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What a way to end the Olympics!

As soon as the money comes in, it goes out. I've had enough repayment over the last month to be able to cover another $25 loan to someone in the developing world that needs a helping hand. This time around, I just chose the first person on the list, when I clicked on lend on the Kiva site . Usually, I sort the loan applicants by region and gender, giving to women in Africa. This time around, a woman in Juba, South Sudan , was at the top of the list, and saved me the sorting effort. Agnes, to whom my $25 loan went to, is a mom with three kids and a husband, who is a soldier. She is looking to grow her charcoal selling business, with the hopes of using the additional profits to build a house. The loan is facilitated by BRAC , an NGO based in Bangladesh, operates a microfinance program in South Sudan, focusing on war refugees -- and already has 418 village organizations with more than 14,000 women members. The $25 loan is a drop in the bucket of world's needs, but even whil...

They're Canadians. They're hockey players. This is part of what they do. Of course, I can understand why there may be some people upset. They are, after all, women. So, to those embarrassed by this, I say, go look in the mirror. These ladies are fine examples for girls all over the country.

So I was watching the game with this cutey tonight. She's loves hockey -- and the only thing she feels more emotional about, is her country -- Canada. The following was shouted by this Canadian hockey fan, watching the Russian-Canadian game tonight. It was more interesting watching her than the game. Far more interesting, listening to her. It was distracting as hell. Overheard, and for your entertainment -- and this was only from the middle of the 3rd period, onwards: "Drop dead Russia!" "Shoot the fucking ... emmm ..." -- the Canadians heard and shot the puck. "Doesn't he know not to jinx it, you stupid!" -- a retort at the commentator suggesting that the game isn't over yet (Canada was leading 7:3 with about 7 minutes left). "How stupid can you be to take a penalty now?! Stupid!" -- at Pronger taking a late penalty for holding. "Come on Russia, pull your goalie!" -- never one to settle for a 4-goal lead with 3 ...

McGuinty is playing politics. Right now, the public is rightly pissed at TTC workers, especially after the can of sleeping worms opened up simmering issues with how TTC workers treat their constituents. That is the only reason McGuinty wants to beat on already reeling TTC workers. No McGuinty, this is not a good time for a public debate on the issue of making TTC workers essential to the running of the city. Emotions would get in the way of any debate. On the issue of the TTC being an essential service, I would have to disagree. I am a TTC user. Without the TTC, I would not get to work. I don't have a car. The one hour TTC commute would turn to hell. I would have to car pool; beg for a lift; or work from home. All options I'm willing to take if necessary, but would rather the TTC employees (not union) and the TTC management, settle labour issues by negotiation -- not strike. If it comes to a strike however, it is labour's right to have that choice. And unlike th...

It's never too late to be late, and the Saudis are way fucking late. But it's all part of a plan. King Abdullah is trying to move his diseased society forward, one tiny step, without being lynched by one crazy mullah or the other. The plan has been afoot to allow women lawyers to argue some cases in court -- for the first time -- for a few years now. Of course, before we get all emotional over this announcement, we shouldn't forget that the women are educated in the Shariah justice system. (And yes, I realized that I'm being moronic with that sentence. Add a little bit of oxy if you don't get it.) in reference to: BBC News - Saudi women to be allowed to argue cases in court ( view on Google Sidewiki )

In 1804, Haiti was the first nation to outlaw slavery. That is an amazing accomplishment -- but you wouldn't think so if you knew Haiti today. Today, 10% of the most vulnerable population in Haiti, the children, live a life of slavery. Child slaves in Haiti, known as restaveks , number around 300,000. They come from large homes, where parents can't afford to keep them, to homes of affluent family members. Often, these children suffer abuse at the hands of families they are enslaved to. The practice having restaveks has been around since 1804. Lighter skinned Haitians became the ruling class -- and the darker skinned, poorer Haitians, were made to believe that if they couldn't take care of their children, it was acceptable -- and better for the child -- to be shipped off. This has been a widely acceptable practice around the world -- back in the day -- but it shouldn't be, anymore. The root cause of the problem is large families. It's not uncommon for pare...

