Drivers. Pedestrians. A Frothing Rant.

The most amazing thing I've seen in some time appeared in the Calgary Herald this morning. I looked at it, and was horrified. My first question was, why do we let this go on?

Let me backtrack. An engineer named Dustin Jones plotted 16 years of automobile / pedestrian collisions from police data onto a map, and released it. Here's a link to it. Take a moment to look, it's worth it even if you don't live in Calgary. I'll guarantee that if the same thing was done to your town or city, it would look much the same.

Every one of those dots is pain and suffering, and there are a lot of dots. There are so many he ran out of dots, and started to use flags. The purple ones represent between 30 and 50 collisions AT ONE INTERSECTION!

I love this guy! He's taken reams and reams of data that have been ignored by everyone who knew about it. An abstract report giving these numbers doesn't mean anything to anybody, except maybe a traffic engineer. Even a graph wouldn't really do much. But put it on a map, and holy cow. A data visualization like this will smack you upside the head. Nobody can ignore it.

If you live in Calgary, find your house on this map. How far away is the nearest dot? How often have you walked past that intersection? What about where you work, and however much of the route there you walk? What about the route your children take to school? Where's the nearest dot or flag? Downtown is awash with them. My house is a corner lot, and there is no dot there, but the next intersection in each direction has a dot. No matter where I park for work, I can't help but walk past a dot or flag.

In the print issue of the Herald there was a letter to the editor by an idiot saying that drivers are pure as driven snow and it's those darn pedestrians flinging themselves under the wheels of vehicles. Bah! There is no shortage of pedestrians that do stupid things in traffic. I've seen them. But it's drivers too, big time. I've  nearly been struck by cars several times, and only paying vigilant attention gave me time to dodge out of the way, and once I was on the sidewalk. Eventually, as I get older and slower, I fear one of them will get me. I'd like to change the system now.

My only real beef with Mr. Jones is that he calls them accidents. THEY ARE NOT! Most emphatically, they are not accidents, and we have to stop calling them that. They are collisions. They have a cause. The choices are driver error, or pedestrian error, but one of them made a mistake. Maybe, rarely, both of them. I tend to believe drivers make the most mistakes for two reasons. Pedestrians are the one with skin in the game, and walking downtown I see a lot more driver error. We would need to put a lot more investigation into these collisions to truly determine who is at fault. Maybe we should.

A nice to have on this map would be an additional flag to note where the deaths have occurred, but maybe that's just morbid. The data is there if you click on the little dots. Allow me to digress a moment. This is a wonderful example of the power of data. I totally applaud Mr. Jones. This is why information should be free. I never would have thought of mapping the data like this, and I'm glad he did. I'd like to see more data freed up, and see what the ingenuity of other people will produce. There is no way that this will not impel changes in how we deal with such collisions.

I couldn't even begin to count the cost to our health system for all those people and their families represented by all those dots. It has to be substantial, and so preventable. Even a no injury collision means that someone probably at least went to a walk in clinic or their family doctor just to be sure. Many would have visited the emergency department, taking up untold and increasingly scarce medical resources. Think of the time taken by emergency services such as police and fire, and by the City road crews. Think of all the time taken off productive work to get medical attention and followup therapy of various kinds. Think of all those other people tied up in traffic because of the collision.

Now, the hard question. What do we do about it? My first thought is to get some skin in the game for drivers. Any collision with a pedestrian should mean the driver is required to attend a weekend advanced driver training school and some (100 hours?) of community service dealing with survivors of auto collisions. It goes on their record. Next time, if there is a next time, there's a formal investigation of the collision, with a big fine and points that would lead to an insurance increase. I hesitate to use the term three strikes and you're out, but it's tempting. More than a small number of collisions with anything (other vehicles, pedestrians, stationary objects) is a demonstration of fundamental driver incompetence. Such people should lose their driver's license permanently.

