The Plastic Bag Reduction Act comes into force here on PEI next week.

My favourite part of the legislation—other than the “no more plastic bags” part—is that there’s an exemption to allow plastic bags to “transport live fish.”

“Hold on, Marv, what about goldfish?!”, one can imagine the engaged public servant exclaiming during the drafting of the bill.

Which causes me to recall a song I wrote for Catherine during our early courting:

I don’t like your fish, I don’t like them very much.

I don’t like the way they look at me, and talk about such and such (and such and such).

I don’t like your fish, I don’t like them one bit.

I don’t like the way they swim around, and I don’t like the way they shit (all over the place).

Chorus:

But I sure (sure) do like you. Yes I do.

Not the best wooing song, perhaps. But it worked.

I met this morning with Shayne Connolly, my personable life insurance broker. While reviewing our coverage he scrolled by the section of the PDF that had my actuarial age at death as 84.

It wasn’t so much that this was news to me as how casually it floated by.

According to the US Social Security actuarial tables, my probability of dying in the next year is 0.65%. By the time I’m 84 it goes up to 8%. If I live to 119, I’ll have an 88% probability of being dead with a year.

In this, as in all things statistical, the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould in The Median Isn’t the Message are helpful:

We still carry the historical baggage of a Platonic heritage that seeks sharp essences and definite boundaries. (Thus we hope to find an unambiguous “beginning of life” or “definition of death,” although nature often comes to us as irreducible continua.) This Platonic heritage, with its emphasis in clear distinctions and separated immutable entities, leads us to view statistical measures of central tendency wrongly, indeed opposite to the appropriate interpretation in our actual world of variation, shadings, and continua. In short, we view means and medians as the hard “realities,” and the variation that permits their calculation as a set of transient and imperfect measurements of this hidden essence. If the median is the reality and variation around the median just a device for its calculation, the “I will probably be dead in eight months” may pass as a reasonable interpretation.

Some encouraging discussion about cycling during Question Period in the Legislative Assembly yesterday, prompted by a question from Steve Howard, Green Party Shadow Critic for Transportation, Infrastructure, and Energy:

Mr. Howard: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Electric bikes are another emerging trend. These can be used to get around outside of winter months. This combination of active transportation and small scale electrification will become more prevalent. Are there any plans to encourage the uptake of electric bikes?

Speaker: The hon. Minister of Transportation, Infrastructure and Energy.

Mr. Myers: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. At this point we haven’t even gotten a program off the ground to help people get into electric cars, so we’re working towards that. As we talked about in House here last week, I believe our solar option is stage one to living a sustainable lifestyle and as I’ve said to you in private discussions, I believe that electric vehicles is clearly stage two – something that I’m committed to work towards, it’s something that our government is committed to work towards and I’ll take any recommendations you have seriously and I’ll bring them back to our efficiency people and to our energy people and make sure that they get on the agenda.

Speaker: The hon. Member from Summerside-South Drive.

Mr. Howard: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. The active transportation network’s bike lanes and regulations will be sufficient to encourage the safe use of these of these types of active transportation. The range extension that electric assist affords means it would become much easier to bike into town from rural areas – meaning we will see an uptake in bicycles on our highways. Can we expect to see any improvements to highway planning infrastructure that will accommodate the inclusion of more bicycle traffic?

Speaker: The hon. Minister of Transportation, Infrastructure and Energy.

Mr. Myers: Thank you, Mr. Speaker. So we have a sustainable transportation committee – the Minister of Environment, Water and Climate Change; him and I set that up not that long ago. We have a strategy that we’re about to unveil that’s going to cover a number of topics, one of them will be active transportation links and how we plan to deal with them moving forward in the future, so yes, it’s on our agenda. I realize there hasn’t been a lot done in the province in the last 100 years as far as bicycle goes. Prior to that probably there was. At this point, since there are some vehicles on the road there’s been very little done to accommodate any other type of vehicle on the road. Yes, it’s something that we’re looking at. It’s something that’s in our planning, and it’s something that we’re going to try to get to as we build new highway structures across Prince Edward Island.

I’m happy both that the question was asked, and also the spirit of the reply.

Clark reports on the experience of his family eating at Hojo’s Japanese Cuisine, a new restaurant “in the old Pat & Willys.”

As is the case with most restaurants in Charlottetown, the cost was about 2-3x the price of a similar meal in Hsinchu, but unlike the “fries-with-that” places that litter the city, it’s a worthwhile treat.

Relative to 25 years ago, when we arrived here in Charlottetown, the proportion of “fries-with-that” restaurants has dramatically decreased; there was a time when that was almost all you could get if you ate out.

