I I just watched about 6 short videos on ‘Journey To Midway’, a documentary on the life and death that humans plastic consumption causes. How do we continue to breath? It is really quite shocking what we have done, what we continue to do, and what we continue to ignore. This is not a soft topic, this isn’t a discussion to be had over dinner with the business contacts. This is not about which number of ply you will buy of toilet paper and how much one can save if you buy bulk. Continue Reading →
On March 4, 2011 at 6pm Becker Galleries opened their space for Unintended Calculations, a show being curated by the talented Indigo showcasing artists from around the world. I had the fortune to be invited to the VIP opening of the show, and I was blown away by the artwork and the artists themselves. Continue Reading →
Due to the recent events in Japan, with a nuclear power plant going into meltdown (of the facts we do not yet all know) I’d like to go on a little rant here on nuclear energy and the state of Japan’s health. I would like to point out a few things. Continue Reading →
Right now, it’s the middle of midterm exam season, which is great. The time of the semester where you check yourself into reality, and realize that yes, you haven’t been looking at the text books, and yes, you need to really focus now.
This mean time to turn off Facebook, Twitter, log off wordpress, stop rebloggin on tumblr, etc. etc.
It’s the middle of midterm exam season and I’m not refusing any of these social media outlets. Why you may ask? What I have learned about myself is if something is on my mind, if I’m getting distracted by it and don’t do anything about it, it just continues to well up on my mind and takes over any capacity to learn the material I’m trying to. This is a bad thing when you’re trying to learn… clearly.
So what do I do? I take care of these little things one at a time as they each come to me. I’ll go onto facebook and check to see if I have any new pressing matters to check in on. I’ll go check twitter to see whose yelling at me, and after a minute or two, I’ll begin to realize that nope, nothing urgent has happened since I looked on here an hour ago, and I’ll close it up and get back to studying.
For me, this usually takes about 5 minutes to do, and I’m back at studying. Except tumblr, that can go on forever.. that’s a dangerous beast one must watch out for! But for the majority of issues that come to my mind; little ideas, things to do tomorrow, appointments I have in a week… I can just write them all down on a little list in less than a minute, and carry on with studying, not ignoring any of the thoughts that come to my mind, as well as getting right back at more efficient studying.
So what do I do now that it’s the middle of exam season? I get back to studying, this has been a great 5 minutes 🙂
Dear spammers,
Honestly, what do you think that you are accomplishing? Do you really think that you are gaining some traffic from doing such spamming? Hmm. Maybe you are… But does it translate into customers that click through and make you money? Do people actually not look at the content keeping it on their websites, or do they immediately delete it from their website? Really now, what is your purpose on this planet?
Further more, do you think that anybody in their right mind clicks on the links that you post, or spam us with? Do you feel happy at the end of the day knowing you have scared somebody so much about the use of their computer that it severely hinders all progress in gaining customer satisfaction on the internet? Is that your goal?
It’s people like you that make me not proud to be a human. The disgusting filth that prays on the unsuspecting by cruel means; taking their hard earned money for good causes they think they are supporting, or completely unsuspecting victims to forgery or identity theft.
Further more, you pollute the internet with crap and garbage that dilutes any great webpage from getting across its relevant information into a site riddled with bugs and garbage.
If you haven’t got the point yet: take a hike, get lost, find twigs to break somewhere in the dessert. Do something productive, and beneficial to man kind with your time and you will be rewarded much more greatly by the spoils of your effort.
Finally, do you really feel that spamming your product makes your product stand out above the rest? Because I really do feel that it highly degrades your product, and that if I had a choice between a product I’ve been spammed about, or another product, I’d be way more inclined to choose the other product.
With hate,
KK.
I’ve recently been spammed galore on one of my sites. The site is dedicated to health, exercising, mind issues like psychology and positive thinking. Yet, somebody felt that I needed to see “Virtual Life Like Sex Dolls”. I wish I could say this was cute, but it really isn’t at all. It’s rather annoying and stupid that I have to deal with such a thing.
If you are a spammer, why do you do it? If you’re not, does it annoy you as much as me?
A massive catastrophe is speedily reaching us. Its not a doomsday forecast, predicted in the year 1801 by a psychic named Rasus. Nor is it propaganda from giant corporation funded newspapers to insight hysteria into the consumer to buy buy buy! What we are faced with is the pure facts of exponential growth rates.
For years we have been headlined with such slogans as “Our oil reserves have been increasing production at 4% per year, which means that we have more oil than every before in the reserves”, or “the world population must increase at a rate of 3% per year or we will not have enough people to fill our factories.” How do we continue to support these same newspapers and TV programs when the fill us with this junk? It boggles my mind.
