Blog » As a first draft there are a variety of fairly simple, fixable problems with this movie and a few major core problems which we're going to have to discuss at greater length. You're an experienced writer at this stage, so you know what the editorial red pen is like, so let's just get right into it. We'll cover the simple stuff first.
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D-O doesn't do anything, scrap it. It just wastes screen time. That's an easy edit.
Finn says he has something to tell Rey but gets cut off. We never find out what it was. So how about this: edit those lines out completely and forget about it.
Palpatine wants Rey to become a vessel for him in the conclusion of the movie, so the line at the beginning where he tells Kylo Ren to kill her should probably be cut.
This whole subplot with Hux being a spy, exposed by Pryde, killed and replaced by Pryde is pointless. Axe the spy subplot, axe the Pryde character and give all his lines back to Hux. Figure out another way for our heroes to evade execut...
Seems like keyboards are a thing these days (I wonder why). I have grown disenchanted with ThinkPad keyboards (largely due to the lousy experience I had with the Carbon X1 I used a couple of years back) but I used to be a fan, and there are hordes of people out there for whom using this as a desktop/tablet1 keyboard would be a dream come true.
It is also extremely clever marketing, so there’s that too.
They do not claim iOS compatibility, but I expect people will try to use this with an iPad regardless. ↩︎
If unchecked, Trump’s action to kill Soleimani may be the final nail in the coffin for the US Constitution.
Whatever you think of it, the way in which it executed shred whatever government norms are left at this point and bypass any oversight of the executive branch by congress. I can’t see how this isn’t effectively the action of an autocrat who is enabled by his party’s compliance and unflinching, unquestioning, and relentless loyalty.
As has been my tradition, in December I repost old favourites from years gone by. This year am looking back to 2016
Two weeks ago Kevin Hall and I had our diet commentary published in The Lancet. Not surprisingly, we upset some folks - primarily low-carbers. Some accused us of being low-fat cheerleaders. Others that we fostered an "animus" towards low-carb diets.
While I can't speak for Kevin, I can honestly state that I'm totally fine with low-carb diets. For some people they're a life changer and our office is happy to work with patients on them. I've also got nothing against low fat, Paleo, intermittent fasting, vegan, gluten-free, or any other diet that has a name.
What matters most to me, and what was also the crux of our commentary, is whether or not a person likes their chosen diet enough to sustain it. Food is not simply fuel. Food is comfort, food is celebration, and food serves as the foundation of a huge part of our social lives. Regardless of whether or not one diet vs. another diet affords a person an additional few pounds of loss (or even whether or not it confers specific health benefits) pales in importance to whether or not a person likes that diet's style of eating enough to live with it for good
As noted in our piece, every diet out there has its long term success stories, and so moving forward, if you see anyone out there suggesting their diet is the best (or that your diet is the worst) rest assured they have an agenda. Their agenda might simply reflect an n=1 mentality of, "it worked for me therefore it's what you should do", it might reflect basic post-purchase rationalization, or it might reflect genuine science and studies that infer greater short term losses or potential health benefits. But if they can't wrap their heads around adherence (which on an individual basis is an expression of whether or not you like what you're eating and don't miss what you're not) as any diet's long term's most critical component, their ideology is showing.
Temporary efforts will only yield temporary outcomes no matter how exciting the outcomes might be in the short run.
The only time I use them is within Lightroom's Keyword List Panel. It's an easy way to add multiple, relevant keywords. So, with keyword hierarchy I could add Toronto’ and the app would add ‘Ontario’, ‘Canada’ and ‘North America’.
It also properly keywords identically-spelled homophones: "People > body parts > chest" vs "Furniture > chest". When searching for 'chest' Lightroom lets you select the type of chest to search for.
The semi-automated assist of these types of keywords within the app helps me to use them. But I tend not to use tags in writing apps because I usually forget which tags I've created, and have tended to create similar tags over time that make a mess of sort and search.
I was checking out some DIY electronics at a local Microcenter, dying to buy something (hardware hacking has started to consume my attention, lately). I saw some NeoPixel rings that reminded me of a Celebration Spectacles guide I had read on Adafruit. Then I saw on the store shelf an Adafruit kit for making steampunk-ish Kaleidescope Goggles, making me to want to build some form of LED glasses, which made sense, as New Year’s Eve was only a week or so away.
Putting all together Interesting hardware and useful guides with code and wiring diagrams make it really easy to do your own hardware projects. I’m not surprised that my first wearable project was inspired by Adafruit. I had first heard of Adafruit many years ago specifically because they were making hardware to be sewn into clothing – true wearables.
I used the two Adafruit guides as my inspiration. Like in my kitchen, recipes are suggestions. I modified the Celebration Spectacles build and combined and tweaked the code from both guides to have the animations, sequencing, and timing I wished to have.
In the end, I used the two Neopixel rings (the most expensive parts!), a positively adorable Trinket M0 (more on that in future, for sure), a pair of specs from the dollar store, and a battery. I then soldered it all together, hotgluing the setup to the frames.
Pretty cool.
What I learned This is so far the most physically complicated hardware project I have done due to the wire routing, hotglueing, and careful soldering needed. I had no problem prototyping the set up, or writing the code. Though I had to pay special attention to the assembly – soldering and glueing are sort of one-way activities in that they are a pain to reverse. To facilitate connecting the pieces and assembling the glasses, I made a paper template to mark out position of things and to measure and route wires. Being patient and checking things twice made the assembly go smoothly and efficiently – much faster than I expected.
