Remember those math questions in trigonometry and geometry about calculating the heights of trees and lengths of shadows and so on? Here’s one for you:

I saw this picture on Google Maps and wondered how much information you could get from it. We know the CN Tower is 553.33 metres tall (with the SkyPod at 447 m), and located at coordinates 43.476667 N, 79.3875 W.

Questions:

• How high is the sun in the sky?
• What time was the photo taken?
• What are the coordinates of the satellite that took the photo?
• Others…?

Yes more information is required, but nothing you can’t look up or make a reasonable guess at. At least I don’t think so. I wonder if anybody will notice if I work out this geometry for my summer project instead of exoplanet orbit geometry like I’m supposed to. Are there other big landmarks we could do this for?

I was looking up some of the finer details of the ellipse the other day on Wikipedia, and it turns out that the ellipse is a special case of something called with a “hypotrochoid“, which, with a few different parameters, is also the equation of a star!

How cool is that? 1965 cool.

People have been raving about the new Star Trek movie, but I think in the end it tried to do too much and fell flat on its face.

My first criticism, and one that most people who enjoyed the movie won’t care about, was that this film was more space opera fantasy akin to Star Wars—action packed for action’s sake, spaceships merely the backdrop there to provide an explosion or two—rather than the more subtle stories I’d associate with Star Trek. Maybe I had an unrealistic picture of the Star Trek franchise in my head going into this thing, but either way space opera does not make good science fiction. Yes it may make a good summer blockbuster action flick, but in my book that’s not the same as a good movie.

I also found the film reminiscent of Muppet Babies. Here’s why.

As a prequel, we see all the characters from the original series further back in their stories than we’re familiar seeing them. That’s fine. But I found the credibility rather quickly being stretched thin, as we were expected to believe that all the Enterprise crew really met this way, in short succession, taking on the same roles they would eventually have many years later. Star Trek exists in a future where many impossible things can happen, but I have no reason to believe that this crew really spontaneously popped into existence in one mission straight out of the academy. Yes, it’s a cute idea to make a show about the muppets when they were babies, but don’t throw them all in the same nursery and ask us to believe that’s really how they met.

Ah, but it turns out this is a different timeline. Even if we don’t think they met that way in the original series (I don’t know what the canon position on that was), that’s okay, since this mission that brought them all together turns out to have been caused by some time traveling menace, in an event that never happened in the universe we are familiar with. This also, rather conveniently, opens the door to any other sorts of BS the writers want to throw at us, because the whole movie becomes non-canon right from the outset. This also gives them an unbounded future to play with in sequels. No reason to carry all that dead-weight canon around, eh?

I did, at least, appreciate that it was a visually well done movie with great effects, with what I think is a more realistic picture of what the innards of spacecraft would look like than your typical Star Trek. Although the scene with Scotty transporting into a water pipe was completely unnecessary (and since when do transporters have an interstellar range?).

Then again, the movie also had a supernovae that was going to destroy the galaxy, which somehow nobody noticed was right next to Romulus. Are there no astronomers in this century? I can forgive the red matter phlebotinum, but not the harmless time warp species of black holes it seems to produce.

For the sequels that will inevitably follow, maybe I’ll have some hope of enjoying them if I just ignore the title and expect nothing more than exploding spaceships and masturbatory fan-boy slash fic (*cough* Spock/Uhuru *cough*).

I like to imagine that this is an example of Toronto’s graffiti artists marking the International Year of Astronomy.

Recently there have been a number of news stories popping up about minors being charged with child pornography related offenses because of naked pictures they have taken of themselves which end up in the hands of the wrong people. This week’s episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit touched on this issue as well.

Benson: How is sending naked pictures to two boys your own age kiddie porn?

Cragen: The law hasn’t caught up with new technology.

Benson: And we’re criminalizing private behaviour.

Cragen: It’s not private when these kids begin sexting. College admissions officers, future employers, even their own children might see these pictures one day. They don’t realize the consequences of their actions.

The judge trying the case expressed a similar sentiment earlier in the episode, about how teenagers are not considering the seriousness of their actions when they distribute such photos of themselves, even if just to their boyfriend or girlfriend.

I want to comment not on the child pornography part—although I do think that whether this type of thing really qualifies as such is very far from obvious—but on the consequences and seriousness of it.

Remember the examples Captain Crager lists. College admissions officers. Future employers. Their children.

I find it funny to think that those admissions officers and employers, should they reject a candidate because of some naked pictures of themselves that were circulated online (regardless of age), are probably doing so citing the consequences and seriousness of allowing that to happen.

It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The only reason there are consequences to having naked pictures online is because many parts of society have decided that there should be consequences for that.

As for the possibility of one’s children seeing these pictures, so what? Are we worried that it might set a bad example? If so, only because we have decided that being seen naked is a bad thing. But who hasn’t encountered some dirty old grandmother bringing out the old photo album to show off how hot she was back in the day when all the boys were after her? The only difference with this idea is that you’d really see how hot she was. At least compared to her 90 year old wrinkly self. And possibly be scarred for life, but what else are grandmothers for?

Now, however, with the advent of sites like Xtube and Pornotube, with hundreds of people posting homemade sex tapes each and every day, two things will happen. Slowly but surely, those aspects of society which are firmly convinced that all things sexual are shameful and should be hidden away at all costs, will be chipped away at until only the cores of some fundamentalist religions remain. True, still not everybody will want to post pictures and videos of themselves and all their naughty bits online, but you wouldn’t worry about getting fired for it either.

