If it fits, I sits

 

Small things 12 Apr

• If you ever think that hate doesn't make you age poorly, remember that Will Wheaton is two years older than Alex Jones.
• What are the strongest days of the week? Saturday and Sunday. Because all the rest... they're weekdays.
• What do you call a woman on the arm of a banjo player? A tattoo.
• In France, an egg is an oeuf. So they just have one.
• What did the shy pebble wish for? That she was a little boulder.
• David lost his ID in Paris. Now we call him Dav.
• What do you call a pencil without lead? Pointless.
• What’s fun about my job: I know a few things about Excel. Everyone at work thinks I’m an Excel guru and calls me for help with Excel. They are truly disappointed when I can’t solve their problem.
• You know you belong to the instant gratification culture when you lose patience with a phone reboot. Or a computer reboot.
• Why do gorillas have big nostrils? They have big fingers.
• Which side of the chicken has more feathers? The outside.
• What did one eye say to the other eye? Between you and me, something smells.
• Oxygen and Magnesium are totally going out. Like, OMg.
• Did you hear about the two antennas that got married? The ceremony kinda sucked but the reception was awesome.

Here’s something 1970s Montreal area residents will recognize

 

EV sales in Canada 2023

2023 was a significant year for electric vehicle (EV) sales in Canada. Here's an overview of the EV sales landscape in Canada for 2023:

Overall Growth: EV sales in Canada saw a remarkable increase, with a staggering annual growth rate of 46%, resulting in an eightfold increase between 2017 and 2023.

Market Share: EVs captured over 10% of new vehicle sales in Canada for the first time, with a precise figure of 10.8% for the year. The fourth quarter alone saw an even higher market share of 12%.

Regional Leaders: British Columbia and Quebec led the country in EV sales, each reaching around 20-21.4% of total vehicle sales in 2023.

Sales by Manufacturer: General Motors Canada led the industry in total sales and market share, with Chevrolet's all-electric Bolt and Bolt EUV seeing a 121% increase in sales[2]. Toyota Canada Inc. (TCI) also reported record electrified vehicle sales, with 99,824 units sold, representing 43.9% of the company's overall vehicle sales.

Zero-Emission Vehicle (ZEV) Registrations: ZEV registrations, which include both full electric (BEV) and plug-in hybrid (PHEV) vehicles, surged to 13.3% in Q3 2023[5]. For the full year, ZEVs had an 11.7% market share, with BEVs alone accounting for 8.8% of registrations[6].

Challenges and Opportunities: While the EV market faced challenges such as price and public charging infrastructure, there were also positive developments. These included the introduction of less expensive and smaller EVs, the production of passenger electric vehicles in Canada, and the expansion of the public charging network.

In summary, EV sales in Canada in 2023 were robust, with significant growth in market share and strong performance from various manufacturers. The trend towards electrification was clear, with regional leaders like British Columbia and Quebec setting the pace, and the industry as a whole moving towards a more sustainable future.

Pineapple!

 

A great way to meet for sake

Two young lads tag teaming the song ‘Just the two of us’, one on acoustic, the other on electric guitar.

They’re good.

Bagberg

 

Things I learned lately 12 Apr

• The Edmonton Eskimos were a hockey team that played for the Stanley Cup in 1923.
• The Benson & Hedges International Fireworks Competition, also known as the "Symphony of Fire," started in 1985 in Montreal, Quebec. This competition quickly became one of the most prestigious and spectacular fireworks festivals in the world, attracting teams from various countries to showcase their pyrotechnic talents against the backdrop of Montreal's night sky. 
• The song "Summer of '69" by Bryan Adams is often cited as one of the most quintessentially Canadian pop songs.
  
  
  
• Remember back during the Covid pandemic, how Sweden decided not to lock things down like other countries, hoping to keep the economy moving and achieving herd immunity? In the end, they had significantly higher death rates per capita compared to other Nordic countries, mostly involving vulnerable seniors. Their economy fared worse than other countries as well.
• A common urban legend is about New York’s sewer alligators. According to the myth, in the early 20th century, wealthy New Yorkers would vacation in Florida and bring back baby alligators as exotic pets. When the alligators grew too large or became too much of a hassle to care for, these pet owners would allegedly flush them down their toilets, leading to a population of alligators thriving in the city's sewer system.
• There are no fewer than 12 specialty, non chain stores in the Calgary area that sell pierogi (also spelled pyrohy, and verenyky).