With respect to the software, I had partially wanted to do the spectacles as an excuse to use the Trinket to do something with CircuitPython. Alas, the animations in CircuitPython were so much slower than the same animations in Arduino, so I kept with the Ardiuno IDE. I guess I’ll keep playing with CircuitPython on my Circuit Playground Bluefruit. But this was a good lesson in the difference in the capabilities between Arduino and CircuitPython.
Funny thing, though, just before I put the Trinket on the frame it seemed dead. It had some touchpad code that I had last played with and I could not get the board to connect to the Arduino IDE. I panicked, pressed the board’s reset button uselessly, until I read that if you pressed the reset button ‘twice’ the board would go into USB mode. Just like other CircuitPython boards. D’oh. How’d I not catch that before?
Last thought I was able to assemble it all in time for New Year’s Eve, wearing it all that night and then the next day as I drove around and walked the dogs. Haha.
I thoroughly enjoyed working with the NeoPixels and the Trinket, so expect more in future. Indeed, I’ve been sharing wearable examples with my mom and she’s keen on me helping her with a project around pixels and microcontrollers on something she might sew or embroider.
I woke up sick on Friday morning and spend that day and most of Saturday feeling sorry for myself.
By yesterday afternoon I was going stir crazy so I decided to write some code—nothing essential,
just a few improvements to something I wrote last year to translate Markdown to LaTeX.
After an hour or so I decided to tear it all down and try a different approach.
By dinner time I felt like I was on the right track,
and after a few more hours today it was back in working order
and much tidier than before.
Was it worth five or six hours of my life?
I think so:
I took pleasure in doing something that I knew how to do
and in creating something that would fit my needs perfectly.
Sitting on the couch listening to Andrés Segovia
I was reminded of how my mum used to knit while listening to the radio.
We all had more sweaters than we could ever possibly wear,
but she enjoyed knitting for its own sake,
particularly when she had been on her feet teaching all day
and couldn’t concentrate enough to read.
On days like this I code for comfort,
and Emacs and Python are my yarn and needles.
I’ve been following Jono’s work for years and few people have his expertise, insights, and ability to articulate the present and future of communities as he does.
The webinar is completely free, I hope you will join us.
What: Online Webinar
Who: Webinar with Jono Bacon
When: 9th January, 2020 @ 5.30pm GMT // 12.30pm Eastern // 9.30am Pacific (sorry Australia)
Where: Click the link here to register.
If you haven’t bought a copy of his book yet, do so here.
At Thingscon last month in Rotterdam, I sampled various talks and sessions. I ended up somewhere halfway in a contribution by Sarah Kiden (currently a research fellow at University of Dundee). She mentioned the ‘radio in a bucket’ project in Uganda, as illustration how to bring technology into the hands of more people by removing some of the thresholds and fears. Radio in a bucket is precisely that: it’s everything you need to create a local radio station, packaged in a bucket. The bucket serves as a way to appear familiar to those who normally don’t interact with (high) tech devices. The familiarity of the bucket as everyday object removes some of the apprehension of using the technological devices in the bucket.
Hide Tech as it were, not High Tech.
I liked this example for the balance it was trying to find. Regularly when technological complexity is hidden from someone using the technology, it takes away agency. I cannot even change the lights on my car these days, because the entire front is integrated into a single object. Nor can I access all the sensors and software in my car. It renders me helpless whenever something needs fixing on the car.
The Ugandan examples is about hiding some of the technological complexity to stimulate agency. To take away initial apprehension, do I dare touch the device, so curiosity can take root (what happens if I flip this switch?).
What tech should be packaged in a ‘bucket’ for your to adopt it more easily. For instance distributed alternatives to social media platforms. What Hide Tech would encourage you to do more?
Differential work factor cryptographic method, system, and data structure for reducing but not eliminating the work factor required by an authority to break an encrypted message encrypted with a secret encryption key. The secret key is split into at least two partial keys such that knowledge of a first of the partial keys reduces but does not eliminate the work factor required to break the encrypted message. The first partial key is encrypted using a public key of the authority. The encrypted first partial key is provided with the encrypted message to enable the authority, upon obtaining the message, to decrypt the encrypted first partial key using the authority's private key and to break the message using the first partial key. In preferred embodiments, the first partial key is encrypted with additional information which can be reconstructed by the recipient, such as a hash of the secret encryption key, a hash of the secret key concatenated with a salt, all or part of the salt, and control information. The use of a hash function provides one method of enforcing the partial key system. If a salt is used, the salt is also encrypted with the secret key encrypted using the intended recipient's public key. The invention provides secure communications against attackers while satisfying governmental restrictions on the use, export or import of strong encryption products.
To work around export restrictions, Lotus had to provide NSA with a backdoor to break the Notes encryption. This is the patent awarded to the scheme.
yosemite wrote:
Wow! Those are two big features! I'm digging in... so far I love the
>"search helper" the most...
Initially I didn't think much of it (as Dynalist is miles ahead with their File Pane), but the new left bar in WF is becoming useful for setting up "starred" items as bookmarks for quick access.
Now they just need to add a tag pane finally...
As for the date feature, I prefer Dynalist's implementation still.
Via Kris Olds and Croakey.org this story is from Gemma Carey who lives in Canberra Australia and is an associate professor in the Centre for Social Impact at the University of South Wales.
