Adventures in Toronto I

We just returned from spending a few days in Toronto, Ontario with Mary and Dave. We were complete tourists, with tickets for the double decker "Hop on - hop off" bus to get us to all the major sights. And by major, I mean this one:   

The shoe museum had a history of shoes on the bottom floor, then exhibits about particular styles or time periods of shoes on the other three (yes, three!) floors. We had just finished touring the Casa Loma Museum, which had no air conditioning, just a few fans to move the record-setting 100 degree heat around. So the air-conditioning made this trip worthwhile. On a positive note, there was a display of mocassins and other native American footwear which was pretty interesting. But not much in the way of men's shoes, so no pointers for me.We weren't allowed to take flash pictures in here. I think the shoes feel that they lose some of their sole when you take their picture (sorry).   

I don't remember where we were when Ann took this picture. I seem to have blanked it out of my memory.    

 Donatello's was a very nice Italian restaurant not far from our hotel in downtown Toronto.  No pictures of mutant turtles on the wall, so that was a disappointment, but people said the gnocchi were very good. We walked there, but cabbed back. It had been a long day of walking, and I couldn't have taken another mile long walk at 9 PM. For some reason, the rest of our party was not as interested in where we went to dinner as I was. Priorities, people!   

One of the coolest things about Toronto is that at several places in the downtown area, there is a public piano like this one. Anybody can step up and play whatever they want. People listen while they walk along, or stop and listen for a while. We tried to get Mary to play outside of the Royal Ontario Museum, but she declined. I think she was worried that Dave and I would sing along.    

And through it all, we got to use Canadian money. When the museum admission people said "That will be $35," we knew it meant we needed two flying monkey bills. and we would get back three coins, which we were unsuccessful in unloading before we left Canada. If you are headed to Canada, let me know. I'm like a no small fee currency exchange in Wauconda.    

Fast Times at Battle Creek High

We stayed overnight in Battle Creek, Michigan last week. We were in Michigan for Patrick and Brittany's baby shower and found a Baymont Inn in downtown Battle Creek that was reasonably priced. That might explain why, as were leaving to go to dinner and we explained to the young lady at the front desk that our toilet was not working properly, she suggested we stop at the desk on our way back through and pick up the toilet plunger to see if that would fix the problem. It is the "many hands make light work" business model. Our hands in fact did make the problem go away and we returned the plunger to the front desk later, a warm spot in our heart for solving a serious plumbing issue without having to resort to maintenance men (or women).  So our initial take on Battle Creek was colored somewhat by that incident. Battle Creek - a tough town full of tough people who take care of their own troubles ... and expect you to do the same. In case you don't live around here, Battle Creek is known as the home of breakfast cereal. From Wikipedia:  

Battle Creek, known as the "Cereal City", is the world headquarters of Kellogg Company, founded by Will Keith Kellogg in 1906, whose brother, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, invented cold breakfast cereal as an alternative to the traditional meat-based breakfast. It is also the founding location of Post Cereals which is now Post Holdings, as well as the location of a Ralston Foods cereal factory.  

Ralston Foods, known earlier as Ralston Purina, was the marketer of the Chex cereals which are primarily used in snack mixes for parties and of Cookie Crisp cereal, an attempt to recreate the great combination of chocolate chip cookies and milk. 

Ann and I each went at separate times to Battle Creek as kids to do the tours of the factories and earn the little boxes of cereal as gifts for completing the tour.  The factories are gone now, overseas or in Mexico, so the tour is pretty lame.  As simple Ohio folk, we were big on factory tours. Ann and I went on a tour of the McCormick Spice Factory in downtown Baltimore and enjoyed it very much.


 Now, however, my image of Battle Creek has changed. As we drove back to the motel in the evening, we passed a small shopping center that included the store shown below.  

Now I think of otters as being able to generate their own good times, but Battle Creek otters must show up at more organized activities as well (maybe they do WhirlyBall, like Dana). This storefront seemed like a good chance for your urban otter to get together with his/her mates and bust loose, as otters are prone to do. Upon further inspection, though, the primary sales at the Otter Oasis were cigar and cigarette accessories.  

That seemed like a path that otters might not want to follow. I don't know how picky otters are about their health, but my instincts are that they tend to be fresh-air, playing in the river kind of mammals. My resident otter expert lives in Portland, Oregon, now, so I don't have the direct line to what otters are thinking nowadays, but "Does that come with a Menthol tip?" seems out of place to me.   

Luckily, the otters are not left solely to their own devices. At the shopping strip across from Otter's Oasis was a newer store dedicated to helping those otters that don't know when to stop. It is known as Otter's Oasis Detox Depot:      

Here, I assume, otters can work their way through the seven steps to detoxification. Step 1 is to put yourself in the hands of a higher power. For otters, I would guess that would be Kooshda, the dreaded land otter of the Tlingit people. Kooshda are human from the waist up and otter from the waist down, Something like this, maybe:    

Sometimes considered the bogeyman of the Tlingit people, maybe they can improve their image in the community by acting as sponsors for Otters Anonymous.

We were sorry we didn't have time to stop and talk to the otters about the perils of urban ottering. I'm sure it would have been fascinating.  Maybe next time.  Hang tough, little otter dudes. Fight the good fight.    

Next up - on to Toronto, land of friendly people and funny money.  

Science Explained!

