My seminal memory of high school history class is a black and white film that we were shown about the war of 1812. It was a low budget educational film, and because of its low budget there were several scenes where it was obvious that the characters were walking around and around and around the same tree. I guess they could afford only one. We were not impressed. But we did learn something about Laura Secord.

Oliver is taking MUS801A - Styles of Popular Music this semester, a course that offers a decidedly different lens on history: he reports that this week the focus is on the 1970s, and today’s subjects included Joni Mitchell, the Eagles and Frank Zappa.

While the 1980s were certainly a more educationally enlightened decade than, say, the 1950s, the idea that Frank Zappa would ever be a subject of study in high school history would have been so outside the realm of possibility so as to never have even been considered.

We’re traveling to Halifax tomorrow and so Oliver is missing two days of school. As a result, he’s going to miss the history of punk.

Anne Boyer has a piece in the April 8, 2019 issue of The New Yorker, What Cancer Takes Away, where she writes, in part:

Being sick makes excessive space for thinking, and excessive thinking makes room for thoughts of death. But I was always starving for experience, not its cessation, and, if the experience of thought was the only experience my body could give me beyond the one of pain, then opening myself to wild, deathly thinking had to be allowed. I warned my friends in a set of e-mailed instructions: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death.

In the you-or-someone-in-your-family-has-cancer world there’s a social prohibition about talking about death. As though talking about death will kill you. Or as though admitting the possibility of death is somehow bursting a bubble of hope, letting the team down; “don’t talk that way.”

It took me a while to be able to say “when Catherine dies” out loud. But as soon as I did, the monsters receded just a bit, as I’d taken away some of the power they have from being unspeakable.

I’ve had Montreal, by Port Cities (recorded | live | remix) on rotation for weeks now.

It is a lovely song, with strong lyrics. But, more than that, I think it’s a sort of universal song, inasmuch as the possibility of meeting someone at a house party in Montreal is within the atlas of possibilities for many Canadians: it just seems like the kind of thing we might all have in our past.

I recall hearing a story, perhaps apocryphal, about the late Marc Gallant: he was living in an apartment in Montreal, and about to be evicted. So he invited everyone he knew to a house party and asked everyone to take something from the apartment home with them, to prevent the apartment’s contents from being seized by the landlord.

Just over a decade ago we saw Bruce Guthro in concert at Harmony House in Hunter River; Bruce brought his then-17-year-old son Dylan up on stage with him during that concert, and it was obvious that he’d inherited the family musicality. Ten years on he’s one of the trio that is Port Cities.

VBike, in Vermont, is a non-profit cycling advocacy group:

VBike is a unique advocacy group dedicated to bringing super bike mobility to Vermont. We’re talking a bike revolution. Electric-assist cargobikes for families & households, e-bikes and e-trikes for seniors & commuters – it’s a game changer! Now we can get over the hills, ride our kids, smile, and not be confined to the automobile.

In my experience it’s really hard to get information about anything other than “regular” bicycles here on PEI; while bike shops occasionally get in tricycles or three-wheel recumbent bicycles, they tend to be presented as a rare, unusual and expensive.

It seems clear that the future is going to demand that we use bicycles more, and for that to be accessible to all of us we’re going to have to tackle a broader range of active transportation options.

I was setting up audio and video in Skype this morning in preparation for a call with my friends Elmine and Ton and noticed a setting, Blur my background for all calls, that I hadn’t seen before.

Here’s what I looked like with the setting toggled off:

And here’s the blur turned on:

The background was noticeable enough for Ton to remark on it; I like it because it reduces the visual clutter of my office while not completely eliminating the background (presumably a “remove the background” setting would be a possibility using similar algorithms).

When Ton toggled the setting on it was less satisfying: there was a bookshelf in the close background that Skype couldn’t quite distinguish from Ton’s head, leaving him with a bookish halo effect.

I’ve largely abandoned Skype, as my weekly conference call with the home office has replaced it with Zoom. One of the reasons we made the switch is that Skype updates were forever interrupting our calls, but with no obvious improvement in functionality stemming from the update; indeed this “blur” function is the first new feature I can recall in Skype in a long, long time. Not enough to win me back, but still interesting nonetheless.

Zoom is not without its own real time video processing: it offers a Touch up my appearance setting that appears to work like a kind of digital putty knife:

Here’s Zoom with the setting turned off:

While Skype’s background-blurring feature seems innocuous and helpful, Zoom’s touch-up feature seems creepy and dishonest. And so I leave it off.

The seminal learning I took away from grade 2 concerned simple machines: Ms. Abrams, our teacher, did an excellent job at schooling us in the ways of the pulley, the lever, the inclined plane and the rest. There must have been something about the elegance of getting something for nothing that appealed to me, as the lessons stuck with me.

I thought of simple machines when I read Accessibility guidelines as heuristics, or the need for a ramp and emergency pants by Anne Gibson, wherein she makes a solid case for the utility of everyone installing an inclined plane at their house:

A few years ago, we replaced the back deck in our backyard. Instead of stairs leading to a damaged brick patio, I requested an ADA-compliant ramp that runs alongside the house, terminating just at the garage door.