Today, within walking distance of my office I can get bibimbap at three different places; we have two Vietnamese restaurants, three Thai restaurants, and three Indian restaurants. Our 1993 selves wouldn’t recognize the place.

I first met Jeff Eagar when the PEI Home and School Federation hired him to shoot and edit a short film about the Island’s universal provincial school food program.

Tonight, as I was waiting to pick up our food at Richard’s, Jeff said hello, and we had a chat.

He was just back from India, he told me, a trip planned in part to recognize the 20th anniversary of Bang7, a holiday that Jeff invented in 1999 with his brothers, and that they–and an increasing number of their friends and familiars–have celebrated every year since.

Happiness.  Good health.  Love.  These are simple concepts buried under skinny jeans, social media hashtags and shiny, new cell phones. Society is lost in a culture fixated on possessions, appearance and impatience.  Contentment seems illusive in today’s manic and ‘wired’ world.  It’s a problem that affects nearly all of us and it’s this reason that 20 years ago us brothers created the unique holiday Bang 7 – Life Day.

Twenty years ago in the tiny remote town of Pushkar in the Rajasthan desert of western India us brothers decided we needed something that would remind us of what is actually important in life.  We needed something that would keep us grounded and remind us of what truly makes us happy.  We had been travelling through India for months with little more than a backpack and a few basic provisions, but we were happy, healthy and content; a simple and fulfilling existence.  Sunsets had beauty, food had flavour, conversations with strangers were fun.  So on June 7th, back in 1999, in a wonderful moment of simplicity and clarity, we created Bang 7 – Life Day in order to never forget what life is truly about.  Since that day, every year on the 7th of June, we have been taking that day to celebrate life, love, our health and the people around us.  In addition, we have been sharing the celebration with as many people as we can around the world.  Whether you are Indian, American or Japanese, regardless if you’re black or white, female or male, Sikh or Christian it’s all the same, Bang 7 is for everyone.

Given the spirit of Bang7, it’s kind of appropriate that I reconnected with Jeff at Richard’s: a visit there is one of Catherine’s favourite summertime things to do, and yet our last time there was in August of 2016, two years ago.

There are myriad reasons for our long absence: some, like “when you’re on chemo everything tastes like metal” are completely understandable.

But there’s also a good dose of forgetting to do the things that really matter that was responsible, and I’m happy that we took the effort today, and thus got a reminder of “what is actually important in life.”

I’m happy to report that Richard’s is better than ever–with the long lines to match: the fish and chips were simply fantastic, the sun was shining, and the summertime vibe everywhere.

In Google Maps you can click on any point of interest on the map to see details and, optionally, you can click “Save” to save the point for later reference.

When you click “Save” you’re presented with a list of options: Favorites, Want to go, Starred places, plus any lists you’ve created previously:

You might imagine, because of the way they’re presented, that each of these options simply represents a co-equal category in the “Your Places” section in Google Maps, and certainly the way the lists are presented there suggests this is the case:

It turns out, however, that under the hood, at least as far as your ability to export your places using Google Takeout is concerned, these are very different categories.

Starred places

The Starred places list is exported from Google Takeout via the Maps (your places) export:

The list that gets exported as a result is a GeoJSON file with each starred place represented like this:

{
    "geometry" : {
      "coordinates" : [ -0.1305119, 51.5109554 ],
      "type" : "Point"
    },
    "properties" : {
      "Google Maps URL" : "http://maps.google.com/?cid=14538551136252988017",
      "Location" : {
        "Address" : "5-6 Leicester Square, London WC2H 7NA, United Kingdom",
        "Business Name" : "Cineworld Cinema - London Leicester Square",
        "Country Code" : "GB",
        "Geo Coordinates" : {
          "Latitude" : "51.5109554",
          "Longitude" : "-0.1305119"
        }
      },
      "Published" : "2016-05-15T16:32:36Z",
      "Title" : "Empire Cinema",
      "Updated" : "2016-05-15T16:32:36Z"
    },
    "type" : "Feature"
}

That’s about as much information as I’d ever want about a starred place, and it’s very helpful to have.

Everything else

Everything else–Favorites, Want to go, plus any lists you’ve created previously–is available from Google Takeout via the Saved export:

These places cannot be exported as a helpful GeoJSON file, only as a CSV, and the CSV only contains the title of the saved place, any note you added, its Google Maps URL and any comments:

Title,Note,URL,Comment
Cyclesmith,,https://www.google.com/maps/place/Cyclesmith/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x4b5a222a1bfe6b69:0xf8fad3e13f099e36,
3660 Strawberry Hill St,,https://www.google.com/maps/place/3660+Strawberry+Hill+St/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x4b5a21095c7e943b:0xcaafa3916fb4a0e6,
Sportwheels Sports Excellence,,https://www.google.com/maps/place/Sportwheels+Sports+Excellence/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x4b5988577cfca89f:0x7002bb9c32866180,
The eBike Centre Halifax,,https://www.google.com/maps/place/The+eBike+Centre+Halifax/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x4b5a2367215d4d2b:0x51aa4206ac656daf,
Dragon E Bikes Ltd,,https://www.google.com/maps/place/Dragon+E+Bikes+Ltd/data=!4m2!3m1!1s0x4b5a21a86a32afe3:0xc6fe4d5ec596b038,

There’s no geographical information in the file.

