In his book The Human Use of Human Beings, first published in 1950, author Norbert Weiner describes his coining of the term cybernetics:

Until recently, there was no existing word for this complex of ideas, and in order to embrace the whole field by a single term, I felt constrained to invent one. Hence “Cybernetics,” which I derived from the Greek word kubernetes, or “steersman,” the same Greek word from which we eventually derive our word “governor.”

He goes on to elaborate:

It is the purpose of Cybernetics to develop a language and techniques that will enable us indeed to attack the problem of control and communication in general, but also to find the proper repertory of ideas and techniques to classify their particular manifestations under certain concepts.

It was impossible not to think of cybernetics while watching Premier Wade MacLauchlan’s address to senior provincial public servants yesterday, The Premier as Public Servant Leader.

In his address, MacLauchlan clearly demonstrates that he is, at heart, a cyberneticist – a “steersman,” if you will – and that he views his role as Premier to manage a complex system of people, resources, and motivations to, as he references several times, “move the trend lines” of prosperity, demographics, revenue, and expenses.

The Premier’s construction of “ten lenses” through which policy will be regarded – collegial, people, prosperity, engagement, ethical, strategic, rural, frugality, entrepreneurial, small is big – surely equips his office, and his government, with a set of tuned “organs” that Weiner describes:

Much of this book concerns the limits of communication within and among individuals. Man is immersed in a world which he perceives through his sense organs. Information that he receives is co-ordinated through his brain and nervous system until, after the proper process of storage, collation, and selection, it emerges through effector organs, generally his muscles. These in turn act on the external world, and also react on the central nervous system through receptor organs such as the end organs of kinaesthesia; and the information received by the kinaesthetic organs is combined with his already accumulated store of information to influence future action.

This approach to Prince Edward Island as a cybernetically-governable system is echoed when MacLauchlan discusses his “strategic lens”:

The first role of the premier as a public servant leader is to identify strategic priorities and communicate them to the public service and the entire community. Without prosperity, we do not have a pretty future. Economic growth must be our top priority. With prosperity, our demographic trend lines will adjust, with the right strategic efforts and policies, to reflect the fact that we are retaining, repatriating and recruiting a younger, talented and entrepreneurial population.

These strategic priorities, prosperity and population, will be reflected across government. They are not a substitute for commitments to deliver services such as health, education, social assistance or environmental stewardship. However, if we cannot grow the economy and rejuvenate our population, our ability to deliver services in other areas will become increasingly stressed.

The premier’s leadership role, in addition to identifying strategic priorities, is to ask the right questions, repeatedly. I think of this as a Socratic form of leadership. Specifically, I will be heard to ask regularly, in response to proposed initiatives: Where’s the growth? How will we measure the return on investment? What does this do to change our demographic trend lines?

In saying this, MacLauchlan echoes Weiner’s description of the role of information in cybernetics:

Information is a name for the content of what is exchanged with the outer world as we adjust to it, and make our adjustment felt upon it. The process of receiving and of using information is the process of our adjusting to the contingencies of the outer environment, and of our living effectively within that environment. The needs and the complexity of modern life make greater demands on this process of information than ever before, and our press, our museums, our scientific laboratories, our universities, our libraries and textbooks, are obliged to meet the needs of this process or fail in their purpose. To live effectively is to live with adequate information. Thus, communication and control belong to the essence of man’s inner life, even as they belong to his life in society.

The Premier’s “What does this do to change our demographic trend lines?” is Weiner’s “the information received by the kinaesthetic organs is combined with his already accumulated store of information to influence future action.”

MacLauchlan is not alone in being a cyberneticist; newly-elected leader of the PC Party, Rob Lantz, is, both by inclination, chosen career as a digital worker, and demonstrated action as a member of Charlottetown City Council, a cyberneticist in his own right.