Ms. Carey writes that the smoke enveloping Canberra has shown the need “for better health warning systems, especially around hazardous air pollution, and for equity considerations to be foremost.”
In her city “the unprecedented fires which began on New Year’s eve brought a thick ‘fog’ of smoke across the ACT (Australia Capital Territory) and parts of New South Wales. Canberra, where I live, is perhaps worst hit with particle readings of up to 1800 2.5PM. The limit for hazardous levels is 200 2.5PM in the ACT, according to the ACT Government.”
Ms. Carey wrote in December that being pregnant in a climate emergency meant she was stuck indoors, and had not seen the sky for a month. “At that time, dangerous particles of 2.5 micrometres or smaller (‘2.5PM’) were at 100-300 – ranging from serious to hazardous.”
The air in Canberra is ten times over the hazardous level and is the poorest air quality of any city in the world. Air with this type of particulate creates complications for people with lung and breathing issues, and can impact heart disease and cancer rates. Research shows that the longer the exposure to these particulates, the higher the incidence of disease. Couple this with research showing that pregnant women exposed to these particulates appear to have babies that are premature, weigh less, and can be miscarried. What is not being calculated is that families in Canberra are also experiencing direct stress due to the fire disasters as well as the long term implications of particulate exposure.
Poorer areas in the city have worse air. Ms Carey states “We have no precedent in the scientific literature for the health implications of what is currently happening in Australia.”
Clean air is costly~“Since New Year’s, nowhere indoors is safe. Shopping malls, libraries and national monuments – where many were seeking refuge – are filled with smoke. Air conditioning systems are simply not designed for this level of pollution.”
Even air purifiers which cost 500 to 800 dollars are not affordable to many people and there are none left in Canberra or its suburbs. Indoors people wear high grade pollution masks. “I take it off only to shower and eat.”
The air particulate mask is only good for 100 hours and costs 50 dollars. Again as in the air purifiers, there is an equity issue of who can afford and access them. The masks available at hardware stores are not designed for the particulates that are raining down on Canberra.
While fires are expected to be more frequent, there has been little information from government sources on warnings and air quality. With poor education on the impacts of the particulate, “few people could be seen with masks on the streets of Canberra and many were out exercising, and drawing toxic particulates deep into their lungs, and passing through into their blood streams.”
Ms Carey observes: We will be counting the public health implications of current events for years, if not decades, to come.Without immediate action on climate change, living in facemasks trapped in our houses could become the new normal for Australian summers.”
And now there is a change in public expression of the climate emergency~ Australian doctors are finally publicly saying that people will die from the health impacts as reported in the Guardian.
You can follow Gemma Carey on Twitter at @gemcarey
Last Fall Consumer Reports revealed that although most Americans killed in car crashes are male, data shows that it is fact women that are at a greater risk of death or serious injury in a car crash. A female driver or front row passenger with a seatbelt is 17 percent more likely to die, and 73 percent more likely to have a serious injury.
Crash researchers have known for forty years that the bodies of male and female react differently in crashes, but automotive research still stubbornly clings to the “50th percentile male” which is understood to be a 171 pound 5 foot 9 inch dummy first developed in the 1970’s. And that crash test dummy has not substantially changed, despite the fact that the average American man weighs 26 pounds more.
It was not until 2003 that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) used a scaled down male dummy to represent a woman. This dummy was so scaled down that it also could double as a 13 year old child. It is a 5th percentile crash dummy as even to 1970’s standards it represented only 5 percent of women.
Crash tests do not recognize that half the drivers in the United States are now female. The 5th percentile female crash dummy rides as a passenger, not a driver. As Consumer Reports writer Keith Barry states “Because automotive design is directly influenced by the results of safety testing, any bias in the way cars are crash-tested translates into the way cars are manufactured. So if safety tests don’t prioritize female occupants, carmakers won’t necessarily make changes to better protect them.”
Automotive safety relies on regulation to do the right thing. Using crash dummies that are not smaller models of male dummies is the first step, along with recognizing that women’s structures are different than men’s. Today’s average female is five inches shorter and 27 pounds lighter than the average male, and wear seatbelts differently and sit closer to the steering console.
While there is a new generation of dummies coming, there is still no plan to build an average female for crash tests. Called THOR (Test Device for Human Occupant Restraint) these new models are due to be used in Europe this year for testing and will collect more data than previous crash test dummies.
“Astrid Linder, Ph.D., a professor at Chalmers University in Sweden and the research director of traffic safety at the Swedish National Road and Transport Institute, agrees that the length of time it could take to build a new female dummy is frustrating, but she says that is not an excuse for delaying the work further. This was the answer I got 20 years ago when I did a review as a Ph.D. student,” she says. “There is no data that isn’t possible to collect. Go ahead and do it. We know how to do it.”
Imagine~politicians and policy makers have an opportunity to create a crash test female dummy that could save lives and serious injury . Regulators could insist that they be used in crash tests.
What is stopping them?
The YouTube video below is Astrid Lindner’s TEDx talk where she describes her work and introduces the audience to EVA the female crash test dummy developed in Sweden.
If you’re expecting to answer 10 questions per day and you’re getting 100, you have a problem.
If you don’t solve this problem fast, you’re going to disappoint members and have a community filled with unanswered questions.
Three things here.
1) Learn enough to answer the easy questions. You don’t necessarily need to be an expert (although it helps), but you do need to learn enough to be able to answer most of the basic questions yourself. If you’re not using the products you’re managing the community for, this will be tricky. If you need to get educated fast, have a plan for it.
