Month: September 2007

Officials say a large animal may have gotten into one of the utility’s conductors, leading to the large scale failure.

(See this posting for the earlier report.)

If you’d heard about the segment on the morning TV show The View in which the new castmember can’t answer the question “Is the world round?” and wanted to see the clip, here it is:

Can’t see the video window? Click here.

There’s a big power outage right across downtown Accordion City at the moment. The affected area is bounded by:

• Spadina on the west
• Yonge on the east
• Queen on the north
• The lake on the south

There’s no indication as to when the power will come back, but if you’ve got an appointment there this afternoon, there’s a good chance that it’s been cancelled.

According to this description in Toronto Life magazine (who are a reliable source of information for this sort of thing), the folks at Invitation House do excellent work, and they do it the old-fashioned way, eschewing computers for good old-fashioned letterpress.

Unfortunately, Invitation House is sending the wrong message with their sign, in which the letters are packed like typographic sardines:

Photo courtesy of RoninKengo.

Here’s a closer look:

Photo courtesy of RoninKengo.

Interestingly enough, Invitation House was a business spun off from a company called Kern Stationers. Kern is exactly what happened to their sign — overly so (the tracking is also a bit tight, in my opinion).

These guys should probably get a new sign made — they probably don’t want potential customers to get the impression that their wedding invitations willenduplookinglikethis.

The 40th birthday is coming up soon. There’ll be a party, and while I doubt that I can top the hot tub on a truck like a did back in ’03 (the photos will be back online soon), if I could, I’d try to top it by throwing in some tesla coil action:

Photo courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.

Yes, Whole Foods is pricey, and a bit too “bougie” for some folks, but wow, their produce is amazing and they’ve got stuff you won’t find in most other supermarkets.

(As an added bonus, it makes the Ginger Ninja feel more at home, since Whole Foods is where she did her grocery shopping when she lived in Boston. You should’ve seen her face light up when she discovered that we had one here in Accordion City, on Avenue Road, about halfway between Bloor and Davenport.)

A recent discussion on Chowhound has got the Ginger Ninja excited: there seems to be a new Whole Foods in development at Sherway Gardens, our shopping mall of choice out here in Accordion City’s west end.

We’ll still frequent the nearby No Frills and local greengrocers such as the nearby Fresh and Wild, but when we’ve got an occasion that calls for top-shelf ingredients or have a hankering for the stuff at their deli, we’ll soon have a Whole Foods nearby.

Former Harvard physics prof Andrew Foland has a blog called Nuclear Mangos, which he describes both it and its amusing names as follows:

This blog is intended to provide reliable technical analysis of nuclear issues with non-state actors and nuclear beginner states. Some technical issues have important policy implications that citizens in a democracy should be able to make informed decisions about. The motivation for the blog has been the incredible amount of lies & hyperbole on the Iran situation of early 2006. The blog title is to remind you constantly of the quality of minds in charge of our nuclear security today.

(Being one of my favourite fruits, I find the blog’s title insulting to mangoes!)

After reading comments to a Salon article on Andrew Ledeen’s new book, The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction (also covered in a recent article in National Review), Foland put together a comparative bar chart, shown below, that sizes up the U.S. and Iran on various metrics that one might use in a threat assessment:

Based on the CIA World Factbook’s data for the U.S. and Iran, as well as Uranium Enrichment and Nuclear Weapon Proliferation and Iranian Centrifuge Developments.
Click the graph to see the original at full size.

SWU, measured in the rightmost bars, is short for Separative Work Units, a unit of measurement used in the nuclear power industry. According to the USEC site:

A SWU is a unit of measurement of the effort needed to separate the U-235 and U-238 atoms in natural uranium in order to create a final product that is richer in U-235 atoms.

Most naturally-occurring uranium is too low in uranium-235 to be used in nuclear reactors; it needs to be “enriched” first. The SWU measure for Iran — that is, the work being done to enrich uranium so that it’s usable for creating nuclear reactions, whether for making electricity or for making the “Great Satan” cry — is too low to show up in the chart; Foland writes that its value is 0.00015.

Based on these numbers, Iran just isn’t anywhere near America’s weight class. As Foland puts it:

By international standards, Iran is a poor, underdeveloped country with substantial infrastructural lacks. If such a country is indeed an existential threat to ours, it can only be the result of some mighty serious mismanagement of American power.

These numbers don’t change the fact that the Iranian government comprises some of the worst examples of humanity, but it does challenge the neocon notion that a military solution — and soon — is necessary.