It's not socially acceptable to do it, but sometimes at work, I really feel like taking a nap. It's usually right after lunch. I could just crawl up quietly under my desk and snore for a bit. There has been lots of studies that have shown a little nap time would give a performance boost afterward. The latest from Berkeley suggests that a 90-min nap during the day is good for cognitive performance. A nap allows the brain to empty the hippocampus of short-term memories to the pre-frontal cortex for long-term storage. That emptying, allows you to accept additional short-term memories later in the day, to then commit them to memory at night. in reference to: "Dr Matthew Walker, who led the study, reported at the AAAS conference in San Diego, said: "Sleep not only rights the wrong of prolonged wakefulness, but, at a neurocognitive level, it moves you beyond where you were before you took a nap." - BBC News - Nap 'boosts' brain learning power ( view on G...

TENTHMIL has a cool timeline showing human impact on the planet for the last 10,000 years. We have been awesome in bringing the planet into our servitude. We've given up our roaming ways, looking for food, and are now producing more food than we can eat, but still manage to starve millions. We're fat cats with every whim and desire easily sated. We eat whales because we can. We hunt sharks for their fins and dump the rest of the body to rot on the ocean floor. We've made gardens in deserts and deserts of our gardens. We rule the world. Our dominance is unquestioned and unparalleled. No other species has accomplished what we have. We are wonderful, fellow humans. As the TENTHMIL points out though, it's all coming at a cost. The price to be paid is not what the TENTHMIL will have you think however. It's not the planet that will pay the price -- or the other species that are still around. Those costs have already been paid and continue to be paid. What ...

Earth is more interesting than most of us know -- and in our short time on this planet, humans have only really scratched the surface in our exploration. Take Lake Vostok for example. It is the largest, but only one, of more than 140 subglacial lakes to be found under Antarctica. Yes, that's right. The relatively unexplored continent, has more that is not explored. According to radar data, Lake Vostok is similar in size to Lake Ontario, only it is below 4,000 metres of ice. The subglacial lakes may be connected via a network of subglacial rivers as well. Because of the pressure and geothermal heat, the water is liquid at around -3 °C. It is also an oligotrophic extreme environment. At that depth, cut off from the rest of the world for the last 500,000 to a million years, organisms that live there have been isolated, to say the least. It's expected that the environment, with oxygen levels 50 times higher than those in ordinary freshwater lakes, would have evolved a un...

Another group I discovered in that Cathay flight, was Tinariwen . Tinariwen is a band of Tuareg musicians from the Sahara Desert region of northern Mali. They've gained international prominence beyond the world music community, and have performed in music festivals in Europe and North America. The first song that made me take notice of the band, was Cler Achel . Below is a video of the band performing that song. I also liked other songs from their recent album, including Toumast, Imidiwan Winakalin, and Awa Didjen . To understand the band and their music, you need to understand a little about the Tuareg -- a nomadic people living in the Saharan interior of North Africa. (The name Tuareg comes from early European explorers of the region -- they instead refer to themselves by various other names.) Their nomadic way of life came at an end in the early 20th century due to bloody colonization by the French. When the French finally retreated, like so many post-colonial stories, ...

I discovered Youssou N'Dour when I was flying back from China in December. I decided that there were no movies I wanted to see on the Cathay flight back. Yes, I know. There were dozens of movies, and I had seen all the ones I had wanted to see -- and there are only a few movies that bears watching twice. I searched the Internet, looking for a specific song from him -- looking for videos. The first I found was N'Dour in concert with Peter Gabriel at Bercy, Paris, for Amnesty 1998 . In Your Eyes happens to be one of my favourite songs, so here it is, for no other reason than it features N'Dour and Gabriel. Enjoy. For those not familiar with N'Dour: he's a Senegalese singer and percussionist, famous for helping to develop the popular mbalax music in Senegal. He began performing at age 12 in Dakar, and eventually became one of the most celebrated African musicians. He's performed with numerous western artists, and is noted for having written and perfor...