What we do not understand is how this continued 3% or 5% growth rates effect us in the long run. What this ‘positive’ growth rate fails to inform us about, is how this actually works.
First of all, when you have a 5% growth, it compounds on top of the year before, so we now have a 5% on the 105%. So, lets use numbers.
Year 1, we have 100.
So you see, at a growth rate of 5% we will have doubled in ~15years. One might be inclined to think 100/5 = 20, so it should take 20 years to double… But no.
This simple math can be estimated with the function ln(2)/% = 70/rate. So, for our case, 70/5=14. Pretty simple. The magic thing to remember is the 70. Somebody quotes you: “oh yeh, the expected growth of this stock is 7% per year,” or “These equity funds grow at a rate of .002% per year.” Now you’ll be able to say “One second, let me take out my smart phone calculator and add these up.. 70/7 = 10 years to double! Wow great investment! 70/.002=35000 years to double??! I think I’ll stick it under the mattress, thanks all the same.”
The other amazing thing, is that when we reach this double amount, it means that the total amount we are now seeing is more than double the previous double point. So, to show figures, year 1’s 100, the amount the year 16 (doubling year) has increased by is 107.89. This means that it has more than doubled. And this continues on forever, as long as the exponential growth (or compounded continual growth continues).
To see this in a graph:
This simple graph has year in the x axis, and resultant growth total in the y-axis. You can see that between year 12 and 13, it is very obvious that the value has gone from 4000, to above 8000; more than doubled. It doesn’t just occur in those years though, it occurs in all the years prior as well, so every doubling period sees the same growth. Every time that 70/% year hits, this doubling factor is felt.
Another thing that I would like to point out is that if you notice at any two points, if you take the same two previously mentioned at year 12 and 13, you see that the 4000 it has grown by in year 13 (to 8000 from 4000), is a growth of more than what the entire total of all the years before have accumulated to, which was 4000. This is in itself the definition of a doubling time, which is the time it takes when you do the 70/% growth factor, so you can see how quickly this will grow at?
I hope this has enlightened you a little bit, or made you more aware of what it actually means to be a compounding or exponential growth, and I hope it will make you more aware of the situation that is inferred when somebody on the news says: “We need our population to grow at 3% per year, that would be a good sustainable thing”, or “Our oil consumption has a steady growth of 3.5% per year, which is expected to grow over the next 20 years by 0.3% per year, which should give our company a great stance in the markets.”
I want to leave you with this 8 part series of videos to watch off of youtube, or anywhere else you can find, so that you can learn this from an expert Dr. Albert A Bartlett who is famous for his lectures on exponents and who will explain it in far better terms than I can!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY]
Good luck!
So, many of you may not know what a Flash Mob is. According to Wikipedia, they are “a group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then disperse.”
Sounds kind of fun doesn’t it? I think so too. Although I’m sure it would take a considerable amount of time to prepare one of these things.
A friend of mine, Liser, just brought the light of these flash mobs back into my eyes when she told me about how riveting such a thing is. She said that the idea of so many people in one place, dancing and happy puts her “at peace with the world.” I agreed with her when she mentioned that the energy is so positive, how can a gathering like that not be? Seems fun to me.
So, as a result, I have been watching a few videos on some examples. The first one Liser showed me was one where they all met in Central Station in Antwerp, Belgium and suddenly started dancing.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EYAUazLI9k&feature=fvw]
To me, it was pretty cool. The way that they just are all acting casual, going about their business, and then just like that, they’re all dancing. Kind of really rules!
The next one I watched was a supermarket one where they all froze.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4GMXavfKPY&feature=related]
So I read on the Wikipedia page about them further, since my interest was clearly in it, and it turns out that the originator of recent day flash mobs is a man called Wasik who started doing them to be as a kind of joke to the conformers of the world, showing them the absurdity of things, as well as have some fun. The first one I guess failed since they owner of the store they had planned on infiltrating was alerted about it. But, they did the next one only a short month later.
One funny event that I wish I would have been able to see is when there was 200 of them that all went to the 8th floor of a department store and surrounded a rug. They were all told that if they were asked by anybody working there what they were doing, they were to tell them that they were all part of a community living space, and they were looking for a love rug. That they only made this decision when all of them were there together. Tell me that wouldn’t be totally funny to see!
So I ask you, what type of inspiration do you find from this? Does it intrigue you or does it make you roll your eyes at the stupidity idle men brainstorm to disrupt the normal way of life..?