Being in a car is one of the most dangerous things a North American does. All of us are part of the problem. Are you still sneaking a look at that text that just arrived, and it only needs a word or two to respond so you do? THEN YOU'RE A FUCKING IDIOT! How many close calls have you had recently? Close calls are an indication of a problem; man up and deal with it. Do you distract the driver, or let yourself get distracted by anything other than the task at hand? Do you think you're the most important person on the road? Grow up. Safety on the roads is shared. We're only as safe as the least safe of us.

Dash cams are cheap now. Maybe a driver involved in a pedestrian collision should be required to buy, install, and use a dash cam. They aren't expensive. Having it off during a next collision should be treated as a crime itself. If the record shows that semi-mythical pedestrian flinging themselves under their wheels, then the driver is off the hook.

Don't even get me started on impaired drivers. My solution involves heads on pikes. You only think I'm kidding.

And pedestrians, I'm looking at you too. There cannot be anything on your mobile phone that is as essential to your well being as looking both ways before setting foot in the street.

For those that didn't click on the link, this is a partial screen shot of what you missed, showing downtown and part of International Ave.

In other news, I'm feeling much better. Well enough to go to work and be productive, but not quite well enough for a workout yet. Not going to push it.

Looking for discussion here. What do you think we should do to prevent any more dots from going on the map?

Alternate realities of delusion

The inside of my head has been a very noisy place the last few days. I don't know if I have the cold or flu, but it hardly matters. My chest aches, breathing is fraught with peril, and I've had a mild headache for several days now, off and on. More on than off. I've been really tired, yet not sleeping well. Why not?

Well, part of the problem is the movie playing in my head. Movies. Many many movies. Most of us think of ourselves as a unitary person. One entity that makes the decisions and carries out the various actions. One entity that talks to other people. One entity that is "us".

Some people don't have that experience. For whatever reason they have a condition or conditions that lead to multiple "selves". It's certainly a staple of fiction. For a while I was interested in this, but I haven't looked at the current state of research in many years.

What I have looked at is all the stuff going on in the background of my head. There are several broad streams of, of, stuff, I guess is the best way to put it. One stream is revisions to my novel universe, which gets into some very strange places in the far corners. Nobody has seen that yet. Another stream is visualizing flows of data from the several databases I work with. Another one is various fitness activities and (much more to the point) POTENTIAL activities. Plus add in all sorts of superhero fantasies made alive, along the lines of - so how would someone with this particular superpower actually act and react in real life? Add in some concern about the terrible things that Stephen Harper is doing to Canada, and what could or should be done about it.

All these things are mixing and melding together in various ways at various times. It's like several movie projectors flashing different images all at once up onto the wall of my semi-conscious mind, with content of the reels changing constantly, the projector bulbs brightening and dimming, or the projectors themselves starting and stopping. I'm certainly not in control. Right now I can't seem to focus in on any of them, so I drift along, listening to the babble, watching the show in my head. Trying to sleep.

It's very entertaining sometimes. I'm currently writing out a new scene to start the book, to show readers Hardisty's bike crash, rather than talking about an event of several years ago. Now, in my head, Ronnie (who is a take charge kind of girl) overhears on the police radio that they've found the guy that caused the crash. She successfully assaults a cop to get into the police car, and zooms off to do God knows what to the guy.  Lights and sirens going. Keep in mind that during this scene she is covered in blood from trying to hold Hardisty's leg together till the ambulance came. I think that qualifies as adding a bit of action to a scene.

One of the ever-present scenes in my head is the one where the aliens come to earth. Cats have been their spies. Several species we share this world with are sentient, and they testify against us. It turns out that worlds with life on them are rare and precious. We've been messing up our world, and they take charge. One thing they do is end commercial fishing and all whaling.  There is a scene in my head of the alien ships plucking whaling ships out of the ocean, and dropping them on the office buildings owned by the corporations involved. Transporting dangerous goods is still permitted, but any spills are brought to the attention of management and shareholders, in lets just say a forcible way. Some of them don't survive. Human life is cheap to the aliens; there are so many of us, and so many are wastes of skin.

In one of them I was a race director. Several databases were lined up, sending out various entities to duke it out to decide which database had better data. The entities marched out in neat rows, sort of like a marching band, competing to get my attention. Meanwhile, I'm looking at the wounded and malnourished entities, trying to get them fixed up so they can participate properly. Sometimes it's hopeless and I have to put them out of my misery.