If you’ve been treating Google Maps’ ability to save places as a way of building up a list of places that you later hope to use in some other system, you’ll want to consider only saving to the Starred places list, as it provides the greatest flexibility for later export.

Cory Doctorow writing about Facebook in 2018:

Facebook isn’t a mind-control ray. It’s a tool for finding people who possess uncommon, hard-to-locate traits, whether that’s “person thinking of buying a new refrigerator,” “person with the same rare disease as you,” or “person who might participate in a genocidal pogrom,” and then pitching them on a nice side-by-side or some tiki torches, while showing them social proof of the desirability of their course of action, in the form of other people (or bots) that are doing the same thing, so they feel like they’re part of a crowd.

Maciej Cegłowski writing in 2016 from Antarctica:

The usual dynamic between locals and tourists is backwards in the Ross Sea. Everywhere else in the world, tourists are the ones ruining everything, showing up in hordes, drinking hard, contributing nothing but money to whatever place they’ve chosen to culturally strip-mine for their entertainment. The locals have to struggle to reclaim the quiet life that attracted the tourists in the first place, and their connection to home is eroded by having to role play for a changing cast of strangers. Regrettable t-shirts are printed and sold. A Señor Frog’s opens. It’s grim.

Here, though, the tourists are the ones keeping it real. McMurdo is a scar on the landscape, the least natural place in Antarctica, and most of the people working here are seasonal transients. They come down for a sense of adventure, clean grease traps for six months in a windowless building, and go back to where they came from. The only natives in Antarctica are penguins, and you can spend years at the American base without seeing one of them.

I’ve been experimenting with Termux on my Moto G7 Play. While my route in was looking for a terminal emulator for the phone, I’ve since discovered that Termux us much, much more than that.

For example, I can run Node-RED on my phone via Termux, which gives me a rich visual programming tool for wiring up inputs to outputs.

What kinds of inputs, you ask?

Well, via Termux: API, I gain access to all of the sensors on my phone. And it turns out there are a lot of them:

# termux-sensor -l
{
  "sensors": [
    "LSM6DSM Accelerometer",
    "MMC5603NJ Magnetometer",
    "MMC5603NJ Magnetometer Uncalibrated",
    "LSM6DSM Gyroscope",
    "LSM6DSM Gyroscope Uncalibrated",
    "EPL259x ALS\/PS PROX",
    "EPL259x ALS\/PS ALS",
    "LSM6DSM Accelerometer -Wakeup Secondary",
    "MMC5603NJ Magnetometer -Wakeup Secondary",
    "MMC5603NJ Magnetometer Uncalibrated -Wakeup Secondary",
    "LSM6DSM Gyroscope -Wakeup Secondary",
    "LSM6DSM Gyroscope Uncalibrated -Wakeup Secondary",
    "EPL259x ALS\/PS PROX -Non Wakeup Secondary",
    "EPL259x ALS\/PS ALS -Wakeup Secondary",
    "Gravity",
    "Linear Acceleration",
    "Rotation Vector",
    "Step Detector",
    "Step Counter",
    "Significant Motion Detector",
    "Game Rotation Vector",
    "GeoMagnetic Rotation Vector",
    "Tilt Detector",
    "Android Stationary Detector",
    "Android Motion Detector",
    "Gravity -Wakeup Secondary",
    "Linear Acceleration -Wakeup Secondary",
    "Rotation Vector -Wakeup Secondary",
    "Step Detector -Wakeup Secondary",
    "Step Counter -Wakeup Secondary",
    "Game Rotation Vector -Wakeup Secondary",
    "GeoMagnetic Rotation Vector -Wakeup Secondary",
    "Chop Chop Gesture",
    "Moto Glance Gesture",
    "Camera Gesture",
    "Stowed",
    "Display Rotate",
    "Flatup",
    "Flatdown",
    "LTS Gesture",
    "FTM Gesture",
    "LTV Gesture",
    "Off Body",
    "capsense_top",
    "capsense_bottom"
  ]
}

Lots more experimenting to do now!

Colourful men’s shoes don’t come along everyday. And so when I needed to replace the leaky shoes this afternoon, these jumped off the shelf at me.