you have it.
The pedestrian boom gates are down.
We expect a 15-year old to know what that means.
If the 15-year old disregards the wisdom of elders, what is there left, except the grieving and the mourning.
You will see the same behaviour tomorrow morning as some idiot – might be you! – runs a red traffic light to save an extra 60 seconds.
- Ask the train driver if it’s worth it.
- Ask the girl’s parents if it’s worth it.
Tags: Assuming, Chris, ChrisRewards, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Element, Further, Girl, Google, Greaves, Killed, Loading, Melbourne, Talk, Train, Trains
Poverty-Free
Sign outside a local church on the eve of the provincial election.
Got me thinking.
Define poverty
Most people I’ve polled say something along the lines of “below average income”, and while that’s not a correct definition, it’s what the masses thing when they see the word poverty.
So when they see the word “poverty” on a sign like this, they think immediately of folks on below-average income.
So presumably they feel urged to do something (in this case vote!) to raise the income of those people.
Immediately shifting the average and introducing a new set of people who are, by definition, on below-average incomes!
In essence it’s a never ending arms-race towards higher salaries.
And in that sense, poverty can and will never be eradicated.
Poverty and the Origins of the Third Balkan War
I read extensively on the origins of this war, almost a century ago, and I read first-hand accounts and historical novels. To do so is to be amazed at today’s standard of living, and while I confess to living in a developed country, I have a sneaking suspicion that there are cell-phones lurking in off corners of India, China and Africa.
The Christian Bible
I am in possession of a Christian bible, and I read in Matthew 26,11 and Mark 14,7 that “the poor will always be with you”.
Since the sign in the image above is sitting on church property, I’m tempted to ask the congregation how firmly they believe in their bible!
Tags: Balkan, Bible, CGreaves, Chris, ChrisGreaves, ChrisRewards, Christian, Custom, CustomSearchControl, Define, Element, Free, Google, Greaves, Immediately, I’ve, Loading, Mark, Matthew, Mississauga, Origins, Poverty, Poverty-Free Africa, Sign, Talk, Toronto