I think its refreshing, creative, and fun. What better way to celebrate life than a (seemingly) spontaneous DANCE PARTY!
Today I finally used my two year membership to the Vancouver Art Gallery (aka VAG) for the first time since I got it in October. To be honest, I was a little bit disappointed. I have been a membership holder before, and I will most definitely be again, but the show this time wasn’t to the caliber I had hoped it would be.
To me, an art gallery is there to illuminate marvelous pieces of art, expression and meaning into a whole new world of wonder. One should leave wondering what they had just seen, and how it was even possible. AND, with an incredible urge to attempt that art themselves, or at least write a lengthy blog about it. But this time, it wasn’t until I reached the 4th floor that I was mesmerized. This is the first time this has ever happened to me at the VAG, but no doubt, something of the sort will happen again.
I often ponder how I can be a critic, when art itself is pure creative. It’s everything from preparing, thinking, seeing, believing, and determination that goes into each piece of art, but there is also something about great art, and something about just art, which I feel there is a line between.
In the same breath, how can I dare criticize something so delicate as the past? It is not really my part in this world I don’t think.
Please don’t misunderstand my sentiment; there were many many pieces of Robert Adams that absolutely floored me as pieces of extreme beauty. The one above wasn’t in the collection, but many others were. It was explained that Robert spent most of his time photographing North Americas West, but there were other photographs in there too.
Apparently his work is interpreted to be of how man has altered nature. Glorious (some may think) blemishes on the otherwise vegetative landscape that are labelled with the words of progress. Do you believe this is progress?
Who knows. I do not dare decide that answer for myself, for I feel if I were to say no it’s not progress, I would be turning my head away from everything that is in my day that builds up to bring me here today. I am in fact writing this to you on the premise of progress: a computer. And if I were to say it is progress, how could I explain the way we neglect mother nature, blindly turn away from the facts of overpopulation, or waste, or poverty. Or what about the great class spread that we (my fathers and mothers before me) have worked so laboriously ahead of me to eliminate?
That shall be my rant for today on the world.
On to the rest of the gallery. The second floor was an instillation done by Song Dong. They say he’s an ‘avant guard instillation artist from China.”
Walking through his exhibit, it felt like I was walking through one of the millions of pawn shops, or junk stores you come along on the road. It was amazing how it was organized though, like a maze of dominoes. It was all just JUNK, displayed along the floor in neat symmetric matrices arranged according to function. From toothpaste tubes, to gardening tools, to old cardboard boxes used for pills, to teddy bears, to shoes and clothes, and plastic bottles or even the re-useable bags they’re making us buy at the grocery stores now. It was pretty wild to see how he arranged everything. Just taking the random things we all know and see and turning it into a fantastic spectacle of absurdity!
The one thing that caught my eye, at the very end of it, was a chalk board, with a girl drawn in chalk on it, partly smudged out along the edges, but for the most part still very visible. I wonder how he came to have these things?
The 4th floor had an exhibit that was ‘In Dialog with Emily Carr‘, which was astounding. Over the time that I have spent getting to know Emily through the Art Gallery, it has made me greatly respect the woman.
Today there was a place to sit down and you could hear a dialog between one of the artists and her (I suspect it was an Emily impersonator since she’s been dead for some 60years) about the difference between now and then. It was amazing to hear her amazement about how one of her paintings sold for just over 2million dollars! Apparently there was lots of time how her paintings couldn’t even sell. Where she had lost all hope, and how she struggled to make ends meat. I guess this is the woe of all artists isn’t it?
$2.16Million Piece
The guy illuminated how green never sells paintings… It kind of made me think a bit about my next paint purchase!
Emily‘s work is both exact and abstract to me. It has a remarkable beauty in that it illuminates certain aspects of the life, without forgetting the other parts of the picture, while still remaining somewhat… well, just amazing I guess is how to explain it. Her work has now become very recognizable to me, since the VAG houses the biggest and most extensive Carr collection known.
What makes me sad is knowing how an artist like this was never appreciated in her time because of the fact that a. she was a woman in a mans world, and 2. she bridged a racial barrier that hadn’t ever really been attempted or valued at the time.
One is very tempted to say we will never come across something like this again in our time, but that would be much to naive for a person that knows better. Most certainly it is happening now as we speak. Who knows, maybe we already know the person personally!
I have been made aware of the recent child porn probe in the Greater Toronto Area, and to say the least, its disgusting. The rage that builds up inside of me when I hear this stuff is unquestionably filled with disgust and offense.