2) Put community questions in the support team process. You need to build strong relationships with customer support/success teams to answer questions in the community as well as those received by tickets. The most effective approach is to work with senior leaders to make the % of answered community questions a support goal as much as it is a goal for support tickets/calls. If you need to scale up response rates fast, this is the only way to do it.
3) Provide overwhelming benefits to MVPs. You already plan to do this, but if you need to scale it up faster you need to provide overwhelming benefits. This doesn’t mean free gifts, it means giving MVPs overwhelming opportunities for influence, recognition, and feeling respected. You might ask the CEO to reach out personally, put MVPs in touch with product teams for feedback, or provide them with their own domain within the community to take responsibility for.
Ultimately, it helps to have a plan to educate yourself fast, processes to drastically increase support team participation, and provide overwhelming benefits to MVPs.
Don’t let your biggest success become your biggest failure.
This is interesting, but feels like it could have happened five years ago if Apple had prioritized things differently.
I’m game if they ever come up with an iPad mini version. Although Brydge’s current iPad mini keyboard looks like it would be a pain to use with conventional covers, a compact, standalone BT keyboard with backlit keys and a built-in trackpad would be nice.
With thanks to Duke of Data Andy Yan for the reference, here’s a memory for those of a Certain Age that were taking transit in Vancouver in the 1980’s and 1990’s. At that time, the city seemed to be covered with ubiquitous places where you could get muffins, most near transit hubs. Muffin shops also carried coffee, not the fancy stuff of Starbuck’s creativity but the kind that came straight out of a glass carafe, and usually had the consistency of caramel.
Karon Liu in the Star wrote last spring about the muffin trend, stating that “the bar (was) set by Toronto-based muffin chain Mmmuffins (full name: Marvellous Mmmuffins). In the chain’s ’80s and early ’90s heydays, almost every Canadian mall had a location that offered a rotating menu of flavours. Everyone had their favourite: some liked the cornmeal muffin, others peach bran, while my mom loved the seldom-seen pineapple muffin…”
Marvellous Mmmuffins started in 1979, was franchised, and peaked in the 1980 to 1990 years. By 2019, what was once a bevy of stores had shrunk to only two with one of them, the Second Cup, picking up on the new trend towards espresso and specialty coffee.
It may seem a weird trend now where people are careful about ingesting carbohydrates , but in the late 1980’s Liu observes that the muffin had the three ingredients necessary for the “yuppie” (“Young Urban Professional”) lifestyle.
Those three items were convenience, taste, and nutrition. Not many food at that time had all three elements.
Here’s the 1980 commercial for the “muffinizing” of the Dunkin’ Donuts Chain that added the fourth emotional element to its sales pitch~putting your Grandmother out of the muffin baking business.
Time has run out for the Harper Strategy on climate change.
I like to give Stephen Harper credit for this strategy because, in his trips to the Arctic, he so well exemplified it. (I wrote about it in 2014, and again here
If the goal is to keep climate change off the public agenda, the most effective strategy is not the ‘hard denialist’ strategy of rejection but the soft strategy of omission: saying as little as possible, preferably nothing, to keep the topic off the agenda.
As previously noted, that was the brilliance of Prime Minister Harper’s ninth Arctic trip in August, as observed by Jeffrey Simpson in The Globe:
“Nowhere in Canada is the impact of climate change more increasingly evident than the North. And yet, the words ‘climate change’ are never heard from Mr. Harper in the North, as if the idea they connote are so distasteful that he cannot bring himself to utter them.”
No denial, just no recognition. And hence a standard for others in power to follow, whether politicians, business people or editors: serious people don’t have serious public concerns about climate change, so that decisions today need not take into account tomorrow’s probable reality.
The strategy works only so long as nothing too serious happens too frequently. That results in fear, and then anger, and then bad things politically. And then you have to say something. If you have nothing substantial to say about climate change – because the whole strategy was never to do anything substantial – then you’re in trouble. As George Bush quickly discovered in his indifferent response to Hurricane Katrina.
And as Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison just found out.
As people yell at the Prime Minister when he visits their devastated communities, or howl for his blood on social media, the story of Bush’s failure to immediately recognise a catastrophe and the urgent need for leadership it represented, tells us what problems are created by Scott Morrison’s perplexing failures of political and policy judgement in recent weeks. …
… the scale of this ongoing catastrophe — which on Thursday saw the biggest peacetime evacuation in our history — and its likely length, means the Prime Minister and his Government will be daily confronting the realities of climate change in their response, however much they continue to choke on the words.
These fires have made climate change a reality of the present tense for many Australians, not something that we can put off to the future.
Conservative politicians like Bush, Harper and Andrew Scheer calculated that doing less than the minimum needed would fly with the public so long as the right words were mouthed:
The parrot-like references to “meeting and beating” targets has been very effective at blocking any real focus on what policies the Government claims are actually driving this emissions reduction miracle without any pain to anybody.
When you look it turns out that the policy cupboard is pretty bare. The Government’s quarterly figures on what has driven emissions lists figures without any real obvious help from government policy.
Now they have to respond to emergencies on such a scale that the word ‘apocalyptic’ is an acceptable, new-normal descriptor. Then they have to find a new ‘business-as-usual” model when they doubt there is one, while still defending fossil fuels as business as usual.
