Author: Steven Garrity

Bob McDonald is an active listener

by Steven Garrity

Today at work we were talking about the concept active listening. Hearing the practices of “reflecting back what is said”, “asking for clarification”, and “summarizing” made me think of Bob McDonald.

Bob McDonald is the host of the CBC Radio science program, Quirks & Quarks. I also loved watching his science TV show Wonderstruck when I was a kid. I remember one episode of Wonderstruck about balance where Bob learned to center his mass over the rear axle of his mountain bike and rode around perfectly on the back-tire only.

On the Quirks & Quarks radio show, you can hear the pattern of asking questions of a guest, listening, and then reflecting back what was heard (often in simpler terms). It’s a great way to communicate, and it’s also a great way to host a science show. Keep active-listening, Bob!

 

The Charlottetown / Halifax weather radar blackout of 2021

by Steven Garrity

I spend a lot of my time on the internet. Much of that time is spend checking the local weather via the Canadian Weather Radar service. Some time this year, one or two of the weather radar stations seems to have stopped reporting data on this page. As a result, a swath of PEI (née Epekwitk) and Nova Scotia is in a radar dead-zone. What gives?

UPDATE: As per this helpful comment from Isa, the Chipman – CASCM radar station (near Fredericton, New Brunswick) is having an “Unscheduled outage” and is expect to return on June 9, 2021 (a few days from the writing of this post).

UPDATE UPDATE: It turns out there are two simultaneous outages that I’m conflating here. The Chipman CASCM station mentioned above comes back online in a couple of days, but according to the CBC, the Halifax radar station will be offline until the end of August.

Radar map screenshot showing spots with no data around PEI and Nova Scotia

While we’re on the topic, there are a few other interesting things to note on this page:

  • A recent redesign of this page added many improvements, but also made the large map area something with zooming and panning, which interferes with regular scrolling on the page (you have to make sure your cursor isn’t over the large map before scrolling).
  • That long narrow rectangle-with-blob near the top right is the geopolitical peculiarity of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, a territory of France off of the Canadian province of Newfoundland.

 

Trivial Tragedy #7: The science class lie

by Steven Garrity

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

I was a pretty good student in high school. I wasn’t great at applying myself, but I was capable of getting marks in the 80s and 90s. At the time I thought I was smart. I found out a couple of years later that my ease with math and physics was actually an ease with high-school-level math and physics. When later confronted with university-level material, I quickly realized that I needed to work hard and didn’t know how.

While I did well enough academically in high school, my attendance record was weak. Contingent on transportation of some kind, I skipped a lot of classes. Teachers didn’t press too hard on this, given how I was keeping up with the class.

I had one grade-12 science teacher who got suspicious. I skipped his class one afternoon. The next day as I entered his class, he asked me where I had been the day before. I steeled myself and lied. I told him I had been sick at home.

He had laid a trap for me. Before class, he had phoned my parents to confirm my absence for the day before. He knew I wasn’t home sick — he was asking to see how I would respond.

He looked me in the eye and earnestly asked: Why did you lie to me?

One of a handful of students who witnessed this train-wreck later told me that I actually “made a sound”. It might have been my soul leaving my body.

I don’t even know how I responded, but it felt like a punch in the gut made out of shame and regret. Skipping a class wasn’t a big deal, but an adult human being looking you in the eye and sincerely asking you why you lied to them — that left a mark.

I remember thinking: you’re a high-school teacher and I’m a student — aren’t I supposed to lie to you?

Even though that moment has stuck with me for about 25 years, it didn’t do much to change my behaviour. A few weeks later, I had a friend call the school office and have me paged for a “dentist appointment”.

The PA-system in our class passed on the message. I packed up my things and walked across the front of the class to the door. I’m not sure what the teacher was thinking, but every kid in that class knew exactly what was happening. I knew they knew, and they knew I knew. For about twenty seconds, I was Ferris Bueller.

 

Let’s rename Prince Edward Island

by Steven Garrity

Prince Edward Island is a special place. Most people elsewhere in the world know of it as a place with nice beaches (true), a place that grows good potatoes (true), or the place from the Anne of Green Gables books (true).

It has been called Prince Edward Island (or P.E.I. as we call it) since it was renamed by British colonists in 1798. Before that was was called Île Saint-Jean (St. John’s Island) by French colonists. Before that, it was Epekwitk.

The name Epekwitk is from the language of the Miꞌkmaq People who have lived here for thousands of years. Epekwitk is pronounced ehb-uh-gwihd and has been anglicised as Abegweit.

Despite having watched every episode of The Crown, I don’t know much about His Royal Highness The Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn, after whom our island is currently named. To be clear, we’re talking about the Duke of Kent and Strathearn born in 1767, not the Earl of Wessex who was born in 1964. There’s little risk of a British Royal Family member being forgotten by history or lacking in honours. Prince Edward has a whole section for “Titles, styles, honours and arms” on Wikipedia (along with a section on mistresses).

