Fine print...

Ottawa is a political town. It is impossible too walk to far without seeing some of the detritus of Canada's political life pushed in your face. Usually you see it, you laugh at it, and move on. Sometimes, it's not quite so easy.

This past week, while undertaking my lunchtime constitutional in stfiling Sahara-heat that is the Ontario summer, I had the following handed to me:

To give some sense of scale: the object in question is roughly 3 inches high by 4 inches long, similar to those that you might see advertising a club show, and first glance the colours suggest a circus, or carnival-type event. On closer viewing, it would appear that it is in fact a political ad, criticizing an as yet (at the time of writing) unreleased tax policy to be proposed by the federal Liberal party of Canada. There are quotes purporting to be a myriad of reviews of the policy, though they are only from something called the "Times and Transcript" (if you've heard of this publication I commend the breadth of your reading) and Sun Media. Indeed, they seem to be reaching the bottom of the review-barrel here. At the bottom there is a link to a website, http://www.willyoubetricked.com/, which is done up in similar colours and has a certain juvenile cleverness.

"Who might have put together this marketing masterpiece?" I asked myself as I skimmed the website. No doubt one of the Liberal competitors...however, there was no immediate "vote for X" indications anywhere. A-ha, a clear rank amateur, I thought - some kind of Madison newbie enjoying beginner's luck. Then I looked back to the card for some evidence and upon closer inspection:

No apologies for quality-further zooming would be pointless. Why? Well, the actual attestation has been smudged so that you can't make it out. Printing error? Doubtful. If you stare at it long enough, you will get an idea of what it is - rather like those 3-d digital drawings that were so popular back in the 90s. I was somewhat taken aback that someone would be ambiguous in establishing their association with this creative masterwork. Seeing as there were so many of these pamphlets littering the downtown, I would have thought that whoever printed them them would want to stand up like a man, given the environmenal sacrifice.

More likely, whoever sponsored this would like to keep their association minimal as it is truly ridiculous. It's so silly as to make any serious dicussion of the issues farcical, . The credibility of the party involved will be eroded, and theirde facto spokepeople will become the talking inkblots on the website. It's a little like George Bush nominating Spongebob Squarepants to be his spokesperson on Iraq (though, this may be an improvement). Certainly, placing them at gas pumps across Ontario will help establish them in our mind's eye.

In any case, as you may have made out by now, this appears to Authorized by an Agent for one of the err...main parties of our venerable democracy. I am pleased to see that they seek to engage the citizenry on the issues in a manner that has all the youth and vigor typical of a college fraternity. Certainly, as an uninformed bumpkin on this controversial issue, I can feel rest assured that before long I will have absorbed enough agitprop to take a stand.

A frictionless, slippery slope,

I am certain that I shock no one when I say that civilization has generally treated the environment with all the care of Vikings at a nunnery. The 20th century, in particular, has seen us taking from the world whatever we feel we need for ourselves, and then viewing the remnant as a convenient wastebasket for what we can't use. One only needs to review the historical record on biodiversity (the passenger pigeon, the dodo, the yangtze river dolphin, the amazon, etc...), air quality, water quality, the ozone layer to get an idea of how well we're doing. To be fair, much of the damage came at a time when we could not conceive of the eventual negative impacts of our action, but we have now reached a stage in our development that we should be applying thorough due diligence as we launch new projects and products. Or, we like to think so.

U.S. Patent # 2,230,654, poly(tetrafluoroethene), has gotten a bit of a bad rap, as of late. Most, would be more familiar with it under its registered trademark name of Teflon, produced by the Du Pont corporation. Invented by accident in the 1930's when a researcher was trying to invent a new kind of CFC refrigerant (I hope the irony here is lost on noone), it has become rather ubiqitous in our culture. Besides covering our cookware to keep our food from sticking when it's being fried, we use it to cover bearings, bushings, computer mice, bullets, most of the Millenium Dome, Gore-Tex, and many others. Generally speaking, it's inertness and low coefficient of friction(the lowest of any known substance) make it an incredibly useful chemical for a range of applications.

That being said, it should be noted that the chemistry of teflon is so complex that many scientists don't quite understand what gives it its special properties. As it has been covered extensively in the news as of late, most people have been made aware that when heated past 500 degrees Celcius (which a typical frying can easily achieve whilst sitting on a burner), Teflon will begin to break down and release chemicals in a gaseous form. In addition to showing up in the blood and tissues of anyone who has ever used a non-stick pan, these chemicals show up in high concentrations in workers from Du Pont's teflon factory, and to a lesser extent in ever man, woman and child in North America. Even polar bears, a species not historically known for frying its catch, have been found to have measureable concentrations in their tissues. The presence of these chemicals in higher concentrations has been linked to increased risk of cancer, hypothyroidism, and in polymer fume fever in very high doses. Amongst our innocent animal colleagues, birds apparently are hypersensitive to teflon-particles - minutes exposures can harm or kill them. This article examines teflon-related health issues in some detail.

