Drivers would be required to leave a buffer zone of three feet when passing cyclists on city streets, as part of a campaign pledge by the New Democrats to make Ontario’s roads a little more bike-friendly.

Nova Scotia already enacted a similar law (1 metre) a few months back, and to me, it’s just codifying common sense. If you can’t give a cyclist or any vehicle 3 feet of room when you’re passing them, then you shouldn’t be doing it. And if you can’t wait 10 or 20 seconds before it’s safe to pass without having road rage, then you shouldn’t be driving. Yet from the comments in the article you would think the NDP was declaring war on automobiles.

I think meagre cyclists don’t help though by hugging the side of the road. By doing so, they’re signalling to drivers it’s ok to pass them even when it’s not.  When biking on a narrow road, take the lane, and make cars wait or go around you. It’s not only exercising your right, it’s protecting your safety.

First off, I was gone for a few days for vacation. The day I returned I suffered with a nasty sickness of some kind and was bed-ridden for over a week. Coming off the sickness, I took it easy on the bike and then popped the two consecutive flats including my spare. And then to top it all off , I had a non-serious medical condition that kept me off the bike for another week.

Oh, did I mention work has been really stressful lately and I’d been working long hours? Or that my shift schedule changed erasing any chance of a social life for the remainder of the summer?

Alright, enough complaining. The long and short of it is that the last few weeks have been a downer, but I got my bike fixed up and the go ahead from the doctor and I finally got out today on it for a bit. I didn’t go too far, about a relaxed 20km cruise. But the weather has cooled down since Hurricane Bill and it felt really nice to get out on it today. A short cruise, and I feel a million times better already.

From the wiki page:

The Seven Bridges of Königsberg

The city of Königsberg in Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia) was set on both sides of the Pregel River, and included two large islands which were connected to each other and the mainland by seven bridges.

The problem was to find a walk through the city that would cross each bridge once and only once. The islands could not be reached by any route other than the bridges, and every bridge must have been crossed completely every time (one could not walk halfway onto the bridge and then turn around to come at it from another side).

Enough people tried to find a solution to this problem unsuccessfully that nobody believed one existed but yet at the same time, nobody could prove it. One tedious way they could have tried to solve this problem would have been to try every possible walk. Euler, in 1736, became interested in this puzzle and approached it from a different method.

Euler’s proof there was no solution:

He started by realising that the actual geography of the city didn’t matter and he could abstract this problem by replacing each landmass with a “vertex” labeled with an upper-case letter and each bridge with an “edge” labeled with a lower-case letter. For example, one possible walk is abfecdeg. In this walk, a person would start on the landmass B, end on C and cross the e-bridge (edge) twice and every other bridge once. The landmasses (vertices) that would be covered in order would be B,A,B,D,A,C,A,D,C.

Euler also noticed that in the Königsberg bridge problem, every landmass has an odd number of bridges attached to them: A has five bridges attached to it; and B, C, and D each have three bridges attached.
He also noted that in any walk, to cross every bridge A must be represented three times, and B, C, and D must be represented twice each.

To prove a solution didn’t exist, he realised the order the bridges are crossed is irrelevant. What was important, was that in any Königsberg bridge walk, there are nine vertices. However, if a walk existed where only every bridge was crossed once, the total amount of landmasses represented would only be eight. Since there is one more vertex in any possible walk than a solution where only each bridge is crossed once, the solution doesn’t exist.

The importance of the results:

Having proved there was no solution to the Königsberg bridges problem, Euler didnt stop there and he generalised his results to other similar problems, showing that solutions are feasible depending on if there are an even or odd number of edges and vertices exist. His work on this is considered the beginning of sub-branches of mathematics called graph theory and topology which are important areas of research in applied mathematics and computer science today.

As for Königsberg, a couple of the bridges were destroyed in WWII and a few others were replaced or removed, leaving only five present day bridges and not all originals. It’s too bad, they missed out on math nerd tourists making the “pilgrammage” themselves to find out that they couldn’t cross all seven bridges once and only once in one trip.

I went for a walk afterwards, saw a few downed branches, and the harbour was still choppy with lots of flotsam around the edges, but nothing major. There are media reports of sporadic power outages, but however they play on this, Bill was definitey no Juan let alone a Katrina.

After the wind died down the sun poked out this evening, and it is actually really nice out. The storm cleared out some of the stickiness from hot humid weather, and even better, it cleared out that terminally lingering city sewage fiasco smell of 82 million litres of unfiltered sewage being the dumped in the harbour daily we’d been having to tolerate the last few weeks.

It’s with a bit of irony that whenever a warning is put out to stay away from the shoreline because of wave surges, the first thing everyone thinks is let’s get the kids in the car and go look at the big waves. I’m just as guilty as anyone for that. If there wasn’t a small element of danger about it, there would be no excitement either, right?