While his convention speech this weekend at the PC Party Leadership Convention was for a political audience, not a public service one, and therefore was less finely drawn than MacLauchlan’s address to the public service, Lantz demonstrated evidence of his own cybernetic approach to governance:

Lantz, like MacLauchlan, speaks of the twin pressures of demography and prosperity, and positions himself as a “problem solver”:

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, nobody does, but I’m a problem solver, I know how to listen, I know how to weigh the evidence, analyze the facts, and I know how to make decisions… It’s time for hard work, smart decisions, humility and listening. It’s time for building on our strengths and tackling our weaknesses.

That’s political rhetoric for a political audience, yes, but combined with the evidence of Lantz’s approach to government on city council, an approach that was generally regarded as open and collaborative, it suggests that he would be well-equipped to be a manager, a filter, an amplifier of the type of “messages” that Weiner writes about:

Messages are themselves a form of pattern and organization. Indeed, it is possible to treat sets of messages as having an entropy like sets of states of the external world. Just as entropy is a measure of disorganization, the information carried by a set of messages is a measure of organization. In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems.

I had a spirited discussion yesterday with a good friend with a deep knowledge of Island politics; I suggested to her that Lantz and MacLauchlan were opposites: Lantz the digital tradesman, MacLauchlan the intellectual, Lantz the self-styled realist, MacLauchlan the self-styled optimist. She reminded me that Lantz and MacLauchlan are, in far more ways, cut from exactly the same cloth. What she meant was that they are both men, both well-off, both from “strong Island stock,” and so forth.

And of course she was right: they are more alike than they are different.

And perhaps in no way more so than their shared vision of Prince Edward Island as a system that can be managed and, what’s more, a system they are capable of managing.

While it might seem self-evident that anyone putting themselves forward to be premier would necessarily regard themselves in this light, there is less evidence to suggest that Prince Edward Island premiers-recent – Ghiz, Binns, Milligan, Callbeck – viewed themselves as tacticians to the extent that MacLauchlan and Lantz do, as tacticians able to – through collaboration, analysis, planning, and action – “move the trend lines” to such an extent that Prince Edward Island emerges from their tenure substantially changed.

This is not to suggest that our recent premiers have been do-nothings, simply that their approach has drawn from different approaches to leadership and governance, ones not so seemingly-rooted in notions of systems theory: there have been substantial rearrangements to specific parts of Island society over the last two decades, but they have been more “strategic” in nature than “systemic.”

The last time the Island was governed by a premier with this approach was from 1966 to 1978, the tenure of Alex B. Campbell, a man MacLauchlan has studied closely. Campbell’s Comprehensive Development Plan was nothing if not the product of a cyberneticist. As MacLauchlan relates in his book on Campbell:

With the signing of the Comprehensive Development Plan in March 1969, things changed for Campbell and his government – and for Prince Edward Islanders. In a February television address, Premier Campbell spoke with Islanders about the difference the CDP would make, telling them that this “may be our last chance to provide a future for this province.” He went on to say that PEI’s economic and financial condition was “precarious” and that stop-gap remedies and short-term policies “will no longer service the purpose.”

In other words, Campbell was suggesting that the Island’s future demanded planned, systematic change. You will find shadows of Campbell in both MacLauchlan and Lantz inasmuch as they both regard the Island, as Campbell did, as a system in need of substantial adjustment, and they both have confidence that this adjustment can be carried out through a careful process of adjusting systems, controls, and messages.

What is different this time around from the Campbell era is that while in the late 1960s Campbell saw a need to import systems expertise from off-Island, both Lantz and MacLauchlan see the resources they need to marshal in the people who are here already. This suggests that their comprehensive plans for the development of the Island, while they might share the same confidence in cybernetics as Campbell’s, will be enacted in a way that’s more homegrown and locally rooted.

I am myself a cyberneticist at heart, and so it should go without saying that I greet the renewed ascendance of the cybernetic mindset with considerable optimism, especially as it appears to cross party lines and so, one way or the other, is likely to underpin the next generation of PEI politics.