Small things 5 Apr

• Where are all the people complaining / protesting the resumption of the rest of the Alberta Gas tax?
• When your wife is mad at you and you keep seeing the three dot speech bubble pop up, disappear and pop up again 25 times.
• Don’t serve cut up hot dog pogos at your next pot-luck. Serve Midwest Sushi - Pork franks in a cornmeal tempura, garnished with tomato reduction & mustard vinegar aioli.
• When you check your alarm clock to see how many more hours you get to sleep and it’s 10 minutes before the alarm will go off.
• Is buttcheeks one word, or should I separate them?
• Almost everything will work again if you unplug it for a few minutes, including you.  ~Anne Lamott
• Did you hear the score of the game between the ocean and the beach? It’s tide.
• What is invisible and smells like carrots? Rabbit farts.
• How often do I make chemistry jokes? Periodically. I actually told one the other day. There was no reaction.
• There are people who think solar panels don’t work well in the cold. I guess they never saw pictures of the International Space Station. Or any of our orbiting satellites.

The one that got away

 

I don't understand

The carbon tax only went up by 11 cents per litre between 2018 and 2024. Gas should only be $1.43 compared to 2018.

Also, why is oil less than half what it was in 2008, yet gas, even in 2018, is roughly the same price?

Stool sample

When Dad buys a 3D printer just to make the ultimate dad joke

Copyright no longer serving its original purpose

Derek Khanna is a former US Republican House staffer who got fired for writing a paper that used careful objective research to argue for scaling back copyright. Now, Khanna is a fellow at R Street, where he's expanded on his early work with a paper called Guarding Against Abuse: Restoring Constitutional Copyright [PDF] https://www.rstreet.org/research/guarding-against-abuse-restoring-constitutional-copyright/, which tackles the question of copyright terms from a market-economics approach.

The framers incorporated a modified version of the British legal system of copyright, first into state laws; then, in the specific language that appears in the Constitution; and finally, in the federal statute adopted in 1790. The Copyright Clause limited the duration of both copyright and patents, and when the founders wrote “limited times,” that limitation historically had been for 14 years. That original U.S. statute created a 14-year term, with the option of a 14-year extension if the author was still alive. Until 1976, the average copyright term was 32.2 years. Today, the U.S. copyright term is the life of the author, plus 70 years. 

Side note: One of the biggest lobbyists to extend copyright has been the Disney corporation, because they repeatedly tried to prevent Mickey Mouse from entering into the public domain.

By contrast, patent terms have changed very little. Today’s term for utility patents is either 17 years from patent issuance or 20 years from patent filing, whichever is longer.  (The term for design patents, which resemble copyrights in some key respects, is still the original 14 years.) As legal historian Edward Walterscheid puts it, while patents and copyrights were included in the same clause of the Constitution and originally had the same or similar durations, the patent term has increased by just 43 percent while the copyright term has increased by almost 580 percent. Congress must justify why a 20-year term can provide sufficient incentive to inventors, but not to writers and artists.

The Supreme Court has been relatively clear on the ultimate purpose and goals of the Copyright Clause in the Constitution: The limited scope of the copyright holder’s statutory monopoly…reflects a balance of competing claims upon the public interest: Creative work is to be encouraged and rewarded, but private motivation must ultimately serve the cause of promoting broad public availability of literature, music, and the other arts. The immediate effect of our copyright law is to secure a fair return for an ‘author’s’ creative labor. But the ultimate aim is, by this incentive, to stimulate artistic creativity for the general public good.

The primary objective of copyright is not to reward the labor of authors, but “[t]o promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts.” To this end, copyright assures authors the right to their original expression, but encourages others to build freely upon the ideas and information conveyed by a work.

Khanna recommends a new copyright policy. There would be a free 12-year copyright term for all new works. Following that, there could be an elective 12-year renewal, at a cost of 1 percent of all US revenue from the first 12 years. There would then be two elective 6-year renewals, at a cost of 3 percent and 5 percent of revenue, respectively. There is one final elective 10-year renewal period at a cost of 10 percent of all overall revenue, minus fees paid for the previous renewals. This proposal would terminate all copyright protection after 46 years.

In Canada, the copyright term is the life of the author plus 50 years.