I’m sure a few emergency workers and Environment Canada employees would roll their eyes at me for that one. I also think the danger is a little bit overblown. Thousands of people will go to the shore today to take a look and most likely nothing will happen to them. Yes, the ocean is unpredictable, yes it’s over-powering, and yes there are rogue waves. And yes, a few overzealous people will get too close to the water and yes, if they fall in they’re going to be in serious trouble. However I maintain that storm-wave watching is not that dangerous if youre cautious about it; and it’s certainly no more dangerous than say, bridge-jumping at Mira Gut. (Which is of course, not condoned either, but my point is that plenty of people do it every year and have a lot of fun doing it even if once every few years an unlucky soul finds themselves panicking in a rip current and swept out to sea.)

Anyways, I’m glad the sticky humidity and sewage smell are gone for now. Let’s hope the sewer smell doesn’t come back this year and it’s fixed before next summer. With the incompetence and lack of transparency our city has been showing on the sewage treament issue, I’m not holding my breath on that one. Actually, that’s the wrong choice of words; I suspect next summer I will be holding my breath on that one.

It’s all about performance…, or lack thereof. And lack thereof is what I’m feeling now when it comes to tires. The other day, out on a bike ride in 567-degree heat and 3550% humidity, or something like that, I rode out over some gravel and popped a flat.

As Murphy’s law would have it, I popped the flat in a place with no shade and when I was out of sunscreen. After a half hour or so of cursing myself for not topping up my tires before going on the ride and letting my Irish skin bake in the sun, I got it together and headed for home exhausted and full of grease.

Lo and behold , the next night I got off work and was driving home, and I  was thinking gee, this pavement is awfully heavy…and then oh no…another flat! Less than 30km later. Four flats in less than 600km on the bike, all on the back tire. There’s something definitely wrong.

I think it’s time to take it to the next step.  I’m considering putting a slime tube in the back tire.

Update: “putting a slime tube in the back tire.” Or so I thought. The sales guy at the store today talked me out of it. I’ll give the regular old tubes one more chance..but there’s gotta be some point when I draw the line.

Yep, that’s right. I’m sure you’re completely shocked by this, but someone’s gotta break the news to ya. And you know what? All those gimicky sound effects you add to the slides, they really, really irritate everyone. So much in fact that the last time you gave a presentation Jonny ended up taking 3 months stress leave afterwards. It’s especially grating when you go back a few slides and we get to hear the same stupid effects another ten times for good measure since we enjoyed them so much the first time.

From the BBC:

The article’s a good read and there are a lot of good points. Here’s one part of the article that particularly stands out for me:

A Microsoft executive recently said that one of the best PowerPoint presentations he’d ever heard had no slides with bullet points on them. This didn’t surprise me at all, because we’ve known for years that audiences don’t much like wordy slides and don’t find them as helpful as pictorial visual aids.

What does surprise me is that so many of the program’s standard templates invite users to produce lists of bullet points, when the program’s main benefits lie in the creation of images. If more presenters took advantage of that, inspiring PowerPoint presentations might become the norm, rather than the exception.

I’m actually going to go against the grain here and say that I don’t hate powerpoint at all; I might even go as far to say that I like it, or rather, I like the much cheaper and just as useable alternatives. It’s just the problem with PowerPoint, is that it is well, too easy to use.

Your boss tells you 9 o’clock Wednesday morning that you have to give a “training” presentation to the team that afternoon leaving you little time to prepare, what do you do? Having little presentation experience or inclination for it, you throw some notes into a powerpoint bullet format and go in and “follow the slides.” If things go awry and you put everyone to sleep, it doesn’t matter because you’ll email out the slides afterwards and let the audience go through them on their own time. Who is in a position where they have had to give presentations with no time to prepare and is not guilty of this?

Ok, I started by saying I like Powerpoint. Really, I do. Sort of. When I was teaching junior high school level ESL, I had a computer and screen set-up in my classroom and I did use powerpoint a fair bit. But here’s the kicker: I would only use it for at most 15-20minutes a class, and my presentations had absolutely no bullet-points style formatting to them.

Teaching beginner-level ESL classses, I did a lot of vocabulary and sentence building activities with the students. Sometimes I would do it as a game, or a class warm-up. All the bells and whistles that come in powerpoint that drive everyone in a presentation crazy when the presenter actually uses them are actually quite useful for making simple games. An example of an exercise I would often do would be to find a dozen or so pictures or other media related to a certain topic and have the students make sentences about the media. Powerpoint provides a convenient way to organise them, and I would click forward to give students hints or move on to the next picture.

Another example is I would playa ‘Family Feud’ style game where I’d flash a topic and have students guess five popular words related to that topic. Again, powerpoint has all the tools to make a game like this look good relatively easy and quickly and I could reuse the presentation by changing the topics and words.

Ok, that’s kids learning basic vocabulary and grammar in a foreign language. How about adults in the working world? Does PowerPoint really have a use for them? Of course as I’ve said above, it’s ridiculously over-used, but I think it does. I’m no expert on public speaking, but I think the key is the audience’s focus should be on the presenter and vice versa, not on their slides. If the audience is expending more energy trying to digest the information on the slides rather than listening to the presenter, or the presenter is looking at the slides as much as the audience, it’s not being used effectively. The powerpoint should be a visual cue, and nothing more.

