In my literary travels, I recently learned that Helvetica was originally called… Neue Haas Grotesk. And indeed, the name was changed for marketing reasons.
That reminds me of the case of the Chilean sea bass, the yummier-sounding fisheries label for the creature otherwise known as the Patagonian toothfish...
(image from Wikipedia)
Back from a Rockies roadtrip with the in-laws, the highlight of which was when a black bear family — a mother with two cubs — sauntered past our (parked) car on the road to Miette Hot Springs, near Jasper. Below was the best picture: with my photographic skills, I managed to override the autofocus feature on the camera on the others. 
We first noticed the stopped cars on the other side of the road, so we turned our hazards on and idled our way forward. When we saw the bears heading our way, we parked, not wanting to distract or otherwise irritate the ursine family. After picking at some roadside dandelions, the mother bear decided to cross the road — and the cubs followed, in tow. I didn’t appreciate how much they actually look like teddy bears. Now, the term “teddy bear” comes from an incident between a bear and US President Theodore (”Teddy”) Roosevelt. But unlike legendary Simpsons-hometown founder Jebediah Springfield, Roosevelt neither killed nor was killed by that bear.
As the mother bear passed by the driver’s side front-bumper, cubs in tow, it belatedly occurred to me to roll up my window. 
Still, it was very cool to come within about five feet of a sloth of bears in the wild — sloth being a term for a group of them, like a “murder” of crows, “crash” of rhinos, “clowder” of cats and personal favourite, “bloat” of hippos. It was cooler still, that we were safely ensconced in an automobile at the time.
The photo also got picked up by Yves Smith on her economics blog, one of the half-dozen or so on my daily reading list. It was Sunday’s “antidote-du-jour“. The backstory to her pseudonym is that it’s a play on the Biblical Adam and Eve, and Adam Smith being the codifier of capitalism.
I was recently told that two local behemoths — BC Hydro and Best Buy — brought consulting firm Accenture in, to run their IT groups. The idea is that Accenture’s expertise will enable them to provide the IT function cheaper than the two aforementioned behemoths would be able to, even with a profit margin.
This immediately made me think of mitochondria, the “engines” of living cells. The thinking is that a couple billion years ago, advantages accrued to cells which had assimilated / “swallowed” mitochondria: the latter were very efficient at generating ATP, a chemical used by the cells for energy.
In the corporate analogue, BC Hydro and Best Buy would be the host cells, and Accenture (or other outsourced IT service providers like IBM) would be the mitochondria. The key measure is whether the aforementioned firms do indeed enjoy advantages through this activity — or whether they decide to return to the DIY path, down the road…
We recently covered Jim Collins’ book Good to Great, in our business book club.
The tome is responsible for popularizing the hedgehog metaphor, namely that a company should stick to what it’s best at, and not diversify into other sectors where it has no competitive advantage. (I’ve heard of this kind of diversification being jeered as “deworsification” by irritated investors. )
I’d heard that the fox / hedgehog contrast originated from Aesop’s fables… but when I double-checked, it turns out that Aesop’s fox/hedgehog story was a parable about how when the proletariat overthrow the bourgeoisie, it just leaves a power vacuum for a new and even-more-rapacious aristocracy to move in. Or at least, that’s how Marxists would put it.
Turns out the fox-and-hedgehog comparison comes from an even more obscure Greek guy, Archilochus, who said: “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing”. That’s about the only thing of his that’s survived. Who knows — but for selective scribes, equally pithy aphorisms about, say, the hippo and the oxpecker, or the cat and the giraffe, might have inspired future business books! (Hippos and oxpeckers are symbiotic species, while I chose cats and giraffes arbitrarily.)
Now, the real test as to whether the fox-and-hedgehog parable holds true, is whether there are more foxes in the world, or hedgehogs. Sadly, I couldn’t find any population numbers in a quick online scan. Though given how dumb hedgehogs are reputed to be, I’d sort of imagine foxes would be more genetically successful… which would contradict the saying.
(Mind you, foxes are near-top-of-food-pyramid predators, and there are generally far fewer such predators than any prey species.)
(Note: originally written March 3. Posted March 27)
Now that the Olympics are over, and I’ve sworn off lineups until… oh, the next Lady Gaga concert, I have some Olympic tales, which I shall hereby recount. ’cause I’m a sharing kind of guy.
Now, I was one of the crazy not-so-few who lined up for the free Zipline strung across Robson Square, braving the elements and getting to know my line-neighbours. As it turns out, one of the people in front of me was a biologist; we chatted about the recent true-colour dinosaur rendition in National Geographic, based on a scanning-electron microscope comparison of modern feathers with ancient fossilized imprints. But mostly we commented on the folks behind us, who weren’t savvy enough to get in line two hours before the Zipline opened. :)
Thus it was that four bathroom-break-interrupted hours after I arrived, I got my eighteen seconds of fun, looking down on the cacophonous rabble as I sped by. Sort of a dinosaur’s-eye-view of Robson Square — if you were one of the bigger dinosaurs, that is. Running somewhere in a hurry. I repeated the experience two days later to reserve a place near the front of the line for, uh, someone who said she felt like sleeping in that morning.