Du Pont itself, along with seven other companies who manufacture the product, has itself gradually come around to this point of view, helped on its way by a class-action lawsuit. As I write, it is speedily working to remove all the harmful chemicals from its manufacturing process by....err...2015. However, the intended replacement appears to break and produce petroflourocarbons (PFCs) which have their own, rather nasty, health and environmental effects.

This has become an unsettling refrain that plays frequently through the course of twentieth-century history. DDT pesticides, CFC refrigerants, Bisphenol A - so many products that were found to have great utility that were later found to have unintended, and unfortunate, side-effects as we over- and misuse it and then flush it into the environment.

Anyway, I'm losing focus. The above was really meant as a bit of a preamble...

I was forced to shake my head in frustration recently, while shopping at a Canadian Tire store here in Ottawa. Whilst standing at the checkout, my gaze happened to fall upon the odds and ends of the cashout sale racks, which included the usual collection of batteries, excel gum, stuffed-animal keychains, and this. Yes indeed, it's Motomaster Premium windshield washer fluid with Teflon®! Not only does it melt and remove dirt, ice, grime and grease - it also reduces windshield friction for a cleaner wipe. And if that isn't enough to make you buy, be aware that it reduces chatter (whatever that is) and works perfectly to -45C, making it perfect for those Canadian winters. Truly, a windshield washer fluid for the new millenium.

Of course, little mention is made of what the impact of all that teflon is if it fails to land on your windshield. Issues with the host fluid aside, it strikes me as one of the easiest ways to send teflon into the groundwater table, and subsequently into potable water and the human food chain. I dread to think what the future outcome of hundreds of thousands motorists doing their darndest to make their windshields frictionless with this stuff. It's as if we've chosen to fire a bullet vertically into the air, blissfully refusing to think about the possibility of it ever coming down.

I can't in good faith argue for a complete ban on Teflon - its special properties and uses would make that an unreasonable proposition. My point is intended to address its abuse, over- and misuse.

On the other hand...as Tevya would say....our bodies are already loaded with the results of so many of our shortsighted inventions, what's one more?

Flat Smokers Society

O tobacco! Your glorious pedigree of shamans, kings, cranks, explorers, chiefs and heroes who drew upon your heavenly smoke has been thrown into the spitoon of history by the cold weight of scientific evidence.

It didn't take that long after its introduction, either. In 1604 diatribe, King James himself wrote that smoking was, "...a custome lothsome to the eye, hatefull to the Nose, harmfull to the braine, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse." And aside from that unnecessary reference to hell, the good King more or less hit it on the head. But the effects wouldn't really make themselves into a serious epidemic before the mass production of cigarettes in the Victorial era, and really before World War I. Whiling away the ennui in the trenches between engagements, soldiers were customarily provided cigarettes as part of their ration. At the outset of "All Quiet on the Western Front", the protagonist, Paul, explains how he has managed to beg, borrow and steal 80 cigarettes from his fellow soldiers - roughly what it would take to get him through the day.


Anyway, before long we had something similar to what appears in the chart at right. Lung cancer, previously a rare condition, began to grow in incidence in the population on a twenty year lag with the growth in cigarette consumption. Statistical analysis aside, the chart is a rather stark representation of the negative health impacts of smoking. Of course, if you have a few free hours, the whole spectrum of known tobacco-related ailments can be perused at this wiki. To date, there have been thousands on thousands of studies linking this behavior to cancer and other diseases. In economic terms, various studies have estimated lost productivity and health costs to be somewhere between $7 and $40 per pack.

What I'm saying here shouldn't come as a surprised to anyone. The first government-sponsored anti-smoking campaigns in North America began as early as 1964 at the Surgeon-General's behest, and have since become almost ubiqitous. As long as I've been able to watch television, or string latin characters together to form words, I and the rest of the North American population has been bombarded with anti-smoking public service messages. Celebrities from all walks of life were drafted to save the children including an unlikely pair of Star Wars adventurers. One might question the believability of tobacco's presence in a galaxy far, far away or even the lack of studies of nicotine's impact on 'droids, but to a North American child growing up in the eighties, the message would have been clear and powerful.

All this rests in addition to restrictions on the locations available to smokers to indulge, the tombstone warnings now mandatory on every pack saying that horrible consequences are inevitable should you smoke it to its inevitable conclusion, and the gradual end of the formerly uber-prevalant tobacco advertising. The end result has been that as of 2004, half of all North American adults who have ever smoked have successfully quit, and the incidence of smoking in the population as a whole had dropped by about 10 percent between 1970 and 1995 (as an aside, its use continues to grow substantially in the developing world - so much so, that the World Health Organization considers it the single biggest cause of premature death worldwide). Philip Morris has made the case that this will only lead to increased costs to social services as increasing numbers of non-smokers live longer (non-peer reviewed study), but I shan't get into that discussion now.

But, those of us who haven't lived inside a tree for the last thirty years know all this, so you are no doubt wondering where Oatmeal is going with all this stuff?

