Arcade Fire put up a million dollars for Haiti <– At the Festival d’Ete de Quebec, Arcade Fire announced that they will match donations to Kanpe, a Montreal-based NGO working on rebuilding Haiti, dollar for dollar up to one million dollars. You can donate $5 by texting “STAND” to 30333. I don’t know much about Kanpe but they’ve worked with Partners in Health which is not too shabby. C’mon, $5=$10.

“J’commence le countdown pese ca clutch” <– I found this on Said the Gramaphone, a music blog that comes out with two weird reviews (a la Peters’ Pick) every day or two. He finds some diamonds now and again but this one–I’m not sure what to call this one. It’s a cover of Space Oddity by Lucien Midnight–but in Quebecois French. Things like, “planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do,” get translated to, “la planet terre est bleue que c’est tu veux que ca me calisse.” Or, “tell my wife I love her very much,” turns into, “dites a ma blonde que je l’aimais en ostie.”

Photoshop of Horrors <– As if they weren’t screw ups enough. A week or so ago, BP posted photos to their site that were obviously poorly photoshopped. Wired decided to get their readers to show BP how it’s done. Check out all the photos here.

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I was listening to an interview with George Dawes Green yesterday on NPR when he said something I’ve noticed without ever really being conscious of it. The time one person can speak uninterrupted in a conversation is getting shorter. Talking specifically about New York City, he said that people have too much ego and/or testosterone to let anyone else speak for more than 12 or 13 seconds. Think about the last time you were hanging out in a bar or at a dinner party, how often can one person tell a story that lasts five or more minutes. I tested this (unscientifically, of course) at lunch yesterday when, at the picnic table next to me, I noticed that the stories people were telling each other were, at most four or five sentences long (and incredibly stupid).

The natural reaction is to blame Twitter, Facebook, Youtube and everything else old people don’t understand. I’m sure all those things play a part but I also think that the art of storytelling is being lost. People just don’t have ability to tell good stories anymore. It happens to me at least once a day a where someone tries to tell me an story that’s longer than the social norm and they bungle it completely by including too much detail where it wasn’t needed or by completely foregoing any sort or flow or rhythm to their story.

If you’re looking to rekindle your ability to tell stories or just want to listen to a good one, I’d suggest checking out George Dawes Green’s website/podcast/live event called The Moth. The name comes from Green’s inspiration: a moth circling the kitchen lamp while people told stories when he was a kid.

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At the Aspen Environment Forum 2010, a moderator of one of the panels stated that British kids could more easily identify Japanese cars than native plants and animals (h/t: Tomorrow’s Table). On one hand, given that cars move fast and do exciting things while plants just sit there, that’s not surprising at all. It also helps that cars have their names written on the back so, in a way, it’s like a flashcard game. Plants can be extremely difficult to identify. Of course, there are many plants that are easy to identify, but I’ve been in the forest with expert botanists who’ll admit that some plants are difficult, if not impossible to tell apart without DNA analysis. All this to say, it’s no wonder kids know their cars better than they know their plants and animals.

I do find it surprising in the sense that it’s a sign of how disconnected and isolated we’re becoming with respect to the natural world. Knowing the names of plants and animals is only one way out of many to be connected to the natural world, but the fact that most people (I’m extending the conjecture to everyone now, not just kids) could identify more kinds of cars than plants says something about which way we’re headed. Pamela Ronald, of Tomorrow’s Table, wonders:

Can we draw a link with this disconnect and the loss of biodiversity at an unprecedented rate? By 2050, the majority of our citizens will consist of the young people where that disconnect is most profound.

Would those responsible for destruction of entire species think twice if they knew the names of some of the species they were affecting? Would the CEO of BP invest more money in blowout prevention if he knew a bit more about marine biology? I’m not convinced but it’s definitely something worth thinking about.

Bonus points if you can name both cars and the plants in the photo above. I’ll be impressed if anyone can do both. I definitely couldn’t do the cars if I didn’t already know what they were.

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On my bike ride home yesterday, I encountered three stereotypes of Montrealers that best exemplify the type of people we don’t want non-Montrealers to know or hear about. The first was a motorbiker with an obnoxiously loud bike and a joint hanging out of his mouth. The second was a guy on a pedal bike who blew a red light and almost got hit–with his three year riding in the child’s seat in the back. Third, just before I got home, the Montrealer we try the most to hide: the guy with a red Mazda3 listening to really loud, bad dance music from the nineties. Yes, we have bikers, bad drivers and people with bad taste in music, but here are three cool things about Montreal to held you forget about those people:

Crossing the tracks is a cool little article from Maisonneuve which talks about the railway that skirts the northern boundary of Mile End:

The tracks serve as a neat boundary for the neighbourhood, dividing it from Little Italy, the Petite Patrie and the nameless industrial area to the north. To cross them, you have a choice of three underpasses: one on Park Avenue, one on St. Urbain and one on St. Laurent.