Google loaded $2M in cash into the tubes, and sent it over to Wikimedia , the nonprofit that oversees Wikipedia . The donation, which matches the donation from Pierre Omidyar's from six months ago, will go the distance to ensuring Wikipedia will continue to hum along in 2010. Despite the recession, people have apparently been loosening the purse strings and sending cash Wikimedia's way. Over 240,000 have given so far this fiscal year (July 1, 2009 - June 30, 2010). While we're on the subject of giving, another worthwhile organization to give to, is the Sunshine Press -- the nonprofit that is the custodian of Wikileaks -- the organization that specializes in shining the light in darkest recesses of censorship around the world. Wikileaks provides a forum for whistle blowers to get classified, censored and otherwise lost truths, into the open. Wikileaks has been attacked by many governments, including those of the free, democratically elected type. In response, Wikilea...

These assholes should all be arrested and thrown in jail. Oh, I don't know ... since we're living in a world that likes terrorism, how about arraigning them all on domestic terrorism charges? That's for the assholes, aka, anarchists, or whatever they wish to call themselves. They have no point. They are simply there to cause chaos, wearing their fashionable made in China black clothing. They're not anarchists. They wouldn't know the first thing about anarchy. in reference to: ""The demonstration involving a number of anarchists, some of whom dress all in black and employ a tactic called Black Bloc. This included a loosely organized group of thugs from Central Canada known to attach themselves to any cause, travel to any event that attracts media coverage and promote anarchy wherever they go," said a statement issued by police." - CBC News - British Columbia - Anti-Olympics rioters smash Vancouver store windows ( view on Google Sidewiki )

I'm watching the opening ceremony of the Vancouver 2010 Olympics. I usually don't go for this kind of stuff -- but hey, it's happening in Canada. And I have to say, it's quite a show we're putting on for the world. For some of the world, this may form some opinions of our country -- or what we may want them to think of us, regardless of the realities. Some of it may very well be a little bit of propaganda to inspire a little bit of nationalism -- which wouldn't be such a bad thing, either. We are a great country of 33 million. I was surprised by the amount of homage paid to the First Nations people -- considering the amount of protests that followed the flame around the country -- including during the opening ceremony. The homage was great to see. Made me proud to see the First Nations people welcome the world's atheletes to Canada -- to their lands -- and it was especially nice to see that the First Nations leaders were treated the same as other head...

MilkyWay@Home, the distributed computing project using the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing platform, is now the fastest computing project on that platform -- and probably the second fastest public distributed computing program, behind Folding@Home. MilkyWay@Home, using volunteer computing power from home users across the planet, has achieved 1,382 TFlops, as of January 12. Just for context -- that's just behind Jaguar, the Cray XT5 supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, that has performed at 1,759 TFlops and uses 224,162 Opteron cores -- compared to the 45 thousand users volunteering on MilkyWay@Home. For more on the MilkyWay@Home project, click here . in reference to: PCs around the world unite to map the Milky Way ( view on Google Sidewiki )

Today, Google unveiled a lot of Canada to the world. Street View went live with 130 additional cities and towns across Canada, on Google Maps. Now, you can plan your road trip across Canada from the comfort of your home computer! And special, just for Vancouver 2010, Google also took the slopes. Can't make it to the Olympics? You can now surf the slopes! How awesome is that? in reference to: "The 360-degree, slope-level imagery of Whistler Mountain is the first collected by the newest experimental Street View system, a snowmobile equipped with state-of-the-art photographic and GPS technology. Winter Games fans, skiers and snowboarders around the world can now pan across several Whistler runs as if they were there, and wind through Whistler Village and Whistler Creekside at the bases of Whistler-Blackcomb mountains." - Announcement / Nouveauté (Google Street View Canada) ( view on Google Sidewiki )

