Is that hominid my grandmom?

I'm not sure if it's the scientists or the science writers that can't seem to get beyond their Victorian male sensibilities of the old school texts of their childhood. I must admit I'm leaning toward the science writers for failing to ask the right questions to present a well-rounded article. This is the article that set me off today: African fossils paint messy picture of our past

It's whats missing that annoys. It mentions at the beginning that researchers keep messing with the tidy old-fashioned human evolution cartoon, but the article points to them as trying to make a new one that is just as tidy. If they are why?

Why do they not believe say that humans aren't from a crossing of H. habilis and H. erectus? We know from the history of breeding practices even on a non-academic level that many close species can interbreed with a viability of 25% in the F1 generation and can be 90% viable by the F4, so do they have enough bone or teeth material to do a complete genetic workup of the hominids to disprove an interbreeding. I would expect all these things have been considered in the research, but the right questions were not asked by the writer so thereby fails to give us the answers proposed in his opening statements.

Over-qualified graduates or just misplaced ones?

From Starbucks Hazeldean 11:10

Sat and read my first paper copy of the Globe and Mail in quite a while (only found the entertainment section on Monday). There was an article on how twenty percent of new University grads are over qualified for the jobs post graduation. It doesn't go on to mention how many will continue to be overqualified five and tens years after graduation. I also mentions that many grads will enter MBA courses to order to find better positions.

It's an issue that should be better studied for several reasons: the emotional and psychological impact on these individuals (an the inevitable physical deterioration which will be an added burden to the already overburdened health care system); the appropriateness of certain people going into university and into certain programs when they had better been directed into other programs; whether the lack of proper and appropriate guidance was given in high schools (and possible junior high schools) and whether such guidance would work and how it should be enforced (a la Poland etc).

I'm a strong supporter of the democratic/socialist mix of Canadian government and I think this is a perfect example of how we are losing it. This is not to say I'm not a staunch individualist, but I'll be the first to admit that this point of view may well have directed me wrong in my own career path.

I think individualism has in some ways been allowed a little to soon and that more direction is needed in the early education system. With the proper guidance in school I might very well be a working scientist, doctor or lawyer instead of employed outside my chosen field. I'm not suggesting that my original path as an Artifact Conservator was wrong as no one could likely have predicted the huge Government layoffs of the mid-nineties, but they certainly even then could have predicted the short fall in the medical profession and possible in the high-skilled trades even then.

So what we have now is important trade departments being closed in community colleges and a crisis level short fall in the medical professions. So where are these people? Likely frustrated under-employeds, and unsatisfied and possibly out of work high-tech employees. Why is this? Gore-filled TV doctor shows? Newspapers filled with Dotcom winners? Or unutilized or nonexistent guidance councilors? This last, in my personal belief, is an important culprit.

In high school, many moons ago, we were given various aptitude and personality tests and actually had a guidance councilor, which I think I saw once if memory serves. I know that neither those tests nor the ones given to us in Junior High school came up in that one guidance interview. As far as I can tell the test were a waste of time and paper. It is a rare student that has a good realistic grasp on what they want in life and how it is best to be fulfilled, most of us would glaze over once some unknown adult starts spouting on what they feel ‘we, a rebellious teenager’ should do with their life, especially when the only barriers are good enough marks and enough money/student loan. They now that there will be other hoops to jump maybe even something in the form of and SAT for all degree/certificate/diploma entrances, then the child will have the time to better prepare.

A good supported guidance councilor is the beginning. I feel that better training and exercise of these instructors and this should be supported by an after-high-school course that is part of the basic curriculum. It would go a long way to avert the grief that will happen to so many individuals in there later working life.

An independent teacher instructing children in various professions would help. It might also relieve stereotypes of certain professions and widening the field of view for many. I mean how can the child of a truck driver who’s general acquaintance of employed people is other truck drivers going to think beyond low skilled blue collar trades even if there innate abilities would make them a good doctor? Or how is the child of a moderately successful hi-tech employee living in a plastic suburban house going to know that they might make it best as a self-employed plumber? They can’t, as it wouldn't even occur to them.

It didn't to me. I grew up in a fairly enlightened house full of books ranging from country music biographies through to hard science fiction to anthropology and art. I met an assortment of individuals but mostly in the capacity of artists and folk singers, not as air traffic controllers, bookkeepers, accounts, trappers, and geologists that they were in their day jobs. So I spent my childhood being told I could do anything, expecting to go to University and wanting to be an archeologist. My loving and liberal minded parents never dissuaded me never temper such an idea (possibly believing I would become more rational on the subject or maybe they them selves not knowing any archeologist at that time, that archeology is the way to starvation especially after the advent of Indiana Jones. I took an art degree with the plans of following up with an archeology degree later. It was a course in Archaeology that was just offered that I discovered Conservation. Had markets been better I might still be happily employed in it. Or maybe not. As much as I enjoyed it and it was my life I still in retrospect seriously wonder if it was where I should have been. I wonder if better guidance had been given that I might well be efficiently employed and even happier elsewhere.

