Cool Runnings in 2024

Through some accident of weather and culture, I ended up watching the 1993 movie Cool Runnings with my family this evening. For those of you too young to know (like my kids), it tells the (dramatized) story of how a Jamaica bobsled team competed in the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary, Alberta.

It was not bad. It didn’t age as badly as I might have expected. A few observations:

  • I forgot how prominent Calgary was as the setting. I’m heading there next month it will now be “the place from Cool Runnings” for my kids.
  • The USSR and East Germany participated in the 1988 Winter Olympics.
  • The Swiss bobsled team in the movie were smoking (literally and figuratively).
  • The score was composed by Hans Zimmer.
  • John Candy, god rest your soul (my kids recognized him as the “guy from Home Alone”).

I did appreciate that my kids assumed the stars of the movie would win the big race, and they didn’t, but it was still triumphant.

After the movie, we looked up the how ‘true’ the based-on-a-true-story was. I enjoyed this quote from Wikipedia:

“The film depicts the team carrying the sled to the finish line to a slow-building standing ovation: in reality, the team walked next to it and received some sporadic applause.”

Wikipedia

A few other gems from the Wikipedia article:

  • Disney wanted Kurt Russel to play the coach, but John Candy insisted and took a pay cut to play the role (it was his last)
  • Cuba Gooding Jr., Jeffrey Wright, and Eriq La Salle were considered for roles of the bobsled team.

 

102 BBQ propane tanks worth of energy per year

After having a series of energy efficiency improvements done to our home in Charlottetown, we received the following rating from an EnerGuide efficiency evaluation:

Info graphic showing a typical new house using 123 GJ/year and This House using 51GJ/year. One gigajoule (GJ) equals the energy from two BBQ propane tanks.

Our “before” audit showed us using 85GJ/year and our “after” audit has us down to 51 GJ/year. We had cold climate air source heat pumps added (like, a lot of them) and spray-foam insulation added to accessible portions of our basement foundation walls (including sealing some glaring air gaps out into an unconditioned garage).

The house already had a ~16kw solar panel system when we moved in last year, so the solar is incorporated into the before and after evaluations.

These evaluations are approximate. There’s no measure how how much energy I’m actually using. They do a blower-door test to measure for air-tightness (our “air leakage rate at 50 pascals” is 3.89 air changes/hour – down from 5.7 before our recent improvements). Beyond that, the values are calculated based on number and type of windows, house size, and a bunch of other static measurements.

So, these values could be better if I keep the house freezing all winter, or much worse when the kids leave the door half open in the middle of winter.

I do like that the rating from EnerGuide Canada includes this note:

One gigajoule (GJ) equals the energy from two BBQ propane tanks

Maybe a BBQ propane tank is the “football field” or “Olympic-sized pool” (!?) measure for energy. Note that this is just for comparison. We’re not actually powering our home with primarily with propane.

Knowing our house could be using around 100 BBQ propane tanks of energy per year sounds pretty low, and way too high at the same time.

 

Size or Speed

Come along with me on a small thought experiment:

Imagine for a minute, you’ve been given a task by the United Nations Commission on Computers & Stuff.

  • Your job is to optimize all of the un-optimized digital images in the world (to take less storage space).
  • Your mandate dictates that you can only do lossless optimization. For context: there are tools that reorganize the contents of image files such that they take take up less storage space, but no data or image quality is lost. This is in contrast to compressing an image more, where you discard data and lose image quality.
  • In my thought experiment, you somehow have the funding, computing power, and the access to all computer systems in the world.

My question is this: Is it better (from a climate standpoint) to:

  1. Spend the energy once to save all of the storage space in the longer term, or;
  2. Don’t spend the energy to optimize, and keep spending the energy required for the un-optimized storage?

Obviously the real answer is It Depends on factors like: how much optimization is possible on most images, how long (and on what type of storage) are most images stored. Let’s not ruin a fun (?) thought experiment with nuance, though.

What say you? Does it cost more to squish a big image, or keep it around un-squished?

 

Do I need insurance when I rent a car

Any time I’ve rented a car in my life there’s been a question I didn’t know how to answer: Do you need insurance?

I’ve had a vague notion that my credit card may provide insurance for cars I rent, or maybe my own personal car insurance may cover cars I rent. I didn’t really know though.

Sometimes I waived the rental company insurance, sometimes I paid for it.

With an upcoming rental with the Turo car rental app (think Airbnb for cars but hopefully without fuelling a housing crisis), I was asked again if I needed my own insurance, or if I should pay for Turo’s insurance.

I finally decided to figure out the real answer: do I already have insurance on cars that aren’t my own? I called The Personal Insurance Company, who insures our beloved minivan, and got a real answer.

After some confusion about coverage for when I’m driving a rental car, and coverage to pay for a rental car when my own car is damaged, I got my answer: No, I don’t have coverage for cars I rent.

How much would it cost to get insurance for cars I’m renting? They called it “endorsement PE-SEF 27” and it is $8. A year. Done.

It took me decades, but I can finally waive rental car insurance with confidence.

 

Great Tweets

As part of their story about the downfall of Twitter, The Verge has compiled an archive of Great Tweets. I might just be tired, but I’ve been laughing for 15 minutes at these.

Not on the list, but a couple of favourites of mine:

“There’s still so much we don’t know about HTML. Even now, scientists are discovering new tags almost every day”

@Orteil42

“Stepping down from my job to devote myself full time to reading the emails from my kids schools”

Joseph Birbiglia @joebirbigs (deleted)
 

Uncovering differences in images with the Web

This video (that I found via Waxy, who found it via the Tom Scott newsletter) does a great job of illustrating how you can visualize subtle or hidden change over time in video:

Thumbnail image from video showing clouds of mixes of bright colors and a YouTube style play button in the middle

In a much less sophisticated example of a similar principle, I sometimes use the ‘Difference’ filter mode in Photoshop (or other image tools) to catch small changes between two images.

As a simple example, these first two images (screenshots of the WordPress settings screen) are almost identical. The third image uses a ‘difference’ blend mode to make this small change obvious.

The differences between the first two images are: a checkbox was moved down a few pixels, and the word “register” was replaced with “join”. If you open the first two images (A & B) in two browser tabs, you can also switch quickly between them and your brain will do the work to highlight the change (just like the T-Rex did in Jurassic Park before it ate that lawyer off the toilet).

As a bonus, the Web has native support for this ‘difference’ blend mode via the CSS mix-blend-mode property. I was able to put together a quick example with some simple HTML/CSS that shows the difference mode without a tool like Photoshop.

See the Pen Blend Mode by Steven Garrity (@sgarrity) on CodePen.