These are interesting times.

Back in 1992 I saw a film called Feed at the Festival of Festivals (now the Toronto International Film Festival), a film that IMDB succinctly describes like this:

This is a documentary about the 1992 New Hampshire primaries. It includes much footage of candidates as they meet people, and just before they go “on-air”.

It was a well-produced look into the moments just before the lights go on and candidates turned from regular everyday people like you and me into people who talk for a living professionally.

That’s a fascinating moment, one packed with nervous anticipation. Although I’ve never been a candidate for anything (at least not since I ran for grade 7 class president under the slogan “Vote Pete: He’s Neat!”), every time I speak in public requires going through that phase shift, from private to public. It’s like going through a wormhole.

And no matter how confident and prepared you are, focusing on that moment, as Feed did, provides some insight into the differences between private people and public people.

It’s a moment perhaps best encapsulated in popular culture by Bob and Doug McKenzie in their 1981 seminal recording of Great White North, a track that begins “This is where the DJ talks, don’t say anything… Ok, eh”

This weekend’s PC Party Leadership Convention provided another glimpse behind the curtain as the CBC Television web feed went to “air” seven minutes earlier than those at the anchor desk were aware of, something preserved in the video archive of the event. Host Bruce Rainnie is joined by guests Paul MacNeill and former premier Pat Binns and over those 7 minutes they have the kind of pre-broadcast chitchat that is at once mundane and deeply compelling. Here’s a transcript:

Paul MacNeill: …Pat?

Pat Binns: Yah, if you wouldn’t mind.

Paul: Do you wanna… have you seen it, Bruce?

Bruce Rainnie: I haven’t, no.

Bruce [to control]: Yah. Yah. Um hum.

Paul: Was it Pat Binns seven?

Pat: Yep.

Control [to Paul]: [indistinct]

Paul: Oh yah, kick it anywhere you want…

Paul: I hope that’s attached.

Paul: [indistinct]

Unknown: It was a good read today. [pause] It was a good read today.

Paul: Did you get that? Is the attachment there?

Pat: Uh, I don’t see the attachment. It’s probably here.

Paul: No, sometimes I have a problem with this. Just one sec.

Paul: Come on…

Bruce: Hey guys, um, CBC, Tracy’s printing out speeches, the three speeches, she’s gonna bring them over in paper form.

Paul: Oh is she, great.

Bruce: Five minutes, guys, five minutes. When we go live to the web.

Paul: That’s more notes than he used on last election night.

Bruce: Yah, these are just… yah. I’ve had a couple of nice conversations with all three. Just some personal stuff.

Bruce: Oh, oh.

Unknown: How are yah?

Bruce: Three minutes to the web, gentlemen.

Bruce: So we got, we got… [fade to silence]

Bruce: Guys, the plan here… [indistinct]

Bruce: Compton’s first, right?

At this point the lights go up, the theme music rolls, and the three become the public versions of themselves.

We are fortunate to have a CBC that is, at least for now, well-funded enough to be able to cover two political conventions in as many weeks (the Liberal Party held its convention the previous week and it received similar coverage).

It’s like it was sung by angels…

Last night on Netflix I came upon a movie called Paul Williams: Still Alive and, more intrigued, I must say, by the typeface on the poster than by any strong memory of Paul Williams, I started to watch.

And then, all of a sudden, my childhood started to flood back.

Paul Williams, it turns out, was a part of almost every piece of pop culture during my childhood through the 1970s and 1980s, a pop culture that is perhaps best encapsulated in this 1978 episode of Hollywood Squares, one that featured Harvey Korman, Rose Marie, Loretta Lynn, Melissa Gilbert, George Gobel, Karen Lynn Gorney, John Amos, and Paul Lynde. And Paul Williams.