The real test, however, may not be on what the Government does on cutting emissions, but on how it leads us to confront the sorts of brutal adaptations current events show us we now face: not just the immediate effects of disasters, but the questions they raise like building standards, towns that governments will not able to afford to rebuild, and communities that have run out of water.
There is, of course, another response: take the offense. Double down on denial.
“Let’s all get in the same boat, grab an oar, let’s go. I’ll bang that drum and keep our rhythm.” — Panos Panay
I got to finally shake hands with Panos last fall in Berlin after having watched his product announcements for many years. Not enough to really get to know the man, but he seems like a really great person.
Ich mochte sie nicht. Zu groß, nicht faltbar, zu fester Sitz. Im zweiten Anlauf aber mag ich sie. Die Zeit macht den Unterschied. Ich hatte in der ersten Runde nicht genug Zeit, die Headphones kennenzulernen. Nun trage ich sie seit Wochen und ich mag sie gar nicht mehr ablegen.
Ich habe die Surface Headphones mit vier Geräten verbunden: Mit dem iPhone 11 Pro, einem Surface Pro, einem Lenovo X1 Yoga und einem Lenovo ThinkPad. Von den drei PCs ist stets nur einer in Betrieb, das iPhone jederzeit. Und so kommt es, dass sich die Headphones automatisch sowohl mit dem iPhone als auch dem PC verbinden, den ich gerade benutze.
Man kann diesen Kopfhörer nur dann richtig ausspielen, wenn man auch einen PC hat. Die Konfiguration passiert nämlich ausgerechnet über eine Cortana App für Windows. Die hat auch ein klangverbesserndes Software-Update eingespielt. Die App ist ein Überbleibsel aus der Zeit, in der Microsoft noch versuchte, mit Cortana gegen Alexa anzustinken. Heute ist sie ein Anachronismus. Ich habe Cortana auch einfach abgeschaltet, da ich diesen Assistenten nicht benutze. Die Headphones müssen deshalb nicht lauschen, ob ich "Hey, Cortana" sage. Zwischenzeitlich hatte ich auch die Touchgesten abgeschaltet, aber aktuell sind sie an. Lege ich einen Finger auf eine der beiden Seiten, meldet sich Siri vom iPhone.
Absolut genial ist die Bedienung mit den beiden großen Rädern links und rechts. Nach hinten dreht man zu, nach vorne auf. Rechts wird dann die Musik lauter, links verstärkt sich die aktive Geräuschunterdrückung. Das ist eine völlig natürliche Handbewegung, die man schnell lernt. Mit beiden Händen konfiguriert man die Headphones blitzschnell so wie man sie braucht. Die Touchgesten sind die gleichen wie bei den AirPods oder den Beats. Einmal heißt Start/Stop, zweimal vorwärts, dreimal rückwärts. Das geht ebenfalls automatisch richtig und funktioniert auf beiden Ohren.
Was ich noch mehr probieren muss ist telefonieren. Die Headphones sind gut dafür gerüstet mit vier Mikrofonen, die jeweils nach vorne lauschen, um die Stimme von den Umgebungsgeräuschen zu trennen. Aber auch die AirPods Pro sollen das können und das Ergebnis überzeugt nicht. Ich bleibe also dran.
Im direkten Vergleich mit den Beats Studio³ fällt der Klang etwas ab und die Surface Headphones sind auch mehr zu spüren. Wenn man aber stets nur einen Kopfhörer nutzt, fällt das nicht so auf wie im direkten Vergleich. Die Beats nutze ich aktuell nur mit dem iPad Pro und niemals zum Telefonieren.
Erfreulicherweise hat sich der Preis der Surface Headphones nun etwas normalisiert. Sie kosten nicht mehr exorbitante 380 € sondern sind schon für ca. 220 € zu haben.
On December 29, 2019, the Toronto Transit Commission’s venerable Canadian Light Rail Vehicles disappeared from the city’s streets. To mark the occasion, six CLRVs, offering free rides, were put into service on Queen Street between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM before a ceremonial last run to Russell Carhouse in Toronto’s east end.
The first six CLRVs, 4000-4005, were built by SIG in Switzerland, and entered service on the 507 Long Branch route on September 30, 1979. An additional 190 streetcars were built by Hawker-Siddeley in Thunder Bay, with the last cars arriving in 1981. Those were followed by 52 articulated ALRV streetcars, which were delivered between 1987 and 1989, and retired earlier this year.
The CLRVs were unique to Toronto, designed by and for the TTC. Other North American cities that still operated streetcars in the 1970s opted for different designs to replace their ageing PCCs, though Boston have the CLRVs a try.
Several CLRV and ALRV streetcars will be preserved at transit museums, including the Halton County Radial Railway near Rockwood, Ontario; two CLRVs will remain on TTC property for special events.
With the arrival of the last of the 204 Bombardier Flexity low floor streetcars this month and the retirement of the CLRVs, the entire TTC fleet is now 100% wheelchair accessible and fully air-conditioned. Gone, too, with the CLRVs are back-lit vinyl destination signs, treadle rear doors that open by stepping on the stairs, and windows that open at face level and the warnings to keep arms inside.
Streetcar 4124 picks up passengers at Yonge Street, December 29, 2019
Though the accessibility and the capacity of the new Flexity streetcars represent major improvements, I will miss the old CLRVs, and not just because they’re the last transit vehicle in Toronto that are older than I am. I was fascinated by Toronto’s streetcars at an early age. As a child growing up in Brampton, I would lobby hard to ride Toronto’s subways and streetcars whenever we went downtown as a family. My parents took me on a ride on the 501 Streetcar between downtown and Parkdale (with lunch at Harry’s Charbroiled Burgers when it was across from the Gladstone Hotel) when I was seven.