Some of you may remember from a post many years ago I discussed ways of making various sporting events more entertaining. Golf. Triathlon. Baseball. There's other things there that might interest you. Polar bears, even. I was thinking for marathon all the competitors get an accurate GPS chip that tracks their distance, but they don't get a readout. They all start off in a big block like now, but have to make their own way cross country in rough terrain well stocked with hungry creatures, with no course marked. No aid stations, no weapons. If they come back and haven't completed the required distance, they get disqualified.

There are many more flitting through my mind. Meanwhile my chest and back are very sore. There is supposed to be a 16 K run this weekend, but that's not going to happen. At this point I'm not even sure if work will happen on Monday.

That NyQuil is great stuff.

Not much to say

I stayed home today. There's hardly anyone from my team at work anyways. I'm not missing much. It's funny, as I was leaving on Monday, there was a large sign in the lobby about not coming to work bringing the flu.

So when I had the achy body, queasy belly, scratchy throat, and feeling out of breath, I stayed home. I had an afternoon nap. There was much cat cuddling going on. When possible I worked on my book. However, Curtis is a very literate cat, and is always willing to help. Here he is, helping. You can imagine how difficult it is to use the keyboard. Life is hard.

And yes, for the curious, that's Scrivener open. Scenes on the left, main writing pane next, and a reference one next over, and a pane for other odds and ends. Very handy to have it all right there. I suppose if you blew it up, and squinted, you could see the raw writing of Ronnie helping Penny learn to run.

A tickle. I'm nervous

Generally I'm pretty healthy. But the last few days I've been a little more achey than expected, and I woke up this morning with a tiny little tickle in my throat. Eek.

I still went to the pool and swooshed out a 19:30 K nice and easy, thinking about form. Water ran after for another 10 minutes, nice and easy, stretching out. That felt pretty good.

Then I gradually stiffened up over the course of the day at work. I think my office chair hates me. Mostly it's where the quads tuck into the knees, but the hams are a bit cranky too. It doesn't help that the task at hand is massively tedious, and yet tricky.

Took it easy when I got home, then settled into the vibrating chair and let that pummel me for a while. The cats were nervous about it, keeping me entertained skittering around the basement while I bashed out 900 words or so of a new bridging scene. I'm starting to get a grip on some of what's needed. I like writing out the first draft of something.

While doing that I slurped on a nice cup of herbal tea, which seems to have done my throat lots of good. Even with the attraction of watching the first episode of season 3 Sherlock, I'm going to go to bed really soon now.

A very long weekend gone already

I'm not even quite sure where it all went. Ran today though, looking for about 45 minutes worth going a bit harder, and nailed it!

The wavy line is me deliberately running at different speeds, then recovering. It all felt pretty good, with only small complaints from my left calf. The weather was lovely, sunny with a light breeze, about 0 C.

I warmed up, odd as it sounds, with a good vacuum cleaning sessions. The fun part is that the cats had been drugged a little earlier. Celina isn't afraid of the vacuum cleaner at all, and when high on catnip wanted to be right in there on the dust bunny hunt. I woke her up.

Sunday morning I was in the water for an hour. Swam half of it, and the other half was water running. The pool was surprisingly busy for a holiday weekend Sunday morning. The hot tub jets felt really good on my legs.

Maybe I should have taken this coming week as vacation. There won't be many people in the office. Maybe I'll get my stuff done.

For writers. For marathon trainees.

Let's start with the writers. Just because. As some of you know I recently sent my NaNo novel out for comment to a select group of masochists, I mean, friends, to read and let me know what they thought. They've all been very gentle, pointing out the various flaws with exquisite politeness.

I struggled with keeping the ages consistent as the novel progressed, and even at the time I was pretty sure there were minor slip ups here and there. I tried sketching it out, and got lost. Then I figured, there has to be an app for this, and there is. It's called Aeon Timeline.

It's awesome, is what it is. This isn't intended to be a full blown review of all the features. Essentially I've been working with it for a day or so, plugging in people and events from the current version of the novel. It looks like this.