Through that collection of stars you get everything: the Dick Van Dyke Show, Good Times, Little House on the Prairie, Carol Burnett. Throw in a couple of Love Boat episodes and you’ve touched on all the TV we watched as kids.

Oh, and by the way, Paul Williams wrote the lyrics to the Love Boat theme.

And, of course, much of the American songbook over those decades, including Rainbow Connection, and Rainy Days and Mondays.

And, more recently, Touch, from the Daft Punk album Random Access Memories.

You see Paul Williams, as the film’s title suggests, is very much alive.

And in making a movie about him, Kessler has also made a movie about my childhood. And my adulthood. And about friendship and taking risks and rising again.

It’s a wonderful watch, and I highly recommend that you seek it out.

This morning at Robertson Library I gave a workshop, titled “Who Left the Lights on?”, to members of ARMA Prince Edward Island Chapter. The workshop focused on the work I’ve been doing in open data and electricity for the past 12 years.

Most of the 29 people who attended were provincial public servants working in records management and other data-intensive aspects of the government.

The workshop ran from 9:30 to 11:45 with a brief break; it was held in the Modern Languages Lab at Robertson Library, a venue chosen for its fleet of iMac computers (and the capable staff that maintain them) and its SMART board.

My goal for the presentation was to give the attendees a feel of what open data looks like from the data-consuming side of the equation: to get there I provided a brief introduction into electricity measurement, and to HTML, CSS and JavaScript (the “three pillars of the modern web”) and then talked about some of my open data advocacy and development.

Slides from the workshop are available in a variety of formats, and can be distributed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license.

• View HTML (viewable right now in your browser, with audio and video)
• Download HTML (download, unzip the file, load the index.html in a web browser; includes audio and video)
• Apple Keynote (requires Keynote version 6 to view; includes audio and video)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (download, unzip the file; includes audio and video)
• PDF (slides only; no audio nor video)

There are 172 slides in all. Many slides include web links that lead to example or other resources. It won’t be possible to understand the complete workshop from the slides along, but you can take a stab at it.

Thanks must go to Simon Lloyd for the invitation, Mark Demone facilitating, and to Melissa Belvadi, Don Moses, Alkarim Bhalesha and Jerrad Gilbert at Robertson Library for reacting quickly and pleasantly to my requests for software installation on lab workstations.

Over the course of my weekend spent obsessed with snow and ice removal, I made several trips to Sherwood Home Hardware.

On my first trip, to buy an extension ladder, I paid with my MasterCard.

I remember, while I was paying, seeing a sign on every cash register alerting the cashiers to make sure that customers didn’t leave their credit or debit cards in the machine.

And I remember thinking “who the hell would do that?”

Later in the day I returned to Home Hardware to buy some ice melter, and went to pay with my MasterCard.

But it wasn’t in my wallet.

I phoned home.

It wasn’t there.

“I must have left it somewhere,” I said to myself.

And I paid with my debit card instead.

Out in the parking lot, I mentally retraced my steps, and realized that the last place I’d paid with my MasterCard had been at the selfsame Home Hardware.

So I went back inside.

“I didn’t happen to leave a MasterCard here earlier today, did I?”, I asked.

The friendly cashier rooted around in the lost and found drawer and quickly located a MasterCard.

“What’s your name?”, she asked.

“Peter Rukavina,” I replied.

She handed me my card.

I thanked her profusely, and related the irony of my earlier disbelief that anyone could be so stupid as to leave their credit card in the store.

On my way toward the door, the other cashier, the one who I’d bought the ice melter from just moments earlier, chimed in.

“Did you say your name was Peter Rukavina?”, she asked.

“Yes,” I replied, with some trepidation.

“You forgot your debit card here too, just a minute ago.”

So, not once, but twice.

Who the hell would do that?

It snowed. And snowed. And snowed. Over a metre of snow over a couple of weeks. So that by last weekend our back yard looked like this:

That’s a 5 foot fence, to give you a sense of the how deep the snow is.