Once I was old enough, at age thirteen, I was making my own trips to Toronto, taking GO Transit trains from Downtown Brampton or Mississauga Transit buses from Shoppers World and Square One to the subway, buying a day pass, and then spending a day wandering the city. The high floor CLRV and ALRV streetcars with their open windows offered great views of the city rolling by.
I continued to ride the rocket regularly when I attended university, taking advantage of breaks between classes to ride further out into the suburbs, eventually riding nearly every bus route in the city. Even after I moved to Toronto, a streetcar ride was an affordable delight (as long as I wasn’t in a rush).
Short turn: Swiss-built CLRV 4001 turns into Wolesley Loop at Bathurst and Queen
My favourite seats were right at the back, with the curved rear with great views on three sides, similar to the bullet lounge at the end of VIA Rail’s Canadian and Ocean trains. The single seats on the operator’s side of the streetcar were also favourites.
Though the last of Bombardier’s 204 new Flexities have finally arrived, there is still a streetcar shortage in Toronto. The 505 Dundas and 502/503 Kingston Road routes continue to be operated with buses. Many of the new vehicles planned for Dundas and Kingston have been reallocated to King Street, where the transit priority project resulted in a significant increase in ridership. The TTC wishes to purchase 60 more streetcars to fully furnish the existing demand and support expansion on the waterfront, but funding isn’t yet available.
Unfortunately, buses will have to fill in those gaps as the CLRVs disappear.
Retired streetcars at Russell Carhouse await their fates
A major redesign of Vancouver's Richards Street officially begins on Monday, with traffic disruption for motorists and cyclists expected to last 15 months before the $11 million project is complete.
The makeover will extend nearly the entire length of the downtown street, from Cordova to Pacific, bringing improvements to the bike lane, which now lies between a row of parked cars and the sidewalk on the right side of the one-way southbound street.
According to Paul Storer, the City of Vancouver's manager of transportation design, the plan to extend the current bike lane stalled, as the city received feedback about the design.
"There isn't a huge buffer between the parked cars and the bike lane, and the bike lane isn't very wide if one cyclist wants to pass another cyclist," said Storer.
The city's solution is to move the entire bike path to the left (east) side of the street, separate it from vehicle traffic with permanent physical barriers, and widen it to allow bicycle traffic in both directions.
Trees have already been removed on Richards Street to make way for construction. Storer said the some trees are in the way at intersections, but most of the ones that have to be cut need to be removed because their roots have grown too much, causing damage to the sidewalks.
As part of the project, more than 100 new trees will be planted and water trenches and silva-soil cells — which help suspend a sidewalk above the soil, allowing water to be absorbed underneath — will be installed to manage storm water and keep the new roots from damaging sidewalks.
The project will also add an electric vehicle charging station, two new bike share hubs, and more bike racks, according to the city.
Storer said construction will begin at key intersections, then move from the north end of Richards toward the south end. He said vehicle traffic will often be reduced to one lane and cyclists will have to detour during the work, which is expected to wrap up in spring 2021.
The drone killing of Soleimani reads to me (and probably about half the population of the planet) as President Trump playing a massive distraction card before his impeachment trial is set to start.
It doesn’t help that the support for this action is, predictably, split right along partisan lines – the same lines which have been undermining the way the United States government has operated for generations, and which the likely upcoming impeachment trial result of an acquittal for Trump will likely continue to erode.
Kurz vor Weihnachten lud Samsung zur Eröffnung des neuen Smarthome-Showrooms in der Deutschlandzentrale ein. Und sie hatten einige Informationen unter NDA dabei, die vorhersehbar mittlerweile alle durchgesickert sind. Die neuen A71 und A51 waren gar am selben Tag bereits höchstoffiziell in Asien vorgestellt worden. Es war eine schwierige Situation für die PR-Leute.
Zum A71 und dem A51 gab es auch noch zwei neue "Lite"-Versionen von Galaxy S10 und Note 10. Und dabei interessierte mich vor allem das Note 10. Denn erstmals gibt es nun ein Note mit S-Pen zu einem gescheiten Preis. Samsung lässt einfach die unwichtigen Sachen weg, etwa den gebogenen Bildschirm und startet mit einem Listenpreis von 599 Euro noch in diesem Quartal. Ein Marktpreis von unter 500 Euro ist also bereits absehbar.
Das Galaxy Note ist ein völlig konkurrenzloses Gerät. Niemand sonst hat ein Smartphone mit einem Pen, direkt im Gerät. Und auf einmal gibt es auch wieder einen Headphone Jack, wenn ich mich recht erinnere. Wireless Charging hat es nicht, aber ein 25W-Ladegerät direkt in der Schachtel, dazu einen Akku mit 4300 mAh. Drei 12MP-Kameras mit Tele und Weitwinkel. Auch die restlichen Daten gehen voll in Ordnung.
Wie alle Samsung-Geräte zieht auch das Note 10 Fingerabdrücke an wie das Licht die Motten. Aber da es sowieso in einem Case verschwindet, ist das völlig gleichgültig. Samsung macht alles andere gerade sehr richtig. Schnelle Updates, eine abgespeckte Software, nun auch einen guten Preis für ein Galaxy Note. Das ist eine Empfehlung wert.