Unlike the legacy of His Royal Highness, the history and legacy (and the present and future) of the Miꞌkmaq People is at risk.

Thanks to efforts by the L’nuey group, PEI has been adding the Miꞌkmaw names for communities to the official signage (for example, Cape Egmont is Mntuapskuk). I’ve appreciated these new signs and would like to see us go much further.

Let’s restore the original name of our island. Let’s rename Prince Edward Island to Epekwitk.

It is worth noting that I’m not an expert on the etymology of PEI. I’m just a white man who was born here and read the Wikipedia page. I do not think we should take back the name as though it belongs to us. It really belongs to the Miꞌkmaq People of Epekwitk. Renaming this Canadian province is something I think we should to do honour the Miꞌkmaq People, but that honour should be theirs to accept or reject and to own and control.

It’s only worth making such a change if we’re also willing to make more substantial moves to respect the rights and cultures of indigenous people. A name change is a gesture. Gestures can be helpful and gestures can be hollow. To learn more about what else we can do, follow L’nuey on Twitter.

 

Disproportionate time compression in a shortened week

by Steven Garrity

When a typical five-day work week is cut short by a holiday, as this week is in Canada by Victoria Day, peculiar physical properties of a scheduled week are revealed.

When the week is compressed, not all parts of that week compress equally. Events that are scheduled, especially regular and recurring events, tend to remain scheduled with their usual frequency and duration. Even though the week is squeezed, these events resist compression and hold their size. It’s the space around these events, the unscheduled time, that does all of the compressing.

Diagram showing a 5 day week and a 4 day week with scheduled events that retain their size, and unscheduled time that compresses.

Be aware that the unscheduled time in a shortened week is compressed disproportionately to the rest of the week.

 

Trivial Tragedy #6: The case of the broken case

by Steven Garrity

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

I was eight years old in 1986. We spent our summers at a cottage on the North shore of Prince Edward Island. It was a twenty-minute drive from our house in Charlottetown, but it felt like another universe.

Our family had a small portable radio/cassette player that we called our ‘ghettoblaster’ (?!). My older brother had a copy of Bon Jovi’s Slippery When Wet, which seemed like the hardest and most transgressive music imaginable to me at the time. I was yet to purchase my own first album.

I somehow decided I was a fan of Huey Lewis. I bought my first album: Fore! by Huey Lewis and the News. Yes, the one that Michael Bateman raves about while axe-murdering in American Psycho.

Audio cassette case for the album Fore! by Huey Lewis and The News
I can still remember thinking that light-grey suit looked super cool. Photo from Etsy (sorry, sold out)

When I first peeled off the plastic wrapping, I dropped the cassette (in the case) on the floor of our cottage porch. The cassette was fine, but the plastic outer case cracked. I was crushed. This felt like one of my first real possessions, and I had already damaged it.

I looked around and confirmed that no one else had seen my mistake. I quietly removed the paper cassette case lining from the broken case and swapped it with the intact case from my parents’ Peter, Paul, & Mary cassette. I knew they wouldn’t really care about their cassette case, but I feared the shame of having been careless with my precious new purchase.

With the paper-linings switched, no one would ever tell which case was which. It was a perfect crime that I’ve carried with me, along with every note and word on that album, for the past thirty-four years.

 

Trivial Tragedy #5: Man-e-faces

by Steven Garrity

This post is one of a series called Trivial Tragedies. Each installment is a small story of minor heartbreak that has stuck with me from my childhood.

Like many humans on planet Earth, I enjoyed the He-Man series and the related toys as a child. When one of my well-meaning aunts asked my parents what I would like for Christmas, they must have suggested a He-Man doll (or “action figure”, as we nervously called them).

This well meaning and generous aunt headed to the local Consumer’s Distributing outlet where she discovered that all of the He-Man figures were sold-out. They did have a blue version of He-Man though. He’d do.

Well, it turns out that the “blue He-Man” is no He-Man at all. A true fan knew that this was Faker (I remember him being called “Fake-or”, but the Internet has me second guessing myself). Faker looked exactly like He-Man, except that he was Smurf blue.

Faker’s super-power was that he could fool people into thinking that he was the real He-Man. People like my aunt.

Two cartoon action hero figures - on the left, the original He-Man (battles evil) and on the right, Faker who looks exactly like He-Man but is bright blue (fools aunts)
From left to right: He-Man, Faker

I was devastated that Faker had fooled my aunt and left me with a villain-toy rather than a hero. This was clear enough to my parents that they took me to exchange the toy at Consumer’s Distributing (site of the telescope tragedy). Of course, there were still no He-man figures in stock. 

I settled for a Man-e-Faces instead. He could turn his face around, but he was no He-Man.