Drowning in the Sea of Information

Seth Lloyd, over at Discover Magazine, writes a fascinating story, You Know Too Much, about the exponential increase of information in general, and science in particular, that we are subjected to in today’s world. Its fascinating to me not just because he uses one of my posts as an illustration of “The development of the scientific history of the universe, which now threatens religious creation myths” … its fascinating because he makes some excellent points about the glut of information that floods into our consciousness every day and the ways we must deal with it.

The Emperor’s Old Clothes

Bill Moyers has long been one of the sharpest and most in-depth voices in American Media, a journalist who can take us deeper into a story than almost any other. In his recent look at American media failures in the run up to the Iraq war in 2002 and 2003, Buying the War, he demonstrates that even in 2007, he is still one of the sharpest tools in the shed. It’s a relentlessly detailed time line of the media reporting of the case for war in the last part of 2002 and early 2003 that would be comical to watch were it not frighteningly true, chronicling the misstatements, exaggerations, and spin of media pundits as the Bush administration laid out the case for the Iraq war. Its a long piece, but definitely well worth the time.

To Edmonton, with jokes

Well, another week of tons of driving for a tiny amount of stage time is over. I’d have to go through my GPS nav records to work out exactly how many kilometers I drove, but I’ve got no doubt that my miles to minutes ratio is pretty crappy at this point. Still, it was a fun night in Edmonton, and I must say the #9 and #36 make for a very nice drive on a sunny day. The roads are all two lane undivided, but they are in decent shape, and some of the scenery is quite spectacular. Its rather silly, but in four years of living out here, and four years of driving west on #1 and north on #884 to work, Wednesday was the first time I’d ever driven through the CFB Suffield intersection and gone farther north on #884. I wasn’t entirely sure how long it was going to take, so I didn’t stop many times to take pictures, but I need to head back out there when I can stop, as there are numerous places that have some amazing shots.

April showers, May flowers, and Gliese 581-C

“April showers bring may flowers” is a silly child’s rhyme that I think is familiar to most my readers. Like most such rhymes, its a teaching tool for young minds, allowing us to explain complex ideas in simple fun ways. That simple little rhyme that many of us learned as very small children helps us understand and conceptualize the changing of the seasons, the emergence of new life, and even such basic concepts as the value of water to life itself. Its something we don’t often think about, but water is one of the most fundamental aspects of everything we’ve ever seen that we called life … it is so fundamental that “life as we know it” simply couldn’t exist without water. Thats not QUITE to say that life can’t exist without water, but if it does, we have no conception of how that would work in practice.

The best kept comedy secret in Calgary

Dickens Pub in downtown Calgary has been a mainstay for decades, both under the name Dickens and in its previous incarnation as Buckingham’s, serving up a comfortable atmosphere, good food and beer, and great live music. Going back at least as far as the 80’s, I can recall several nights of drunken revelry to live blues, specifically a particular night of listening to the Powder Blues Band … I won’t go into details in order to protect the guilty (in this case, almost exclusively me, lol) but suffice to say the night involved my first wife, my not-yet second wife, a former lover of my first wife, and the brother of my not-yet-second wife. All in all, its not a night I’ll soon forget … the stupid thing is that I was having such a great time at the comedy show last night, I didn’t even get to my marriage material and wasn’t even able to relate the story on stage. Oh well, next time …

How to get from taxes to comedy …

I’ve taken a few days off from View from the Edge to spend some personal time, as well as to work on a few other projects, so this is my first post for a few days. Its going to be a bit of a mish-mash post, I think, covering a few things. First of all, in a few hours I am off again for some more comedy shows, in Calgary and Edmonton. Later tonight (Monday Apr 23, 2007), I’ll be doing a set at Monday Night Comedy at Dickens for the first time. Looking forward to checking out the show and seeing what they do down there. On Wednesday, I am in Edmonton again for “Crash and Burn Wednesday” and this time I plan to do far less Crashing and Burning … it will mean a lot of driving again, but at least this week the weather looks good, so I’ll not have to fight the snow at least. I didn’t get a Tuesday time-slot this week, but I may pop into Yuk Yuk’s in Calgary anyway for Tuesday night just to see the show. I’ve recently purchased a new camcorder as well, so with any luck the I’ll be able to get some decent video from my shows this week … we’ll see what happens later tonight.

Relentless truth

I tend to quote Salon.com quite a bit in my posts here, in part because I always like to support independent journalism, especially in today’s world of corporate media saturation, but mostly because they employ and publish frighteningly talented writers.  The contributions to Salon by regular contributers such as Joan Walsh (editor-in-chief), Tim Grieve (War Room), and Gary Kamiya (various commentary) are always top-notch examples of writing, even when I disagree with the opinions being put forth.  But remarkably, the rigorous intellectual standards in place also make most every piece in Salon extremely well thought out and ruthlessly logical, usually leaving little room to disagree with what are clearly the “correct” conclusions.

Medicine Hat Arena and fiscal responsibility

I don’t often write on strictly local issues, as I realize that not many of my readers are from Medicine Hat, and I tend to think in terms of larger issues anyway. Today, however, I do want to speak about a local issue that has larger implications, IMO, to the way we all tend to finance large projects. Over the past few months, the City of Medicine Hat has been looking into the feasibility of building a new arena and trying to find a suitable building site. There is little question in the community whether a new facility is needed … just considering the WHL Tigers alone, the continuous sell-outs of their games in the current 4000 seat building show there is certainly a large appetite for seats for the hockey games. When you add that to the events that Medicine Hat looses as a result of not having a facility large enough to accommodate the crowds, its not hard to see the need for such a facility.

A civilian transition?

In most of the “first world” the notion of democratic power transfer is taken for granted. When an old government is thrown out at the polls, and a new one elected, no one in Canada ever wonders if the old government will, in fact, relinquish power … its taken for granted that the people have the final say in who governs, and there is no legitimate reason, or method, for a defeated Canadian government to remain in power. If a defeated Canadian Prime Minister were to attempt to take control of the military to forcibly hold onto the leadership of Canada, it would be seen throughout the world as a truly shocking event. Even the logistics of how a Canadian PM might manage to get enough of the Armed Forces to go along with him to make this even remotely viable are nearly impossible to imagine … its simply not even a credible option to imagine a military coup d’etat in Canada in response to an election that went differently from the incumbant’s expectations.

“People being kind to one another”

June Callwood – June 2, 1924 – April 14, 2007 (Photo by David Henderson)

To June Callwood, called Canada’s Conscience by many people, life was pretty much as simple as the title of this entry, or at least, she felt it should be. In the extended version of the final TV interview of her life with George Stroumboulopoulos, June talked about how much better the world would be if every baby simply got a “good start” in life. Its remarkable how the simplest ideas are sometimes the most compelling, but June had a way of bringing the compelling to level of everyone else.