I’m really not sure who’s side I’m on in this battle:
On one side, CTV, Global, CBC, and other Canadian Networks claiming “Local TV Matters.” This despite their closing of countless local TV stations, and continued underfunding of local TV.
On the other side, carriers including Bell, Rogers, Telus and Shaw with their new “Stop the TV Tax” campaign, even though Shaw and most cable providers face no local competition in every market they provide television in.
I do have to say this, both side’s commercials are slick and feel like an election campaign – only much better than any Canadian political party has released recently.
Personally, I’m on peasant visions (Vancouver peasant vision includes 3 HDTV channels, and 4 analog channels), so I don’t really care about whether or not Shaw will pass the fee the broadcasters onto consumers or not (and you know they will because they can).
I think it’s a lie to call a carrier fee between businesses a “TV Tax” and a “Bailout” since these funds don’t go through the government, but the terminology is likely to resonate with people.
xtra.ca has a good article on the debate, but I really don’t know that much, but feel free to fill me in if you can. Maybe I don’t support either side because they’re both bloated corporate giants that don’t face enough real competition to force them to actually provide good service.
Oh and apparently you only have 3 days to get your opinions in to your MP (less by the time you read this), as giant clocks on both websites will tell you. Perhaps I’ll support the Stop the Tax campaign because it arbitrarily gives you 8 more hours than the Local TV Matters kids.
After I complained earlier this week about SFU’s postal outlet closing next week it looks like things have turned around. From SFU Public and Media Relations:
You may have heard that the Canada Post outlet on the Burnaby campus (now located in the SFU Microstore) is closing down shortly. Here’s the good news: The postal outlet is in fact remaining OPEN, with all services as usual until a new location at UniverCity is confirmed in next few months.
So either this is a coincidence or else SFU administrators read this blog and take me very seriously. If the latter is true, I shall use my new-found powers wisely.
Because when you skim a subject and see “SFU Notice: More gunfire at Surrey Campus” there’s cause for alarm, but when the actual email says:
Movie gunfire at Surrey campus
The sci-fi TV series “Caprica” will be filming at SFU Surrey and Central City on Friday night, October 30. The Dale B. Regehr Grand Hall (mezzanine level) will be used as a futuristic airport lounge.
The action may include running through the grand hall, down the staircase to the main entry lobby. The actors will carry and fire weapons and fake blood capsules will explode.
If you’re visiting, working or studying at the Surrey campus be aware that the film shoot will begin at 6 p.m. It should finish by 9 p.m. but will continue in the Tower lobby and outside on the Plaza until 4 a.m.
Campus access will remain open on Friday night. There may short periods when the cameras are rolling when people on campus will be asked to stop for a few minutes as they come in from street level or the parkade. Security guards will be posted to assist with the access. The Surrey Fire Fighters Computer Lab and all other study spaces on campus are open as usual without restrictions during this film shoot.
Then you can rest easy.
On a side note: It is pretty sweet to attend a school that’s been used to film shows like Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek in the past.
Update: For factual honesty, SFU has never been used in a Star Trek episode or movie. It has made the following though:
Alberta’s new pharmaceutical plan is either really good news for Albertans (in which case we should thank Stelmach and Liepert) or creative paperwork designed to look good. Let’s hope its the former and a step in the left direction.
Apparently the local SFU campus branch of Canada Post is closing on this upcoming Sunday due to “lack of profits” (the words of the local clerk).
SFU is on a freaking mountain, students and staff living on campus (either in residence or the expanding UniverCity community of what’s supposed to be a self-contained city) now have to make the 15 minute bus ride or drive down to the bottom of the mountain to find the nearest post office.
I thought Canada Post was supposed to be a service to Canadians, not a business that we’re making money off of.
This story isn’t really that surprising to see from the bankrupt line of newspapers. Maybe they’re hoping that by putting more Tory-friendly news, they can get a bailout. Of course, that’s unlikely since Harper apparently doesn’t watch Canadian News.
Anyways, let’s dissect CanWest’s attempt to trace the money from the Knowledge Infrastructure Program to federal ridings.
From the Tory-Blue Industry Canada Website:
The Knowledge Infrastructure Program is a federal initiative to renew Canada’s college and university infrastructure. By making large-scale investments in infrastructure, the Government of Canada is providing significant short-term economic stimulus in local communities across the country.
So basically it’s $2 billion out of the $12 billion stimulus plan being targeted specifically at Universities in Canada.
CanWest then digs and digs, which they admit is ridiculously hard since Harper apparently hates the idea of being audited. They discover, remarkably, that most of the money going to Universities is going to opposition ridings, and is disproportionately higher than the percentage of ridings held by those parties federally.
