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Natural Is Not Good

Posted in Unfounded Speculation on October 31st, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Gay Stuff, Science, Politics

There is a series of articles I want to write on a variety of topics, if I ever get around to it, and they all sort of need this article as a basic underpinning. Rather than make the argument over and over, I would like to make it in one place and refer back to it. This point has been made by many other people many times before, but it seems to run very much counter to many popular ideologies, so it bears repeating: just because something is natural, doesn't make it good. A lot of natural things are bad, even evil. And a lot of unnatural things are good. Goodness itself is somewhat unnatural. Basing your ideology on arguments about what is natural and what isn't with the underlying subtext that natural is good is only setting yourself up for a fall as our knowledge about nature evolves.

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"Ethical Oil" by Ezra Levant

Posted in Personal Miscellany on September 4th, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Reviews, Politics, Energy

This weekend I read the book Ethical Oil: The Case for Canada's Oil Sands by Ezra Levant. I have complicated feelings about Ezra Levant, and I was certainly of two minds about buying this book. On one hand, it's an interesting topic. On the other hand, it's Ezra Levant, someone who I view as trying to inject the Canadian body politic with the same poison that's killing the United States an inch at a time à la Fox News, and that's not something I want to support financially. In Levant's favour, when it comes to the civil liberties and journalistic freedoms which make public dissent possible, Ezra is not just a cynical ideologue playing for his team first, last and only; he is the real deal, willing to stick up for anyone's rights, even people he doesn't agree with. What clinches it for me was the fact that he was the only person with a media outlet (when he ran the Western Standard magazine) who had the sheer balls to publish the Danish "Mohammed Cartoons." Furthermore, he was hauled before the Alberta Human Rights Commission as a consequence of doing so, winding up out of pocket something like a hundred grand to defend himself, and succeeded in staring them down. It is ultimately in honour of that swinging pair and that single, decisive act to defend freedom of speech in Canada from religious oppression that I threw a few bucks his way, and now a few links, too, via giving my impressions of his book.

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Cultural Change Is Slowing Down

Posted in Unfounded Speculation on July 30th, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Crystal Ball, Science Fiction

Earlier, I blogged on my predictions for technological progress, with an angle on the implications for science fiction writing. My basic thesis is that writers in most times are guilty of extrapolating the notion of progress from their own time. Pre-nineteenth-century authors would generally extrapolate technological progress flatly, or shallowly, if it occurred to them to anticipate it at all. Nineteenth and early twentieth century authors perceived the rapid rate of progress in their time but extrapolated it linearly, tending to undershoot many aspects of the actual progress which occurred. And mid-twentieth-century to twenty-first century authors have tended to extrapolate the apparently exponential progress of our own time and overshoot our actual progress (i.e., "Where is my flying car?"). I was lately struck by the impression that the same thing seems to have happened with the way cultural change is depicted and anticipated.

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Synthetic Fuels

Posted in Unfounded Speculation on May 8th, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Crystal Ball, Energy

Human survival at our present population level absolutely requires vast reserves of energy, to produce and transport food for our immense population if for no other reason. Particularly if we want to maintain anything like a comfortable and pleasant lifestyle for significant numbers of people, affordable and plentiful energy is a must. While there is a lunatic fringe in geology which proposes that oil is being continuously generated in the earth by microorganisms and essentially limitless, and others who favour an abiogenic origin of petroleum and much higher reserves available than conventional geology predicts, the safe money is on the hypothesis that fossil fuels are a finite resource, and that further, in the case of conventional oil, we are actually at or near a peak in production. Hence, curiosity about what, if anything, humanity will do when fossil fuels become scarce enough that running our civilization on them is prohibitively expensive leads one to the consideration of synthetic fuels.

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Jumpy Web Pages and AJAX

Posted in Tech on April 28th, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: AJAX, Web Design

Go to www.cbc.ca/news - one of the things you will notice is that after the page loads, AJAX elements are continuously loading which causes bits of the page to jump around. This can result in you clicking on a link you didn't intend as the page jumps around under your cursor if you are not content to wait for all the AJAX to load, and in attempts to scroll the page being very choppy and unpleasant. I'm only using CBC as an example - a lot of AJAX heavy pages do this. I submit that this is an example of bad use of AJAX and bad design overall, as it irritates the user and makes a worse user experience. Proposed rule: When using AJAX to load content into a web page, reserve room for that content in the page's CSS and do not allow it to shove bits of the page around as it loads unless you have a damn good reason to.

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Bring on the Coalition

Posted in Personal Miscellany on April 20th, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Politics

In the current Canadian election, the Conservatives have been using the word "coalition" as a scare word, and the opposition have been obligingly playing along by ducking for cover and disavowing any intention of forming a coalition. Well, let's take the scare off.

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Review: Django JavaScript Integration: AJAX and jQuery

Posted in Django on April 16th, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Reviews, jQuery, AJAX

A while back, I was asked to review the book Django JavaScript Integration: AJAX and jQuery, written by Jonathan Hayward, published by www.PacktPub.com. The company is looking for people who have blogged about the topic of the book to write reviews of it on their blogs - as this is a topic I have written about and I was very interested reading a book-length discussion on the topic for free, of course I agreed. If you would like a sampling from the book, a chapter is available for free online (Chapter No.10 - Tinkering Around: Bugfixes, Friendlier Password Input, and a Directory That Tells Local Time). I think this chapter is fairly characteristic of the book as a whole and will give you a good sense of what Hayward has to offer. I think some people would enjoy this book and get something out of it, but my personal reaction was more of disappointment. Overall, I'm glad I didn't pay good money for this book.

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It Worked On Dion - Will It Work On Ignatieff?

Posted in Personal Miscellany on April 5th, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Politics

Giving so much attention to Ignatieff and making it seem like he is an underdog that the mean popular kids are picking on might backfire on the Conservatives. Ignatieff is not a weakling, a fool or an idiot. Yes, he lived for 30 years outside Canada - where he achieved international recognition in the absolute top tier of his field of expertise in a mercilessly critical and competitive environment. Stop and think about that for a minute. You don't get to that kind of position in life for nothing.

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Is "Funding Separatists" Really So Bad?

Posted in Personal Miscellany on April 3rd, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Politics

I'm frankly sick and tired of all the whining about "taxpayers funding separatists" in relation to MP benefits in general and the political party subsidy in particular going to the Bloc Québecois. Like it or not, they have a perfect right to that funding the same as any other democratically elected representative in Canada.

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Harper Promises to End Political Subsidy

Posted in Personal Miscellany on April 3rd, 2011 by Stephen DeGrace Link
Topics: Politics

I'm not a fan of Jean Chrétien's campaign finance reform, but I'm even less a fan of Stephen Harper's plan to keep the system while dropping the political subsidy. The idea behind the vote-based political subsidy was to replace corporate and union contributions without turning Canada into the kind of country where the party which can fire the most passion gets an overwhelming financial advantage. Populism sounds nice if you don't think about it too hard, but if stirring up often-ugly passions is the only way to compete in the Canadian political arena, it will change the character of Canada for the worse.

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