And that’s a tree, not a bush.

And so we ended up with a lot of snow on our roof.

And with my eye off the ball, paying attention to the snow on the ground, not the snow on the roof, we started to get ice dams forming along the gutters.

By Friday afternoon we started to fear that the ice dams would result in water getting into our house, and so it was time for evasive action.

Catherine made a round of calls to teams of shovelers that we’d used before, but we were not alone in our plight and they all replied with “maybe we can get to you by Monday.”

So it was up to me.

Feeble old me. Action.

Plan A: Find the Ladder

It would make sense to keep our extension ladder inside the house so as to be accessible for times like this. And so, of course, we did not do this. And so the ladder was – the theory went, anyway – out in the back yard under the aforementioned 5 feet of snow.

As it was still somewhat mild and the snow somewhat malleable on Friday evening, I headed out with a shovel in hand on an archeological dig along the right side of the yard.  I dug two very deep holes and came up empty. If the ladder was down there, I didn’t find it.

I did, however, manage to give myself a mild wrist sprain.

It goes without saying that our roof rake was in the back shed, similarly inaccessible.

Plan B: Buy a Ladder

With Friday night’s ladder-finding a washout, on Saturday I suspended all normal market-going activities and headed out to find a ladder, a roof rake and some ice melter.

Sherwood Home Hardware had a very nice ladder, but no roof rake, so I bought the ladder, squeezed it into the car, and headed on to Kent Building Supplies in the suburbs to see if they had any roof rakes.

They didn’t.

But, thankfully, Sherwood BMR did, and the staff there proved remarkably helpful to boot.

The roof rake, I am happy to report, is the king of all the roof rakes: made by Garant it’s called the Yukon and it has several advantages over the roof rakes we all know and loathe: first, it’s got an oval-shaped main shaft, which means that even at fully-extended length it’s remarkably stable; second, its handle is telescoping, so there’s no losing the extension arms, and making it longer and shorter is an easy “press the button and slide in and out.” I heartily recommend this rake to anyone who needs one.

Find Pantyhose

This Old House recommends filling old pantyhose with salt and placing them on ice dams to create channels for water to flow out. As the alternative was going at the ice dams with an axe, I decided to try this out.

But nobody in our house wears pantyhose.

So I sent Catherine out to find some, and she ended up buying out the dollar store’s entire inventory, at $2 a pair.

Married with the ice melter I bought at Home Hardware, I was ready to go.

Target One: The Vestibule

I decided to start with an easy win. Our front vestibule, as you can see here, had its own share of snow on it:

So, armed with the roof rake, I went to town.

It took about 30 minutes, but the roof rake proved up to the task, and I had the vestibule roof down to bare shingles when I was done.  I sprinkled some ice melter in the gutters to judge its effectiveness, and moved to the back mud room.

Target Two: The Mud Room

At this point the photographic evidence is rare, as I was in the throes of work.

We have a mud room off the back of the house that’s about the same size as the vestibule at the front, but with a flat roof with a very gentle slope. So it accumulates a lot of snow. It also happens to be an excellent staging ground for attacking the snow-laden back roof the house, so it was my next target.

This was a bigger job because there was more snow, because I needed to use the new ladder, in stepladder-mode, to get all of the the snow off, and because I had to stop and shovel the snow off the back deck regularly to keep the back door clear and to give me room to work.

But after an hour or so, the mud room roof was clear, and I was ready to move higher and riskier.

Fear of Heights

Intellectually, I am not afraid of heights. But when faced with a task like “hop up on that slippery roof with some sharp implements and do some physical work to which you are unaccustomed” I was given some pause.

But I forged on.

With the roof rake I was able to pull a fair amount of the snow from the edges of the back roof, but I couldn’t reach very far up the roof, and I couldn’t really do anything about the ice. So I sucked up my courage, climbed up the ladder, and gingerly shimmied up the mud room roof.

