There are twelve new electric school buses on the road in Charlottetown this week. The buses are from Lion Electric. As a safety precaution, they play a musical tone in place of the grumble of a diesel engine. I’ve heard it going passed my house just this morning.

It’s nice to see a small step to reduce carbon emissions. About 25% of our electricity on Prince Edward Island comes from on-Island wind generation, and hopefully this number will grow soon.

I look forward to these being so common that I come to hate their music.

Yesterday, CBC’s evening radio news program As It Happens covered the embarrassing refusal of the Canadian Conservative Party to acknowledge that climate change is even real. Host Carol Off had no patience with the nonsense she was hearing from members of the Conservative party as they struggled to explain away the absurd decision.

After a rambling attempt to explain the Conservative approach to climate policy from Conservative MP Tim Uppal, host Carol Off replied:

“To be honest I have no idea what you just said. I don’t know what you have told us is your policy on climate change.”

Carol Off, in response to Conservative MP Tim Uppal on CBC Radio – March 22, 2021

Then, Carol Off spoke with Conservative delegate Moshe Appel. To his credit, Appel supported the motion to acknowledge reality, but when trying to explain the confounding decision of his fellow Conservatives, he raised the argument that it’s so obvious to say climate change is real that is is like saying that water is wet. Carol Off replied with my favourite few seconds of radio in a while:

Water is wet and climate change is real.

Carol Off on CBC Radio – March 22, 2021

The Conservative Party can’t be taken seriously. I appreciate that Carol Off acted accordingly.

The editors of the Volkswagen Canada site were trying to helpfully inform me that a Canadian version of their car may differ from the European variations. The composition of this photo and text conveyed a different message.

Is Tom Cochrane the Canadian:

1. Bruce Springsteen?
2. Tom Petty?
3. John Cougar Mellencamp?
4. Who is Tom Cochrane?
5. Must we define Canadian artists by comparing them to Americans?
6. Somewhat agree

I was delighted to hear such a beautifully optimistic take on space exploration from Stacey Abrams’ in her interview with Kara Swisher on the Sway podcast.

After forty minutes of talking about voting rights and how to repair American democracy, Swisher took a hard left turn and asked, “Do you want to go in space?” Abrams’ response (hear it at the 43 minute mark or read the transcript) should be hung on the walls of NASA.

As if that wasn’t good enough, she went on to a completely earnest discussion of how Janeway is her favourite Star Trek captain.

I’ve always loved Star Trek: The Next Generation, but never had much time for the other flavours of Star Trek. Stacey Abrams may have convinced me to try out Voyager. How long could it take to catch up? There are only 172 episodes…

I heard a song near the end of episode 3 of season 2 of the show Search Party that stuck with me enough to look it up. It’s Circles by Prairie Empire. It reminds me a bit of the restrained guitar and vocals from The National. Recommended.

As for the show Search Party, I started watching on the recommendation from Jeff Cannata from the Slashfilmcast. For the first few episodes I just hated the characters, but I’ve been sucked in to their world. Such a bizarre show.

Just puttin’ a new video card in my gaming PC. No big deal.

I stumbled across this cover of Radiohead’s Paranoid Android by Ball Park Music. I have never heard of Ball Park Music before, but I was captivated by their surprisingly faithful cover.

Radiohead managed to make a few guitars, bass, and drums sound like nothing I’d ever heard before in Paranoid Android. Seeing it recreated in such an unassuming way makes me appreciate the original song even more.

Ball Park Music does a great job with the cover—particularly the vocals, but no one can recreate the sound of Johnny Greenwood on guitar.

I can remember listening to OK Computer when it first came out in 1997 and being annoyed by it on the first listen. It just sounded like a noise to me. After a few more listens it not only stopped sounding like noise, it turned out to be a collection of beautiful melodic pop songs.

Vaccination against COVID-19 is getting becoming more real and less of a vague hope as eligible family members and acquaintances are starting to get vaccinated.

This reminds me of a post I made in 2017: Selling the Flu Shot. My point at the time still holds up: If you want people to get a vaccine, don’t use photos of needles sticking in arms to promote it. No one likes seeing a needle sticking into an arm!

To their credit, the provincial government website doesn’t have any such photos on their pages about COVID-19 vaccination, but the CBC keeps using needle-in-arm photos in their coverage of the vaccine roll-out. Granted, it’s not the job of the CBC to sell the vaccine, but also, it’s up to all of us.

Oh, and don’t call it a “jab.”

The many variations of Mario Kart games have been among the most fun I’ve ever had playing video games.

One of the many mechanics that helps make the Mario Kart games great is how the game is designed to narrow the gap between stronger and weaker players. If you’re in first place, you get weaker power-ups. If you’re in last place, you get the best power-ups, including some that will help you catch up to the pack, and some that specifically target the leader.

The strongest example of this in Mario Kart is how racers in last place are often rewarded with the Blue Shell. This Blue Shell is a special power that when launched, skips over everyone until it knocks out the racer currently in the lead. Should that lucky last-placer end up in the lead, they’ll face the same danger.

Levelling the playing field doesn’t just improve the game for weaker players, it makes the game better for everyone. Since the object is to have fun and not just to win, even the best players benefit from the ways the game becomes more challenging for them.

Allow me a sharp change in direction.

Many of our problems stem from the gaps between the strong and weak, rich and poor, privileged and underprivileged. Closing these gap tends to improve things for everyone, including those who were starting at the top.

This isn’t a new concept in governance. This Mario Kart mechanic is used in social programs with tools like progressive taxation.

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s surprisingly hopeful novel about catastrophic climate change, The Ministry for the Future, Robinson imagines a future in which wealth and income is capped at a multiple of the average. If you want to get paid more than ten times the average, you’ll have to drag everyone else up with you.

I would also like to see this gap-closing mechanic applied to social media. Imagine an algorithm that penalizes popularity and rewards obscurity with attention. You wouldn’t silence the popular. Rather, you would make the climb a bit harder for those with established audiences.

Such a system could make networks more welcoming, boosting new voices, while raising the level of difficulty for those with entrenched experience.

Let’s try tuning our systems to work against the seemingly innate gravity of wealth and fame. Perhaps this would help engineer an ecosystem of many moderate voices, rather that constellation of a few hyper-celebrities.

Update (April 15, 2021): Since make this post, I’ve learned that a researcher from Boston University, Andrew Bell, wrote an academic paper about using the Mario-Kart balance principles to help with environmental governance. Bell’s paper is also covered by Boston University’s research magazine.