Searching for more information on what has happened, I came across this incredibly emotional blog the owner so graciously let me use. Hopefully it will make more people aware of what some of the life long struggles victims must go through, or at least make us aware that some things in life that we hear about, or see on the news and say: “Oh thats so sad,” and then when we are faced in real life with such situations, we choose to shrug off the situation with some sort of hypocritical justification that its ‘ok’ to continue on your way without demanding change.
So, take charge to change situations where there is a victim, this world needs your action.
Without further delay:
______________________________________________
7 men of the Greater Toronto Area were arrested in an international child porn probe. 25 Canadians. 57 men total. 45 child victims were identified. 25 children were rescued. 12 of those children are Canadian.
I’m going to do some naming and shaming.
Richard Dyde, 47 – YORK UNIVERSITY FELLOW!! not only did this pedophile possess child porn and make it available, he has additionally been charged with making child pornography.
Toby Stimpson, 24 – YORK UNIVERSITY RESIDENCE DON
Jonah Whitehouse, 31
Erin Holder, aka Erin Wilson, 26
Michael Pellow, 68 – Toronto real estate agent, charged with making child pornography
Christopher Holowatyj, 20
Trevor Partridge, 44 – posed as a 17 year old online and convinced girls to perform sexual acts over the internet for him to record
Kevin Sheppard, 41
Outside of the GTA, Randy Miller, 40, of Napanee, a PROFESSIONAL CLOWN, VOLUNTEER SCOUT LEADER. He’s been charged with sexual assault, 2 counts of making and possessing child pornography.
David Caza, 47 – CONVICTED PEDOPHILE, RELEASED FROM PRISON IN 2005
Reverend Robin Barrett, 51 (first charged, already sentenced to 2.5 years. That’s all?)
According to the Toronto Star, some men have already been convicted and sentenced to jail terms ranging from 30 months to 25 years.
I began my life as a child porn star at age 8. Now I can tell you that I’ve suffered immeasurably for the 25 years I’ve lived since then. If justice were fair, perpetrators should be punished for AT LEAST as long as the consequences of their actions torment their victims. Bare minimum. And those who perpetuate victimhood by sharing these pictures? Keep them locked up until the victim decides they no longer feel any shame about their abuse and humiliation being used to gratify their evil desires. I can guarantee you not one victim has recovered after 30 months.
Maybe you have read a bit about my struggle with mental illness lately. I have Post Traumatic Stress, and according to some therapists, I have borderline personality disorder. I have extreme difficulty with interpersonal relationships, whether they be intimate, professional, familial, among friends, and with the general public. I have fears and anxieties that paralyze me, and keep me a prisoner in my home. I’m terrified to go out in public in case I overreact to something and respond “inappropriately”. I haven’t kept a romantic relationship for more than 3 months because my issues exhaust even the best-intended.
My spirit was shattered then, and I haven’t been able to put it back together. Would I be like this if it hadn’t been for my perverted teacher back in grade 3? I don’t know. I don’t know anybody like me. I read about people like me in psych books, but I don’t know anybody who can relate to how I feel. People undermine my being and my feelings, blaming everything first on the abuse, then second on my mental illness. ”You’re depressed because of what happened to you as a kid” ”You’re gay because you were raped” “You’re overreacting because of your mental illness…” ”All our problems are because you’re crazy”. I haven’t yet been respected for having real, authentic feelings stemming from me being human, I’m always reduced to a mentally ill victim-turning-villain.
Because yes. I’m turning into a villain. I’m not a kid any more. It’s hard to keep having sympathy for someone who was damaged so long ago. I’m not that frail little blonde, blue-eyed girl with gynecological damage, or the tortured teenager that youth workers wanted to save. Now I’m a middle aged cat woman who can’t keep a job, a lover, a friend. I kill happy vibes. I’m the one who you avoid eye contact with, because I’m the ugly woman on the bus crying. I make you uncomfortable. I’m sucking up your tax dollars with my welfare checks, my disability insurance, my repeated hospitalizations.
I’m sure I’ll be told my anger at this recent batch of perverts is inappropriate. That we are innocent until proven guilty, and that we all deserve a chance at rehabilitation. That these people are sick, and should be pitied and helped. Well, I’m used to having inappropriate anger. These men should be murdered. By the state. They will not get better. Look at David Caza. Call it “mercy killing”, euthanasia, capital punishment, eye for an eye, extermination or whatever you want. But Do. Not. Let. These. Monsters. Out. Ever.
Three soldiers ventured into the BC Royal Museum one fine November day. We were summoned to duty as soon as we stepped in the door. We suited up and hit the road looking to take out the trash…
Post brought to you by McGog.