We Saw a Chicken …

Category: goatee-stroking musing, or something

  • Why I’m Allergic To ‘Cradle To Cradle’

    I’m reading McDonough & Braungart’s book Cradle To Cradle, and it makes me sneeze.

    Not that the content is to be sneezed at — it’s a very sensible treatise on a zero-waste, EPR-based society. It’s not the polymer that the book is made from, either. It’s the fact that the a previous borrower of the book from the Toronto Public Library was the owner of a probably very attractive grey cat.

    I’m allergic to most cats. And this isn’t usually a problem with library books, as paper doesn’t attract hair. But the polypropylene pages of Cradle To Cradle do, and so reading this book makes me itch. I guess this wouldn’t be a problem if I’d bought my own copy, but it’s a deal more environmentally responsible to share a few copies amongst the thousands of library patrons than keep one for myself.

    I don’t necessarily agree with some of the arguments made about the upcyclability (that is, a product that can be recycled into something of an equal or higher quality) of the book. Basic entropy tells you that you can’t reform a product without losing something of the original. Some of the material will evaporate, or the filler will degrade somewhat, or some additional colourant will be required to restore the original tone.

    Some other things that don’t jibe:

    • The book is a surprisingly dense chunk of polypropylene. Polypropylene is made from non-sustainable fossil resources. This is a case of doing less damage than the status quo, which Cradle To Cradle decries as being insufficient.
    • The ‘paper’, while very smooth, isn’t fully opaque, so the text from the other side of the page is distracting. That, and the cat-hair attracting static issue …
    • The book’s printed in China. At the very least, it has been shipped half way around the world, again using a wad of fossil resources. Knowing a little of the publishing industry, it wouldn’t surprise me if the raw materials were shipped to China, printed and bound, and then shipped back for the North American market. And this is a good thing how?

    In fairness, mad props for McDonough’s work on green roofs, and to Melcher Media for giving the plastic book a try. But thinking that a few polymer pages will change the world is pushing credibility to its limits.

    [And I really should temper the madness of my props to Melcher, as it would appear that they’re trying to patent the plastic book. I’m sure there’s some iota of novelty in replacing the form-factor and access methods of a cellulose polymer book with a hydrocarbon polymer, but for the life of me, I can’t find it.]

  • do you … enjoy … knives?

    I think perhaps I do, a little too much. The latest acquisition is a very benign Japanese Carpenter’s Knife from Lee Valley. While fullfilling two (shiny, pointy) of the three requirements (shiny, pointy, lights up) of tool porn, this heavy blade is all about utility. It reminds me of the knives I used to see in the market in Kochi in Southern Japan; brutally sharp, but designed for work, not violence.

  • like the constipated mathematician …

    I’ve just finished Henry Petroski‘s The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance. While the standard wooden pencil is indeed a marvel of economical mass production, and you know I’m all about the pencils, I found the book to be pretty slow going. Petroski’s To Engineer Is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design is much more fun, if perhaps due to its wider scope.

    While packed with more pencil lore than you could ever hope to learn in a lifetime (like the Henry David Thoreau connection to modern pencil manufacture), some of Petroski’s observations didn’t quite ring true. The books is written from a very American perspective, and when he claimed that the whole world is using a yellow-painted No. 2 eraser tipped pencil, I felt that there was something wrong with his usually objective prose.

    To me, a good pencil is red or blue, or occasionally dark green or plain wood. A yellow pencil is a scratchy and petulant thing, consigned forever to the grubby bilges of a school pencil case. Petroski repeats the anecdote of how a manufacturer produced a batch of pencils, and painted half yellow and half green. Consumers complained that the green-painted pencils didn’t write well, and broke frequently. Curiously, I remember reading the same anecdote in the UK, except the batch was one quarter each red, blue, green and yellow. It was the green and yellow pencils that broke in Britain.

    And a rubber (eraser) on the end? It destroys the balance of the pencil, and at best produces a nasty smear on the page. Rubbing-out is what your Helix Colonel is for!

  • bad scene chesterday

    A very bad thing happened on the subway yesterday. Whether it was a fire at St George, or some undefined weirdness between Sherbourne and Bay, I don’t know. What I do know, however, is that by 07:55 we were told to get off the train at Chester. 7:55 is the time that my train leaves from Union station, so things were bad already.

    Me and several thousand other folks were crammed on the platform at Chester. No-one was going anywhere. There were supposed to be shuttle buses, but there was no movement. People were just on the edge of freaking out, and there were ‘helpful’ suggestions flying about. Things got especially unhinged when extra trains came in, making the platform impossibly crowded.

    Then a train came in which wasn’t said to be out of service, so people surged into it. The picture below was nowhere near as crowded as it had been:

    chester, westbound, 07:59

    So then no-one knew where to go. It seemed that many people were locked by indecision, so when I finally managed to barge my way to the stairs (featuring non-working escalators, crowded with static people):

    chester, westbound stairs going nowhere, 08:00

    All told, I was stuck down there for about fifteem minutes. It was very nasty. I’ve never been in such a large crowd in such a small space. Things almost turned ugly.