Now that I’ve said this and brought up the article above, any good advice in it is all going to be thrown out the window tomorrow when your boss comes and “asks” you to give a 45-minute presentation on the new TPS Reporting System that afternoon. It’s crunchtime and you’re under the gun, so you better load up on those powerpoint bullets, so to speak.

The World

Beer, in my opinion, is truly the international drink thanks in part to European colonialism and hedgemony. But unlike the more recent internationalisation of grape wines, beer had stood the test of time and there’s a good beer to be found just about anywhere in the world.

Even the most isolated country in the world, North Korea, has a decent beer after the eccentric leader Kim Jong-Il decided sometime around the turn of the century that if they wanted to be taken seriously, any great dictatorship such as his needed a good brew. He sent his top men to Engand in 2002 to buy an old brewery, learn the tricks of the brewing trade to the tee, and then had the brewery taken apart and shipped to North Korea where they rebuilt it brick by brick. Now brewing beer is possibly the one and only one thing that the North Koreans do better than the South Koreans. (For the record, I’ve never tried North Korean beer. South Korean beers are far from great, but they are at least drinkable.)

At least we know how North Koreans learned to brew great beer. (Incidentally, Japan learned to brew a good beer during the early Meiji period in the 1800′s in a simular manner, by sending their top experts to Germany to learn the ins and outs of beer-brewing.)

One strange beer country for me is Laos. A very poor, traditional land-locked country surrounded by neighbours with mediocre to poor beer, Laos somehow manages to have a decent brew, Beer Lao. I’d love to know the history of how they managed to get what I think is the best beer in South-East Asia. Surely it wasn’t from the French? That didn’t work out so well in Vietnam where the beer is one step up from horse piss.

Halifax

Here closer to home, I tend to favour ales over lagers and like my beer to be beween 4.5% and 5% alcohol. My favourite all-around has always been the very popular local India Pale Ale “Alexander Keith’s” (I don’t think it’s a true IPA though, since it only has 5% alcohol). However at a pub, nothing beats a nice cold pint of Kilkenny or a Guiness on tap.

Lately I’ve become a little more into a microbrewery here Propeller Brewery, especially since I can buy the beer in growlers from the cold beer store just up the road from me. My favourite Propellers are the Pale Ale and the London Porter.

I’m a pretty boring guy these days and don’t do a lot of partying and almost never get drunk anymore. But once in awhile there’s nothing better in the world than a nice cold beer. Oh jesus, listen to me, maybe I should try out for the next beer commercial in Pyongyang.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a huge public transit advocate for our cities, and this is great news for Vancouver. I was surprised to read the line is coming in at cool $2-billion and is only 19 kilometres long.

However, it’s virtually all good news. The Canada Line is the only train-airport link in the country. Not even Toronto or Montreal has that honour, and the line runs through the busy BC corridor connecting the suburb of Richmond and the Vancouver airport to downtown. According to their website, it offers the capacity of 10 car lanes in an area where lane expansion is neither desirable nor feasible. According to the CBC commentary here, it took about 23 minutes to get to downtown from the airport on the train, whereas even in the best of traffic they estimated it would have taken about 45.

Best of all, amazingly, it was not slated to start service until November but started three months ahead of schedule. That’s a very rare event in the public sphere, and Vancouver and BC deserve kudos for getting it together to accomplish this.

Anyone with a head on their shoulders in regards to urban planning knows that our over-focus and accomodation around the automobile since the second half of the 20th century has run it’s course and has been an expensive, unsubstainable failure. This is a good step in the right direction for Vancouver, and all the better since I have my eye on possibly moving there in the near future.

To formalize this proof that there is an infinite number of prime numbers. First, I state the following lemma .(I won’t prove this part, although it is an easy proof as well.)

Lemma: For any integer k and prime number p, if p divides k, p does not divide k+1. (For an example 3 divides 9, but 3 does not divide 10.)

Now to prove there are an infinite number of prime numbers:

Claim: There is an infinite number of prime numbers.
Proof: [We start with a false assumption so we can derive a contradiction.] Assume that there is a finite number of prime numbers. Let (upper-case) P be the largest prime number, and so the set of all prime numbers is {2,3,5,7,11,…,P}.

Now Let N equal the product of all the prime numbers plus one:

          N = (2 * 3 * 5 * 7 * 11 *…* P) + 1

By the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, we know that since N > 1, N must be divisible by some prime number (lower-case) p. We also know that if p is in the set {2,3,5,..,P}, then p divides (2*3*5*…*P). However, by our lemma above, p cannot divide (2*3*5*…*P) and also divide N. So we now have arrived at a contradiction where p is a prime number but not in the set {2,3,5,..,P}. Therefore P is not the largest prime number and the set of all prime numbers is not finite. QED

I think answering in haiku is a lot more fun though, isn’t it?