Conservative Leader (and possible Premier) Dennis King was quoted in The Guardian this morning on the carbon tax:

“We understand the premise, that if you put a price on carbon, it is to encourage people to change their habits. The challenge we have here is we don’t have any other options other than to drive.”

Mr. King lives in Hunter River.

There are two buses a day that travel from Hunter River to Charlottetown, one at 7:15 a.m. and one at 8:14 a.m. They pick up at Central Queens Elementary School.

There are two buses back from town to Hunter River, one at 4:20 p.m. and one at 5:30 p.m., leaving from Confederation Centre of the Arts.

The trip takes about 30 minutes each way, which is about the same time it would take to drive a private car. There is WiFi on the buses.

So there are “other options other than to drive,” at least for him.

And if the limited schedule of two buses in and two buses out per day is not sufficiently convenient for Mr. King’s commute, he is in the lucky position, as a new legislator, of being able to do something about that.

When I planted our Karla Bernard campaign sign in the front garden 10 days ago, it was still decidedly winter-like on PEI.

This morning, the morning after the election where Karla won her seat, the front garden is filled with the signs of a green spring:

Elections PEI published results of yesterday’s provincial general election as a collection of HTML tables, which are not well-suited when you’re looking for machine-readable data to do interesting things with. Things like this visualization of the winners of each poll:

Or this visualization of the party that came second place in every poll:

Or this visualization of polls where Green candidates came first or second:

Fortunately, HTML tables are sort of machine-readable to start, and it doesn’t table much to parse them and turn them into something even more machine-readable.

So this morning I wrote some code to do exactly that, and you can download it and take it for a ride or, if you’re just looking for the data itself you can grab one of two files:

• pei-election-results.json is a JSON file of all of the results for each district of each poll.
• pei-election-poll-winners.csv is a CSV file of only the winners of each poll.

It’s that “winners” file that I used to create the visualization above, which you can explore in an interactive version that I’ve just published to the QGIS Cloud.

I combined the CSV file with the Electoral Districts GIS layer. To be able to do this I first needed to create “virtual field” called “distpoll” in the Electoral Districts layer:

With that virtual field in place, I could join the winners CSV file to the Electoral Districts layer, using the “distpoll” field for the join:

And with the files joined, I used “rule-based” styles in QGIS to colour-code each poll by the winner (leaving those polls with no winner–those in District 9 in this case, where the election was delayed–white):

I’m hopeful that others can build on this code to make additional interesting things from the results.

Karla Bernard is our new Green MLA for District 12, in a Green Official Opposition. We are very, very happy.

I took screen shots of the four political party websites this morning–polling day–for posterity.

C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed:

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being  afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing.

At other times it feels like being mildly concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.

My friend Ton writes about the air quality impact of Easter Fires.

Easter Fires!? I’d never heard of this tradition.

(P.E.I. Green candidate, son die in canoeing accident days before election)

In a very special episode of Pondercast, Laurie Brown interviews Icelandic musician Ólafur Arnalds, bringing two of my favourite people together.

During their chat, Arnalds describes an Icelandic word, sköpunargleði, like this:

In Icelandic we actually have a beautiful word for this; I’ve been looking for it in English, but I don’t think it exists. There’s a word in Icelandic that is sköpunargleði. It’s a word for the feeling that you get when you are creating. It doesn’t mean creating. It means the feeling of creating. You could call it… the closest I’ve found in English… would be creative joy, the joy of creating.

But it’s not exactly joy. It’s a different feeling. There’s a creating feeling, which is just this feeling that you get when you somehow manage to forget about everything else than exactly what you’re creating.

This is sometimes called flow state; that’s one scientific method of explaining this.

But it’s this feeling you have when, suddenly, two, three, four hours have passed, and you just wake up. And you go “what just happened?”

And you created something.

That time in between was that creative joy, that flow state or, in Icelandic, sköpunargleði.

What an absolutely necessary word to describe a feeling I instantly recognized, one that I know and love and wish I could spend more time in.

Go listen to some of Arnalds’ music now.