I discovered several things about my book. There is a touching scene near the end between Veronica and Thomas, where they talk about Thomas's long dead wife. I had just assumed they had met at the plant where Ronnie works, and where several of the other characters work. Oops. Their time at the plant hadn't overlapped at all, so I need to play with that a bit.

What's really cool is that as you create characters, you create a birth date, and potentially a death date. Then as you add events, those vertical lines you see are created. At the intersection, you can put a dot to indicate if the character is a participant or observer of that event. (I could, but I won't get into a philosophical discussion if the observer is participating in the scene.) You can toggle on or off a feature that tells you how old each character is for each event.

If the scene involves something that's age dependent, like driving, or voting, or drinking, or renting a car, you can be sure the person is the appropriate age. At once spot I had one character say to another, "I'm twice your age and still trying to figure it out." It's not a killer line or anything, but it flowed naturally for the conversation. If as I play with the birthdays, and the event dates, I'll know if that line can stay. Or not.

It's really easy to drag any of the events around, and it updates everything on the fly. You can specify the date right down to the second if you like, and can control the level of detail for each event. I'm currently playing with the dates for when a major event happens in Hardisty's life. My thought was that he Janice had got married just before that, at ages 22 and 20. Not unreasonable, if a little young, especially given a conversation about that. But then that meant Janice was 37 when she got pregnant. A little old, but not unreasonable, but I hadn't realized it had been such a long time after marriage. I could leave it, but I'm playing with the dates a little bit. I'd like to open the book  with that major event, so it helps to know how old they are, and when it happens in relation to the other events. The other constraint is that it's a major injury, and the current opening has Hardisty doing Chinook half ironman in about 5:30, so the injury couldn't have just happened. It would take at least a couple years to recover.

Another major problem concerned a father daughter talk that took place much, much too late. Erin was in her early to mid-20's when it happened, and it's much more reasonable that it would have happened mid-teens. But that drags in the whole question of when Thomas became a widower, and exactly how old Erin is in relation to Kelly, since one of the minor plot points is that Erin babysat Kelly. That implies a fairly tight range of ages, and as I marked it out, I could see I had goofed there too.

Events can have a duration. I used this to mark out when people had worked at the plant, and Janice's pregnancy, since the timing of that determines some of the conversations at a party, and baby care during some other events. In a more subtle way, it changes the flavor of some of the heavy duty conversations if someone is pregnant.

There is a lot of functionality around all this. I'm really quite impressed. Plus, and I haven't played with this much, you can group events into arcs. Right now I've just got 2, a background one and a global one. The background one is where all the birthdays go, and time at plant lines and a few other events. The events in the global arc are the ones that will make it into the novel. This will really shine if there are events happening in separate locations that need to come together just right. You can use these arcs for filtering as well. There is lots of search features, and you can change the scale of things on the timeline.

Best of all, you can export it to Scrivener and other writing tools. If you do it right, and it looks like it's a bit of a fussy procedure, all the data gets dropped into Scrivener as meta-data, and all your events are there. I think the characters get listed somehow too. You can determine what gets exported.

I wrote the NaNo novel flying by the seat of my pants. I never knew where things were going some days, and I discovered some really interesting things. However, now I'm trying to iron it into an actual book, and that means the details matter. Aeon Timeline is a great tool for outlining and sorting out your timeframe references. It even does custom calendars for your fantasy or alien world. Check it out!

The marathon training is chugging along. Today's run was very nice, 13K in 1:35, nice and easy. I could hear the pace times today, and it was really even all along, about 7:16 plus or minus a few seconds. On the way up to the reservoir I had the wind at my back so it felt really easy. Easy chatchatchat pace though there was nobody to chat to but myself.  I figured out how to combine two events for a revised book opening. On the way back I was into the wind and had to work a bit harder.

It was a beautiful day for a run. I was thinking about keeping my shoulders relaxed and trying to run with light feet. I nibbled a bit of a Clif's bar along the way. As soon as I dug a piece out and put it in my mouth my breathing started deepening. Now that it's warmer I need to start carrying liquid nutrition again.