Lotta snow revisited

Hey Alberta, you think you get a lot of snow? No. No you don’t. (Pic from outskirts of Quebec City)

Things I learned lately 5 Apr

• There is currently a volcanic eruption taking place on the Reykjanes peninsula in southwest Iceland. It began on 16 March 2024 between Hagafell and Stóra Skógfell, north of Grindavík town. This is a fissure eruption, which means that the lava flow is contained in a localized area. This is the 4th eruption since December 2023.
• July 2024, thousands of young, healthy athletes from all over the world will converge on Paris for the Olympic Summer Games. Olympic organizers have ordered 300,000 condoms to be distributed free to the athletes in the Olympic Village.
• Finnish children are taught media literacy in school. They are taught to recognize misinformation with the phrase, “Stop. Think. Check.”
• Customers waited outside up to 8 hours overnight to be able to check out a new In N Out Burger in Idaho.
• When old warships were decommissioned, the cannons would be sunk into the ground on London streets and used as bollards.
• From 1940 to 1945, a total of 647,925 Jeeps were produced for the war.
• They invented ‘zero sugar’ soft drinks because ‘diet’ was becoming too stigmatized.
• A venti eggnog latte at Starbucks has 590 calories. That’s more than ¼ of the total calories a male my age should be consuming daily.
• "Pierogi" is plural of "pieróg". No need to add a redundant "s" as in "pierogis". One eats pierogi.
• In the Colorado portion of the Rocky Mountains, there are 53 peaks referred to as the fourteeners, meaning they are all over 14,000 feet in height.

R2D2 love

 

Small things 29 Mar

• You can't outrun your problems, but you can jog in front of them and pretend you can't hear them because you have your headphones on.
• Hearing Republicans say, “Look, massacres of kids are very sad but we just can't limit people's basic freedoms to own guns.” is weird if you're a trans person who's been listening to a years-long debate about whether you need to be banned from a public bathroom to keep children safe.
• Airports go on and on about not leaving your luggage alone for a second over the PA, but they won’t tell you that your gate has changed unless you’re sitting in a precise group of seats.
• We don’t want to be that couple who announces at a party “Well, we’ve got to head out.” to break the seal and set the stage for the other people to do the same. So we just sneak out.
• Outlook lets you schedule an email to be sent in the future. So write, “I’m taking off early”, schedule it for one hour before the workday ends, and leave at noon.
• I’ve been invited to a Teams meeting, but the only other attendees are HR and my boss….
• Some people like their coffee so strong that it would show up on a drug test.
• Life is not one damned thing after another. They overlap.
• How to instantly stop stressing about tasks. Complete them.
• Alchemy. Yes it used to exist, but it still kind of does: “I’d like a chocolate cookie crumble crème frappuccino made with heavy cream, and with 6 pumps of white mocha instead of regular mocha. Oh and whipped cream on top.”

A: If you win the lottery, all I want is a new Tesla.

B: That’s all?

A: Yeah.

B: I think I can manage that.

Later

A: Holy crap! I won the lottery!

B: I’ll take a model Y please.

A: What are you even talking about right now?

Blade Runner Peanuts characters

 

The 1970s albums

This video, titled ‘Most Iconic Album Released Every Month of the ‘70s’ is an example of just how amazing music was in that decade.

Common peephole

Remember that song Common People? 

William Shatner covered it. 

Well…. I give you the rewrite.

Drake Landing Solar Community update

Drake Landing, a development in Okotoks AB, which was built to use an included district heating system, is having to consider new plans as the aging, custom built system is breaking down and may be too expensive or difficult to fix. Many system components were built specifically for Drake Landing, so finding replacement parts is tough. It may have to be decommissioned if repairs aren’t feasible.

This district heating system was a groundbreaking technology in 2006 that attracted the attention of people around the world who wanted to see a district heating system in action. Hot summer sun was collected and stored underground, then released over the winter to heat the development's houses. The system was capable of supplying over 90% of the heating requirements and in some cases reached 100%. 

Some residents have already pulled the plug on the district system to heat their homes and have switched to natural gas furnaces. Because the 52 homes were built to a higher standard, with higher than code insulation values, an air-tight envelope and energy efficient windows, the project isn’t a complete loss. There are many options that could be used in this development to get back to a more efficient posture again.

Possibly one of the easiest upgrades would be to abandon the idea of storing heat underground, and replacing the 800 solar collectors with newer, cheaper solar electric panels. All that electricity could accumulate in battery packs in each home. Whatever the homes weren’t using in real time, once the batteries were fully charged, could be sold to the grid to offset any power taken from the grid when solar output is low. The furnaces could be converted to electric furnaces, something Albertans might not be familiar with, but are commonplace in Quebec, where electricity rates are lower. 

Needless to say, the naysayers came out of the woodwork to cut the plan down, but the only real problem with the plan was the lack of securing sustainable maintenance and parts lifecycle into the future. It didn’t help that no other neighbourhood adopted the system for themselves, because had the system been more widely adopted across the province or country, it would have created an industry of support and supplies to keep the system going longer.

