The Major Minority
Four years after Harper was elected, Liberals still like to console themselves that he hasn’t won a majority. But he now controls a majority on the Rights and Democracy board, and the Liberals couldn’t even slow him down.
via Changing a society, one step at a time – Opinion, Paul Wells – Macleans.ca.
Population of the Dead Infographic
Cool Infographics posted a link recently to a neat infographic entitled “Population of the Dead”
What I find most interesting is that in the history of the world, it seems (as far as the creators have estimated) that only 106 billion people have ever lived.
Future of the Gordcast
I’ve experimented with the podcast genre twice before: once in a context of musical exploration, the second a humorous look at pop culture with my friend Stephen Speer. A combination of boredom and other life commitments caused me to finish each “season” with about ten episodes.
I have been rethinking the show and I will be aiming to have more guests, to do less discussion of television, more of news, politics, and general silliness. I’m glad to report Stephen is on board for Season 3 and we promise it will be awesome or your money back.
Look for season three starting in late February 2010 on iTunes and here.
Code Switching
Code switching refers to “alternation between one or more languages, dialects, or language registers in the course of discourse between people who have more than one language in common.
” Anyone who lives in a multicultural urban area has most likely witnessed this phenomenon. If you are polylingual you have most likely code switched at some point in a conversation with another person with two languages in common. Living in Ottawa, the national capital of a multicultural country, I am likely to overhear conversations in, at the bare minimum, two languages throughout my day. Often this number raises as high as six or seven different languages. Therefore, as you can guess, I hear a lot of code switching in the course of an average day.
I recently have made several observations about the relative frequencies of intersentential and intrasentential code switching. Intersentential code switching, where the code switch happens between sentences or thoughts seems to happen more with speakers of Austronesian or Sino-Tibetan languages. Intrasentential code switching, where the switch happens within a thought, tends to happen more with speakers of Afro-Asiatic and Indo-European languages.
It is my belief that the disparate syntactical structures of Indo-European versus Austronesian and Sino-Tibetan languages makes intrasentential code switching prohibitively difficult except in single word code switches. I have observed that these linguistic groups generally code switch when the subject changes to a person who speaks the secondary language, at a change of participants, at location changes, and when discussing current events.
Intrasentential code switching is something that Canadians are all accustomed to. Anglophone Canadians will often state something and complete it with a “n’est pas?” We will often discuss someone possessing a certain “je ne sais quois.” Although our code switching is certainly not limited to the occasional word. It is common for fluently bilingual Canadians to intersententially code switch back and forth from French to English regardless of the mother tongue of either participant.
I think that large scale code switching environments (such as Ottawa) are conducive to the growth and change of the English language. English, being the largely common element here in Ottawa, and being as flexible as it is ends up amalgamating commonly code switched words from other languages. I believe this phenemonon must occur in any large multicultural city.
Interesting research in code switching is used for determining ethnolinguistic vitality, understanding the needs of polylingual societies, researching bilingualism, and, of course, keeping amateur linguists entertained.
Deforestation
I watched Maya Lin’s “Unchopping a Tree” today and it is incredible to think about an issue like deforestation this way.
Maya Lin – Unchopping a Tree from What is Missing? Foundation on Vimeo.
I do find it odd that Stanley Park, Vancouver, British Columbia was left out of the video as it is ten percent larger than central park and contains a significant number of extremely ancient, tall trees.
Hat tip kottke.org
The Seven Day Experiment
I have blogged since before I knew what it was. Even before that I started keeping journals (something I do to this day). Somewhere between a great upheaval in my personal life in 2005 and advances in my career that sapped my time and energy, I lost the love of blogging, and even writing.
I have been pondering retiring my blog for now, and just leaving a placeholder with how to contact me, and some relevant personal information. Before I do so, I’d really like to give it one last attempt. One of my major problems is that I continually self-censor thinking it won’t interest people, or they will dislike my opinion. Also, I feel inept at writing in the humorous, and witty style I desire. These blocks are personal, and most likely stem from self-esteem issues in general and as such I should not submit, but fight the urge to just quit.
In essence, I would like to try a seven day experiment wherein I blog whatever I want as it comes to me. I will blog every day from noon Sunday, January 10, 2009 to noon on Sunday, January 17, 2010.