I had both Runmeter and RunKeeper going, and both behaved, producing almost identical results. Maybe they know they are in a competition to the death and are on their best behavior. One thing that is nice, though I didn't set it up this way, is RunKeeper talks to me every 5 minutes, and Runmeter every K. Both with time, distance and pace information, so it's much easier to keep track of pace and where turnaround is. 16 K next weekend. Anyone looking to run around the reservoir Saturday or Sunday, whichever has nicer weather?

Here's the splits, because I know some of you love the numbers. Very even pacing for me.

Let's see, a nice swim on Wed, 1 K just under 20 minutes long course, and another K mostly pull and easy kick. The intent was to join Katie on Friday, but I felt like crap. I'm not sure why, but much of Thursday and Friday morning I felt very bloated and gassy. At least Friday afternoon I got in a good stretch session with some core.

Tuesday was a spin session and core.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with the training so far. Now that the weather is a bit less extreme I'm hoping to be out running more regularly. My legs and feet are feeling pretty good, though I think it's almost time to start another pair of shoes in rotation. I think getting a pair much like the current ones, but a half size bigger, as well as ones with a bit more cushion for the longer runs would be a good idea.

Lastly, just because. This was today after the run. Having two cats on your legs, purring, is great recovery, almost as good as legs up the wall.

We had a beautiful sunrise the other morning. The actual photos of it didn't turn out all that well, but I liked this one of the reflections in my neighbor's truck.

And another one of Curtis, because, well, he's just so distinguished.

Pensions, a rant

I never thought about pensions when I was young, which was just a month or two ago, or so it seems. If I had been given the choice of having the money deducted off my cheque for a future pension, or having it left for me to spend, I certainly would have chosen to take the money. And so would you. Don't lie to me, you would too.

Now I don't work for that company any more. I don't have a company pension. But Linda does. She's been with the City 30 some years and could retire real soon now. Naturally, her pension is a big concern to her, and me too. Something about buying groceries will do that.

But first, I want to tell a joke. Three guys meet, an investment banker, a trade union worker, and a white collar worker. While the other two of them are introducing themselves, the banker takes 11 of the dozen doughnuts provided for the meeting, and swills most of the coffee. When they sit down, the banker tells the white collar guy, "watch out for that trade union guy, he's going to steal your doughnut."

The one phrase sure to enrage almost anyone these days is "gold-plated pension". Let's talk about this. It's often used by politicians and wealthy corporate hacks to describe the pension that civil servants will get. People like my wife, to be up front about it. People like the firefighter that walks into burning buildings to drag out you or your children. People like cops that deal with scum the rest of us don't want to think about. People that drive the ambulance to take you to the hospital where conditions that would have killed you only a few decades ago are routinely managed. People that take away your garbage, plow and sand your streets, drive the buses, take care of the parks and green spaces, run the plants the provide drinking water and treat sewage. Various inspectors to ensure that safety codes are adhered to for public safety. People that sit in offices and do the paperwork essential to making our complicated society work. People that teach your children. Those and a 1001 other jobs done by people paid by a government with money coming from your taxes.

The wages for these people are often publicly discoverable, at least in broad ranges. One can look up the City of Calgary's union contracts on the internet, complete with wage scales. A quick look, and the highest wage I found was for a journeyman at $41 per hour, or just under 80 K a year. In a province where the oil and gas industry can pay such people much, much more.

I won't go look up the rates of pay for all those other civil servants, but it's pretty fair to say most of them don't get paid that much. Some could only dream of that kind of wage. That's a gross wage, of course, the net is considerably smaller. The pension earned after 30 years service is considerably smaller yet.

The presentation last night stated that the average pension paid to LAPP people is about $14,500 per year (before tax!), and isn't particularly well indexed now. There's many factors that go into pension calculations, and it's easy to make the average be what you want. But let's consider and compare.

The 85 factor. Your age and years of service, when they add to 85, gets you an unreduced pension. When you started, and how much you earned will determine your pension. Some people reach their 85 factor in their early 50's. Some never reach it. Technically, I suppose I could reach it, starting such a job now, and working for about 15 years. Not likely.

