Puzzlepieces

My earth lab today was a field trip. We visited a bunch of places including a landfill, recycling depot, and sewage treatment plant. We ran out of time so didn't see the water treatment plant. I was writing and listening most of the time, but below are two photos from the landfill, taken from inside the bus. Apparently birders come to the landfill to count the seagulls; makes sense. The sewage treatment plant surprisingly didn't smell as bad as you'd expect it to. The talk by the guy giving us a tour of the landfill and adjacent projects mentioned quite a bit about the economics of it. Quite interesting. Methane from the landfill is used to generate electricity; we had to wear earplugs as we went through the generating station.

I have just finished reading The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (Amazon link) (Wikipedia link) by Edward Tufte, and I'm reading another of his books now (both from the university’s library). I was first lead on to this author by Luigi earlier this month, and I'm certainly glad about that. There's a lot of things in the book that I was already inclined to, and also some new things. Things I want to remember:

• integrate text, tables, and graphics; display tables and graphics inline; use more text labels on graphics
• turn non-data-ink (ink in the metaphorical sense, these days) into data-ink, such as by using the axis to show ranges, distributions, and/or real values
• avoid using more dimentions to display data than is in the data; i.e. area to show linear data, and if actually doing so, scale properly
• never use pie graphs – this one is interesting, and I will have to think about it more
• graphics can cater to multiple views, i.e. overall, horizontal, vertical; information immediately obvious, with more revealed as you look at it in other ways
• a lot of data can be fit into quite a small area, viewers are intelligent; small amounts of data are usually better in a table than a graphic

CNN.com - 'Flexitarians': Vegetarians?who eat meat - Mar 18, 2004 - interesting, that's roughly where I see myself heading. Never occurred to me that others were the same. Via Blogdex.

I skipped my calculus class today to attend a talk by Jack Layton. For those non-Canadian readers, he’s the leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, left-leaning, with basically no chance of winning the next election (they now hold 14 of the 301 House of Commons seats).

The turnout was bigger than I've seen for other events, although really it should have been bigger. As the guy sitting beside me said, how often do you get to hear a talk by a federal party leader? I only found out about the talk two days ago, and none of the several people I bothered about it came with me. Bah.

Anyhow, the talk was quite interesting. He began by talking about climate change. He actually used the term WalMart-ization. He talked about regulating industry to encourage cleanliness and energy effiecieny, and discourage pollution, about funding transportation. He wants hybrid cars to be manufactured in Ontario (that's the province I live in, the most populous in Canada, with lots of vehicle manufacturing). He commented that we could be at the forefront, not way back like Bush. He also criticized the Liberal government and Paul Martin (the Prime Minister), including that Martin wants to decrease Canada's debt, yet just proposed that the maximum student debt be increased. In that example, as with others, he pointed out that it is the Banks that benefit from that (and his tax cuts) which in turn fund the Liberal Party. Apparently Sweden doesn't have tuition; Jack considers education a right, not something that should be part of the market economy. He also pointed out the conflict of interest of Paul Martin's company (now his kids' company) making money by shipping coal. Another big issue was the US's STAR WARS program, which he points out would probably not work anyway. Mention on decriminalizing (or legalizing, I don't remember, check their webite) marijuana, along with a joke about that. He got a few good laughs during his talk. Mentioned that young people aren't voting (very true), and how important that is. His position on gay marriage (yes) got an ovation, as did quite a few other points. Of course, I guess that isn't unusual, since the crowd was probably mostly supporters. Talked briefly about how racial profiling and pesticides are bad (not related, of course).

Overall, it was much more interesting that my calculus class would have been. I wonder why at every event there are people who take 10,000 years to ask a question; that really doesn't show respect for others who have questions, when the speaker has a limited time. There was a CTV news cameraman there.

I am subscribed to the RSS feed from Feedster of search results for things happening in Kitchener and Waterloo, where I'm currently living. About two weeks ago, one of the results was a press release, Sterling-Hoffman announces Angel Mehta to speak at University of Waterloo. I live on campus, and it looked interesting, so I RSVPd; it meant arranging with one of my professors to attend a different class, but that wasn't a big issue.

I thought that I might be the only first-year student there, or the only non-computer student, but I wasn't, on either count. I guess there were around 20 people all together. I was there early, and was talking to people before it began. One of the organizers was asking how we had found out about the event, and my answer was definitely the most interesting. I didn’t try to explain RSS or anything though. Another organizer didn't even seem to know about the press release. And I did meet someone who knew about RSS and Feedster. Would you believe that I go to a school famous for computers, and I think this is the first person I met who knew what I was talking about?

Anyhow, the talk was definitely interesting, especially the real-world anecdotes. I cleaned out my pocket- and wallet-suppy of business cards, I should have brought more with me. One woman (a recruiter) was highly impressed with whatever it was I told her, which I guess would be from the business card and website, and being "only" 19. Looks like I'll be attending their next event on the 31^st, which will be more participatory I think.

AFU/Minutes/AFU Ottawa I/3 clay - looking for information on clay that underlies the city of Ottawa, and I end up with something written by Clay Shirky. Small world.

News - gaim - installed Gaim (instant messaging software) yesterday. Don't think I'll be going back. Also, I've got a Jabber account now.

CeBIT to premiere USB Swiss Army Knife - I was almost laughing a this... until it occured to me that I carry both a USB memory stick and a swiss army knife on me at all times ;-). This item will sell.

Edward Tufte: Ask E.T. forum - I love this stuff. Haven't read the whole thing yet. Also, I really need to add some new categories to this blog. Via Luigi.