Sunday, November 18, 2012

Bicycles

Because I had decided not to wash my hair yesterday before I stepped out to go grocery shopping, I was stopped by a CityTV news guy with a giant camera on his shoulder at the corner of Jarvis and Carlton streets.

He wanted to ask me some questions about the Jarvis Street bike lane, the painted line demarking which had been, under protest, removed the week before.

But it was Saturday morning, for heaven's sake, and I hadn't washed my hair, so, while I did not refuse to answer questions under the glare of the big, empty-eyed camera, I struggled for something not stupid to say.

My mind went instantly to the construction of the bike lane on Sherbourne Street, but that seemed off topic. The racing electrical pulses in my brain then took me to the conversation I'd had earlier in the week with a colleague who lives on Jarvis Street and who had witnessed the protesters sitting in the path of the City vehicle specially designed to remove paint stripes from roads.

She said that the Sherbourne lane - which I had offered up in our conversation as a fair trade off - was not the answer. "There should be bike lanes everywhere," she said, making a solidly irrefutable point.

So I said to the man behind the camera, whose face I could barely see, that I thought there should be bike lanes everywhere. 

He then asked me about the drivers. At that point my struggle truly began. I blathered something about the ridiculousness of worrying about a minute or two added to a commute that could be made in any case in about ten minutes on the subway and it was too bad it was a political decision and fuel is getting more expensive every day and did I mention that I thought there should be bike lanes everywhere.

I felt like an idiot.

He let me go then, and I went on to do my shopping.

I didn't give the interview another thought until I'd finished my shopping and was on my way back home. A guy on an electric bike, riding on the sidewalk, had his vehicle barely enough under control to narrowly miss me and stop right in front of me as I walked up to the fateful corner of Jarvis and Carlton. I looked him in the eye and said, in an even tone of voice, "You're a menace, you know that?"  

The cyclist then advised me to do something both pleasant but inappropriate in public. I thanked him for his kind advice and encouraged him to do the same.

And then the best answer to the camera-guy's question about the bike lanes occurred to me: "I'm fully in favour of anything that will keep cyclists off the sidewalk."  

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The Sherbourne Street bike heaven was supposed to have been completed before the Jarvis lanes were removed.

But it's less than half done:



So share the road, folks, and have a great week!

Karen




Saturday, November 10, 2012

My Finite and Fleeting Lifetime

We all know our days are numbered. Here's a couple of paragraphs on how I've spent the last seven.

Complicated Versus Complex

In a calculated move to suck up to my boss's boss, I volunteered to work on something called "Polivery" (apologies; I will explain later), which is a day-long conference held every year or so, organized by the Ontario government's Cabinet Office, for the purpose of firing up the minds and imaginations of a couple of hundred Ontario public servants.

This year, the event had to be done on the super cheap, which meant most of the speakers were local (no travel costs to reimburse) and most of them generously waived their fee.

The keynote speaker was David Weiss. He's written a book called Innovative Intelligence and he shared some of the concepts in it with the 250 middle-management level bureaucrats gathered. He's a terrific speaker and his talk was full of great stuff, but the part that clung tightest to my forgetful middle-aged brain was the difference he described between complicated problems and complex problems.

Complicated problems have many parts and processes. They need to be simplified and organized. So, building a shoe factory is a complicated problem. The thinking most appropriate for complicated problems is to leverage existing expertise to develop a common solution that simplifies and solves the complicated problem. For the shoe factory, you convene a couple of experts who have built factories before and off you go.

Complex problems are ambiguous, possibly unique, and probably involve a lot of different interests. So, ensuring everyone has a pair of shoes is a complex problem. The approach most appropriate for complex problems requires innovative thinking to deal with the ambiguity, and to gain insight into the complexity. Usually you can't limit the discussion to just a few experts, for the perhaps obvious reason that, since this is a new problem, there likely are no real experts. Instead, you ask the people involved to share their knowledge and perspective and from that discussion, the picture emerges of what the problem actually is. From there, the problem can transform into one that is merely complicated and off you go.

A very common error, said Mr. Weiss, occurs when people treat a complex problem as if it were complicated. He said, "For every complex problem, there is a simple, elegant complicated solution that is dead wrong." 

Dead wrong complicated solutions to complex problems would be along the lines of adding more police to the municipal force to deal with the urban gang problem, or using the rules and concepts of the market to solve the problem of climate change.  

And, At the Very Opposite End of the Spectrum

I have stumbled upon and invited into my life a video game based on the Simpsons called Tapped Out.  This frightful time-sucker has extensive presence on the Internet, with its own Facebook page, a fan page, numerous hack posts and, according to the unreliable source that is the game's creator, millions and millions of players.  

I really can't say more about this because I have to log on to my Springfield and see what's going on.

No actual picture this week, but I hope the many links are diverting and amusing.

Have a great week!

Karen

Oh. Right. "Polivery" is the word you get when you squish "policy" and "delivery" together into one word. I could go into more detail, but why on earth would I do that.




Sunday, November 4, 2012

Mostly About Trees

Many, many years ago, back in the day when the man-made, world-as-we-know-it-ending pin prick of anxiety in the back of my head was nuclear war, I worried about the sad things that mutually assured destruction would bring. I recall feeling especially bad for trees (go figure).  

Trees, particularly if that is where we came from, seem to be a necessary precondition to human thriving. Trees provide shade, fruits, nuts, spice, building materials and small mammals and birds to skin or pluck and eat. Cultural and religious images frequently include trees. The Buddha sat under one.  Christ was crucified on a wooden cross. Newton sat under a tree so a falling apple could give him the notion of gravity. Adam and Eve also discovered something important in the vicinity of an apple tree. George Washington allegedly chopped down a cherry tree. 

We call it a tree of knowledge. We have family trees. To feel homey, snug, safe and warm, we burn trees.        

Were you to ask me if, of all the trees in the Allan Gardens, I had a favourite, I would say yes I do. It's the graceful, 100-plus year-old sycamore growing just east of the greenhouse and just south of where all the walkways meet:


Were you to ask me if I was dismayed by the toll building bike heaven is taking on the trees in front of my home, I would also say yes. Two tiny chestnuts less than 10 years old and one very big maple easily more than fifty years old have had their roots cut back and abutted by concrete. I assume the chestnuts will be dead by spring and the maple by this time next year, at which point it will become a hazard and will have to be cut down.



Some readers may recall my observation that big trees next to the sewer project excavation in the Allan Gardens were protected by boards made of the flesh of less fortunate trees. Readers may also recall my ongoing interest in the murals painted on those boards. And now, in the wake of Sandy, the wind has declared supremacy over both art and trees.

Half of the panels of the north-east facing mural have been blown away: 



And Sandy felled two old trees in one big blow. 



On Sunday a City of Toronto worker carved up and took away most of the two trees. 



I chatted with him briefly.  He said it was sad to lose the two trees - the big one was 125 years old - but they'd come by and plant two more.  I said, sure, and in a hundred years or so, it'll be just like it was.  

I was just making conversation, of course.  The disturbances my neighbourhood saw because of Sandy are nothing compared to other events in Toronto let alone the eastern United States.  Some things are never again going to be what they were.

Now the man-made, world-as-we-know-it-ending pin prick of anxiety in the back of my head is climate change.  But this problem doesn't come like nuclear war did with a handy enemy to hold in a balance of mutually assured destruction.  Climate change proposes to us nice people who do good things and who just want to live a good life, that we have to rethink how we do that. We'll either figure it out for ourselves, or the world will do it for us.

Have a great week!

Karen