The lack of proper guidance and actual application of personality and aptitude tests may well be what can avert the waste of our human resources. The system is even mostly in place it just needs to be used. It's a sad thought that the lack of importance placed of proper employment guidance to high school students may well be fundamental to the brake down of medical system, an ideal fundamental to the Canadian mindset. I think Canadians are lucky to still be Canadians - to hold the population comparable to the State of California alone distributed over a vast tract of land full of natural barriers and different ecosystems is a tribute of a deeply stubborn and independent nature given to us by our early Aboriginal, French and Scottish ancestors and ephemeral ideas of unification given to us by our medical system, CBC, charismatic leaders such as Trudeau, our system of government and possibly hockey.

We are currently facing the erosion of many of these things. The crisis in the medical system through fuel on the riches cry for a two-tier health system, the treat of commercial subsidization of the CBC, our new weak-assed-conservative-couldn’t-be-less-charismatic leader Harper, and more and more people are sending there children into soccer instead of hockey simply because it’s a lot cheaper. I think that better preparing our children for the future and guiding them it to their best place where they will be fulfilled and where our society best supported is a way shoring up our nation where it is starting to sag.

The Globe and Mail article is no longer available in the regular edition but the Comments section can be found here.

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Battlestar Galactica: all the vision is in the look.

We were just listening to won of Michael Moore pod casts. They've become as painful to listen to as the show has become to watch, leaving a bitter and lingering after taste. I was so impressed originally with the mini-series and the first season, but by the fifth episode they started to seriously loose me as a viewer. I don't know if I gave Moore too much respect at the beginning because of how greatly his voice and manner resembles Joss Whedon who managed to hold my respect for over seven year barely ever slipping in my personal poles.

Michael Moore has sadly proven that he isn’t Joss Whedon and that he isn't truly much of a SF writer in the end. He is unable to step free from his white middle-class American belief structure to see through the wonderful idea started in the mini-series by what must be luck.

Now even in the beginning I had issues (but I'm critical by nature and cynical by experience) with how they were trying to portray equality both between the sexes on the ship and the predominant Caucasian ethnic in the cast. Setting aside the lack of ethnic diversity and focusing on the so-called equality of the sexes. What we are being given is basically what Moore seems to believe the US (thus for him the world) will be like in another 50 to 100yrs not a culture that has supposedly existed separately from ours since the Egyptians or whenever. While likely they may have had they're ups and downs they wouldn't have had ours. So why should there hang ups be ours? It likely given they've retained their science better than we had that the Visigoths never sacked their Rome, that people weren't dragged from Their Africa to be slaves, woman weren't persecuted in by their Taliban, they may never had witch trails or a Pope. They aren't us. For all we know they've enjoyed sexual equity from the beginning. So the ugliness of sexual inequity may never be a default modern human behaviour. From instances of rape through to conniving women are more and more proven to be social indicators not necessarily originally default human ones.

Rape is something I'll never undestand so I'll move on to conniving. We have many instances of conniving and manipulative people in BG all of which are women. There are many stories written by men (and even a few women) throughout the ages about 'this type of woman'. Not doubt this 'type of woman' existed and currently exist but it can be considered that this stereotype was created and now persists because of social constraints previously placed upon women. A power hungry, forceful or even just ambitious man could strike out into the world and make their way but woman could only fulfill these needs through others (that is of course husbands and other males). It is a reaction to a societal condition.

Compounding this is people default societal reactions to things. Now I wouldn't try to write from a black man growing up in the US South in the 20's anymore than I could write from the perspective a woman who would cover their face in obeisance to men, but I would certainly write a black man a hundred years from now or an Iraqi woman because one can only believe that at the pace of globalization that cultural memory of African slavery and religious misogyny may have passed beyond living experience therefore the decisions those people would make would not be based on such social/religious hang-ups. When we become used to something it becomes everyday, common and we only question it in its absence. Just as we become inured to violence on TV we will become used to seeing other ethnic groups and the sexes in all types of positions in society. We can socially inoculate people to the ideas of equality by its constant example in the media and like wise we can damage it the same way.

So Moore has lost the chance to show us how from different cultural and thus different cultural scenarios might react differently. Or demonstrate how given different major events may have produced a more equitable society. By this I’m not asking for Star Trek, basic equality does not mean utopian society. It does not mean fluffiness, it does not mean the end of inner strife, it only means that possibility their reactions to that strife may be different. But no, Moore is giving us a well-produced but hackneyed plot, plot devices and subjects instead of looking forward as science fiction should.

