Living in the Future

Author: Rob Attrell

  • Here’s what it actually takes to #BikeToWork

    Here’s what it actually takes to #BikeToWork

    There are lots of great reasons to bike to work. Health, including fresh air, exercise, and heightened mental awareness are just a few of the obvious benefits of the self-powered commute. As Twitter celebrates Bike to Work Day today, a few of the difficulties many people face in actually planning to bike to work every day should be considered.

    Riding a bike to work is not something anybody in a professional environment can do on a whim. If you are going to pedal in to work without a real plan, you’re gonna have a bad time. Sweat, wind, dirt, and many other factors complicate this process, and even if you live close to your place of work, there’s a lot to consider.

    If you make the decision that you want to ride to work, here is a list of things you should think about before even hitting the road:

    1. Do you have a bike? If yes, is it tuned up? You need to check tire pressure, gear lubrication, brakes, lights, your bell, and any other accoutrements you might need or want.
    2. There’s a lot of bike gear. What about your helmet, bike shorts, layers in case it’s cold in the morning, proper shoes that can get a little beat up, sunglasses for glare and dust protection, gloves (for warmth and bumpy rides), water bottles, and anything else you can think of.
    3. Can you wear your work attire on the bike? If you work in a business with a uniform or dress code, will you be able to ride without getting your work clothes dirty? If not, you’ll need to bring a change of clothes, and preferably not have them get wrinkled.
    4. Does your place of business have bike parking nearby? Is it safe? Do you have a proper lock or bike storage facility?
    5. How long is the ride, and does your place of work have showers or facilities where it would be easy to clean up for work if you’re sweaty on the other end? Can you leave toiletries, a towel, or any clothing at work, in a place where it will stay safe and clean?
    6. Is the weather cooperating with you today? If it’s raining, that’s a whole other consideration, and if you live in a place with unpredictable weather, a flash rainfall while biking can really ruin your morning.

    The place you work can be very supportive of biking to work, but it still won’t be easy to just roll out of bed in the morning without lots of planning. If you drive or take the bus to work, you can probably just get ready at home, and the odds of forgetting an essential piece of clothing or accessory are small. When you bike to work, if you forget a shirt, it’s a big problem. There are ways to reduce these risks if you’re forgetful, but it’s still something to think about.

    Now that you’ve thought through your plan and everything is ready to go, you have to actually get on your bike and go. When was the last time you rode your bike? Was it last season? Do you remember how to do it? What about hand signals for turning, are you even comfortable taking your hand(s) off the handlebars?

    For many amateur cyclists, biking on the street is a daunting proposition, especially during rush hour. While bike friendly cities can do a lot to support their ridership, the odds are good that you’ll have to interact with a car at some point on your commute. If you’ve biked through a city, you’re well aware of problem areas, especially on older roads. Most drivers aren’t too familiar with the one meter strip on the side of most roadways, but it’s not exactly conducive to a smooth ride on many city streets.

    #BikeToWorkDay is a really great initiative, and it goes a long way towards highlighting the reasons getting to work by bicycle is fun and exciting. However, it’s one thing for politicians and people who bike to work one day a year to get through that experience, it’s another thing altogether to consider making it a part of your lifestyle.

    Consider pulling your bike out of the garage more often if you can, and please try to show some empathy for commuting cyclists as you pass them in your cars today (and every other day). They are just trying to get home safe, like you.

  • Shades of Gray

    Shades of Gray

    To many folks out there, the world is black and white. Humans, and our descendants, have evolved and survived for millions of years, in part because we can react quickly and make snap judgments that keep us alive.

    Today, though, we live in a different kind of environment, one with a lot fewer life-or-death situations. In the modern world, there’s more than enough room for a bit of nuance, but that doesn’t mean our instincts don’t kick in and cause problems from time to time.

    One of the easiest situations to think about in these terms is getting scared. The fight or flight reaction is one that is fundamental to all humans, and the accompanying rush of adrenaline comes straight from a time when every day was a fight to stay alive.