Once I got to the back roof’s edge, I was in a good vantage point to pull off a lot more snow, and to go all This Old House on the ice dams.

What ensued was a 4 or 5 hour adventure of rake, shovel, scrape, pantyhose + salt, wait, rake, etc. In the end I was only able to make the barest dent in the mountains of snow and ice, but at least it felt like I was doing something.

Sunday

Because of my all-consuming attention to snow and ice on Saturday, I’d neglected to go grocery shopping, so the house was left without eggs, which meant no Sunday morning waffles. Something that Oliver made sure I knew about:

Waffleless, I returned, nonetheless, to the snow and ice battle.

I made a little more headway on Sunday afternoon on both the back and front, but we were already starting to see some water in our front and back second-floor bedrooms – not great torrents, but enough to be worrisome – and so we concluded that it was time to return to the task of finding professionals.

Catherine made another round of calls, and managed to find a couple of teams that could at least come and “take a look” on Monday morning.

And then our PEI Mutual Insurance claims man made a courtesy call – we’re not covered for ice dam damage under our home insurance policy, but we’d called anyway and he offered to drop by. It was, he told us, one of a number of similar calls over the weekend, and we took some solace in the fact that we weren’t the worst house he’d seen that day. He made a few recommendations for additional help – Ford’s Mobile Wash might be able to steam the gutters, for example – and went off into the night.

Mehrnoosh Saves the Day

At this point I reached out to my friend Mehrnoosh, who’s much more plugged into the Charlottetown-area trades than we are, to see if anyone he knew might help us out.

He immediately sprang into action and by Monday morning at the crack of dawn he had a crew of pros lined up and due to arrive at the house at 9:30. Which they did.

And they sprang to work.

On the front, they started with this:

and, midway through the job, it looked like this:

And by mid-afternoon, our back roof was in much better shape too:

It’s hard to get a sense from that photo of just how dramatic an improvement that was from the situation they started with, but here’s what the mound of snow and ice they removed – or at least part of it – looked like on the ground:

In the end they were on the roof from about 9:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. with two teams, one on the back and one on the front. Both sides are clear of snow now, and they axed out a large part of the ice dam too.

Pantyhose Redux

Did the This Old House technique with ice-melter-filled pantyhose actually do any good?

It’s hard to tell. There was certainly some ice-melting that resulted, but when I compare the amount of effort needed to buy and haul the bags of ice melter, to assemble the melter-filled pantyhose legs, and to get them up on the roof, it wasn’t worth the effort: they made a tiny dent in a problem that needed a substantial solution – removing all the ice and the snow that was driving the ice. We might have received an few hours of water infiltration freedom by redirecting some of the water, but I was only able reach about 1/10th of the gutter surface, and to fully implement this solution would have required 10x more ice melter, 10x more pantyhose, and a lot more ladder dexterity.

So it’s not an exercise we’re likely to repeat.

Where to from here?

With more snow coming later this week – and winter not over, practically speaking, until April? May? – we’re at least better-equipped to deal with the situation now: I can clear the snow with the monster roof rake after every storm and, touch wood, that should be enough to keep new ice dams from forming.

Once winter’s over, this will be the summer that we address the larger issue, perhaps raising and changing the pitch of the back roof, getting a new roof on the entire house with a water barrier, and adding insulation and venting where it needs to go.

Section 2.1 of the City of Charlottetown Dog Control Bylaw says:

Any dog owner residing in the City who does not register a dog with the Clerk on or before the 31st day of March in each year, and does not pay a license fee as set out in Schedule “A” annexed to this Bylaw, is guilty of an offence.

We picked up our 2015 dog tag for Ethan this morning, well in advance of the March 31st deadline, and Ethan was assigned dog tag number 007, which suggests that there are a lot of dogs remaining unregistered this year.

Oliver is iffy on whether Ethan will be allowed to leave his side to attend to his MI-6 duties.