Thanks, all, for your thoughts. So this is basically a support group for CRIMPers!
Like others, I have narrowed down my tool set. At this point, mostly because of a greater reliance on a Chromebook (light, portable, a good fit for my lifestyle) I have migrated almost exclusively to Dynalist and Google Suite. I do share the privacy concerns some have expressed here. I haven't put in the time to build a private network and live in org-mode, although I fantasize about it.
For me, the discovery of the year was that it really matters for me to have a streamlined, unified app that lets me see annual goals (professional and personal), track a handful of projects (the left pane of Dynalist holds active projects, which move to an archive folder when done), and keep something like a bullet journal, with tags. The discipline of maintaining those files keeps me more focused and mindful. That said, the categories of my life seem a little clearer, repeating from year to year. I'm not nearly as complicated as I used to think.
The birthday problem is a classic probability puzzle, stated something like this.
A room has n people, and each has an equal chance of being born on any of the 365 days of the year. (For simplicity, we’ll ignore leap years). What is the probability that two people in the room have the same birthday?
If you’re not familiar with the puzzle, you might expect that in a moderately sized room (like 20-30 people) that the chance will be pretty small that two people have the same birthday. But in fact, if the room has more than 23 people, the chance is greater than 50%! This makes the puzzle a classic for intro statistics classes.
I’ve been interested for a while in the tidyverse approach to simulation. In this post, I’ll use the birthday problem as an example of this kind of tidy simulation, most notably the use of the underrated crossing() function.
Simulating the birthday paradox
First, I’ll show the combined approach, before breaking it down.
library(tidyverse)
theme_set(theme_light())
summarized <- crossing(people = seq(2, 50, 2),
trial = 1:10000) %>%
mutate(birthday = map(people, ~ sample(365, ., replace = TRUE)),
multiple = map_lgl(birthday, ~ any(duplicated(.)))) %>%
group_by(people) %>%
summarize(chance = mean(multiple))
# Visualizing the probability
ggplot(summarized, aes(people, chance)) +
geom_line() +
scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::percent_format()) +
labs(y = "Probability two have the same birthday")
This visualization shows that the probability two people have the same birthday is low if there are 10 people in the room, moderate if there are 10-40 people in the room, and very high if there are more than 40. It crosses over to become more likely than not when there are ~23 people in the room.
I’ll break down the simulation a bit below.
Simulating one case
When you’re approaching a simulation problem, it can be worth simulating a single case first.
Suppose we have 20 people in a room. Ignoring leap years (and treating each calendar day as a number from 1 to 365), we can simulate their birthdays with sample(365, 20, replace = TRUE).
# 10 random numbers from 1 to 365
sample(365, 10, replace = TRUE)
## [1] 53 216 220 309 13 37 35 299 263 333
We then use two handy base R functions, duplicated and any, to discover if there are any duplicated days.
# When the values 2 and 1 appear for the second time, they're TRUE
duplicated(c(1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 5, 1))
## [1] FALSE FALSE FALSE FALSE TRUE FALSE TRUE
# This asks "are any values here duplicated?"
any(duplicated(c(1, 2, 3, 4, 2, 5, 1)))
## [1] TRUE
This gives us a one-liner for simulating a single case of the birthday problem, with (say) 20 people:
any(duplicated(sample(365, 20, replace = TRUE)))
## [1] TRUE
If you run this line a few times, you’ll see it’s sometimes true and sometime false, which already gives us the sense that pairs of people sharing a birthday in a moderately-sized room aren’t as rare as you might expect.
The tidy approach to many simulations across multiple parameters
I find the crossing() function in tidyr incredibly valuable for simulation. crossing() creates a tibble of all combinations of its arguments.
crossing(first = c("a", "b", "c"),
second = c(1, 2, 3))
## # A tibble: 9 x 2
## first second
## <chr> <dbl>
## 1 a 1
## 2 a 2
## 3 a 3
## 4 b 1
## 5 b 2
## 6 b 3
## 7 c 1
## 8 c 2
## 9 c 3
Our simulation starts by generating 10000 * 25 combinations of people and trial, with values of people ranging from 2 to 50. trial exists only so that we have many observations of each, in order to minimize statistical noise.
# Generate combinations of 10,000 replications and number of people (2-50)
crossed <- summarized <- crossing(trial = seq_len(10000),
people = seq(2, 50, 2))
crossed
We then use functions from purrr, useful for operating across a list, to generate a list column of integer vectors. With a second step, we determine which of them have multiples of any birthday.
# Generate a list column of samples
sim <- crossed %>%
mutate(birthday = map(people, ~ sample(365, ., replace = TRUE)),
multiple = map_lgl(birthday, ~ any(duplicated(.))))
sim
Together these three steps (crossed+sim+summarized) make up the solution in the first code chunk above. Notice this simulation combines the base R approach (sample, duplicated, and any) with tidyverse functions from dplyr (like mutate, group_by, and summarize), tidyr (crossing) and purrr (map and map_lgl). I’ve found this crossing/map/summarize approach useful in many simulations.
How can we check our math? R has a built-in pbirthday function that gives an exact solution: for instance, pbirthday(20) gives the probability two people in a room of 20 will have the same birthday. We can compare our su
# pbirthday is not vectorized, so we have to use map_dbl
summarized %>%
mutate(exact = map_dbl(people, pbirthday)) %>%
ggplot(aes(people, chance)) +
geom_line() +
geom_line(aes(y = exact), lty = 2, color = "red") +
labs(x = "# of people",
y = "Probability two have the same birthday")
Looks like we got very close!