Of course, that’s if you decide to cross them legally. Most people don’t bother with that, choosing instead to duck through one of the many holes that have been cut into the chain-link fence along the tracks.

The tracks (I almost feel it deserves a capital ‘T’) are not part of Montreal. They are another world.

If there’s anything I love better than watching the battle between people tearing down the fence next to the railway and the railways people inventing new ways to try and keep people out, it’s walking down alleys. Montreal has a neat system of alleyways between every block as this image on the left illustrates poorly. Whenever I can, I take alleyways because, oddly, there are more people back there sitting on their decks or raking the gravel in their backyard that at some point they thought was a better idea than grass. Recently, Spacing Montreal featured Montreal’s Best Alleyways, full of photos of alleyways even I haven’t seen.

And lasty, the pride of Montreal: voyeurism. Am I kidding? Wouldn’t non-Montrealers love to know.

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Clay Shirky, who I have mentioned a couple of times on this blog already, has a new book out. I haven’t read the book yet–and to be honest, I don’t think I’ll find the time–but his idea of cognitive surplus seems like an interesting one to explore. Wired gave a brief description of his book this way:

He argues that the time Americans once spent watching television has been redirected toward activities that are less about consuming and more about engaging—from Flickr and Facebook to powerful forms of online political action. And these efforts aren’t fueled by external rewards but by intrinsic motivation—the joy of doing something for its own sake.

So people, Shirky says, are getting up off the couch and doing things. All sorts of things. Here’s an example Shirky gives in the same Wired article:

We can do a back-of-the-envelope calculation, for example, using Wikipedia, to see how far we still have to go. All the articles, edits, and arguments about articles and edits represent around 100 million hours of human labor. That’s a lot of time. But remember: Americans watch about 200 billion hours of TV every year.

The human mind, as we all know, has a lot of trouble thinking about numbers that big so Information is Beautiful gives it to us as a visual:

Not what you were expecting? Suddenly, the amount of time required to accomplish something huge (I think Wikipedia can safely be described as huge) seems small compared to the time people dedicate to a leisure activity. Imagine, if a small portion of that 200 billion hours was dedicated toward creative thinking about important problems or issues, we might hear about stories like this more often:

Six weeks ago, Robert Bea, an engineering professor at the University of California, Berkeley, received a late-night call from an apologetic “mystery plumber.” The caller said he had a sketch for how to solve the problem at the bottom of the Gulf. It was a design for a containment cap that would fit snugly over the top of the failed blowout preventer at the heart of the Gulf oil spill.

Professor Bea, a former Shell executive and well-regarded researcher, thought the idea looked good and sent the sketches directly to the US Coast Guard and to a clearinghouse set up to glean ideas from outside sources for how to cap the stubborn Macondo well.

When Bea saw the design of the containment cap lowered onto the well last week, he marveled at its similarity to the sketches from the late-night caller, whose humble refusal to give his name at the time nearly brought Bea to tears. (read the rest of this story at the Christian Science Monitor here)

Check out Clay Shirky’s TED talk:

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From Jonah Lehrer’s Wired blog who got it from a blog post by Ross Douthat at the New York Times:

Part of the problem with meritocracy is that it homogenizes in the name of diversity: It skims the cream from every race and class and population, puts all of the best and brightest through the same educational conveyor belt, and comes out with a ruling class that’s cosmetically diverse but intellectually conformist, and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich the country as a whole. This is Christopher Lasch’s lament in “The Revolt of the Elites” — that meritocracy co-opts people who might otherwise become its critics, sapping local communities of their intellectual vitality and preventing any kind of rival power centers from emerging.

It raises an interesting point. We take our best an brightest and train them all in the same place or at least in places that share a somewhat similar ideology. What does that do to diversity of opinion or ideas? It’s interesting to think about how this differs from music and art. Yes, there are musicians and artists who go through formal training to become orchestra conductors or–I’m not sure what someone with a higher degree in art would do, feel free to cure my ignorance. But the musicians and artists we know best are often those who have transcended boundaries rather than those who excelled within boundaries. I’m not sure how you would go about doing this type of thing with business, humanities or science graduates but it’s something to think about.

A quick note about our living in a meritocracy: I have problems with that too. It’s supposed to be that who ever wants to attend university, to use that as an example, can. Theoretically, that’s true. But then I start thinking about how children from families of high socioeconomic status (a term used often in these types of studies, Wikipedia definition: an economic and sociological combined total measure of a person’s work experience and of an individual’s or family’s economic and social position relative to others, based on income, education, and occupation) will hear millions more instances of words, not different words but instances of words, than children of low SES families by the time they get to kindergarten. Do you really expect these two children to be equal? Probably not. Is it because one child worked harder than the other? Probably not. Is that a meritocracy? Probably not. There are many other instances where what we think is fair and meritocratic is far from it but these are extremely complex social problems that there are no easy fixes for. I guess we’ll just wait for the non-diversified best and brightest to come up with an answer.