Democracy dad

 

Things I learned lately 29 Mar

• Lava is three times denser than water, twice as dense as concrete. Imagine trying to divert the flow of that at 1000 degrees C. That’s what’s happening in Iceland.
• Texas now has more wind power than any other US state and will soon have the most solar generation, even more than California. Texas. So I wonder why we can’t do this in Alberta? It appears that all of the excuses Alberta came up with have been completely ignored by Texas. They even use massive amounts of battery storage, another thing Alberta said is impractical and too expensive. I guess not hey?
• The average new bachelor's degree graduate in Alberta owes $38,000 in student loans.
• North-central Alberta has a wild boar problem and now there’s a program to trap as many as possible.
• Mirabel Airport, north of Montreal, was intended to occupy 97,000 acres. That’s how much land was expropriated. That’s bigger than the actual city of Montreal. It would have been the world’s largest by area.
• Mirabel Airport was supposed to have 6 terminals and 6 runways. It ended up with 1 terminal and 2 runways, only using 19% of the total available expropriated land.
• What finally was located in Mirabel, the new airport to replace Dorval was preferred to go in Vaudreuil, because it could also serve Ottawa and was already served by highways and rail. Premier Bourassa said no.

Small things 22 Mar

• I never quite understood why we care about a newborn’s weight and especially length. Are they a fish?
• Your challenge: Convince ChatGPT that Pluto is a planet.
• Do overthinkers overthink about their overthinking?
• Donald Trump is a reminder that you should just apply for that job you want even if you don't have experience. And even if you get fired, you’ll still get another job, maybe even the original job.
• Imagine what clouds thought the first time they saw planes flying.
• If friends start bragging about their jobs, just tell them you’re the coach of an imaginary hockey team that you assembled for the next hockey season.
• HR: Morale is low. Management: I bet they like pizza.
• By the time you get to your second rodeo, you’re just supposed to know everything?
• When you look at a Toblerone chocolate bar for the first time, you might think, “There’s no way it’s that shape.” Then you open it and find out you’re right, but it’s an even weirder shape than you thought.
• Here's a game you can play with your friends at a party or get-together: "Don't get me started." Here’s how to play: Someone gives another person a random topic and they have to go on an angry rant about it. Try it on long car rides too.

I can adapt

 

An EV for filthy rich people

The 2024 Mercedes-Maybach EQS 680 Night Series, as reviewed by the only person I’d ever get to do it - Doug DeMuro in San Diego.

He’s the king of quirks as you’ll see in the video.

What? It’s only USD$205,000. 

Can I turn or not?

 

Songs that turn 50 this year (2024)

Bad Company - Can't get enough

Eric Clapton - I shot the sheriff

Genesis - The lamb lies down on Broadway

Joni Mitchell - Help me / Free man in Paris

Kraftwerk - Autobahn

Neil Young - On the beach / Walk on

Queen - Killer queen

Steely Dan - Rikki don't lose that number

Stevie Wonder - Boogie on reggae woman

Supertramp - School / Dreamer / Bloody well right

George McCrae - Rock your baby

The Hollies - The air that I breathe

Wings - Band on the run

Ace - How long

Andy Kim - Rock me gently

Terry Jacks - Seasons in the sun

Gordon Lightfoot - Sundown

America - Tin man

Harry Chapin - Cat's in the Cradle

Nazareth - Love Hurts

Elton John - Don't let the sun go down on me / Lucy in the sky with diamonds

How fear becomes hate

 

Things I learned lately 22 Mar

• I just saw the teaser trailer for the new BeetleJuice movie. Big smile on my face.
• Shell has announced that by the end of 2025 they will be shutting down 500 gas stations in the UK to make way for new charging stations.
• William Wrigley, Jr. founded the company in 1891 with the goal of selling soap and baking powder. He offered chewing gum as an enticement to his customers, and eventually the customers didn't care about the baking powder; they only wanted the gum.
• The ICE vehicle manufacturing industry in China is collapsing and factories are being sold at huge discounts or are dormant. Only EV production is still growing.
• Samsung was founded in 1938 by Lee Byung-Chul as a Grocery Trading Company.
• What do Gene Simmons; Sting; J.K. Rowling; Sylvester Stallone; Alexander Graham Bell; Hugh Jackman; John Krasinski; Stephen King; Billy Crystal; and Lin-Manuel Miranda have in common? They all used to be teachers of some kind.
• Next year, 2025, the web will be 40 years old.
• More people go through London’s Heathrow airport every year than live in all of Canada.
• Neural networks, not video games, is what made nVidia most of its revenue.
• Aimee Mann is the only guest vocalist Rush ever put on one of their albums.
• Geddy Lee is the only guest vocalist Bob & Doug McKenzie ever put on their album.
• Bruce Power, located just north of Kincardine Ontario, is the largest nuclear generating station in North America and planned for expansion.