A desire line is the abstract line that represents the shortest route between an origin and destination, and shows where people want to travel. The width of the line represents the amount of demand. Desire lines were used in early transportation planning, prior to the advent of computerized models.
They are manifested on the surface of the earth in certain cases, e.g. as dirt pathways created by people walking through a field, when the original movement by individuals helps clear a path, thereby encouraging more travel.
Like our apartment in Vancouver, our house here in Malta is wired with halogen lamps. They last longer than incandescents, but they’re power-hungry. I did a quick search, and couldn’t find any CFL replacements for halogen bulbs. I did find some far more efficient and longer lasting versions of the standard halogen bulb, though.
Incidentally, NFL fans should also convert to the Canadian Football League. It, too, is far superior.
I recently finished the fascinating, sad and encouraging The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Coincidentally, I also read a Slate article by Daniel Engber examining one of Weisman’s recommendations for saving the planet–the single-child policy:
Let’s cut the birth rate to one child per couple, for a few generations at least. The population would dwindle by about 5 billion people over the next century, he says, ensuring the habitability of the Earth for the 1.6 billion who remained. At that point, they could all reap the rewards of a more spacious planet, sharing in “the growing joy of watching the world daily become more wonderful.”
I tell you, the graph in the book is a pretty impressive bell curve, and nearly mirrors current population estimates of 9.2 billion Earthlings by 2050.
Weisman’s Dream
One of the things that gives me hope for humanity’s future is Japan’s aging population. If we somehow manage to survive the crush of another 3 or 4 billion humans, and continue to improve the lives of the average Asian and African, then eventually many countries on the planet might develop to the point where populations shrink instead of grow. Weisman’s dream of a population of a couple billion might not happen by 2150, but it could happen.
I wrote about a similar yet more radical proposal back in January. In the comments, somebody pointed out that the most effective way to go green is to commit (an environmentally-friendly) suicide. Somebody makes the same point to Engber, and I liked his reply:
I’ve gotten a bunch of e-mails asking me if I favor euthanasia, murder, genocide, etc. But I don’t think that’s the logical extension of my argument. If I told you I favored a Prius over a Hummer, would you then ask me if I thought we should walk everywhere?
Here’s a related bonus link: Michelle Tsai writes about Russia’s peculiar attempts to increase its population.
I should know the answer to this, because it seems like a profoundly stupid question. But seriously, how do populations of mosquitos survive winter? Winnipeg is famous for both its bitterly cold winters and flotillas of Cessna-sized mosquitos. How does the latter make it through the former? The Wikipedia entry was no help.
I don’t ever remember seeing any mosquitos in sub-zero temperatures, but maybe I was looking in the wrong spots?
In temperate climates, adult mosquitoes become inactive with the onset of cool weather and enter hibernation to live through the winter. Some kinds of mosquitoes have winter hardy eggs and hibernate as embryos in eggs laid by the last generation of females in late summer. The eggs are usually submerged under ice and hatch in spring when water temperatures rise. Other kinds of mosquitoes overwinter as adult females that mate in the fall, enter hibernation in animal burrows, hollow logs or basements and pass the winter in a state of torpor. In spring, the females emerge from hibernation, blood feed and lay the eggs that produce the next generation of adults
Today Neatorama linked to a photo purporting to show two islands linked by a foot bridge in the Thousand Islands region of Ontario:
the island on the left is in canada, the one on the right is in the united states. the smaller island contains the ‘backyard’ of the house on the larger island.
That would be cool, if only it were true. There was debate about the veracity of this in the comments, and a couple of commenters cited Wikipedia:
There is a pair of islands near Rockport called Zavikon. A popular tale among local guides is that the bigger part of Zavikon is in Canada, while the smaller part is in the USA, and the foot bridge between them is the “shortest international bridge in the world”. In fact Zavikon is in Canada.
I’m a casual contributor to Wikipedia, so I thought I’d go try to disprove this myth-busting fact. It took a few minutes with Google Maps, but here’s a satellite photo of the islands that maps accurately to to this aerial view.
This supports Wikipedia’s statement, that both islands are a couple of hundred meters inside the Canadian side of the border. So, it’s a myth that Zavikon’s foot bridge is the shortest bridge across an international border. I wonder what is?
And yes, I’m a massive pedant.
UPDATE: As per the comments below, Richard provided a link to this short video from 1929, depicting his ancestors on the island:
I just happened to see the results of this poll on Facebook, and was amused by such a clear example of the Lake Wobegon Effect in action (click for readable size):
If you haven’t heard of this psychological phenomenon, here’s the Wikipedia entry:
The Lake Wobegon effect is the human tendency to overestimate one’s achievements and capabilities in relation to others. It is named for the fictional town of Lake Wobegon from the radio series A Prairie Home Companion, where, according to Garrison Keillor, “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
I think Tapestry is one of the CBC’s most consistently interesting programs. They often have fascinating, learned guests, and talk about topics of religion, spirituality, and culture that rarely get discussed in other secular or (relatively) unbiased settings.