The contractor was puzzled. “Why an ADA-compliant ramp?”

The obvious reason is because if I ever land myself in a wheelchair, or my husband does, it’d be nice if we can still get in the house.

The less obvious reason is because I am too lazy to go do the research myself on what a safe, usable, effective ramp consists of. How long should it be? What’s its maximum slope and rise? What’s the minimum width? The Americans with Disabilities Act research have already done all of that work so that neither I nor my contractor have to. We just need to comply with it.

The reason I gave the contractor was, “We collect pinball machines. If it’s safe for transporting a fragile yet heavy human being, it’s probably also safe for transporting pinball machines.”

Another word for accessible design is good design, and Gibson’s post is a helpful reminder of that.

Inclined planes entered my field of view again this morning when YouTube offered up a video of the Elbląg Canal in Poland (can the YouTube algorithm be so good that it realized I was in a simple machines-receptive state of mind?). The canal incorporates canal inclined planes to overcome a water level difference of 100 m between Lake Drużno and lake Jeziorak:

The inclines all consist of two parallel rail tracks with a gauge of 3.27 m. Boats are carried on carriages which run on these rails. The inclines rise from the lower level of the canal to a summit and then down a second shorter incline to the upper canal level. The first part of the main incline and the short upper incline were both built at a gradient of 1:24. A carriage is lowered down the incline to counterbalance an upward moving carriage. Once the downward moving carriage has reached the summit and started down the main incline its weight helps pull up the upward moving carriage. This allowed the slope of the incline for this section to be built at a higher gradient of 1:12.

Here’s a photo of one of the inclined planes in the canal:

Here in Canada there is one canal inclined plane, the Big Chute Marine Railway, part of the Trent-Severn waterway in Ontario. Its reason for being is at least partially biological rather than elevational, as part of a plan to keep sea lamprey out of Lake Couchiching and Lake Simcoe:

Research was done to find a way to prevent the migration of the sea lamprey into Lake Couchiching and Lake Simcoe, while still effectively increasing the flow of traffic. A biologist sat at the bottom of the railway for days, checking the bottom of boats that locked through, and finally saw a lamprey attached to the bottom of a boat. The lamprey fell off after less than 6 meters, so the railway was determined to be effective at preventing the sea lamprey’s migration. In 1976, it was finally decided that a new, enlarged railway would be built.

As it happens, I was resident at Camp Kitchikewana, just 20 km to the west, that same summer of 1976, but knew nothing of the burgeoning simple machine megaproject next door.

The Trent-Severn canal system runs from Lake Ontario to Lake Huron and is an impressive an engineering achievement. It’s also been something of a spine for significant portions of my life: beyond my childhood proximity to Big Chute, I later worked at a summer camp at Lakefield College School (on the system), lived in residence at Trent University with a view of the system from my window, spent time at a cottage owned by a friend of my mother’s from college on Stoney Lake, dated a woman whose family had a cottage at Rama (on the system north of Lake Simcoe), and, over the years, I’ve known people from Trenton, Campbellford, and Rice Lake.

Oddly, save for taking my young summer camp charges out in kayaks in the Otonabee River, and a bit of sailing in Stoney Lake, I’ve never actually been out on the canal. I’ll have to do that someday.

I’ve been a Jane Siberry fan for as long as it’s been possible to be so, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that no musician has been more influential in my life over the course of the last 35 years.

And yet, after seeing her play live at Ontario Place, and then again at Victoria Hall in Cobourg, both in the late 1980s, I hadn’t had a chance to see her perform for the last three decades.

But last night she played Harmony House in Hunter River and I had a seat in the front row.

It was a unique evening.

I’d imagined myself to be the only Jane Siberry fan on Prince Edward Island: from the size and ferocity of the audience, this is clearly not the case. To my surprise, there were many who I’d consider part of my not-too-distant-extended-community in the house last night, people I’d never considered I might have this in common with. It was a good reminder that commonality is often hidden behind closed doors.

And it was a weird concert: a kind of aural patchwork quilt of sounds and stories that appeared, initially, to be too random and too slapdash but that, over the course of the evening, shimmered into something larger. It was really quite delightful to witness and be a part of.

At the end of the evening Jane offered up three of her paintings for sale–”I can’t take these on the plane with me”–and the one you see between her guitar and her feet, right in my eyeline, was the one that caught my eye (when it’s not rendered in black and white it’s all manner of orange, green, red and blue). So I waited until the crowds had cleared, offered her all the money in my wallet, and we had a deal.

A good night.

Earlier in the year, in response to a post I wrote about salted capers, Jeremy Cherfas left a helpful comment.

Jeremy had found his way here, across the ocean from his home across the sea, via Ton’s link to my post about editing OpenStreetMap.