Well JA Konrath says they way a good blog is confrontational. So if Gina recieves hate mail just by saying that dogs can and do love then I'm bound for a flame war if this blog is ever discovered.

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Early spring flowers and Angel

It’s not only Pamela at Thomasburg Walks to the south of me that has crocuses early. Here are a few little Gypsy crocuses. I think this is the earliest bloom of my earliest crocus. The tulips leaves are also a good 10 cm or so above the ground in places and the leaves of my dwarf white daffodils are peeking out. What I’m most worried about are the budding on my roses and magnolia. The nightly frosts haven’t done them in but we’re still likely to get another snow

Since I haven’t posted any of the pieces I’ve written lately and now my ire about what ever they were is over so I’ll post cute pictures of my cats instead it's better for the blood pressure.

It’s Angel’s turn. We didn’t name her and she isn’t an angel. Oh she has cute-face down pat to the point she’s still called the kitten when we refer to her. Among her other cute tricks, is sleeping in seeming inappropriate and too small places. Like this basket last fall, which worked out well with my red sun hat.

Here she is in my recently assembled seedling stand, I am posting a pic of the overall stand at Back to the Drawlyn. I took this yesterday, but the rack had only been up an afternoon before she discovered to comforts of a seedling catch tray.

And this is where she is as I write this. My knapsack is the comfort spot of the day. For more of the story of Angel and her mom, Velvet, as well as Koi and his MIA bud, Mr Bingley, check out their pages on the Drawlyn.

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Good-bye HBC?

I feel rather ill. One of the prices of a quiet and sequestered life is not knowing what’s going on unless I remember to look at the Globe and Mail’s website. And usually by the time I do it’s too late to be involved in a protest or even write a strong letter.

This happened again today. I went to the G&M’s National page and found this article, Hudson’s Bay, USA by Peter C. Newman. It announced for me the foreign buy-out of a Canadian institution, the Hudson’s Bay Company. Even when control of Tim Horton’s, another landmark Canadian company fell into foreign hands I didn’t feel as sick as I do today. Not only is it being severed from Canada but it is likely to spell the demise of it as well. As a Canadian institution it endured and survived the rigours of social change and economic hardship, but like Eaton’s that went before, it’s patrons will flee in search of a more patriotic solution or to Wal-Mart for the cheap one.

I wonder if anyone else is even noticing. Like most Canadians I pride myself on my stoic-ness, but right now I wish people would get angry. It’s not like it’s an isolated incident – it’s an important icon – more so than the aforementioned Eaton’s and Tim Horton’s, and they all stand for a scary trend. They are a part of an growing number of lost companies sucking Canadians of our money and returning nothing but minimum wage cashier and sales jobs. It is an economic bloodletting and it’s not a Canadian who’s holding the leech.

As much as I hate seeing top dogs like the Black’s and Irving’s of the country developing ever-growing monopolies at least they are Canadians (well, were in the case of Conrad Black). There are likely few Canadians that care less about Canadian culture than Black but at least he was brought up here. It may be a case of the devil you know but I doubt that a foreign company will care more about Canadian culture and economy. The fact that HBC is being taken away is already proof that they couldn’t give a damn.

Of course with HBC it’s not just the Bay Store but also Zellers and the Home Outfitters and likely lesser-known enterprises as well. The one saving grace is that the HBC’s museum collection was gifted to the Manitoba Museum back in 1994. Which means this important cultural property is safe from decorating a corporate office somewhere, or being auctioned off.

Well, my rage isn’t spent and all I can hope is that Canadian and the traditional British shareholders will start coughing up more money and maybe in our social-democratic way that the government will see fit to throw in a few bucks as well. They’ve seen fit to bail out less significant companies. Hopefully a little pride will be evident this week in the halls of Parliament Hill.

From Home with no Coffee

No coffee shop hopping for me today. I thought I had escaped this season without a cold but, no, the yearly one caught up with me. Also we had freezing rain over night, which meant walking would be tricky and the bus schedule will be off. So I figured I'd be better off at home.

It was beautiful this morning even though it was overcast and looking like rain. I managed to get a few worthwhile pictures. Koi who followed me around the yard.

He was watching me take picture of the open birdfeeder.Beside it is a your crab-apple we planted a few years ago and a Grefsheim spirea. The latter has been amazing the last few years. Mounds of flowers. I bought it because there is one on Percy street that I was increadably envious of and I didn't have enough of a sunny location at the appartment to plant one. So it was one of the first shrubs I bought after we purchased the house

Here is a close up of the little crab-apples encased in ice. I was pushing the focus a bit.

