We Saw a Chicken …

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  • too much information

    Too much information, Toronto Union Station

    I’m only an amateur at information design, but I know bad information when it nearly causes me to miss my train.

    The above image (which links to a larger version) is one of GO Transit‘s new information screens at Union Station. It shows all outgoing bus and train traffic from Union Station for the next two hours or so.

    What the used to have was a slightly mouldy old teletext system, where the screen was split roughly into three colour-coded segments: two segments about the next departing train on two different train lines, and the bottom third a big digital clock. You could read the time from across the GO concourse, so you could tell instantly if you had to run for the train.

    This new display, you pretty much have to be underneath it to see the time. Also, if you’re a train commuter, you don’t want to know what happens in the next two hours. All you want to know is if you’ve missed your train. This is not an airport.

    I know the old system left out bus passengers, but buses don’t exactly leave from the same concourse as the trains. They should have their own information board.

  • Don’t make me wear that eggbox …

    Date: Tue, 09 Nov 2004 12:06:02 -0500
    To: Lorenzo Berardinetti MPP <lberardinetti.mpp.co/ at /liberal.ola.org>,
    John Milloy MPP <jmilloy.mpp.co/ at /liberal.ola.org>,
    Harinder Takhar MPP <htakhar.mpp.co/ at /liberal.ola.org>
    Subject: Bill 129, Highway Traffic Amendment Act, 2004

    I am an experienced cyclist. I am strongly opposed to compulsory bicycle helmet legislation. Its discussion is a waste of legislature time, and its implementation would be a waste of police time.

    Bicycle helmets do little to reduce injuries. Better preventative measures include cyclist awareness training for drivers, and proper assertive cycling skills for bicycle riders.

    It is unfair to single out the users of “muscular powered vehicles”. Pedestrians and motorists also suffer head injuries in collisions, and so should be compelled to wear helmets too.

    Toronto has a culture of utility cycling. We do not ride bikes for sport or recreation, but as an integrated part of urban mobility.

    It is no coincidence that the countries with the highest levels of cycling are also those with the lowest levels of helmet use. Please do not harm the health of Ontario by providing barriers to cycling.

    I urge you strongly to drop support for this bill. It does nothing for the cyclists in Ontario.

    Please acknowledge receipt of this e-mail.

    Yours sincerely,
    Stewart C. Russell

  • Why does John Milloy hate cyclists?

    It looks like the Ontario Legislature is squeezing in compulsory bicycle (and rollerblade, scooter and skateboard helmets) through a private member’s bill. The sponsor is John Milloy, Liberal MPP for Kitchener Central.

    The bill’s proper name is Bill 129, Highway Traffic Amendment Act, 2004, and is described as:

    The Bill amends the Highway Traffic Act to make it an offence for any person to use a skateboard, a scooter, in-line skates or roller skates on a highway without wearing a helmet. …

    Wearing a helmet doesn’t save as many lives as having more people on bikes would (source: Helmet Effect Undetectable in Fatality Trends, compiled from Transport Canada data) . It interferes with utility cycling, where the bicycle is an integrated part of urban mobility, and doesn’t need special clothing or restrictions.

    John Milloy’s apparent motivation for this bill was the death of a friend in a rollerblading accident on the Rideau Canal. While I’m genuinely sorry that this happened, I don’t see any bicycle or highway involved here. I wonder if Mr Milloy is indeed a cyclist at all?

    It looks like this bill will be discussed at a panel next Monday, so there’s very little time to act. What you can do:

    Is it coincidence that the countries with more and safer cycling are where fewest cyclists wear helmets?

    It doesn’t help their cause that advocates of the bill support assaulting cyclists. Michael Prue, MPP for Beaches/East York, was quoted in The Star as saying:

    There isn’t a day goes by that I don’t see someone on the streets of Toronto, an adult, with no helmet on their head, and I want to get out of my car or off the sidewalk and I want to grab them and I want to shake them.

    Why don’t you get out your car, Michael, and do something sane, like ride a bike?

    This bill does nothing to support cycling skill, and will waste police and legislature time. If they really want to do something for cycling in Ontario, how about:

    1. automatic fault on the motor vehicle driver until proven otherwise, as in some European countries.
    2. wide right lanes (not bike lanes) required on all new urban roads.

  • let it …

    flurries
    It snowed today, for the first time. To think that it was 14°C on Saturday!

  • Brautiganish

    Is Seraphim Proudleduck the new ‘Trout Fishing In America’?

    Seraphim Proudleduck is a google challenge created by Salmonbones Marketing worth almost $2,000 in prize money. The seraphim proudleduck champion will be crowned on January 1st 2005. Seraphim Proudleduck does not stop there though, a PR7 website and a year of hosting will be awarded for the top seraphim proudleduck image in google images.

