Ranting and Roaring

• In the land of no-balls, the one-balled man is king (Lance Armstrong wins Tour)
• Rolling Stones come to Toronto’s Promotional Resue
• “Help! Keep Us Away From the Free Health Care!” (also penance for earlier mistake)

Actually, I’m leaving on a plane this afternoon for Newfoundland for 10 days, but there’s a few loose ends…

• Power provided by the “wind turbine” (not windmill) on Lakeshore: enough for 250 homes
• Immigrants to Ontario in 2001: 148,244
• How many households (assume 4/house): about 37000
• Number of windmills wind turbines needed per year just to cover energy consumption by immigrants: about 150
• Assuming they’re placed along lake shore at 100m spacing (approx. same as height, see above), length of lakeshore covered by windmills: 15km
• Distance from Hamilton to Kingston: 330km
• Years before the entire lakeshore is covered in wind turbines: 22
• Approximate captial cost of a wind turbine: $CAD 1,000,000^*
• Total capital cost for the next 22 years: $CAD 3.3 billion
• Lifespan of a wind turbine: 20 years

^* The wind turbine people (in general) seem to be going pretty far out of their way not to tell us how much this really costs. I’m guessing based on the size of the Toronto outfit compared to numbers in this. The nuke people aren’t much better, which is why I don’t have comparison numbers here.

Here’s a song fragment for you Frum: You can rely, you can rely on the old man’s money.

Story via The Agitator who bizarrely agrees with him. It’s only R&R guys — entertainment, a show, a night out.

Update: read the comments.

I’m watching a pre-show interview with the Stones. Mick just got tired of all the retarded questions. Q: what does this day mean for rock history? A: let’s just get through the day.

I’m not trying to run this thing down, BTW: it’s amazing. I just hate hate hate crowds like you couldn’t believe. Venues holding a 1000 people make me snakey. And there is sooo many people there.

I really can’t add anything to this:

THE BBC – NICE TO TYRANTS, NASTY TO DEMOCRATS: So, here’s what Tony Blair said (as he responded to a question asking whether he would continue to serve as prime minister in a third Labour term in government): “There is a big job of work to do – my appetite for doing it is undiminished.”

And here’s what the BBC reported in its lede: “Mr Blair, who said his appetite for power remained ‘undiminished’….”

And not to let a good distortion go, the website then links to the story thusly: “Tony Blair sidesteps questions on the David Kelly affair – but says his appetite for power is “undiminished”.”

The CBC webcast seems to be avoiding the musicians. There’s a lot of booing of Dan Ackroyd and Catherine O’Hara.

Update: some chicks are flashing their tits to the camera. I guess I’ll keep watching…

I’m not there … and I’m having a great time.

A new little icon for your blog. David Jane now has some nice little maps linking to his blogmatrix. They’re…

Thank you for delivering to us this Python 2.3 with this and this which have both so plagued your humble servant. Couldn’t your man Guido done something prettier here though?

As if Lileks needs another mention, let alone two from Instapundit.

Read about building your own parts for, well, pretty well anything. Or read all about it in The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. Can we also get Kelly LeBrocks, preferably in pre-Steven Segal condition?

The Girl Who Fell Through The Ice by The Aim. Great song, but I’m not willing to pay $30 bucks for the whole import album. Mine’s from a two-disk compilation called Winter Chill from Hed Kandi. Yes, I’m a poseur loseur , but some of this stuff’s pretty good and I wouldn’t normally have the opportunity to hear it on anything I normally listen to. Radio’s a wasteland.

… of pretty well everything. He nicely expresses my feelings about the Ontario Tories: I want them to lose too and lose badly. Barton at ESR mildly took me to task several weeks ago on this, but I don’t see why a PC^TM brand government is any better than a Liberal^TM brand government if their policies are indistinguishable in a blind taste test. I was recently in a Beer Store, the cleverly named^* Ontario government mandated beer outlet monopoly, and of course they couldn’t provide three popular brands of beer we were looking for. Why should they have it? You’ll get something else or you’ll go thirsty. As mentioned yesterday, there’s not enough damn power in Ontario. I highly encourage you to save energy as I like to keep my house office a cool 68 degrees on those really hot days and your energy consumption may screw that up for me. In the Tories’ defense, they did put up a eyesore windmill on Lakeshore: it can provide power for 200 houses! Unless there’s no wind, like it typically is on the days where we reach peak demand.

Of course, these are merely trivialities. My taxes are thousands of dollars higher than they were two years ago because the PCs realized they could pay for the Common Sense Revolution — tax cuts in 905 and 613 — from Toronto property taxes. The Stalinist-style centralization of management of our school system has produced a pissed-off hornet’s nest of teacher’s unions, without doing much in particular to curb their power or to give Ontario families meaningful education choices. Theoretically, I’ll be inflicting this system on my daughter in three years time. Theoretically.

^* I can’t wait for Municipal Holiday either, which I’m imagining is named after Horace E. Municipal, fourth GG of Ontario.

Now Doug has to discover something new to do. May I suggest intense coverage of the George Street Festival?

My apologies for a little bit of blegging on my part. No, I don’t want your money, just your attention for a few moments!