    Another interesting example of these black and white situations is an allergic reaction. If you have ever suffered through any kind of severe allergy, you know how frustrating it can be to deal with itchy skin, a sore throat, sniffling and red eyes. These reactions are the way your body deals with foreign substances, but in the case of pollen, cat hair, or peanuts, this reaction is incredibly overblown, and can actually cause harm or death.

    If our bodies were properly able to understand nuance and context, a scary movie wouldn’t send a rush of adrenaline through our veins, and an allergic reaction wouldn’t cause its potentially deadly symptoms. These reactions saved our ancestors for generations, and they stay in our genes even though the majority of humans don’t live under constant threats.

    Take humans’ instinctive reactions as described above, and apply them to a society and world where there is room for interpretation, and time to make judgments. Suddenly, we’re dealing with sexism and racism and discrimination based on categories that make no sense.

    For example, transgender people face harassment and judgment every day, in countries around the world. Why? Because large parts of the world believe that either you’re male, or female. Our instincts, which have kept us alive for millions of years, were honed by making quick decisions and placing people and things into groups. Anything that doesn’t fit that categorization has been automatically wrong.

    And in most cases, animals (humans included) are male, or female. However, in this instance, the edge cases are pretty important, and not *that* uncommon. This is especially important considering a doctor has a few seconds to determine the biological sex of a child upon delivery, even though that decision will almost certainly impact the child for the rest of their life.

    Scientific studies have shown that the standard XX and XY chromosome sets are far from the only genetic combinations humans can have. Not only that, but many genes controlling secondary sexual characteristics, like hair growth and other physical attributes, have little or nothing to do with the sex chromosomes.

    And all of this discussion doesn’t even get into the fact that sex and gender have no strong basis in science, especially when it comes to gender roles, personalities, or hobby choices. We set societal expectations based on race and gender as we live our collective lives, these things are not set for us.

    The goal of this blog is to explore the gray areas that lie between black and white (and no, there will be no 50 Shades puns).

    Leave your preconceived notions and assumptions at the door, they are only relevant once they have been tested and re-tested. It remains a challenge to navigate the modern world without stepping on any toes, but empathy is perhaps the most powerful tool we have. Don’t forget about it.

  • Transgender people are still people, obviously

    “Imagine going through life every day and having so many of your interactions involve somebody trying to give you a hug and stepping on your foot while doing it,” Prince, a 31-year-old trans woman in Alexandria, Virginia, said. “And then when you ask them to step off your foot, no matter how polite you are about it, they respond with, ‘Oh, excuse me, I was just trying to give you a hug.’”

    This series on Vox is remarkable and honest. I’m not sure I can do justice talking about it, and I encourage you to go read the whole series.

    What it comes down to is that it doesn’t matter how people choose to live their lives. Being assigned the wrong gender at birth, or having genitals that don’t align with your perceived gender or don’t fit into our neat, tidy definitions of ‘normal’ doesn’t make anybody less of a person.

    As anybody who has ever been bullied for being ‘different’ can attest, it absolutely sucks. For humans, it has been evolutionarily advantageous to sort things into distinct groups and categorize them as such. But treating human beings that way, as though some are inherently more deserving of human rights or legal protections than others, simply because of how they choose to live their lives, is absolutely devastating.

    In the last couple of weeks, we have seen big musical acts like Bruce Springsteen cancel concerts in North Carolina over a terrible anti-LGBT law that passed there, and more of this needs to happen. Lawmakers need to be responsible and consider the needs of all constituents, not just those who represent the majority.

    I don’t personally know anybody who is transgender, but it’s just so blindingly obvious to me that those people are just as deserving of love, care, and compassion as anybody else in the world, if not more so.

    > Transgender stories – Vox

  • Car crashes kill an absurd number of people

    The numbers are so huge they are not easily grasped, and so are perhaps best understood by a simple comparison: If U.S. roads were a war zone, they would be the most dangerous battlefield the American military has ever encountered. 