Generalizing the birthday problem
We’ve seen how likely it is that there’s a pair of people with the same birthday. What about a group of 3, 4, or 5 who all have the same birthday? How likely is that?
First, instead of working with ~ any(duplicated(.)) as our vectorized operation, we could find how many people are in the most common group of birthdays, with another combination of base R functions: max and table.
# table() returns a vector of frequencies
table(c("a", "b", "b", "c", "c", "d", "d", "d"))
##
## a b c d
## 1 2 2 3
# So max(table()) tells us that in this group, one letter occurs 3 times
max(table(c("a", "b", "b", "c", "c", "d", "d", "d")))
## [1] 3
# Use this max(table()) approach in the map_int
sim_most_common <- crossing(people = seq(5, 100, 5),
trial = 1:5000) %>%
mutate(birthday = map(people, ~ sample(365, ., replace = TRUE))) %>%
mutate(most_common = map_int(birthday, ~ max(table(.))))
sim_most_common
Now that we know within each trial what the largest group with the same birthday is. We now need to know the fraction within each number where the most_common is at least 2, 3, 4, or 5. We use another application of the ever-useful crossing function, to apply multiple thresholds to each number of people.
We can visualize these and compare them to the exact values from pbirthday() (pbirthday() takes a coincident argument to extend the problem to more than two participants).
summarized_most_common %>%
mutate(exact = map2_dbl(people, threshold,
~ pbirthday(.x, coincident = .y))) %>%
ggplot(aes(people, chance, color = factor(threshold))) +
geom_line() +
geom_line(aes(y = exact), lty = 2) +
scale_y_continuous(labels = scales::percent_format()) +
labs(x = "# of people in room",
y = "Probability a group with the same birthday exists",
color = "Group size")
From this we learn that in a room of 100 people, it is almost certain that a pair exists with the same birthday, more likely than not that that a group of 3 does, unlikely that a group of 4 does, and almost impossible that a group of 5 does.
What I like about the tidy approach to simulation is that we can keep adding parameters that we’d like to vary through an extra crossing() and an extra term in the group_by. For instance, if we’d wanted to see how the probability varied as the number of days in a year changed (not relevant for birthdays, but might be relevant in other applications like the cryptographic birthday attack), we could have added that to the crossing() and worked with the first argument to sample.
Tesla has announced it has delivered 367,500 electric vehicles in 2019, which is 50 percent more than it delivered the previous year.
TechCrunch reported that the sales were largely made up of the cheaper Model 3.
More than one-third of those sales, or about 112,000 vehicles, occured in Q4 2019, it noted. Tesla also indicated that its production grew by 10 percent from the previous quarter.
It is worth noting that the year did not start off very well for the electric-vehicle manufacturer. In the first quarter, it only delivered 63,000 cars, a nearly one-third drop from what it sold the previous quarter in 2018.
At the time, the numbers predicted what Tesla’s future was going to be like for the year, but the company bounced back in Q2 2019 and delivered 95,200 vehicles and in Q3 2019, it delivered 97,000 vehicles.
Come version 80, any cookie without a SameSite attribute will be treated as "Lax" by Chrome. This is really important to understand because put simply, it'll very likely break a bunch of stuff. [...] The fix is easy, all it needs is for everyone responsible for maintaining any system that uses cookies that might be passed from an external origin to understand what's going on. Can't be that hard, right? Hello? Oh...
Rogers has posted a new operating system (OS) upgrade schedule on its community forum, detailing upcoming updates for Samsung, Pixel and Motorola devices.
To start, the list includes both the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ and regular Note 10. Rogers says these are getting the Android 10 update on January 6th, 2020. Also on January 6th, the Samsung A70 will get the December security patch.
Interestingly, Google’s Pixel line of devices made it onto the list — something I’ve not seen before. The list confirms that the January 2020 security update, which we expected was coming soon, will also drop on January 6th for Pixel devices.
Rogers notes that the Pixel 2, 2 XL, 3, 3 XL, 3a, 3a XL, 4 and 4 XL will all get the update. The original Pixel, unsurprisingly, was not included on the list, since it reached official end-of-life and won’t receive any further updates.
Finally, the Motorola Moto G6 Play and G7 Play will get the December security update on January 10th and 17th respectively.
Rogers also notes that while it prioritizes making those dates accurate, sometimes things happen beyond the carrier’s control and the dates may change. And as for people with those devices on other carriers, the schedule could act as a guide to when you might get your update, but other carriers may have different dates.
Weighty Matters.
Marshall's Musings.
Streetcar 4124 picks up passengers at Yonge Street, December 29, 2019
Streetcar 4178, A Streetcar Named Toronto, at Greenwood Avenue, December 29, 2019
Short turn: Swiss-built CLRV 4001 turns into Wolesley Loop at Bathurst and Queen
Kurz vor Weihnachten lud Samsung zur Eröffnung des neuen Smarthome-Showrooms in der Deutschlandzentrale ein. Und sie hatten einige Informationen unter NDA dabei, die vorhersehbar mittlerweile alle durchgesickert sind. Die neuen A71 und A51 waren gar am selben Tag bereits höchstoffiziell in Asien vorgestellt worden. Es war eine schwierige Situation für die PR-Leute.