Six million Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis between 1945-46. Six million people. And after the second world war, we, the world, vowed we would never let it happen again. As of the 2007 survey of the conflict in the Congo, since 1998, 5.4 million people had been killed. At a rate of 45,000 a month, the deaths have now surpassed the 6 million Jews from the second world war, and still, the world shows little interest in putting an end to it. As horrific as the numbers are, the horrors don't end there. Slaughter doesn't even begin to describe what the women are being put through in the Congo. Rape doesn't describe the horror. Words fail to describe the horror being inflicted, repeatedly, on little girls, teens and women. Congo is especially noted for a conflict where war is waged on women -- on daughters, sisters and mothers. And we do nothing about it. What does that say about the rest of us? in reference to: Special Report: Congo ( view on Google Sidewiki ) “It ...

What is up with the TTC union and (some of) the staffers? Apparently, TTC workers, while not being encouraged -- but certainly not discouraged -- by their union, are thinking of a work-to-rule campaign in response to patrons being pissed at the disservice they've been getting (all prompted by the sleeping TTC worker photo). Are these people so clueless that they're not figuring it out? You don't piss off your customers. We, the riders of the TTC trains and buses, are the reason you go to work. We're the reason you get paid. We're the pockets that fund it all. This is a case of the pissed off staffers taking the public for granted. We're not here to serve you -- it's the other way around! I've met some of these TTC workers. You're the lady in the booth that was anything but helpful when I tried buy tokens from you. I'm sorry, I was out of the country in December -- when I came back, I had forgotten that tokens were not for sale yet, and ...

The UN Population Fund has published their latest report, State of World Population 2009. The authors are focused in this report on the impact of climate change on the human population. As I have argued in previous posts, climate change is no longer a question. It is happening and it is due to human activities. The rapid change is inevitable. The uncertainty now is on the impact to the human population and the environment. History has lessons for us on how we will deal with the inevitable change. It doesn't need to be a disaster, like a tsunami or a hurricane or an earthquake -- though disasters like that will occur as a result -- it can subtle -- like changing weather patterns that bring floods or droughts. Just small changes that doesn't necessarily punch an immediate hole in our day-to-day should be reflected on, to forecast what's coming. When subtle change comes, we the rich, will be able to cope. We the rich will have choices. We are much more capable of adap...

The GEO600 may have inadvertently discovered that "we are all living in a giant cosmic hologram." That, according to Craig Hogan, the director of Fermilab's Center for Particle Astrophysics. GEO600 is a gravity wave detector in Germany hasn't had much success in finding gravitational waves -- but it has been having a lot of problems with noise -- noise that Craig Hogan may have independently predicted. Hogan thinks that the noise GEO600 has detected can be explained as microscopic quantum convulsions of space-time -- which is the limit of the space-time continuum described by Einstein. The physics behind the suggestion that the universe may be a holographic image is complex, to say the least. However, it's exactly what you think. The suggestion is that the universe is like a 3-dimensional holographic projection from a 2-dimensional surface. The suggestion comes from theoretical work done on black holes, to explain the black hole information paradox -- and sup...

Only idiots would now argue whether there is change in the Arctic or not -- and apparently, idiots abound -- but this post is not about them. Change is happening. Climate change is here -- has been here. The only question is, what will the result be. Science can only be speculative with its forecasts. The models just aren't good enough because of the number of variables. We don't know for sure what will result from the great melt -- but the great melt is happening and we're not going to be ready for it. There will be economic impacts . There will be social impacts. And there will be a whole lot of environmental impacts. Some of these we will be able to cope with, some we will lament, and some we will grin and bear arms to deal with. If history is any indicator -- and it is a damn good indicator -- we will lose more than we will gain from this change. We will be unresponsive until it's too late, in the unending hope that certain disasters would be averted by...

