Mock Turtle

Maths cracks beer froth mystery

Mathematicians have come up with a formula that predicts how the head on a pint of beer will change after pouring.

Their advance could shed light on why the foam on a pint of lager quickly disappears, but the froth on a pint of Guinness sticks around.

The math looks fierce.

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What could be more obscure, or easily forgotten, than the Friday press release at 5:10 p.m.?

Well, that would be the one on Saturday evening. And what is being announced?

Oh, nothing important:

Plans for a provincial red-alert disaster information system were announced by the Ontario Commissioner of Emergency Management today.

The “Alert Ontario” system would be used in life-threatening situations for the public, including floods, tornadoes and health pandemics, Emergency Management commissioner Jay Hope said. It would be employed like the Amber Alert missing child system now in place, using broadcasts, road signs, email, text-messaging and lottery terminals to alert the public.

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I’ve always loathed Heather Mallick, once of the Globe and Mail Focus section, now plying her wares with Rabble.ca and the CBC online. When she was still with the Globe I would begin each weekend composing a never-written letter to the editor in my head over breakfast, often bookended with a blood-boiling stop by Cross Country Checkup late Sunday afternoon. I’ve since discovered yoga.

So I got great pleasure out of the stylish pan of Mallick’s new book, Cake or Death, in last Saturday’s paper. It’s rare to see an actual all-out bad review in the Canadian literary world, but Christine Sismondo didn’t shy away from the task. Here’s the point where the review really gets going:

The rest of the book… I wouldn’t read to my dog.

Mallick thinks she is making fun of the world in a clever way. She’s never clever, and is so bigoted and unpleasant that her columns just can’t be amusing.

Sismondo zeroes in on the real issue with Mallick:

In fact, it’s a little terrifying to have somebody who claims to speak for the left be so utterly hateful to anybody who can’t afford to snub Marriott hotels for their declasse placement of the coffee machine, fly first class and shop at Holt Renfrew.

The best thing about the review? Its length. Sismondo could have stopped there — but I’m so glad she didn’t:

If ugliness and hypocrisy were the worst of the faults of this collection, it might be salvageable (at least for other rabid Canadians who thoughtlessly put down lower-middle and working-class Americans for sport).

And the final blow, a classic example of damning with faint praise:

But where Mallick deserves to be chastised for her pointless, rambling, boring essays, she deserves to be praised for her occasional clarity and self-awareness. For example, in one essay she admits to being an appalling combinatin of socialist and snob. Appalling, maybe. Snob, for sure. Two out of three ain’t bad.

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The urbantoronto.ca discussion board’s organizers have abandoned EZBoard, the dreadful system they were using earlier, and have relaunched in a much more user-friendly format while as far as I can tell keeping their archives. This has always been a potentially very useful resource, but hobbled by EZBoard – I’m surprised that as many people put up with it for as long as they did.

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There are still lots of bottles of d’Arenberg “The Hermit Crab” Viognier Marsanne in Toronto Vintages stores. We uncorked a bottle to celebrate my last in-class exam on Wednesday, to go with a yummy though artery-clogging pasta with prosciutto cream sauce.

According to the LCBO Robert Parker somewhere says “notes of honeysuckle, apple blossom, and litchi nuts in its medium-bodied, dry, exuberant, even flamboyant style.” Mind you, he adds, it “also displays some restraint and elegance.” We got dried mangoes, lanolin, pineapple, apricot (J.’s handwriting makes this look like “apriest” but that can’t be right), as well as some kind of undefined floral note. Anyway, it’s both yummy and interesting enough to be worth the $17 they’re asking for it. Think rich cream sauces, shellfish, and/or poultry with a bit of fat on it.

As an aside, I saw a blurb in a supplement to today’s Globe about Indian Rice Factory having brought in some serious sommelier people to think about their wine list. We should go, before it gets much hotter out.