After the week of heavy snow we’ve had here on Prince Edward Island, I wanted to search IslandNewspapers.ca for references to “snow storm” that appeared in The Guardian newspaper.

Entering “snow storm” as a search term produced 1,434 results, and many of these were references in articles deep inside the paper, like this one from page 4 of the January 30, 1952 paper:

An interesting story, no doubt, but what I really wanted was “front page news” blizzards. News likely to be contemporary and local rather than reports from the bygone days.

But there wasn’t a way to limit my search by page number.

So I asked Don Moses, who manages the project, and his quick reply – on a snow day, no less – was:

We do index the page number of the page.  I’ve added a facet “Page Number” to the search results page.  So if you do your search … you’ll see the facet for page at the bottom of the facets listed and can apply that as a limit.

And, sure enough, repeating the search now shows this handy facet in the right-hand sidebar:

By clicking on “1”, I can limit my search to the 322 occurences of “snow storm” that appeared on the front page of the paper.

And by further filtering my search by clicking on “February” under the “Month” facet, I can see only the 64 front-pages containing keywords “snow storm” that ran during that month.

Like this story, with photo, reporting on the crash of a BOAC airplane at Charlottetown Airport during a snow storm on February 25. 1946 :

And this story about 15 inches of snow falling over two days from February 8, 1956:

And the cover of the February 10, 1948 edition, reporting on several snow-related incidents, including the death of a Skinner’s Pond man:

And this bracing story from February 22, 1932 reporting on a train collision near Tignish that happened in “blinding snow storm and zero weather”:

This new ability to filter by page number is a terrific addition to IslandNewspapers.ca, and that Don was able to quickly implement it is a testament to the flexibility of the Islandora platform.

Wikipedia tells us that the surface area of Prince Edward Island is 5,660 km².

The square root of 5,660 is 75.23, meaning that, if reconfigured to be a square, PEI would be 75.23 km by 75.23 km.

NASA tells us that “freshly-fallen snow has a density of 50 kg/m³.”

One centimeter of freshly-fallen snow on a 75.23 km by 75.23 km box is a cube that’s 7,523,000 cm by 7,523,000 cm by 1 cm.

That’s a cube that’s 56,595,529,000,000 cm³ or 56,595,529 m³.

At 50 kg/m³ that means that a one centimeter snowfall on Prince Edward Island has a mass of 2,829,776,450 kg, which is 2,829,776.45 metric tons.

So an 86 cm fall of snow has a mass of 226,382,116 metric tons.

Dump trucks vary, but it seems their capacity is around 32 metric tons, so that’s about 7 million dump trucks worth of snow.

Is my math correct?

Posting this here just in case others find themselves in the same situation.

Since migrating this site from my own silverorange-colocated server to Amazon AWS, I’ve been experiencing seemingly random Apache server outages. The usual suspects – mismatched Apache and MySQL settings, lack of memory, etc. – didn’t seem to apply, and the symptoms were confoundingly simple: all of Apache’s processes – up to the MaxClients settings limit – would be “hung,” and the server would be unreachable. But MySQL was fine, the system load was fine, and, as near as I could tell, everything was beautiful and sunny. Except that Apache was, effectively, hung.

After several weeks of Googling away for “Apache hung processes” and “Apache process limit” and “Apache crashed” and “mysterious and confounding Apache issue,” I launched into some more serious Apache debugging and eventually traced the issue to some variation of APC and this PHP issue. The debugging that got me there was running strace on any of the child Apache processes and seeing:

futex(0x2b19a0b01070, FUTEX_WAIT, 2, NULL)

Rather than trying to solve the APC issue itself, I solved the issue – fingers cross – by upgrading from Apache 2.2 to Apache 2.4 and from PHP 5.3.29 to PHP 5.5.20. Among other things, this let me jettison APC and use PHP OPcache instead. Which appears to have addressed the larger issue, and given me access to a nice OPcache visualization to boot: