Hexayurts are structures made out of rigid insulation panels. They’re quite popular at Burning Man because they’re easy to transport and keep out the heat & dust better than anything else. I plan on making an H12 size hexayurt for my first Burn next year. I made a model using gingerbread.

1. I made dough according to this gingerbread recipe and bought fresh royal icing from the bakery at Thrifty Foods.
2. I rolled 2/3rds of the dough between wax paper to pretty damn thin and baked it on parchment paper until the bread didn’t take imprints, which was much longer than 10 minutes and ended up being brittle around the edges. The bread ended up being 1/8″ after baking.
3. I cut the bread into twelve 2 × 4″ panels with a serrated knife.
4. I cut six of the panels in half from corner to corner – next time I’ll cut half of them the opposite way so I have the same side facing out on all pieces.
5. I iced each pair of half panels into an isosceles triangle, as per the hexayurt design, and left them to set on a piece of wax paper.
6. I iced the walls into a standing hexagon by icing them onto a piece of parchment paper and to each other. Note that a regular hexagon has 120° angles and with 2 × 4″ panels, parallel walls are 6.75″ apart – I sketched the footprint on the parchment paper before erecting.
7. Based on my friend Clamb’s suggestion, I made a cardboard frame for the roof and left it to try overnight. Note that it’s important to put icing on the full panel edge and press them together rather than trying to push icing into the gap after they’ve been assembled.
8. I put icing on top of all the walls and dropped the roof into place.
9. I was too cheap to buy silver leaf, so I mixed white and grey sprinkles to simulate reflective insulation panels. The advice I got from a cake store was to stick them to the walls using warm corn syrup, but the sprinkles dissolved into it. Also, it was very difficult to get good coverage on the sides since I was hesitant to tip the hexayurt – there must be a better way to decorate, but I’m not sure what it is.

My friend Jennifer pointed me to this yearly art show based on the Christmas tree symbol. Here are my 12 favourites in no particular order (another best of list):

Dear Times Colonist Editor:
Re: Oilsands goes bananas, misses real issues

Bananas might be healthier than oil sands for Albertans (although they’re high in fructose), but they’re very unethical.

Getting ripe bananas to market in North America requires burning lots of oil, which is why Chiquita cares so much about where it’s coming from. Consumers demand cheap bananas, so people working in the banana industry are paid very little and the whole industry has been shut down in higher wage countries like Jamaica. Finally, bananas have been bred into a sweeter and fleshier disease-prone monoculture.

Bananas represent everything that’s wrong with globalized, industrial agriculture – we should all consider boycotting them.

I’m a bit confused by articles discussing whether high-income tax increases are “fair”, like this one Simon linked to. Many progressives (Elizabeth Warren most notably) argue that it is fair for the government to take some of that wealth because the wealth was earned by consuming social goods. But that’s still accepting the Randian world view that people have an inherent right to be compensated for their ingenuity, not merely their labour.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights says that people have the right to compensation and property ownership sufficient to ensure their dignity, nothing more. Only the Queen (and the First Nations) has any inherent right to own anything. She allows other people to own things because it is in the best interest of her subjects to do so.

Given that rich people have no inherent right to their wealth, the question should not be how much taxation is fair, the question should be how high can taxes be before it screws up society. There’s a concept in economics called Kaldor-Hicks Efficiency (which is a generalization of Pareto Efficiency): any redistribution of resources is efficient as long as the total amount of resources in the economy does not decline. Taking money from Scrooge and giving it to Cratchit is Kaldor-Hicks efficient as long as Scrooge and Cratchit do not decrease their labour and productivity. (Although note that the Globe & Mail Economy Lab claims that the low capital gains tax is K-H efficient.)

Any Kaldor-Hicks inefficient redistribution will cause a drop in the GDP, which is the current performance measure of choice. But inefficient redistribution could still increase our social welfare function. The left should stop arguing about what exactly the tax rate should be and start arguing about how we measure if a tax system is good.

A few hipster DJs still use vinyl turntables. There are evolutionary dead-ends called CDJ and vinyl emulation where CDs or records with control signals on them controls software on a laptop. Then there are turntable controllers that have input devices that feel like a record.

Given that songs are linear rather than circular and the visual waveforms are really useful for mixing, turntable input seems non-optimal. There is mixing software that can be controlled by a keyboard (one pair of keys to change the location in the song, another to change the tempo) and I’ve seen DJs spin with a pair of keyboards and monitors (I have no idea why he had two of each).

The obvious solution is something where you manipulate the the waveforms directly and tablets are the obvious platform:

Tablets have a lot of potential for electronic music production as well. Apparently Björk has been using something like Reactable ($11.25 in the Android Market) in concert:

And there’s competition called NodeBeat ($2.04 in the Android Market):

I’d love a chance to play with one of these, but I can’t justify buying a tablet when I have no musical talent.

I’ve been procrastinating on writing this post for years. Partly it was because my post on how to use Evernote to implement Getting Things Done is by far the most popular post in this blog’s history. Partly it was because Evernote gave me a Pro account to review and I felt that one negative review was enough for a while. Then after I had procrastinated for a while, I wasn’t sure if my criticisms were still valid: maybe the platform had been improved since then?

So I just reinstalled Evernote and NOPE.

Evernote’s clients follow a strict hierarchy: desktop client > web client > mobile client. There are things you can do on the higher level client that simply cannot be done on the lower clients. I’ve noticed this is particularly common with platforms where the primary client is on OS/X. That follows Jakob Nielsen’s recommendations for mobile app design, but I am an early cloud adopter: my phone is my primary user interface and I have no interest in downloading stand-alone clients.

I ended up dropping Evernote for Getting Things Done in favour of using email for one simple reason: phone developers put a lot of effort into making sure email synchronization works right. On my old iPhone, Evernote synchronization was very unreliable. Evernote for Android has background synchronization, which should approach the reliability of email push synchronization, but you need to have a Pro account to sync folders for offline reading (the star feature in the old version of Evernote appeared to sync things for offline reading but it didn’t).

Evernote is designed as a web clipping and note authoring service – it does those tasks pretty well. But it is advertised as a kitchen sink platform, and some of those uses are simply hacks. A vivid memory was when a version of Evernote came out that was unable to synchronize notes with no content – in my Getting Things Done implementation all the notes had no content! It made it clear to me that I was using the app outside its intended use cases.

This Huffington Post article has been bouncing around the blogosphere for a few months. The author, Yashar Ali, argues that telling women their emotional behaviour is “crazy” is a form of “gaslighting“: convincing someone they’re crazy by questioning their perception of reality.

I wish I could agree with him, but Ali mostly misses the mark. We live in a masculine society. Any non-masculine behaviour is defined by society as insanity. Therefore, men are correct in calling women insane when they act like women. This is basic Foucault: society (not abusive individuals) uses the label of “crazy” to assert power over dissenting behaviour.

Asking men to redefine sanity for themselves is like asking someone to see the code of the Matrix. Instead of just telling individual men not to make gaslighting speech, we need to reform society to value feminine behaviour as much as masculine behaviour.

Section 47.1 of the Canadian Wheat Board Act says:

The Minister shall not cause to be introduced in Parliament a bill that would exclude any [grain]…unless:

1. the Minister has consulted with the board about the exclusion or extension; and
2. the producers of the grain have voted in favour of the exclusion or extension, the voting process having been determined by the Minister.

The Federal Court (a special federal court that rules on civil suits against the government) ruled that the introduction of Bill C-18, An Act to Reorganize the Canadian Wheat Board, violated the rules of “manner and form” introduced by the Wheat Board Act. I’d say the Speaker should have refused to allow the reading of the Bill. But given that the Bill has been passed by both Houses, what should the Governor General do?

This interesting article about British Parliament explains that it is reasonable that Parliament be bound by “manner and form”: whenever the sovereign is an entity other than an actual person, there must be rules to determine the sovereign’s will. Parliament is sovereign, and so must follow manner and form rules; and because Parliament is sovereign, they can pass manner and form rules to define their own will.

The Clarity Act is a similar piece of manner and form legislation.

If the manner and form rules have not been followed, Parliament has not actually passed an Act, they’ve just made vacuous statements. So the Governor General has no act to sign. The Governor General does not have the power to pass Acts on his own, so if he decides to sign some piece of paper that resembles an Act, the courts should ignore that piece of paper.

The government should have amended the Canadian Wheat Board Act as a separate piece of legislation and there would have been no problem.

I recently went to a community mapping workshop for the Fernwood neighbourhood in Victoria. The project is affiliated with UVic’s Community Mapping Initiative, which includes links to a bunch of community maps around Victoria. A community map is supposed to be a map that includes whatever the mappers consider important. The Green Map iconography they use makes their ideological commitments pretty obvious, although they haven’t yet matured to the point of using base layers that aren’t part of the modern ideology.

Another project I heard about was Prince George crowdsourcing a map of idling hotspots using a tool called SeeClickFix. The idea is that PG doesn’t have the resources to do blanket enforcement of their idling bylaw, so a crowdsourced map could lead to enforcement prioritization, moral persuasion or a grassroots campaign like those against plastic bags. Unfortunately, it looks like after the campaign died down nobody kept using the site.

The interesting thing about using SeeClickFix is that it’s a totally open crowdsourcing map. I can go to Prince George’s part of the world and enter any kind of issue I want. Then people can vote and comment on it. I went to Victoria and entered a couple of my pet urban design issues and a City staffer responded within minutes. That’s faster than the City’s online service request form, and gives an opportunity to post and discuss issues that don’t have an obvious fix by the maintenance department.

I think this has a lot of potential for local public engagement. I recommend that local politicians forward citizens to SeeClickFix and subscribe to new issues in their jurisdiction.

I was waiting for Bernard von Schulmann to explain why his party, Open Victoria, lost. But apparently this is all he’s going to say, so here’s my analysis:

In 2008 there was no incumbent mayor and it was a pretty close race between NDP-affiliated Dean Fortin and business candidate Rob Reid. In 2011, Fortin had an overwhelming victory over business candidate Paul Brown. I think most of this can be attributed to the incumbency advantage for a mayor, who is in the media much more than an incumbent councilor. Brown was a weaker candidate than Reid and I guess people weren’t as disappointed in Fortin’s first term as I was. Filipovic picked up votes as the stricter nomination requirements kept the mostly left-wing crackpots out of the race.

There were fewer council candidates so votes were more concentrated (meaning you needed more to win). Notably, John Luton lost even though he increased his vote percentage. Geoff Young obviously did so well due to his opposition to the Johnson Street Bridge process, but given the mayor’s high votes I’m not convinced that his slate did poorly because of their performance. Although the incumbency advantage should never be discounted, the pattern is too random to read a strong voice into the electorate. I think I might have to concede that Ben Isitt, Lisa Helps and Shellie Gudeon simply ran better campaigns, as lame of an explanation as that is. It’s hard to understand Philippe Lucas’ fall in particular: I assume most voters knew that he was a vocal representative of the left, even if he usually ended up voting with the center.

I’m hoping that Isitt will pick up blogging about council now that Luton is gone.