Randall Munroe, who writes and draws the XKCD webcomic that is one of the pages I look at nearly every day, has started a new webpage devoted to explaining sciencey stuff. Called What-if-xkcd, it answers a new question each Tuesday. The first question: what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light?   

The ball is going so fast that everything else is practically stationary. Even the molecules in the air are stationary. Air molecules vibrate back and forth at a few hundred miles per hour, but the ball is moving through them at 600 million miles per hour. This means that as far as the ball is concerned, they’re just hanging there, frozen.

The ideas of aerodynamics don’t apply here. Normally, air would flow around anything moving through it. But the air molecules in front of this ball don’t have time to be jostled out of the way. The ball smacks into them so hard that the atoms in the air molecules actually fuse with the atoms in the ball’s surface. Each collision releases a burst of gamma rays and scattered particles.  

After about 70 nanoseconds the ball arrives at home plate. The batter hasn't even seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time the ball does. Collisions with the air have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it is now a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma (mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it goes. The shell of x-rays hits the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud hits.   

So, when all is said and done, there is a crater where the ball park used to be, everything for a mile around has been leveled, and the city has a sizeable firestorm to contend with. On the positive side, a careful reading of the rules of baseball, says Munroe, would indicate that the batter would be considered hit by pitch and would be awarded first base.  

This week's question is about the possibility of getting a perfect score on the SAT Test by guessing.  The conclusion:  

How certain is it? Well, if they (all 4 million 17-year olds) each used a computer to take the test a million times each day, and continued this every day for five billion years—until the Sun expanded to a red giant and the Earth was charred to a cinder—the chance of any of them ever getting a perfect score on just the math section would be about 0.0001%.   

If you enjoy reading about science, this may be a good place to gain some understanding of how things work.  

Are You Addicted

“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,” begins Allen Ginsberg’s poem Howl, a beatnik rant that opens with people “dragging themselves” at dawn, searching for an “angry fix” of heroin.  

A new incredibly scary article in the Daily Beast lays out the research behind the idea that we have reached that point in society again, only now, instead of heroin, we are reaching for our IPhones.  The author, Tony Dokoupil,  is a senior writer at Newsweek and The Daily Beast. The article discusses the mountingly overwhelming research data that implies that internet use can lead to depression, anxiety,  and cognitive dysfunction.   

Peter Whybrow, the director of the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, argues that “the computer is like electronic cocaine,” fueling cycles of mania followed by depressive stretches. The Internet “leads to behavior that people are conscious is not in their best interest and does leave them anxious and does make them act compulsively,” says Nicholas Carr, whose book The Shallows, about the Web’s effect on cognition, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. It “fosters our obsessions, dependence, and stress reactions,” adds Larry Rosen, a California psychologist who has researched the Net’s effect for decades. It “encourages—and even promotes—insanity.”  

The brains of Internet addicts, it turns out, look like the brains of drug and alcohol addicts. In a study published in January, Chinese researchers found results that link Internet addiction to “structural abnormalities in gray matter,” namely shrinkage of 10 to 20 percent in the area of the brain responsible for processing of speech, memory, motor control, emotion, sensory, and other information. And worse, the shrinkage never stopped: the more time online, the more the brain showed signs of “atrophy.”   

The article stresses the impact that the use of computers, IPhones, and IPads have on teens. FOMO, the "fear of missing out", drives teens to respond constantly to text messages, facebook posts, and e-mails. Teens average 7 hours a day of screen time on school days, much more on weekends and holidays, and walk away from the experience with more stress and lowered self-esteem.   

I think the depressing thing for me in reading this article is the way it points out that the various social media have made us less connected to the people we are with, not more connected.  I watched a young mother walking hand in hand with her four or five year old daughter the other day. I was behind them for quite a while, watching the mom talk on her phone. In the six or seven minutes I was walking along behind her, she never once interacted with her child. She was connected, but not to the little girl she was with. They passed by interesting store windows, passed a dog that the little girl watched closely for a time, and had lots of chances to talk about things that happened around them. There was not a word of acknowledgement from the mother. They were going somewhere together, but the mom communicated pretty clearly that she would rather be with someone other than her daughter. It did not seem like "Mom" behavior to me. I know there are rules now for talking on cell phones while passing by schools and texting while driving your car, but it seems that a more important rule would be that when you are with your children, the phone is always turned off. If not, then "parent" may not be the best word to describe your relationship with your kids. Maybe "escort" would be a better description.    

Flash Mobs

I'm sure most of you are familiar with the flash mob concept. A group of people practice a scene ahead of time, then spring it on a group of unsuspecting bystanders at the train station, or the mall, or wherever.  They can be fun or silly or sometimes an elaborate way to get engaged. Last year, Howie Mandel emceed "Mobbed" for the FOX network in which professionals choreographed a flashmob designed to ambush someone. Outside of Seattle, the phenomenon has been dying out the last couple of years. Probably the biggest indicator that it has run its course is that FOX thought it was noteworthy. On Youtube you can find lots of examples inspired by the TV show "Glee". I tend to watch a few seconds of them to see if there is anything worth watching and then move on.   

A recently posted YouTube of a flashmob occurring in a public square, however, was moving enough to make me want to pass it on. It occurs in the town of Catalonia, Spain, about 20 miles northwest of Barcelona. What makes it powerful is the choice of music: Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.   

Enjoy the faces on the crowd as the music unfolds. And turn the volume up nice and high. This is great music.