In the process of figuring out who this Jeremy was, and why he knew about capers, I came across his Annual Report for 2018, which he started with:

Monthly reports have been going more than a year now, even if I have missed a few, including last December. What to add for an annual report? I think this has to be a different kind of beast, more like a GTD high-level view. But there’s still room for some low-level stuff, down at the bottom, thanks to Exist.

I followed that link to Exist and found, on the other end, a delightful Australian project that enables one to aggregate personal analytics and, in theory, to gain insights:

By combining data from services you already use, we can help you understand what makes you more happy, productive, and active.

Bring your activity from your phone or fitness tracker, and add other services like your calendar for greater context on what you’re up to.

Both as a researcher and someone increasingly prone to seeking insight, this was a good tree for me to bark up, and I immediately started a trial, converting to a paid subscription after the 30 day free window. I’ve been using Exist every day since, and I’m just now, after 4 months, starting to see the faint glimmer of useful insights on the horizon.

Here’s a taste of what I track in Exist.

The Android phone in my pocket is running Google Fit, which counts the steps I walk each day.

I can see my steps per day, averaged by the week (the harshest part of winter was not good for my activity level):

I can see which days of the week I’m most active (there’s a clear pattern here, with my activity level falling over the course of the work week, and then picking up on the weekend):

And I’m given a set of correlations between steps and various other things that I’m tracking. For example, I use Exist’s “custom tracking” feature to mark days with various tags of my own choosing. I use “Receiver” on days I visit Receiver Coffee, for example, “Lunchathome” for days when I eat lunch at home, and “Napeve” for days when I have a nap in the evening:

These charts tell me things like “I walk more when I travel” (common sense) and “I walk more when I don’t have a nap in the afternoon or a nap in the evening” (good to know).

Because I don’t wear a fitness or sleep tracker, but wanted to track my sleep, I used the Exist API to code up a tiny web app to allow me to manually enter my bedtime and wake time each day.

I’ve been tracking my sleep for two months now. The bump in late March and early April was due to vacation and work travel where, apparently, I get about an hour more sleep a night (I didn’t know that).

The bottom chart confirms that I sleep an extra hour on the weekend, that I get an average of 7:30 a night, and that I sleep a little more on Thursdays (for reasons unknown).

The sleep correlations that are surfaced are a combination of the not-very-useful (I may spend more time asleep when I’m in Salem, but I was only there for a single night), the curious (why do I sleep more when it’s sunnier?) to the delightful (the Max Richter album I have downloaded on Spotify is his eight and a half hour Sleep, “a piece that is meant to be listened to at night”; obviously it works).

I bought a Withings wifi-enabled scale in January when it was on sale, and I’ve been measuring my weight at the same time every morning, about 30 minutes after I get up.

I think the readings in early January were an aberration caused by my entering a best guess for my starting weight into the Withings app, so it’s really only the week of January 27 onward for which I trust the data.

There’s not much to be gleaned from Exist’s attempts to correlate my body weight to other things, perhaps because it’s remained relatively consistent. It does tell me “your weight is higher after you’re not listening to music,” and “your weight is higher after you don’t tag Travel,” which are intriguing. Body weight, I think, is something best analyzed over a longer window than a season, so I’ll keep at it; certainly the ease of the wifi scale makes it dead simple to do so.

Another thing Exist is well setup to allow me to track manually is my mood. It’s a relatively blunt instrument, with only 5 gradations. And I’m not sure I’d ever dare to tag a day with a rating of “1,” as that would admit the depths of complete despair. But after 131 days of tracking my mood, I find myself surprised by the results:

I’d been under the impression, perhaps because I’ve had a good run of mood, that I’d tracked almost every day as a 4, but, I learned from this chart, that only happens 68% of the time; 18% of the time I have a “perfect” day, and 13% of the time I rate my mood a 2 or a 3.

Along with entering a numeric mood rating, Exist also prompts me for some words or phrases to explain my mood; I found the aggregation of this really interesting:

The closest that Exist comes to out-and-out recommendations for lifestyle changes is the “What affects your mood?” chart.

Following its advice I should travel more, to warmer places, stay up late, listen to music, stay active and sleep in, and I should avoid sketching, going to Leonhard’s for coffee, eating lunch at home, eating at Mad Wok, having a nap in the evening, and being dizzy.

While Exist is primarily tailored to allowing me to compare me to myself, it does occasionally venture into letting me know how I compare to the global average for all Exist users:

So I’m more sedentary than others (warning sign), but I go to bed and get up around the same time as everyone else, and sleep just a tiny bit more than average.

Beyond the joy of measuring, I enjoy using Exist because of the small team behind it, their sense of design, their openness to openness, their blog, and their quick turnaround for addressing support questions.

If you want to try Exist yourself, follow this link to get an extra month tacked onto your free trial, and to earn me a $2 credit against my subscription.

After seeming weeks of ceaseless rain, we woke up to sunshine this morning.

And the trees reacted by bursting out buds.

I don’t believe the winter-spring transition has ever been as clear cut as this: yesterday the sky was dark and the trees were midwintery; this morning there is life everywhere you look.