China is apparently succumbing to pressure from its affluent middle class to stop eating dogs and cats. Which I suppose is a good thing. As a pet owner, I'd much rather not eat my cat -- or have anyone else eat her for that matter. But why the taboo? Yes, pet owners do come to regard their pets as part of their families -- akin to having children -- but why just dogs and cats? There are people who keep pigs, cows, horses, etc., yet we don't seem to have the emotional reaction to their consumption -- either by us or in the meat that feed our beloved dogs and cats. I think the taboo is silly, but also think our general consumption of meat needs to be rethought. Generally, we're ravenous when it comes to meat -- vegetarians excepted. There is a huge environmental cost to its consumption, and the taking of a life, regardless of whether it was raised specifically for that purpose, is done without a second thought. There is little respect or thanks given for the life that...

Not content with their war in the US, the American Christian right is now taking it's hate to Africa. Earlier in 2009, Scott Lively, at the invitation of Uganda's Family Life Network, descended on the African nation to bring the word of hate. Lively, told Ugandans who attended his "Seminar on Exposing the Homosexuals' Agenda" of how American homosexuals were actively recruiting young Ugandans into their movement. He claimed that homosexuality directly increased the divorce rate, child abuse & molestation and HIV/AIDS. The Ugandans attending his seminar, ate it up. Lively went on to meet with Ugandan lawmakers and government officials. The fruits of his labour became the Anti-Homosexuality Act of 2009 . The act, which was proposed in October 2009, would ban LGBT organizations and introduces the death penalty for homosexuality. American evangelicals have been actively involved in Africa in recent years, as the importance of Africa to Christianity has grown....

IBM has created graphene transistors in the lab that operate at 100 GHz. That's 10 faster than today's fastest silcon transistors. Made from sheets of carbon just an atom-thick, the graphene transistors can be produced using existing semiconductor manufacturing processes. How awesome would it be to have one of those humming away in your home computer? Just wait a few more years, they're coming. in reference to: Technology Review: Graphene Transistors that Can Work at Blistering Speeds ( view on Google Sidewiki )

Harper continues to do his best to ensure Parliament knows he really doesn't give a shit what they think. Like Bush, Harper thinks the executive branch of government is above the law of the land -- and can interpret the constitution at its whim. I hope for the next election, we get some real choices. I hope that voters actually turn out to vote. And I hope we dismiss Harper and his band of yes-men. in reference to: ""The executive is really placing itself above Parliament. For the first time that I know in Canadian history, the executive is saying we are superior to Parliament," said Errol Mendes, a University of Ottawa professor who was speaking at an informal hearing of the parliamentary committee looking into the Afghanistan detainee issue. Mendes was referring to the Harper government's refusal to hand over uncensored documents, despite a motion passed in the House of Commons to do so." - CBC News - Canada - Harper government violating Constitution: p...

You may have heard the news about Colorado Springs, CO . It's a beautiful city sitting on the foot of the Rocky Mountains -- and it's about to get very ugly. The city is broke. It's not bringing in the tax revenues it needs to run the business of being a city. It's cutting firefighters and cops, and slowing down city services, such as trash collection, parks maintenance and public transport. Heck, it's even put its police helicopters on sale on the Internet. Colorado Springs' problem isn't unique. Across the US, towns, cities and states are running into serious fiscal problems. For years, they've spent. For years, they've accumulated debt. And for years, unions representing city workers, have bargained hard, then gone on strike and bargained hard, again. They've got it so good, they're bilking the general population. City workers have it much better than the general population -- and have much less risks to their jobs, pay and pens...

China can't seem to get any slack these days. The latest comes from Britain's MI5, which has accused China of some pretty nefarious practices to cull secrets from British firms and government. In the report, the Threat from Chinese Espionage, circulated to business and government leaders in the UK, MI5 warns that vigilance is needed, as well as government-security intervention to thwart the Chinese threat. Apparently, there have been Chinese electronic attacks on Britain's defense, energy, communications and manufacturing companies, as well as the government. As well, there has been cases of sexual entrapment and espionage involving electronic gifts and bugged hotel rooms. None of this is entirely new of course. China regularly spies on foreign governments. And so do western governments spy on China. What's alarming however, is China is also spying on businesses. Some will argue, especially the Chinese government, that they are innocent of any espionage against w...