Ah, January — when mutual funds roll out ads for RRSP season, and investment advisors get exponentially busier as February 28 approaches. This year, the industry’s “Christmas-after-Christmas” season will be particularly joyous, as many funds will have risen 20% or more in 2009. That still qualifies as underachievement, though, as the Toronto index rose 27% on the strength of… well, on the strength of it no longer being 2008.
Now, according to the Globe & Mail’s mutual fund site, sixteen of twenty-two Canadian gold funds had returns of 100% or more, in the year ending November 30. That’s a poorly-chosen datapoint — November 2008 was the absolute nadir of that sector — but it’s the latest data available on the Globeinvestor website as of this writing. And it shows that for such funds last year, a dart-throwing monkey could’ve probably doubled people’s money… that is, if they were foolish enough to trust their entire savings to an ape. Mind you, considering how the ape’s competition did, that might not have been a bad idea…!
Still on the topic of dextrous chimps, the Vancouver gold show coming up will see hordes of company reps looking to fleece the uninitiated with some old-school Vancouver Stock Exchange bravura. Bre-X was ten years ago, Southwestern was so 2008, so someone new has to carry the torch!
The venue should be obvious from the assortment of protesters politely asking conference-goers not to invest in a various companies pillaging their way through foreign lands like the humans in the movie “Avatar”. There’s a story going around that our mining companies have been so ruthless in Latin America, Canadian tourists are sewing American flags on their travel gear. Like most such stories, it’s probably untrue in the immediate factual sense (I doubt many tourists are doing this) but it does point to a commonly-held belief, which is in this case true (some Canadian mining companies do some vicious things for their shareholders).
Back to activism though. During our recent Portland trip, I was privy to the most effective protest leaflet I’ve ever seen. A few well-dressed individuals from the “In Defense of Animals” group were handing out copies of the professionally-designed, high-gloss postcard below (on the web here).
Basically, they praised Nordstrom and its founders, praised its customers as compassionate individuals, and explained that since the chain had done so well in almost completely eliminating fur from its sold goods, wouldn’t you please politely tell the manager you’d like them to phase out the remaining fur products? While most protest groups would direct their outrage at the store or the very consumers to whom they’re passing out leaflets, these guys neatly separated the evil “other”, the Jungian shadow, into a separate category.
- - - - - -
Male humpback whales — like Sir Mix-A-Lot — like voluptuous females. Or at least, what passes for voluptuousness in the cetacean world.
For their part, female humpbacks may prefer their males to be exotic foreigners — or again, what passes for foreign among creatures who migrate far enough each year to half-circumnavigate the globe.
There was a famous case in the mid-nineties (in nerd herds, at least) of some Indian Ocean male humpbacks getting lost and veering into the Pacific Ocean. Their songs were different from those of the males in the local Pacific Ocean population — but within two years, almost all the Pacific Ocean-male humpbacks had changed their songs to be more like the Indian Ocean males’!
And to complete a humpback hat trick, here’s a link to a website about a wild albino humpback named Migaloo.
Marc at the CCPA notes the BC carbon tax’s first birthday was Feb 18, with a rather depressing fairy tale. Hopefully her second birthday will find her better-appreciated than she currently is, in her stunted state. (Ten bucks a tonne won’t drive any consumer behaviour. Nor will fifteen bucks a tonne.)
- - - - -
I suppose the appropriate analogy would be that this is the first anniversary of the conception of the carbon tax, July 1st being its actual “date of birth”.
Well, here’s to hoping that she has a dino-sized growth spurt from turkey-sized compsognathus to titanic T-Rex (or should that be tyrannosaurus regina?) with appropriate redirection of funds towards emissions-offsetting projects and infrastructure, and tax cuts veering strongly progressive.
The Tory government’s TFSA (tax-free savings account) is an example of a stunningly regressive tax benefit — its benefits skew disproportionately to the wealthy. And it’s projected to be expensive too - roughly $50 million in lost tax revenue in ‘09, $150 million in ‘10… pretty soon, you’re talking about real money!
This New York Times article summarizes why I believe peak oil’s imminence doesn’t mean the end of first-world living-standards as we know it.
It turns out, the US is ridiculously unproductive when it comes to GDP-per-unit-CO2: at 93rd (of 137) it ranks below even Thailand and Mexico! [corrected from 167 as per comment below]
Ah, but there’s more to that than meets the eye…
This story, that Venus looks a lot more interesting in infrared and ultraviolet — both outside the human visible spectrum — reminded me of the futility of anthropocentrism.
After all, flowers such as this, look different under ultraviolet light (invisible to us, visible to insects).
As another example, elephants can hear frequencies far lower than we can hear — in fact, that’s how they communicate over long distances! I suppose that also means they can hear the workings of our digestive system. It’s probably fortunate for us that our internal workings only rarely come into our own audible range…