Instagram filter used: Lo-fi
Author: scruss
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a bad scene, a worse infographic
CBC says that Alberta’s looming multibillion-dollar orphan wells problem prompts auditor general probe. I mean, I’d say it does: estimated costs to clean up abandoned petrochemical wells outstrip the industry cleanup fund by over 132×, so it’s gone way past looming and is well into omnishambles country. But I’m not here to talk about the environmental mismanagement (well, not much: lolRedwater …), but more to talk about CBC’s terrible infographic:
Total estimated liabilities: $30.1 billion; Total security held: $227 million. It doesn’t take Wilkins Micawber to tell you that the result is misery The image is accurate, technically. The estimated liabilities ($30100000000) are 132.6× the total security held ($227000000), and the red square’s length is 11½× (= √132.6) the blue one’s. But people are generally terrible at comparing areas.
Here are the same numbers, but in bar chart form:
They’re not even on the same page, are they?
(Graph badly put together by me in netpbm. Yes, netpbm …)And there’s the problem: it’s too big to comprehend. CBC’s comfortable little chart fits on a page; you can tweet it, even. But reality is a whole lot of scrolling down the page.
Even the manky old pie chart would be better than CBC’s squares-by area:
Securities are a 2.69° wedge. Liabilities, the rest At least pie charts used linear measure as a proportion of the full 360° pie. But comparing areas is hard; in the diagram below, the teal-coloured part is twice the area of the gold part.
Confusing, isn’t it? -
goodbye X10, hello TRÅDFRI …
The old X10 devices were getting really unreliable: seldom firing at all, getting far too hot, bringing a whole lot of not working to my life. So while it was kind of cool to have my lights controlled by an original 256 MB Raspberry Pi Model B from 2012, it was maybe working one schedule out of ten.
So it had to go: replaced by a Raspberry Pi Zero W and a whole lot of IKEA TRÅDFRI kit. I was deeply unimpressed with the IKEA Home smart app, though: you couldn’t use even basic schedules with more than one light cycle per day. So while I know there are lots of clever home automation systems, I wanted to replace my old cron scripts and set about writing some simple command tools. The result is ihsctrl: very limited, but good enough for me. It’s been working exactly as expected for the last week, so I’ll finally get to wade through 8 years of cobwebs and dismantle the old X10 setup. I already miss the 06:30 clonk of the X10 controller turning the front light on — that was my alarm clock (or alarm clonk) every morning.
(old local copy: ihsctrl.zip)
more up-to-date local copy:
2025 update: this still works, if extremely slowly. It takes maybe 15–20 seconds for a command to get through. Sometimes it doesn’t. Retrying is good.
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this is why I did wind power instead
Update, a few panicked minutes later: false alarm. Still no news release from OPG or province-wide phone alert to stand down, but there is this:
Important update: the alert regarding #Pickering Nuclear was sent in error. There is no danger to the public or environment.
— Ontario Power Gen (@opg) January 12, 2020Just as a reminder, you can get potassium iodide pills for free if you live within 50 km of an Ontario nuclear installation. Go to preparetobesafe.ca
50 km buffer from Pickering and Darlington nuclear stations. Includes all of Toronto and much of the GTA 
50 km buffer from Bruce station I don’t know if I should be including Chalk River in this.
Further update: yup, they retracted it. But a scary wee-waa-wee-waa siren while the text is read in a robot voice is not very reassuring
Issued 09:11 -
wrinkle #plottertwitter
Generative art output on a Roland pen plotter