  • NRG Symphonie SQL

    I’ve been using the Symphonie Data Retriever utility for the NRG Symphonie wind dataloggers. I just discovered that the *.NSD site files in C:\NRG\SiteFiles are MS Access databases. This could mean that users could write their own custom data analysis tools outside NRG’s software.

    And I though they were just big ol’ binary files, too.

  • See my blog getting burninated …

    … right here: http://bunnyherolabs.com/dhtml/monster.php?ref=http%3A%2F%2Fscruss.com/blog/

  • SVG clip art

    USB Memory Stick clip art from openclipart.org
    OpenClipart has loads of SVG clip art. I like SVG.

  • NewsIsFree: all the news you could ever want

    NewsIsFree has all the RSS feeds you could ever want. The old internet purist in me balks at calling an RSS reader a newsreader, since that’s for usenet.

  • Kitchen Stories

    We just watched Salmer fra kj�kkenet, a Norwegian/Swedish film about kitchen efficiency in Norwegian bachelors’ homes in 1950. It’s a very touching comedy, and it even has a musical saw!

  • feed on feeds

    Can I just say that feed on feeds, the server-side RSS aggregator, rocks?

  • Mozilla more than a third

    scruss.com stats by browser, October 31, 2004 to November 6, 2004
    From October 31, 2004 to November 6, 2004, more than a third of my readers were using Mozilla. Less than a year ago, it was about 10%. The real common sense revolution rolls on!

  • no white poppies

    Further to They’ll turn white soon enough, I’ve heard from CFSC that you can’t get white poppies in Canada. Maybe that’s a project for next year.

  • Muppets!! On Stamps!!!


    I am no philatelist (though I was a half-hearted member of The Stamp Bug Club — and no, I didn’t know who Alain de Cadenet was, either) but this is the best thing ever: Muppets to appear on U.S. stamps.

    The article says: Kermit and his friends are not the first puppets to be featured on a U.S. stamp … That’s strange, I don’t remember seeing a stamp with George W. Bush on it.

  • Remember, Remember …

    It’s so nice to have a November 5th without having neds lobbing rockets and firecrackers about the place.

  • meet anna phylactic

    This time every year, Catherine bakes cookies to remember her dad, who died nine years ago.

    We were coming home on the TTC last night, and Catherine broke out some of the cookies. They’re peanut butter this year, and they’re as good as they always are. We were gnawing away happily on them when a girl sat near us suddenly leaps up from her walkman-induced reverie, and asks, “Are those peanut butter cookies?”

    We thought from her tone that she wanted one, but when Catherine said that they were peanut butter, the girl yelped and ran off to the next carriage. Other folks on the train looked at us as if we’d just executed an Aum Shinrikyo-style attack on the transit system with peanut roasters planted at every station.

    People just weren’t allergic to peanuts when I was young. But it’s getting so you just can’t enjoy a cookie on the subway any more.

  • car + greenwash = carwash?

    Ford Escape Hybrid Brochure greenwash
    (click on the image for larger versions)

    Ford Canada really have excelled themselves with the Escape Hybrid. It’s a great big huge SUV, but that doesn’t matter because it’s one of those lovely clean hybrids. Yes, that’s right, you can feel good about driving it, because you’re only supporting repressive regimes a bit.

    But the best bit is in the writeup (emphasis mine):

    Giving back to the environment doesn’t just stop at printing this advertisement on recyclable paper. …

    C’mon guys, it’s just a regular car glossy. All paper is recyclable. If you’d have printed it on recycled hemp paper using vegetable inks, maybe, just maybe, you’d be giving something back. But this is just a sop to the car-besotted consumer.

    As they go on to say: We keep thinking about the environment. There’s a huge gap between just thinking, and actually doing something useful.

  • “I Voted”, or something

    Today's MetaFilter Banner

  • Winsome Newsom

    On several people’s recommendation, I bought Joanna Newsom’s The Milk-Eyed Mender CD. It is quite remarkable. Her lyrics remind me of Mervyn Peake‘s nonsense poems (… Even mollusks have weddings, / though solemn and leaden / but you dirge for the dead, / take no jam on your bread …). She sings of catenaries and dirigibles, rephrasing words into unfamiliar shapes. It’s not the most common act, a harpist with a fey wee voice who can also raise up a real backwoods caterwaul, but it works for me.

    Here’s a video of one of her songs: Sprout and the Bean.

    (Norvin, you’d hate it. In fact, you’d hate it so much that I’d advise you listen to it, just so folks around you can experience the ‘neitzen’ effect.)

  • Well, you know what you need to do today …

    … so do it.