    I take the bus to work, and I absolutely love walking and biking. There are certain niche uses where a car is essential, but in an urban centre like Ottawa, many people can get around without relying on a car.

    Having said that, just as many people, if not more, absolutely DEPEND on a car every day for transport to and from work and other social obligations. Most of this is because housing in big cities (Ottawa to some extent, Toronto and New York, for example, just take the example to astonishing extremes) is very expensive, so people choose to live where it’s cheaper, work in the urban centre, and commute for 30-60 minutes by car.

    That thought is crazy to me. Even though I spend a ton of my life listening to podcasts, which are pretty perfect for car trips such as that, the thought of getting into a car every day to drive to the office is not something I think I’d enjoy that much.

    Adding to that, we tend to think of car crashes as a tiny risk in our day to day lives, and it gets worse as those lives come to rely more and more on absolute certainty of normalcy. If our pizza is late, it’s free. If our Uber takes 10 minutes, we complain. When a bus breaks down (or doesn’t show up at all), we’re late for work.

    But in a life (and society) where things are so safe (#firstworldproblems, anyone), the fact that any of us could die in such a quick, violent way on any given day is cause for alarm. We put car traffic above everything else in our transportation system, and yet it’s responsible for so many totally preventable deaths on our roads every day.

    At some point, self-driving cars will take over, and crashes between two of those will be as unlikely as a plane crash is today. But for now, we’re stuck with an incredibly convenient transportation method where countless unknown cars around you are capable of completely changing, or ending, your life in an instant.

    That’s scary, but it gives us something to strive for, and I think car culture as it exists now might be nearing its peak.

    > The Absurd Primacy of the Automobile in American Life – The Atlantic

  • The end of green screen, and possibly the beginning of true 3D movies

    Since Lytro’s tech basically captures all the 3D information in a scene, the imagery is unusually friendly to CGI. Placing virtual objects at exactly the right depth in a scene is essentially taking advantage of a native ability of the footage.

    This is possibly the beginning of what I’ve been looking for since the re-renaissance of 3D movies in the last 10-15 years. As the new ‘real’ 3D movies came to theatres, what I really wanted was to be able to view a scene in full 3D (ie. with the right visuals, everything could theoretically be in focus at all times) and to be able to focus on whatever I wanted at any time.

    You have no idea how disorienting it is (unless you do this, like I do) to be engrossed in a 3D movie, just to glance at something in the background of a scene and see that you can’t focus on it. Is that what living with glasses is like? It’s terrible.

    I’m really hopeful that advances in 3D movies along with these Lytro cameras that are capable of capturing all aspects of a 3D scene could mean an overhaul of not only visual effects, but of the 3D movie as a whole. I think if we were to see something like this, we would be able to truly revolutionize cinema. It might take a VR type experience to truly make this happen, but I think at a certain point that’s where we’ll end up, and I can’t wait to focus on the meaningless background part of a scene in a movie, just because I can.

    > Lytro’s new Cinema camera could mean the end of green screen

  • On watching Steph Curry and the GSW this year

    Trying to figure out whether you like the Warriors, on the other hand, is like being 5 years old and trying to figure out whether you like magic.

    This is exactly how I feel about Steph Curry and the Golden State Warriors right now. I’m not a huge basketball fan. I’ll watch a player or team that’s doing really well (up until this year that was LeBron for me, or the Raptors in the playoffs), but I don’t really follow the league.

    That being said, watching Steph Curry hit crazy, off-balance, near half-court shots routinely makes me think back to the days on the elementary school court, when it was more about having fun and seeing what’s possible than trying to be technically or strategically perfect.

    It’s all the more frustrating that I felt (as a kid) that I should be making more shots than I was, in real life and in video games. But Curry manages to overcome all of that, and swishes shots that should never be taken by anybody, which is something I aspired to, but could only ever dream of.