This is a nice trick. If opposition parties control most of the universities (especially the NDP who “are getting more than twice what they would have got if the money was distributed based strictly on the number of seats each party holds.”) So who represents the universities?
From Universities Matter, we can discover what ridings we need to look up and then we get the following totals (spreadsheet here [xls]):
Totals
%
2008 seat %
NDP
25
26%
18%
Conservative
27
28%
38%
Liberal
34
35%
26%
Bloc
11
11%
10%
That’s 97 universities counted, and some ridings have more than one school. Nevertheless, we see that Liberals and NDP both hold 10% more universities than their seat percentages would reflect.
Therefore, unless the Conservatives were incredibly, overtly partisan, they couldn’t give money to universities without opposition ridings getting some.
Nevertheless, as the Jurist reports, they have no difficulty sending their candidate hacks in place of the democratically elected representative of that university.
No wonder the rumour in Edmonton Strathcona is that Linda Duncan isn’t that visible – she’s not invited to Government of Canada events in her own riding. Meanwhile, she continues to hold town halls that actually let the people there speak to someone who’s willing to listen rather than pontificate.
Newsflash: Conservative cops don’t like Vancouver’s safe-injection site.
In other news, sky still said to be blue (it’s perpetually cloudy here for the next 4 months so I’ll take your word).
But seriously, a study of police officers opinions is not a legitimate source of data compared to actual sociological studies of the project. But facts don’t tend to matter to some officers or politicians.
Since 99% of the trackbacks I’ve been getting on my posts are spam, I turned them off. Leave a comment if you really want to link to me and let me know.
After reading a Built on Facts post on a recent Mythbusters episode that tackled one of the classic first year physics problems (that I happen to be TAing right now), and posting the video on my Facebook, one of my more analytic friends pointed out the shoddiness of the 10% error in their precise experiment.
First, here’s both parts of the video, the first contains all the numbers you need to run the physics estimates and the second has the results:
Here’s the summary of the important values:
Horizontal distance (fired outside): 360 ft = 110 m
Vertical drop: 36” = 0.914 m
So let’s run through the calculations and see where some error can accumulate.
First source: They measured the horizontal distance outside and then moved the gun inside and never re-measured the horizontal distance. While the calculations don’t tend to care where the gun is fired (since we ignore air resistance), the actual bullet is potentially affected by the wind/weather/etc. outside. Humidity actually decreases the density of air, creating less drag and friction than drier air. Total error (estimated): ~0.5%
Second source: I’m not sure if this is a source of error, since information was omitted, but they never guaranteed that the gun was fired level outside when they shot it to find the horizontal distance. Since the bullet needs to leave the barrel with zero vertical velocity, it is imperative that the gun be fire horizontally. However, this ranging exercise was more to place the dropped ball at the same spot as the bullet for the camera, so I’m going to take this error as negligible (however, this distance becomes important for my later calculations, but we’ll assume it’s within ~5%, or about 5 m of the reported distance).
How long should the drop take until the bullet (or ball bearing) take to hit the ground?
(1)
with g=9.81m/s2, the acceleration due to gravity near the surface of Earth, we get a drop time of 0.432s. Just under half a second, or about the time your mind takes /to comprehend a simple picture.
Since we know the time to drop (or at least the theoretical value since they didn’t tell us the experimental time), we can calculate the horizontal velocity.
(2)
where x is the total distance of the bullet, measured outside. This gives a velocity of 255 m/s leaving the barrel, or 3/4 the speed of sound.
Third source: I’m not too familiar with fluid dynamics, but suffice it to say that we can assume some difference in downward drag between the bullet and the ball bearing, although unlikely to account for much more than a 1% error.
And if you really want to get technical with a discussion of fluid dynamics, drag and models of bullet ballistics, check out the overly-in-depth Wikipedia article on ballistics as a start.
Now, in part 1, Adam uses a laser to make a line, level with the gun, at a sheet 20’ from the barrel. He then claims that the bullet’s drop between the gun and the sheet will be negligible. It’s worth noting that we expect this to be false since the distance between the sheet is roughly 1/20th of the total distance travelled, or 5%.
Since we know the horizontal velocity (or at least have a calculated estimate of it), we can find the distance dropped in that distance via the time. Rearranging equation (2) to find the time, we get 0.0239s to hit the 20’ target and rearranging equation (1) to find the drop, y, we get a drop of 2.39 cm, or almost 1”.