How can you help? I would love it if, during this time, you could comment with your impressions, feedback, questions, thoughts, criticisms, suggestions and the like whenever possible. Even if you don’t normally comment on blogs (like myself), it would mean a lot if you could this week. This will allow me to get a feel for what works and what doesn’t and will also help me overcome the feeling that it doesn’t matter if I write or not and that people care. Even if you drop me a note to say I completely missed the mark, or that you disagree with what I said, etc. All of it will be helpful and much appreciated. Do so anonymously if you feel better, but please do.
I’ll report on Sunday and decide where to go from there. Thank you so much. A special thanks to the dwindling group of readers from Poeticgeek who’ve stuck around all these years to see if I’d really ever get back on the horse properly. I really appreciate it.
Movies, movies, and more movie
As you no doubt could guess, I love movies. Emphatically. So, in the interest of talking about movies without reviewing them (as I can’t seem to do that), here is a list of the 10 movies I anticipate the most in 2010:
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Youth in Revolt (January 8)Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief (February 12)Alice in Wonderland (March 5)Green Zone (March 12)How to Train Your Dragon (March 26)Iron Man 2 (May 7)Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (May 28)The A-Team (June 11)Inception (July 16)The Social Network (October 15)
- Youth in Revolt (January 8)
- Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief (February 12)
- Alice in Wonderland (March 5)
- Green Zone (March 12)
- How to Train Your Dragon (March 26)
- Iron Man 2 (May 7)
- Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (May 28)
- The A-Team (June 11)
- Inception (July 16)
- The Social Network (October 15)
More on why to come.
Urban Environments as Living Organisms
I grew up in a small town and have always thought of buildings and construction as mankind making purposeful changes to their structures, be they houses, barns, irrigation systems or roads. The concept of change in this manner, as I took it, was very methedological and systematic: controlled and orchestrated by man.
Now, as a young man, I live in one of the world’s most international cities, flush with development. Buildings are being built and destroyed daily. Large scale transit projects are moving forward at a scale that I can see on my walk to work. While the concept of human-initiated methedological and systematic change sits in the back of my mind as the obvious and necessary initiator for this revolutionary progress, I can’t help but ponder certain questions.
On the level of the individual project, yes, the methodology is the same: human initiated construction or destruction. The same simple processes I had observed growing up, just on a grander scale. But, what if, each individual action while consciously made was tied into a larger emergent unconscious system?
Sitting quietly by the ocean and viewing the city as a whole, the changes seem natural, or at the very least organic, in their cycling. The births, lives, and deaths of these parts of our city: the residential megaplexes, the commercial towers thrusting above the clouds, all the way down to the ground level, it ebbs and flows in a very natural way, with areas spurring into a furor of activity and then reaching a point of stability before parts begin to decay; some systems in place divert resources to maintain stability until eventually the decay overcomes the rate of repair and the system collapses. Shortly thereafter, a new set of buildings and infrastructure will combine to form a subsystem which will replace the old. Areas of the city surge with life and construction at one point only to be dead and forgotten the next. Socio-economic factors, along with human changes in need, taste and population modify the parameters of the larger system.
Imagine an ant, going about its daily toil; pick up a small rock and return it to the colony. This action is the single task of the individual ant and can, in fact, be observed independently of other colony activities. The great beauty comes when you see the actions of the ant in context of the colony as a whole. Each individual toiling ant carries a single rock, but through their individual contributions, an entire colony is built and sustained.
To stretch the metaphor further, imagine that our city is that colony and the individual construction projects are the single toiling ants. We have something that ants don’t: self-awareness and free-will. What could we achieve if city planners, real-estate agents, developers, banks and even citizens became aware of the urban ecosphere and made their individual decisions with forethought as to how their decisions would affect the entire system? With everyone working to maintain the health of this system, the resources we see shifting constantly to and fro could be utilised more effectively. We could see the organic city I’ve described flourish and with it, sustainability, profit (from reduced reallocation of resources) and most of all, stronger, longer living neighbourhoods, which in turn breed stronger communities. Coming from a small town, that is my wish for this city, stronger, longer lasting communities in homes they can afford in the city they love.