    > The Golden State Warriors are the greatest NBA team ever—and the most likable.

  • Carbs are getting in the way of healthy eating

    Canadians heeded the exhortation to reduce fat and reduced their fat intake to 31 per cent by 2004. But during this time, obesity rates spiked, which suggests that dietary fat is not a “primary contributing factor” in obesity, said the report.

    I got healthy (and lost 45 pounds in the last 8 months) but not by focusing on eating healthier foods (like salads) at restaurants and at home. But my main focus was on the AMOUNT I ate, not on the types of foods as much. I didn’t count a single calorie, and though I started my diet exercising by biking to work every day, for the last few months I’ve only really been moderately active, but haven’t gained any weight back.

    The demonization of fat (and subsequent need for people to eat lots of carbs at the grocery store, or restaurants, has meant that people have to eat a lot MORE food to feel full. Letting yourself eat fat, and trying to limit the amount of carbs you eat, is probably going to become increasingly important to the North American diet, whether these guidelines officially change or not.

    > The Canada Food Guide is killing you: ‘The obesity epidemic… really began with our dietary guidelines’

  • So…Cold-fX is BS

    “The study actually showed the placebo to be more effective at relieving (some) cold symptoms than Cold-fX.”

    In something surely nobody could have seen coming, it looks like there’s a non-zero chance anybody who purchased Cold-fX as a cold or flu remedy could be able to join a class-action suit in order to get some of the money they spent that didn’t work as well as a sugar pill in treating seasonal respiratory viruses.

    Yikes.

    > Lawyer in Cold-fX lawsuit to fight for for class-action status, which could trigger mass refund

  • A list of the apps on my phone that can make calls

    Doesn’t require phone number:

    • FaceTime
    • Phone
    • Contacts
    • Facebook Messenger
    • Snapchat
    • Google Hangouts
    • Messages
    • Whatsapp
    Can/does use your phone number:
    • Phone
    • FaceTime
    • Messages
    • Chrome
    • Safari
    • Mail
    • Notes
    Announced, but hasn’t shown up yet:
    • Slack
    As it turns out, pretty much every remotely social company has a way that people can talk to one another in a phone call-type manner. Many of these apps also let you use video chat, but people have no idea. For instance, you’ve been able to make phone calls (and recently, video chats) with any of your Facebook contacts on your phone, for such a long time. But I can routinely blow people’s minds by telling them that, because approximately nobody* knows about this feature.
    Snapchat updated their app yesterday to revamp chat, and added the ability to send video clips or make voice calls to any of your Snapchat contacts who’ve added you back. But none of the features in the update are actually new capabilities your phone didn’t have before, and I’m betting people aren’t going to be making use of this feature any more than they did, no matter how good it is. 
    If I were a gambling man, I’d put money on Snapchat continuing to grow at a rapid pace for quite some time. But people who already have a predefined way of communicating, like my generation and those older than me, won’t use Snapchat for voice calls because to us, the way you make a phone call is by calling a phone number.
    But the kids, they don’t obey these rules. They do whatever their friends are doing, and their friends don’t make phone calls to a phone number. That’s not cool anymore, at least not until their parents stop doing it.

  • Podcasts Like ‘Serial’ Are Encouraging Literacy

    “[L]istening, unlike looking at a written page, is more active, since the brain has to process the information at the pace it is played.” My student Roberto offered similar insight: “I think it helps me out with my reading since I have to keep a pace up.”

    Huh, turns out the best ways for kids to learn aren’t determined by a group of adults telling them what’s best, kids (like everybody) are going to learn best when given options and a choice. And just like I always say, podcasts are a great way to learn and take in new information, and listening isn’t nearly as much work as reading.

    And if learning is work, you’re much less likely to want to keep doing it.

    > Why Podcasts Like ‘Serial’ Are Helping English Teachers Encourage Literacy – The Atlantic