Am I the only one thinking that Harper has been planning this move since before the last election?

Look at it: call an election when the Liberals are weak and useless, with an impending recession. Then, with the political capital of a fresh party, go in for the kill - disembowel all the opposing parties' funding.

This puts the Liberals into the position that they have to use their ultimate desperation tactic - the coalition with the NDP and Bloc, on the brink of a recession. Even if Canadians accept the pseudo-legitimate (edit: clarification, I don't see them that way, but the public will) government, they are going to be presiding over an economic catastrophe that will utterly destroy what little respect they have left. Particularly with a vicious back-biter like Layton clinging on for the ride, the Liberals are utterly hopeless.

This is going to be a disaster of epic proportions.

Somebody in the Con party is an evil, evil genius.

Personally, I'm taking this as a sign that there's something fundamentally wrong with simply assigning the control of Parliament to the party with the most seats by default. It's created a position where Harper got to simply demand whatever he wanted, while the Liberals had to choose between rolling over and pushing the country into another miserable election. Minority governments are supposed to be about compromise, not playing chicken with the electorate.

The Prime Mininister and his cabinet should be elected by an internal vote run within the House of Commons. That would make sure that minority governments still represent the majority of Canadians - or at least the majority of Canadians whose representatives can produce some sort of a consensus.

edit: some more clarifications. I don't think the Cons would do any better with running Canada through the recession. I just think that they could weather the political storms of recession better than a Liberal government that the Canadian populace sees as questionably legitimate, particularly with since Layton has an incredible knack for making them look stupid. I *want* a Liberal government back. I just think that this one is going to be our last Liberal government for a long, long time.

Think about it - when Dion steps down, it's going to be between Ignatieff and Rae. While I despise Ignatieff's support for neoconservative military policy, I think he's a strong enough leader to pull it off... but if the NDP has any say in the replacement, which they might, then it'll be Bob Rae.

Think about that: Bob Rae, running a government, in a recession.

Doesn't matter how good a job he does. He, and by extension the Liberal party, will be scapegoated for every single problem of the recession.

The conservatives know this. They've put the Liberals in a suicidal position.

Like I said, somebody in the Con party is an evil, evil genius.

Question: Which electoral system should Ontario use to elect members to the legislature?
Existing	62.25%
Mixed member proportional	37.75%
Ridings in favour of MMP	4/107
Last Update:October 10, 11:10:58 PM EDT To change requires 60% of the popular vote and majority approval in 64 of the 107 ridings.

It's probably early to call that, but I'm pretty sure we're not gonna see the 60% it takes for MMP to go through. A lot higher than the 23% I expected though.
( Read more... )

Last night wifey and I drove to Toronto and saw Wicked. Very good show.

On Wicked

Wicked is a very fun musical. For those who don't know, it's the story of The Wizard of Oz, told from the point of view of the Good Witch and the Wicked Witch. The musical has a bit of everything - some drama, some witty banter, some very clever special effects, some good musical numbers, and some very clever backwards tie-ins to the original story. Part of the musical involves turning the plot to The Wizard of Oz upside-down, so a recent viewing of the original movie helps to ensure it makes sense. It's incredibly good fun - the back-and-forth between Elpheba's sarcasm and Galinda's blondness is priceless.

The effects were very nice - lots of clever lighting, lots of clockwork stuff, and lots flying things.

Not to say that it's perfect. The musical numbers themselves are very traditional - this isn't Andrew Lloyd Weber or anything else earthshattering here. It's the humour and the dramatic pacing that makes the songs work. The other flaw that the storlyline feels so jarringly modern when shown with the backdrop of the classic fantasy. Issues of political racism, college life, and disability just seem so out-of-place in Oz... but perhaps I'm over analyzing.

I'm still confused why a woman with green skin (spoiler: caused by Fetal Absynthe Syndrome, apparently) is so out-of-place in Oz, after all those Ozzians are pretty freaky-looking themselves.

On Getting To The Canon Theatre

It was a little tricky - parking in downtown TO on a Friday night wasn't actually as bad as I expected, the nasty part is the traffic. This was my first experience in big-city-driving. Had to get used to the tricks of following cars very closely without following them into the intersection and getting stuck in it, blocking traffic when the light turns (happened to me once, had to be careful after that).

The big thing that I've learned: you can't turn left in Toronto. Ever. You will get stuck, or honked-at, or otherwise generally frustrated. As a result, I have since decided that the ideal urban layout is small blocks with consistently alternating one-way-streets. I mean, I don't understand why people don't like one-way-streets... it's not like you can turn around on a busy two-way-street anyways. I mean, look at the things we get from one-way-traffic: you can turn left easily, you can phase the traffic lights with the flow of traffic, and it's safer - no oncoming traffic. The catch, of course, is that you can't turn around, only go around the block again.... but the fact is you do that anyways in any respectably busy 2-way traffic.

The frustration with one-way-traffic happen when trying to find X if you know it's on street Y, but you're coming from the other way - you have to guess-and-loop, unless you've directions telling you what the next street after your destination going your way is. That, and if, like Hamilton, you have your one-way traffic occasionally giving way to two-way traffic or doing very weird things at the edges to handle stuff like the mountain cuts. That leaves you guessing which is the next 2-way-street you can take.

Unfortunately, it seems that most of the people in charge of the development of the City of Hamilton disagree with me.

Oh, and the Canon Theatre is neat-O. It's smaller than I thought, so we got a much better view than I expected when I bought the tickets. Kind of funny how it's got Trump-ish opulence even though it's not very big.