Well, if Jerry Springer has proven nothing else, it's that the outer fringes of Western society are awash with bizarre people and notions (though in some ways that can be said of Western society - save that for another post). It should therefore come across as no surprise to anyone that there is a fairly active cadre of conspiracy theorists who feel that anti-smoking activism is nothing less than pure, Soviet-era propaganda. That is, in the most pure definition, it presents mostly truthful information, omitting certain aspects so that the observer comes to specific conclusions such as, that tobacco is unhealthy.

Now in a sense that can be said to be true of all public messaging intended to increase or decrease the incidence of certain types of behavior (such as drunk driving, for example). Many of these presentations can be said to lack the clear nuances that one might see in a peer reviewed paper. But frankly, a picture of a lung rotten with cancer sends a far more effective message than a pie chart with mortality statistics. They are ends to a social goal whose rewards to society have already been well established.

The movement to restore the respectability of smoking and scrape away the taint left behind by thousands of science based studies has numerous berths on the ether, my favorite being Smoking Aloud. If you spend too much time reading their main page, you may find yourself kicking yourself for not indulging in the health benefits of smoking all this time. While they invest all kinds of room on their website criticizing years of research, while their latest post reads like the front page of the National Enquirer, rather reminding one of that time Bigfoot was seen jamming with Elvis. The Libertarian arguments found on the page regarding personal choice have no place in a society where health care is publicly funded, but that is another topic for further discussion.

The Flat Earth Society was composed of individuals stricken with similar issues. Writing at the end of the 19th century, Samuel Rowbotham produced a thesis turning the physical world on its head. Starting as a project to insulate his literalist biblical belief system from reality, Sammy devised a model for reality which did away with the arrogant "Globo-centric" world that everyone thought had been comfortably established by that time. Instead, humanity existed on a giant platter while the known universe, a mere 3,000 miles away, spun about its environs like a garnish (perhaps this is in the bible, I'm not sure). Having spent time creatively devising explanations that somehow explained and supported it with rather dubious "scientific" experiments. He and his followers even managed to debate it successfully against more traditional researchers who had the combined weight of hundreds of years of data from astronomical observations and circumnavigations on their side.

Rowbowtham's movement continues to this day, in no less freakish a form, defying reason to strike it down. Sadly, it doesn't, but it does make a point with regards to humanity's desire to lie to itself. Cognitive dissonance is a state in which reality argues with one's assumptions causing anxiety unless the argument is somehow resolved. It is a tool, really, that has helped human society evolve and jump forward, by helping our intelligence integrate radical new ideas, like evolution, the Copernican universe, or the negative health impact of a formerly-beloved habit. At other times, though something goes awry, and we need to grasp at straws rather than move forward.

Caribou on the scene.

Ottawa is just big enough that we get a share of musical talent dropping in on their way to Toronto from Montreal, or vice versa. While the big Dinosaur-rcok names are all over the news lately (I note the Police, Rush, etc...), I think it's worth noting some of lesser-knowns coming through town. This past long weekend, we bureaucrats were the lucky recipients of shows from electro-pop talent Chromeo (to which tickets were impossible obtain) and also ambient-rocker Caribou.

Why Caribou, you might ask? Isn't that a subarctic-dwelling dear that call to each other using a series of grunts and snorts? "Hmmmm...that doesn't sound like anything I might like to listen to", you might say, "I much prefer a nice recording of bird sounds". Well, as a matter of fact, this is the musical project of one Daniel Victor Snaith, a supremely creative individual with a Ph.d in Maths from London's Imperial College, who just happens to be have a blind spot for band names. A previous endeavour was called "Manitoba".

I've only recently been turned on to the music of Caribou, whose musical style resembles something akin to early Syd-Barret-era Floyd, a comparison aided by a psychedelic backdrop and spacey ambience of his live show at the Babylon nightclub. Though this may be unfair, as it pigeonholes what is really varied, catchy and engaging music. Currently, Snaith and his band are in support of their latest album, playing a show every single evening of their lives since the start of September 2007, with short breaks for transcontinental flights. Do catch this aural phenomenon, ideally before they collapse from exhaustion.

Inaugural Post

My years of resisting pressure to join the mainstream flood of pop culture as it places its every half-processed thought, gripe and ejaculation into the ether have come to an end. Dear reader (so far, only me), I have officially joined the blogosphere, in a sort of social experiment. I am using this to answer a few immediate questions: how deeply can individual thoughts be buried into the ether relative to their retrievability via google, and how truly engaging can this activity really be? I speculate that this latter question will be a function of both life here in Ottawa, and my own bureacrat's reticence.

In any case, if there's one thing that blogging has proven is that virtually everyone on it has some sort of opinion. The best ones come with supporting information, others are simply spontaneous rants, while others document the day-to-day ennui of those whose primary qualification is a connection the internet. The blogosphere has become a gold mine for social science graduate students, a barometer of popular opinion as well as an influence and a postcard from the edge.

With that, I cut the electric ribbon. At this point, the band should strike up with
an uplifting tune, preferrably with a soaring chorus, something like "Solsbury Hill" or something.