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I’m no fan of the Sun chain and all its works, but I’m sort of fascinated by the Toronto Sun Family blog, which specializes in bring-out-your-dead-style daily casualty lists of editorial employees fired, resigned or laid off that day as the chain collapses. The latest casualty is John Downing, who as an editor closed the last edition of the Telegram, and I’m sure has been being a sentimental blowhard about it ever since.

They’re not big fans of Quebecor, to put it mildly, but whoever was in charge, I don’t think the Sun’s business model could have survived the stresses on it. 1) is that there don’t seem to be enough non-immigrant largely male newspaper-reading Anglophones with limited reading skills and at least some tolerance of redneck politics to float a daily newspaper any more; 2) is that the subway tabs eat their lunch, for obvious reasons; 3) is that they forfeited their stake in a potential ESL reader market because of their politics.

TMQ knows more about this sort of thing than I do.

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Today’s announcement on phasing out incandescent light bulbs by 2012 is supposed to be good news. But once again, today’s announcement overlooks one of the biggest and fastest-growing causes of peak demand during our not-all-that-hot, not-all-that-long summers: air conditioning.

More homes in Ontario have air conditioning than anywhere else in the country — although the city in Canada with the most days of temperatures above 30 degrees is in BC. There is a greater proportion of homes with air conditioning in Ontario than in Sydney, Australia.

Nationally, the average percentage of homes with air conditioners was 44% in 2005, up from 36% just four years earlier. Is that because the temperatures have risen dramatically over the last few years?Well, no. The hottest day in Toronto in the last five years was in fact in the scorching summer of 2002. The hottest days with humidex in June, July, and August were in 1957, 1995 and 1955 respectively. The average number of days with temperatures over 30 degrees tops out at 5.7 for July.

What’s wrong with air conditioning? Well, it’s unnecessary in our climate for 95% of the year. It wastes a great deal of energy. It adds to our smog problem. It makes us forget how to be comfortable outside in warm weather by not allowing our bodies to adjust to pleasant, warm temperatures. And yet, according to the provincial government:

Air conditioners can put an enormous strain on our power supplies. They’re the reason the risk of power shortages is greatest in the summer. If you have an air conditioner, it can account for as much as half of your energy use on hot summer days.

Can’t live without it?

Let’s be honest – most of us wouldn’t give up our air conditioner. That’s okay; you don’t have to feel guilty.

Why not?

Personally, I think Hydro Quebec has the right idea. I hope Ontario hydro authorities are paying attention.

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"Mobile calling" ad

Originally uploaded by morecoffeeplease.

So here’s a picture of a Rogers Video calling ad which is now in the subway. There’s a picture of a smiling girl on the phone, which is being held in a man’s left hand; in the background is a slightly rumpled bed with nighttime lighting.

First there was cellphone porn, now subway-ad promotion of videophone sex? We all know that all technological advances are driven by sex, but must it be quite this overt?

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This may be helpful. (Hat tip to aldaily and Chronicle article, also worth looking at.)

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Offensive former Green Party candidate spews venom as he’s kicked to the curb:

[Potvin] added Sunday that if the Greens think getting rid of a candidate will squelch a controversy, then they don’t know what national politics is like.

Hmmm. Let’s think of some recent occasions where political parties have dismissed candidates, shall we?

Reaching way back to last month, I present Jean-Francois Plante, ADQ candidate for the Montreal-area riding of Deux-Montagnes. He slammed the Dec. 6 ceremony commerorating 14 young women who were murdered by a gunman at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989.

Not only did his party go on to become the official opposition for the province, but his last-minute replacement as candidate actually won her riding.

Or let’s look back at the federal election of January 2006 and the delightful Conservative candidate Derek Zaisman, tossed out mere weeks before the election as charges of smuggling emerged.

Although the party dismissed him as a candidate, it was too late to remove his name from the ballot and the yet-to-be-convicted crook came in a respectable third with just under 20% of the vote and just 450 votes behind the upright Liberal candidate. And, well, we all know whose party went on the form Canada’s eternally New Government.

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