My wife is a math teacher, so I get an earful of today's educational going-ons every evening. A few days ago I heard something that really, really irks me:

They're cutting calculus from Ontario highschools. Totally. It happened gradually, first cutting some of the more frustrating integral operations, then cutting out integrals completely, and since the double cohort they'd been cutting back on derivatives... but now limits and derivatives are going all together. "Calculus" is being replaced with "advanced functions", which is what us older folks took in Grade 12, back when Grade 12 was the second-last-year-of-school.

Basically, the statement is "no, we can't fit a decent math education into four years". As far as I know, they still manage to do it in other provinces with four-year highschool programs.

Now, artsies and English majors may see this as no great loss - they don't use calc. But every scientist does, including any sociologist or psychologist who does real research. Research involves trends and statistics, which involve calculus.

Basically, it has turned out the way that should've been expected - Premiere Harris cut the highschool education down with no real plan as to how to fit five years of education into four years. The ministry, the boards, and so on continued on without any plan either, just cramming the curriculum together. The teachers, in turn, tried to make do, but also with no particular idea what to do besides "rush". Which, of course, simply does not work in the long run - you can rush for a bit, but eventually either your determination wavers and you stop getting as much done, or you find out that some things you rushed you didn't really do right. And so now, they're admitting defeat.

And as a result, kids are going off to university unprepared.

I'm this close to launching some angsty-community-member letter writing campaign. Now, to avoid being labled a random political critic with no ideas to solve the problem, here are ideas:

• Fix middle school, thus allowing highschool math to be more advanced. The first thing wifey has to do in Grade 9 is re-teach the kids fractions and order of operations. Something is going wrong in there. Some possible ways to do this:
  
  
  • Require that middle school math be tought by people with a math teachable. Duh.
    
    
  • Get the middle school and secondary school unions to share seniority, thus allowing middle school teachers to teach at highschool (and vice versa) without taking a pay cut.
    
    
• Move grade 8 to highschool (and, logically, grade 5 to middle school). Maybe it just takes five years to teach highschool math. If so, then start earlier. All I got out of middle school was a broken leg and a seething hatred for the human race. I don't think we'd lose much by axing off a year. The kids are pumped full so many beef hormones that they're growing up faster anyways.
  
  
• Make the grade 9 math test required for graduation the way the literacy test is - then students might take math seriously if they knew they needed a diploma for it.
  

Oh well. That's my rant on something that will interest 0.0001% of the 2 people who read my blog. Have a nice day. Time to STFU and GBTW.

Edit/Update, October 2006: Apparently Google loves this page, as I keep getting comments to it long after I'd forgotten this story. Sine I wrote this article:

• wifey complained about me discussing her work on teh internets, and


• the change to Calculus has been withdrawn and the course has been put under "special extended review" or somesuch stuff.

And now, a random, infantile stupid image that I find hilarious:

• sucks about the supremes.
  
• Clinton-Obama '08 vs. J.Bush-Giuiani (or possibly Cheney). Repubs win.
  
• If Kerry had won, it would've been McCain in '08. Your loss, Americans.
  
• The democrats have to accept some unpleasant realities:
  
  
  
  • Rove's campaign of persistent vague lies and buzzwords is incredibly powerful, especially against mild people like Gore & Kerry.
    
  • Americans are not the people you wished they were... They don't care anymore. Not about Iraqis, not about the future, not about gays, and not about foreign opinion. They're looking out for #1 now.
    
  • You really need to get your shit together.
    
  
  

In my opinion, one of the most important results is that the Bush-hating world will transfer their blame to the American people at large. Expect world opinion to get worse.

Now, on another subject, I played Halo II recently. I didn't play the first, so it was a learning experience. I have to say, people who discard it as “just another FPS” are missing the subtleties, especially in single-player. Bunjie managed to rethink and eliminate every annoying gameplay mistake that's been taken for granted since Wolf3D. Plentiful weapons with a limited inventory removes the annoying rationing of Doom-clones. Frequent checkpoints are a perfect compromise between having to replay whole levels on death or mashing the quicksave key every 5 seconds. The damage model is perfect, avoiding health backtracking and rationing without the frustrating effects of scalar regen. Team beacon & teleport helps the n00b keep up.

Its like Starcraft - its not the most innovative, or even necessarily the most fun and rewarding... It is, however, the most polished, considered, and complete game in its field.

Code is to logic as architecture is to sculpture.

So, as a working stiff, how does one go to the bank? Last time I checked, most people work 9-5... And even here in the big city, CIBC is only open 9:30-4:30. Sucks. I had to pay a TTC token to transfer 'cause of that.

Musings on Canadian politics

Here in Canada, the political system has some problems. First, we have only one mainstream party, which gives them such a massive advantage that, even after being exposed as corrupt cronies, they still took parliament. A second problem is Canada's appointed and useless senate. A third problem is that our riding system marginalizes those with non-regionalized powerbases: the labour-leftist NDP party got about the same votes as the Quebec-centric PQ, producing less than half the number of seats.

The neo-con Conservative party want to remove the Senate, and the NDP want proportional representation. So, kill two birds with one stone.

Implement proportional representation in the senate. Senators currently serve until retirement. This serves to provide some dampening in the government from sudden political shifts, adding a little stability to the system. To preserve this feature, run elections every five years, but only for a rotating quarter of the senate, giving each senator a twenty year term. If one wants to maintain political unaccountability in the senate, mandate political retirement at the end of their term.

But the Liberal government wouldn't like that. Fortunately, they're a minority government - if the other parties combined to pressure them, it would go through. And why wouldn't they? It would give them each seats in the senate, where they had none before. It would also satisfy the Conservative and NDP complaints.