The second effect is that there will simply be so much porn that the chances of, say, your children running across that picture you let your boyfriend take of you twenty years ago, become pretty slim. There comes a point when, in order to find these things, you have to actually look for them. It may be embarrassing that you did some amateur porn, but the person who finds it was actually looking for it. Now, that doesn’t negate the fact that, say, if a student stumbles across that video of their professor getting pegged by a dominatrix (we’ve really strayed from the starting point now) they will probably tell other friends in the class about it, but what does this hypothetical professor have to worry about? Laugh as they might, someone in that class was jerking off to pegging videos on xtube. And, maybe not now but at some point, half those kids would probably put videos up on xtube themselves, even if just as an irresponsible teenager inconsiderate of the imaginary consequences of such things.

But then again, we still live in a society where being seen on facebook in your underwear or touching a boob is seen as enough to make you lose an election. I think my idealised world is still quite far away.

Our apartment who art in the Annex
Lower be thy price
Thy kitchen come
Thy will be done on Earth as it is in my imagination
Give us this day our daily bread
And secure us our bicycles
As we don’t forgive those who thieve against us
And lead us not into dim rooms
But deliver us from basements
For thine is the kingdom
And the hydro and the laundry
For ever and ever
Included

I’m in an airplane with neither a working reading light or a working pair of headphones, so neither of the usual in-flight entertainment options are available to me. I do, however, have an AC plug, so my little laptop with its little dead battery can entertain me for a while. Although, without internet I quickly ran out of things to do. So here I am.

I’m flying home from a fantastic weekend in Chicago. The weather wasn’t quite as nice for the first couple days as the Weather Network had promised, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it threatened to be today, so it all worked out in the end. I was surprised, several times a day, at how windy that city really is. It was a schitzophrenic city weather-wise, with warm breezes one minute and chilly winds the next.

The really important stuff, however, happened indoors—the wedding of one of my best friends, Audrey. It was a great ceremony, great food, great company. We all went “aaawwww” during the bride’s vows and all laughed during the groom’s. The main of honour did the worm and I slow danced with the groom until his father split us up, so we had a threesome with Shelagh instead. Good times were had.

This makes the second summer in a row where one of my friends from undergrad have tied the knot. That makes three couples among my close friends in less than a year, with a fourth now engaged. Add to that what seems like a rash of pregnancies in my department and suddenly I want to get married and have babies too!

Well, okay, not so suddenly. I’ve always wanted these things. I’m very much a small town boy with small town values. I also have big city liberal values which would offend the sensibilities of many small town folk, but in the worst that’ll happen is they’ll make a movie about this small-town-cum-big-city-cum-small-town guy who shows up at the very conservative liberal arts college and starts stirring things up by questioning the natural order of things and supporting birth-control. No, wait—they made that movie and I was played by Julia Roberts. Damn. Now I need to come up with a plan B…

There’s nothing to make your day like finding something you’ve been actively looking for for 12 years. Especially when it’s something as delicious as Cappuccino Nanaimo Bars.

Yum.

Are Pringles potato chip cans getting smaller?

I typically only buy junk food like this when it goes on sale, and now I can’t help but wonder if the Pringles I bought last week, on the left, were only on sale because there was 23 grams worth of chips missing. The can on the right, which I bought at least a few weeks ago, weighs in at 163g—almost a full serving’s worth more, according to the nutritional info.

There must be more to the story, though, since just yesterday I bought another can of a new flavour I hadn’t seen before, and I’m just now noticing that it can in the 163g format as well.

Maybe this short can was destined for a different market, where people are more conservative about their chip eating quantities. Or maybe it’s like the 600 to 591 mL switcheroo in the soda pop biz. I want those 9mL back, by the way!

Actually, all I really want is for them to bring back the cheddar flavour. And no, “four cheese” is not just as good, unless you think vomit tastes like cheddar.

The first thing I have to ask is what’s the deal with the paragraphs? Not having chapters is one thing, I don’t think anybody cares whether the breaks in text are numbered or not, but the lack of standard text formatting did bug me from time to time.

Anyway, if you can get past that, there’s still the problem of sorting through the numerous characters. I just finished the book a couple days ago and, though I can remember a fair bit of what happened, and I can remember a fair number of names, I still don’t have straight in my head who did what. I did enjoy it when occasionally the narration of one character’s point of view would mention people in the background which I recognized to be some of the other characters I had read about in a previous scene (even though I still didn’t know their names). As the stories progressed we began to get more and more of a sense that all these people were connected somehow, if only peripherally.

So though there are many characters, some of them only show up for one or two scenes, and they’re almost more like the extras that add more depth the world everybody else is living in. I liked the group of women, like guardian angles or the Fates of Mont Royale. Yesterday on the first day of the Canada Reads debates someone said that this unifying image was a big weak. I would say more that it tried to be more than it needed to be, and so it came off as lacking. There was that drama with—what was her name? the sister that was afraid she ruined her knitting project—which begged for more explanation that never came. It was used as a way to tell the reader who these women were, but I think that the other mechanisms available—making it clear that they could not be seen, for example—where enough.

In the end I think the only thing I really disliked about this book was how difficult it was to keep all the relationships straight. I think the contribution each character made to an otherwise enjoyable narrative was washed out by the fact that I was rarely aware of who anything was actually happening to. The characters I was most interested in turned out to be the ones that made the fewest appearances. The only pregnant woman I was interested in is the one who didn’t know what pregnancy was, and I only recognized her in two scenes.

This book definitely ranks above Mercy Among the Children but I still don’t have a stand-out favourite between this, The Outlander, and Fruit. I’m only halfway through The Book of Negroes, and though it definitely has the advantage of a heavy kind of story, I can’t say it’s dramatically better. I’ll write more about it when I finish it. In the meantime, I think I’ll probably let myself be convinced by the panel on Canada Reads itself.