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We all like to think we’re in control of our decisions. But, even aside from the fact that we have no free will (thought I’d just slip that in there; UPDATE: here’s another great article about free will), other factors–things we wouldn’t want to admit are affecting our judgment–are influencing our decisions. There are many many experiments out there that show this but here’s one that’s been showing up a lot recently even though it’s over ten years old.

The idea was simple. Put students in a classroom and give them either a two or seven digit number to memorize. At that point, the students are asked to leave, one at a time, and go to a second room. On their way to the second room, they’re asked if, as a thank you for participating, they would like either a bowl of fruit salad or a piece of chocolate cake.

Seems simple enough. When I first heard the description of this experiment, I couldn’t figure out what the trick was. I’ll let Wired editor and author of How We Decide Jonah Lehrer explain:

“Here’s where the results get weird. The students with seven digits to remember were nearly twice as likely to choose the cake as students given two digits. The reason, according to Professor Shiv, is that those extra numbers took up valuable space in the brain — they were a “cognitive load” — making it that much harder to resist a decadent dessert. In other words, willpower is so weak, and the prefrontal cortex is so overtaxed, that all it takes is five extra bits of information before the brain starts to give in to temptation.”

Although the students in the experiment were from Standford, they’re really no different than you or me. That could be you in the experiment getting your snack choice influenced by how many number you’ve been asked to remember. Part of me still thinks that my choice between cake and fruit salad wouldn’t be influenced by something as simple how many numbers I’m trying to remember but I know I’m probable just deluding myself.

Another consequence of this experiment is, couldn’t fast food restaurants and all sorts of junk food makers take advantage of this? They couldn’t really ask you to remember seven-digit numbers, but they could find other ways of increasing your cognitive load in order making it more difficult for you to resist that bacon double cheeseburger. After all this talk of psychology, a bacon double cheeseburger sounds pretty good right now.

You can hear an audio description of this experiment from Radiolab and for more examples of irrational decisions check out this Dan Ariely video.

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I hate to follow up a Peters’ Pick with a deep post like this but here goes:

This is an idea that I think about often but have never put it out there. I’ve read a lot about the continuous debate about the role of religion in society and day to day life. One of the most common objections to letting go of religion is that, without religion, life has no meaning. But there are so many other things out there that we seem perfectly happy to enjoy with out asking about its meaning. No one ever asks, “what is the meaning of music?” or “what is the meaning of art?” We are perfectly happy to enjoy these things without meaning (or at least I can–do music and art need meaning in order to be enjoyed?). Why can’t we enjoy life without meaning? Why are we so obsessed with this question?

I think what people really mean when they ask about the meaning of life is, “what is the meaning of suffering?” I know, I know. This is getting way deep. But think about it. You never worry about the meaning of a great song but you’d wonder about the meaning of being forced to listen to a terrible one. People never ask themselves about the meaning of life when they’re having a great time, only when they’re facing hardship or difficult times. People can live without meaning–people can’t suffer without meaning. So my question is, instead of worrying about meaning, why don’t we just get to the root of it and reduce suffering?

I’ll try and get back to something a little more superficial tomorrow. I promise.

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In a previous life, while fulfilling the role of “tour manager” for a local super group; I got the opportunity to spend part of an evening with the band “You Say Party! We Say Die!” at a Bishops University show. After the concert, we parted ways as their band was whisked away to play another show in some obscure fishing town on the New Brunswick coast and we headed to the inevitable beer smash-down at the legendary “Golden Lion”. Though I didn’t get spend much time with them, I remember telling my friends how I really liked hanging with their drummer, Devon Clifford and hoped to run into him again on “the road”. Devon had a great sense of humor, was a generally personable guy and a great drummer. Tragically, Devon passed away on April 18^th when he collapsed on stage at a show in Vancouver and died of a brain hemorrhage a few days later. Though I did not know him well, it just proves the age old adage, bad things happen to good people.

Recently, the band has announced they are back after a hiatus, appropriately dropping the “We Say Die” from their name. This is great news to me as their most recent album, XXXX, was one of my favorites of last year. It was a huge leap forward in both musical and lyrical maturity from the first albums straight up dance punk pop.  Though upbeat, it has a haunting quality that really gets me in the sweet spot.  I still listen to XXXX often and find it especially gratifying when I am navigating the mean streets on my bike and pretending I am a participant in a “Tour de France” type racing event.

One of my favorite songs on XXXX is “Laura Palmer’s Prom”. This video was recorded on the CBC’s radio show “Q” in Toronto and really shows Devon’s fine and fluid stick moves. RIP.

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This song and video are 8,000 homohms. “Save your anesthetic for the boy next door,” is one of the best lines I’ve heard in a while. The only bad thing about this song is that at some points there’s this synth or something that makes me think my phone is vibrating.

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