Think about someone in their mid to late 50's, for example, reaching their 85 factor and retiring to live on that $14.5 K per year, plus CPP. Some people retire, and die a few years later. Others live out to the average age, now in the low 80's for Canadians. Some will live to see 100 or more. It's a terrible thing to live longer than your money, or live long enough to see inflation ravage it.

So when a $#@! politician tells you that one of the ills of the world is the gold-plated pension of civil servants, you should punch him or her right in the throat, if you can find it underneath their piggy jowls from which the lies emerge. Look at THEIR pensions. Gold-plated is scarcely an adequate word. They work a mere 6 years to become eligible, and the amounts are a huge percent of their annual take.

I could go on about politicians, but that's not the issue. The issue is that the Redford government in Alberta has proposed plundering the modest pensions paid out to ordinary Albertans. They've finally clued in that many of their current work force can retire real soon now. The fiscal reality is that retiree's don't pay as much taxes as working people. They are desperate to keep people working, so they are planning to punish people that retire before 65.

The proposal we've seen takes effect the beginning of 2016, and any pension earned after that gets treated differently. Differently as in huge penalties accrue if you retire before 65. Linda ran the numbers for her, assuming she works only a few years past 2016. The per month numbers don't sound bad, but if she lives to 90, and they cut indexing the way they have proposed, it will cost Linda $100, 000. This was calculated using the Alberta Government calculator.

Say that slowly, one hundred thousand dollars. Is there anyone reading who thinks that's a trivial amount of money for a person's income? Oh, hello Bill, and Mark, I didn't know you read my blog. And this is for someone having only a few years of income exposed to the proposed rules. Now think about your kid, just starting out, happy to get a job with the City because it's more stable than an oil and gas job, even if it doesn't pay as much. 30 years from now, ALL of their so-called pension is exposed to those rules, and it will cost them their retirement, unless they do exceedingly well with other investments.

The LAPP is in a minor deficit at the moment, but they've had the plan analyzed by actuarial experts. They say the plan is on a sound footing, and that the Redford government has no basis for the proposed rule changes. Yesterday, even the government's Auditor General agreed. Many of the trained seals I mean backbenchers, don't know any different. They only eat the dog food given by the premier, and do what they are told in hopes of gaining a cabinet seat.

Well, to get that seat, you need to be elected. Raping hard working people of the pension they have paid for, and been promised, does not seem like a good way of getting elected. The people they are proposing to steal from are the very people most likely to vote. We have the communication tools. One of us, if we stand up, will provide the "Where's the beef?" meme that crumbled the Mulroney government's plan to cut retirement benefits, and will force the Redford government to back down.

Even people that don't have an LAPP or an Alberta pension have a dog in this fight. Why? Because once the governments see that they can gut the pensions for civil servants, they will move on to your plan. The CPP, which all working Canadians pay into. Maybe they'll change the plans that govern the pension at your company, and do you trust them to leave things as is, if changing the rules will save them money? I think we all know how that gets answered.

No matter that almost every cent that gets paid out from any pension gets recirculated back to the economy by people buying groceries and other real world items for daily life. It's far better for our economy to have 100 people circulating 100 dollars, than to have 1 person of of the 100 circulating some of the 100 dollars.

How do we stop it? We have to make a lot of noise. Contact your MLA and tell them in no uncertain terms that voting for this is a ticket to the unemployment line at the next election. Email them. Phone their office. Don't be rude, just tell them to find out the facts, not what Redford and her ilk are spewing. There is a big rally in Edmonton on March 2. Consider going. I guarantee you know people who will be affected by this, and they would be delighted to bring you onto the bus as a guest. Write about it on social media, and any other medium you have access to.

Why does the government want to do this? I don't know for sure, but it's all of a piece with the Harper government destroying Canada. In my more cynical moments, I think it's the rich people that pull Redford's strings that want to sidetrack the money to them, so they can buy a bigger yacht.

Are you or anyone you know living on a pension, or planning to retire on a government pension? What are you going to do about living in retirement?