I recently listened to an episode featuring Daniel Gilbert, Harvard professor and social psychologist. I’m a bit late on this, because I gather he wrote a bestseller last year called Stumbling on Happiness.
Gilbert was an articulate, clever, amusing guest–you really wished that host Mary Hynes would just keep her mouth shut so that he could keep talking. Hynes is usually an excellent interviewer, but I’m afraid she contributes very little to this particular conversation.
The book isn’t a handbook on how to be happy, but seems to be an examination of the past twenty years research on the subject. There are a number of compelling points that arose in the piece. Here are two:
We all have a default happiness setting, to which we tend to return. Events which seem to inspire great joy or sadness in fact have a much lesser, much briefer impact on our psyches than we imagine.
Parenting, statistically speaking, makes you less happy.
I listened to the second half of that BBC documentary on obesity that I mentioned. It was equally fascinating, and it got me thinking about the converging problems of increasing global obesity and declining birth rates (the program didn’t cover this particular ground).
Obesity rates are predicted to increase dramatically in the developing world, and certainly aren’t declining in the developed world. As nations develop, their birth rates plummet. Many Western nations are struggling to maintain a replacement birth rate.
Fatter People, Fewer Kids
Overweight and obese women have a harder time conceiving. I went looking for a nice graph that charted increasing weight or BMI (body mass index) to declining fertility, but I came up empty. I was surprised how little hard data on this issue I could find. Either my search skills failed me or there isn’t a ton of useful studies out there to cite. I did find a 2006 article from the University of Adelaide:
“We know that obese women are 2.7 times more likely to be infertile compared to normal women. Obesity rates have doubled in Australia in the last two decades and that is the reason why a lot of women are having trouble falling pregnant or carrying babies to full term.”
Everybody agrees that obesity leads to reduced fertility, but this was the only data point I could find. Maybe Dr. Beth can help?
Compounding the issue, men who are overweight or obese have lower sperm counts and concentrations (focus, spermatozoa, focus!)–their fertility (or should that be virility?) decreases by 20 to 25%.
I wonder how an overweight and obese human race impacts longterm population projections? If we don’t live as long, have a harder time procreating and procreate less as more nations become ‘developed’, maybe we’ll reach that population peak sooner than we think?
And then start a long, slow decline? Wouldn’t that be cool if, by 3007, there were only, say, a billion people on the planet again?
Educational technologists may wonder if “remix” or “content mashup” are just hipper-sounding versions of the learning objects vision that has absorbed so much energy from so many talented people—with mostly disappointing results. As Susan Metros stated in a 2005 EDUCAUSE Review article: “Learning objects have not fulfilled their promise of transforming education.” Little has changed since then to contradict that assertion.
Describing Brian merely as a ‘fellow Northern Voice organizer’ really doesn’t cut the mustard once you read his byline: “Manager of Emerging Technologies and Digital Content for The University of British Columbia’s Office of Learning Technology and is a Research Fellow with Utah State University’s Center for Open and Sustainable Learning.” You don’t want to attend court functions with Brian–they’re serving dessert by the time the servant’s done announcing his title.
I joke because, in actuality, Brian’s a very humble, self-effacing guy.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the newest plastic surgery on the market is a, uh, shot to your g-spot. Somewhat mundanely, they call it the ‘g-shot’:
By 4 p.m. she sat inside Dr. Justin Salerno’s office, readying to become the surgeon’s first patient to receive an injection called a G-Shot, also known as G-spot Amplification. With a 3 1/2-inch needle, Salerno would pump a small dose of collagen into his patient’s Grafenberg Spot and make it swell to the size of a quarter…
The procedure, which has been performed on approximately 250 women nationally in the past two years at a cost of $1,850 each, appealed to Roberts because she felt life’s rigmarole had left her fatigued by the end of the day, hardly in an amorous mood. Even when she felt the surge of excitement, reaching an orgasm was a time-consuming endeavor that took more effort and energy than she and her husband had to offer.
Well, that’s a bit of a sad commentary on one’s work-life balance, isn’t it? And the subject of the article is only 22 years old. The, uh, climax of the article reports that things went well when she took her new collagen injection for a test run:
Just as she hoped, she could reach climax within a few minutes, and with little effort.
“Just like a man,” she said.
I really wanted to come up with a great, punny title for this post, but I failed miserably. Who can do better?