    It did mean I was nearly two hours late for work (streetcar from Broadview got me in five minutes after the 08:43 train had left). I didn’t enjoy a nearly four hour commute.

  • not quite the worst cartoon ever

    but getting there: Comic Strip in Metro. Every day it lurks, just waiting to suck.

  • million meat march

    Yay! I now have more than 1 million meat on Kingdom of Loathing. And I did it all by trading, too.

  • no fish on me

    Made it past noon on April Fool’s day without being fooled; whew! Anyone who tries now, more fool them.

  • The year of not competing

    I left Oanda a year ago. That means I can now develop teh smrt currency trading system. Or not …

  • road tripped over

    10 days. 5 states. 4500 km. 48 hours on the road. That was quite a trip.

  • leaving st louis

    So I’m standing in the ice-vending area of the Embassy Suites at St Louis airport. Why? ‘Cos their $10/day PASSYM wireless doesn’t work in our room, that’s why.

    So begins the long road trip home; safe trip to all our friends …

  • now writing with …

    J. Herbin Lie de Thé cartridges in the Rotring 600. It’s a little like writing with strong tea. The cartridges come in a very nifty little aluminium pot.

    I think I still prefer Waterman Havane, as it’s a warmer brown. Lie de Thé writes well and I’m happy with it for now.

  • my Rs, they are

    Lazy wee sods can’t be bothered with the famous Scottish rhoticism: Glaswegians throw the R away.

  • stewart speaks!

    When: Thursday 10th March 2005, 6–7pm

    Where: Bahen Centre BA 2179 (40 St George St., Toronto)

    What: As part of the ESC/EWB Power Shift lecture series, I’m giving the following talk:

    Stewart Russell currently works for Zephyr North, a wind energy consulting company. As an executive of Windshare, he contributed his years of experience in the Scottish wind industry to establishing the TREC wind turbine now installed at the CNE. His presentation will contrast the case of large, industrial wind farms with the technological solutions that are appropriate for developing countries. He will outline the special issues that arise when siting and designing modern wind farms in Ontario, and discuss the special challenges of creating simple, small wind turbines out of locally available materials.

  • pencils, pencils, PENCILS!!

    Man, I bought a lot of pencils this week. There’s nothing quite able to cure that tactile jones than writing with a blade-sharpened wooden pencil on good paper. Let me see:

    • 10 Canadiana Naturals bare wood pencils (which, with irony almost morissettian, are made in the USA).
    • 2 Canadiana red marking pencils
    • 2 Faber Castell 9000 pencils. These are almost worth the 5× premium over Canadianas, as they don’t have those semi-useless erasers on the end that destroy the pencil’s balance.
    • a Staedtler 0.9mm mechanical pencil (which I’m never going to use the Opinel on, never fear).

    So all I need now is a couple of non-photo blues and a bible highlighter or two, and I am the king of pencils!

    I’m reminded of the “world’s biggest pencils” that were the coolest things an 8-year-old could have in a Scottish primary school. Brought back from exotic holiday locations, they were enough to win playground approval for a few days by letting your friends have a shot. I always wanted one of these 40cm überpencils, but it didn’t happen then.

    When I did get one, it was three years later, and the cachet was gone. To compound the disappointment, the pencil I got depicted the staid provincial crests of Belgium on a cream-of-chicken-soup–coloured background. To write with it was to be a hamfisted infant again; it looped and swayed against my will. Its lead was narrow and the wood was tough, resisting all sharpening. There was no “sharkener” (as sharpeners were pronounced in my primary school) that would point the thing. It was soon consigned to the back of the cupboard.

  • Union Station, 0748: Is it a cow?

    is it a cow?

  • Where were you when you heard that Hunter S. Thompson was dead?

    8:22 this morning, on the bus to Toronto airport.

  • Strindberg and Helium

    strindberg and helium
    No, not a dynamic crime-fighting duo, just a depressed writer and his pollyannaish pink pal.

  • stewart + moleskine = teh d33p d00d

    I sort-of needed a notebook, and well, it might as well be a moleskine. No, I’m not falling for the hype that this will make me write like Chatwin or Hemingway. No, I haven’t numbered the pages, either. It’s just a notebook. It was about the same price as the others I was looking at, so if the hipster cred comes free, I’m all for it. And they have wind turbines in their catalogue, too.

    I got it at Essence du Papier (caution! blank website) in the Toronto Dominion Centre. They have nifty fountain-pen stuff there too, like Herbin inks. I also saw a decent selection at B. Sleuth & Statesman, Inc. in the Exchange Tower. They too have things to transport the pen nerd to happiness.

  • So I’m a word nerd …

    And consequently, I love this: Online Etymology Dictionary

  • personal BND today

    Catherine and I are trying to have a Buy Nothing Day today.