Fourth source: Adam assumed that in the first 20’ of horizontal travel that the bullet’s drop was negligible when in fact it represented 1/36 of the total drop of the bullet. This introduces an error of roughly 3%, not huge, but it’s beginning to add up.
Now, Jamie show’s off his impressive timing device and demonstrates that the release is timed to 1/3 of a millisecond, or 300 microseconds.
Fifth source: The timing difference introduces an absolute error of less than 1%.
However, to demonstrate his device, Jamie places the dropper and the gun next to one another and lets the high-speed camera capture the release difference. He then moves the dropper to the end of the course for the actual test. I have to assume for safety that they coiled the long cord up when they had the two devices next to one another. A coiled wire will have some inductance, and hence an associated time constant, which will delay the signal. This would mean that the ball might drop sooner when the wire is straightened out.
Let’s figure out an order of magnitude for this time constant.
The inductance of a coiled wire is given by:
(3)
Where L is the inductance, is the permeability of free space, N is the number of loops, A is the area of a loop and l is the length of the coil (assume this to be 10cm for a tight packed coil, note this is not the length of the wire). The wire has to be at least 360’ long, and they likely coiled the majority of it, and if it is coiled into loops with area of 0.785m2 (assuming loops of 1m diameter) we therefore have 32 loops. Using all of this we get an inductance, L of 10.1 mH. If we assume resistance of the wire to be 0.1 Ohms, then we get an RL time constant of up to 0.1 s.
Sixth source: If Jamie coiled the wire of his dropper when he measured the two devices next to one another, he may have introduced a significantly large time constant into the system – on the order of the time it took to drop the ball! Since I don’t know whether or not this happened, or to what extent, I can’t quantify this error any better than to say it could be negligible if it was controlled for, or it could have screwed the experiment. Of course, with properly shielded cable this may not even be a concern.
I have just a couple more issues:
Seventh source: The shutter speed of a high-speed camera is finite, so they have an upper limit on measurements taken by the camera. The best guess I have for this is the 300 microsecond measurement that they gave for the measured difference in the drop times, assuming that measurement was limited by the camera. Knowing Mythbusters, I can see them having some of the fastest high-speed cameras that are commercially available, so this error is likely negligible.
Eighth source: I almost forgot this one, but it’s a huge no-no in science. They got cocky and ran their experiment only once! Their trigger device still worked, so the least the could have done was performed a couple times and averaged them out (perhaps they did and it didn’t make the cut). This is just sloppy and it’s hard to really quantify any error with this though.
Taking all of these various sources, especially the incorrect drop assumption (fourth source of error) and potentially the cord inductance (sixth source), it is not unreasonable that the difference could be upwards of 10% in this experiment.
Of course this is Mythbusters and not a class on error analysis. The show is more valuable by remaining entertaining and employing the rough tools of science, with the nitty-gritty details to be filled in later.
I like The Tyee. It generally offers a non-MSM view of current events and is very grassroots oriented (since its funding comes directly from its readers who want to see better news coverage). But sometimes they let their writers go off the deepend.
This is the case in the latest review of Karen Armstrong’s new book, The Case for God.
The following is my favourite bit of apologetics from the piece:
Despite her determination to steer clear of religion, Armstrong argues in her new book for the existence of a highly misunderstood God; a God who has been pitted against science and extreme Western rationalism for hundreds of years, and has come out on the losing end. What most New Atheists are missing, claims Armstrong, is that this literal interpretation of scripture they so revile (which has led in part to modern-day Creationism and Intelligent Design theories), is actually quite rare, and their dismissal of religion on this basis ignores the basic foundations of most of the world’s religious traditions. In one stroke, she manages to show how both religious extremists and fervent atheists are seriously missing the point.
…
Previously, the great theologians had said that the natural world can tell us nothing about God — you can’t even say that God exists, because our notion of existence is too limited.
Maybe Ms. Armstrong doesn’t meet many evangelicals, or the fact almost 1 in 4 Canadians thinks God made the world 10,000 years ago. That’s not exactly “rare” to me. The USA is even worse with upwards of 40% thinking goddunnit is the fundamental basis that all biology should rest upon.
Similarly, it doesn’t really matter if “great theologians” believe Adam and Eve didn’t exist (hint: they don’t), policy makers and the general public who rest their beliefs on religion do think our “notion of existence” is good enough to know that God wants us to kill for Him.
The “great theologians” didn’t seem to have any issues with all the witch burnings over the years.
Karen Armostrong: You FAIL for not knowing any real religious people and muddying up the waters with apologetic liberal theology.
The Tyee: You FAIL for reprinting her completely uncritically.
