Car Ad in a Gallery

The Edward Day gallery on Queen West seems to have turned itself into a showroom for automobiles. This is poor form for a gallery. They have not only sold away their credibility by displaying the cars, but went so far as having screens playing ads and having marketing materials available.







These are some of the negative comments from the graffiti wall that took the place of a comments booklet. Strangely, most of the comments were either positive, ambiguous, or unrelated.

Critical Mass Review: Chaos is good

I find that I get a bit antsier than usual when critical masses are as huge as the one tonight. It is all good though. Here is the run down:

1. This had to be one of the biggest Masses I have ever been at. It was bloody huge.
   
2. I corked at avenue and Cumberland right after mass started. There were a bunch of n00bs at the front, so I kind of got to decide to turn right. Awesome.
3. Heading down Yonge was better than usual. We've had some business with streetcars on College a couple of times, but today was cool.
4. That Tall Bike! That was pretty cool. I tried to stay away from it as much as possible though.
5. We got split into two groups on University thanks to the police car behind us chirping. We managed to reunite. It is cool to think that there were two groups of cyclists large enough to take back the streets in downtown Toronto at once.
6. What was with the n00bs biking down the wrong side of the street all night? That's not how we roll.
7. The incident with the fire truck at Queen and Bathurst went quite well, considering.
8. I am happy that we continued from Bike Pirates.

All in all this was an awesome mass. Here is how I remember the route:

Gone Fishing Begins @ Scadding Court Community Centre

From Monday June 18 to Saturday June 23, 2007 you are invited to go fishing at the indoor pool at Scadding Court Community Centre located at 707 Dundas St. West (Bathurst and Dundas).

The program hours are:

• 10:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Weekdays only
• 3:30 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Weekdays
• 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Saturday

This is open to the General Public. There is an entry fee of $8.00 per person with a limit of two (2) fish. Each fish over the limit is $3.50. A .75 cent fee will be charged for each fish cleaned.

Air Quality? Not Bloody Likely

So the AQI was at 23 when I got home. Something tells me that they must do these readings a few miles off the end of the Leslie St. Spit. If they had been downtown they would have noticed that the air stank of gas.

I consider driving to be an immoral act in general (see Peak Oil, Global Warming etc), but on days like today it is down right mean.

Canadian Provinces vs. Countries with Similar GDP

Fairly roughly speaking, the list is

1. Ontario: Netherlands
2. Quebec: Denmark
3. Alberta: Greece
4. BC: Portugal
5. Sask.: Slovakia
6. Manitoba: Lybia
7. N.S.: Guatemala
8. N.B.: Sri Lanka
9. N.L.: Lebanon
10. P.E.I.: Benin
11. N.W.T.: Haiti
12. Yukon: Lesotho
13. Nunavut: Belize
    

Inspired by

Mathematical Pet Peeve #1: the equals sign

Here is the first in a list of abuses of mathematics that I will occasionally see that bothers me, in no particular order.

Have you ever seen an ad that has some sort of bogus equation in it? I am talking about things like:

• You + lower mortgage rates = 1 happy camper.
• splenda + olestra = healthy snack.
• Teo Leone + George Wendt = awesome TV show.
• high mileage + tonnes of horse power = 1 killer ride.
  

I have two qualms with this sort of advertising:

1. All ads are lies. By using the equals sign in this context, you deny it it's true meaning. I hope that people don't actually think that these equals signs are valid.
2. These equations aren't even true. You can't add summands with disparate terms and expect a neat answer unless you have defined some custom form of addition (in which case using the equals sign is bad form), when you clearly haven't. Perhaps this would be a better equation:
   
   define a function TV from the space of arbitrary sets of actors into the space of the quality of television sitcoms. Then TV({Teo Leone, George Wendt}) = A good T.V. show.
   
   Of course, I still don't think that this is a good equation. Refer to #1.

I think that the idiocy of these ad campaigns is by design, and that it is meant to cause people to stop and reexamine the message because of the faulty mathematics involved. This is similar to the ads with. random; punctuation, between... words.

No one ever accused marketers of not being crafty, but at least we can accuse them of being dishonest in one more way.

Ride for Heart

I did the Ride for Heart today. It was a lot of fun.