• You’ll notice on the left-hand side of the blog a few new buttons, showing the areas I like to blog about. Why don’t you click you add one (or more) of them to your blog.
• I’d like to spread the word about this — it took a lot of work to do! — so I’d certainly appreciate if you linked to this post
• If there’s something wrong with any of the maps — there’s several thousand, so I haven’t been able to check them all — please tell me.
• If you have better map data which can be freely used, I’d love to have a copy. Especially Shapefiles. Of major lake systems.
• My apologies if some of the map doesn’t correspond to your political reality. I got what I got — it took a while to get all this data together.
• Feel free to say nice things in the comments
• Note my SVG caveats here.

Here’s a few icons for various areas around the world:

Bruce writes about alternative energy. I’m not so sure about what he’s saying: hydrogen is a way of transmitting energy; you still have to create the hydrogen in the first place by splitting water (or methane, or whatever) into it’s constituent parts. Coincidently, there was a recent op-ep in the Mop and Pail suggesting nuclear is the way to go^* to do this.

A few suggestions, in decreasing order of seriousness:

• All new houses should be built with meters that can register electrical consumption on an hour by hour basis. The goal should be to have these meters on all houses in the next 10 years. Then start charging differential prices depending on what time of day it is. One price for 8AM to 6PM, one for 6PM till 11PM, and a really cheap price from 11PM till 8AM. When peak demand days come, start jacking up the daytime/”peak” price until demand sufficiently drops. I humbly offer the phrase “pseduo-market pricing” for this system.
• Build nuclear reactors in big pits in the Canadian shield. We’re a country of miners: we know how to build pits. All waste is kept on site. When the reactor reaches the end of its life, in say 30 to 50 years, we fill in the pit and never look back.
• If our politians want to be in charge of our energy, we hold them accountable for actually making sure there’s sufficient amounts, given that demand is fairly predicatable in a “build new plants” time frame. Ha ha ha, let’s just vote the Liberals in federally and the PCs in provincially.

^* When I went looking for this article, this “partner” ad was on the front page. Has the wall between editorial and advertising been breached at the Globe?

I have temporarily turned off full-text searching feature of BlogMatrix. It works, and I’m still collecting the data but right now it’s sucking up far too much of the CPU time on my little server when you look for things. I’ll probably resurrect this in the late summer, especially if I can get the money together to make a backend SCSI server (instead of a IDE 5400 RPM one!)

Are you using BlogMatrix Track? If you aren’t, you’re probably spending far too much time reading blogs. I follow about 200 blogs and it takes me less than a half-hour a day — depending on how much people are posting, of course!

BlogMatrix Track is a type of aggregator: it tracks what bloggers and notifies you (via it’s web page) whenever there is an update. Furthermore, it tracks cross-blog conversations — threads, as they’re sometimes called. Thus, whenever anyone links to a blog you are following you will see all the references.

If you’re familiar with RSS and various RSS aggregators, BlogMatrix Track has many advantages. You don’t need to install software on your computer as it can be accessed from any web page. Furthermore, not all blogs (especially poltical blogs) provide RSS feeds which means you’re out of luck if you want to read them using an RSS aggragator. Finally, because you’re reading the blogs in a web browser, the blog owners will still get hits, letting them know that someone’s reading!

How do you get started? You can follow the link above or you can go over to BlogMatrix and create a login. You’ll be provide a “starter kit” of about 20 popular blogs which you can use to learn BlogMatrix Track. You can then use the directory and search functions of BlogMatrix to add your favorite blogs to your own BlogMatrix Track.

Right now, BlogMatrix is tracking about 50,000 blogs on an hourly to daily basis. This is pretty good — it’s the best 50,000 blogs — but it’s an order of magnitude (at least) below what it should be doing. The main roadblock has been some of the backend services which were doing far too much redundant work. I’ve been working like a devil over the weekend to fix that and over the next two weeks you should see a major increase in the number of blogs tracked.

I’m moving all annoucements about the status of BlogMatrix over to my personal blog, for ease of use (for me) and increased exposure (for you).

It’s come to my attention that there’s a few naming conflicts with other blogging tools out there, so in the near future (probably by this time next week) BlogTrack will be rename BlogMatrix Track, BlogRSS will be renamed BlogMatrix RSS, and so forth. The buttons will be updated to reflect this also, in a somewhat abbreviated fashion. This also makes far more sense from a “branding” point of view.

Here’s a reference to another blog and another.

Rock climbing is really dangerous.

Having $75 in Chapter’s gift certifcates and being bored out of my skull, I drove over to Indigo yesterday and picked up the following books:

• After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era by Steven Brill. I’m reading this one right now, and it’s pretty good^*. John Ashcroft is even scarier than I thought: his immediate plan post-9/11, written by himself and a trusted henchman, was to turn the US justice system into something very closely resembling the Soviet Union’s. Nuts.
• What Just Happened by James Gleick.
• How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. Well, I’m not sure about the entire modern world, but the template for Canada until 1975 was certainly stamped out by dour-faced over-sideburned Scots, that’s for sure.

^* Full disclosure: I liked Brill’s Content and often picked up a copy at the local magazine store.