The Crab was bought before the spirea but in the same summer. This house was a blank slate when we bought it. A few tiny mainly annual beds and acres of grass. Boring!

Ive been doing my best to hide the bungalow ever since.

At the side of the garage with a lovely shade specimen plant - the name is escaping me. The seed heads were up right yesterday and about 2m high or so. It’s now touching the potentilla below it.

I love the colour in this picture. A minimal pallette with wonderful contrasts. The golds against the blue and the red against the white.

The movement of the curves and diagonals of the stalks belie the rigidness of the encasing ice.

I put the fill flash on and it really shows the echinacea’s seed head well through the thick cap of iced.

I took quite a few pictures of echinacea and coreopsis seed heads in what has become known as the Great Ice Storm of ’98. Someone even put out a coffee table book about it. The damage it caused is still evident in the landscape around here. Actually we still see the damage through to New Brunswick on our trips home.

To see the full uncropped photo click on the images.

At the end of the same bed is a lilac. You can see how warm a February it’s been in the swollen buds. In front of it is a bent over hollyhock stem which unfortunately is out of focus.

The held off but a few hours later the temperature dropped and the wind picked up. Then it snowed. It was a complete white out for about an hour. It’s still windy now. There will be tree damage because of this. Thankfully the cedars can take quite a beating and provide a good wind break for the yard so the ornamental trees seem fine so far.

From Bridgehead Westboro

2006/02/10
10:00 Bridgehead Westboro

I was lucky find a seat this morning, so I shouldn't bitch about the one I have. :) While I normally enjoy sitting by a window when I'm not planning to use the Clio it's a little annoying when I am. The screens not to bright on the poor old thing.

Well it's a gorgeous day, bright and sunny and a normal February temperatures. It was -20C over night and about -8C right now, whish is perfectly livable as long as you remember your longjohns and a hat. Amazingly, few Ottawans seem to actually dress for their weather, which is quite a risk when cars break down or the bus is not running to schedule.

Though here in hip Westboro with the MEC (Mountain Equipment Co-Op) next door there are more ppl decked out in cool hi-tech winter gear than in most places in the city.

The MEC is the destination this morning. I'm going to exercise my gift cert. finally. There’s a knapsack with my name on it.

It is great to have an espresso! It's been retro coffee-wise at home since the espresso part of my aged DeLonghi Treiste finally rolled belly up. It's nearly 10yrs old and I'm debating on seeing if it can be serviced for under what it would cost to by a new one. I'd rather keep it. It takes up less space then a reg drip and a separate espresso/cap machines.

Back to the retro part. I’ve dug out my old electric perc., my first electric coffee maker. I found it at the St Vincent de Paul's thrift shop back in Peterborough. It replaced my large old 40's stovetop model that had been my Grandmother's. It's a great little thing and it makes just the right amount of coffee for one person for one single sitting. I'm not sure how old it is. Anyone have a guess? Certainly newer the my grandmom's. I wonder where that is anyway?

Going back to percolated is a little rough caffeine-wise after the caffeine-liteness of espresso. So a friend gave me a sample of Orzo Pupo, which I believe roasted barley and chicory. So I've been thinning my afternoon coffee with it and it works out quite well. It gives more of a mouth feel and an added carob note that's quite pleasant.

10:30 - still at Bridgehead

Yesterday I went out for my regular walk and to shoot another panorama. I'm trying to refine the method needed to use my crappy little Kodak digital camera. It was certainly not design for such a thing. It's been great otherwise and does well what we originally bought it for. Someday I'd love to get a better one. Something at least approaching the quantity of image of the old Minolta I bought back in university. That thing still works great even though it's been carried through many a wooded hike and through several countries. Now it sits under shoes in the closet. Even the problems with the Kodak can't over come the instant gratification of having the image right away. This is where photography always fell so far behind painting or even sculpture for me in school - the gratification was too delayed. It didn’t have the satisfaction of pushing a big fat brush loaded with paint across a large canvas.

Speaking of which I really should finish at least one of the many paintings I started last summer. The problem is always the same, the idea and execution to the proof stage is fun but anything after that is just work. Sigh. I keep thinking I'll start again in the spring when I can set my easel up on the deck. Yeah right. With the half finished pond, the roof and the chicken coop all needing done it's unlikely I'll get to any of them until summer.

Still, a chicken coop! How cool is that. Actually two, a stationary one for layers and a pasturing one for roasters. Oh and I didn't mention expanding and preparing the garden. I've been considering digging a shallow well back there too. It would help drain what will become the back pasture and save me from lugging so much rainwater. Lee Valley has these cool old-fashioned style pumps which will be perfect for it. The water table is so high especially out there that we'll be ankle deep by the time we're 2m down.

Anyway the coffee is long gone and the MEC's been open near an hour. So I'm gone.