14 Column Inches – Page 5

Passing and keeping time in Victoria’s early years

Gonzales Observatory served as Victoria's weather and time station. Photo © Cindy Andrie via flickr and Creative Commons

We lost an hour last night.

Don’t send out a search party. The hour is not hiding under the bed, or communing with dust bunnies at the back of the closet. It hasn’t eloped with a dish or a spoon, or ridden a cow bareback over the moon.

Our concept of time, with its discrete hours, minutes and seconds, is a result of our need for predictability and stability, and the progress of our technology.

Before moment-to-moment measurement became possible, we relied on the Earth’s tilted, spinning loops around the sun to measure time. Every sunrise, sunset, high noon, or full or new moon brought a new unit of time. The sun’s creep along the horizon signaled seasons. Animals and our own patterns provided points of approximate precision to our days. Wrinkles creeping across faces, children becoming adults, saplings maturing into trees, and other signs indicated decades.

Technology overturned that. Fire and electricity made night into day. Clocks introduced minutes and seconds, and made promptness, regular schedules and shift work possible.

Even after clocks became portable, sailors relied on the sun to determine how far east or west they had travelled. Ships’ captains determined high noon where they were, set one time piece on board to that time, and compared the difference against another time piece. On any ship flying under the Union Jack, that second time piece was set to Greenwich time, in England. In those pre-GPS days, time accuracy was essential for ships in port to set their time pieces and measure position.

As a major shipping port for the British Empire, Victoria benefited. For example, in February 1859, the Victoria Gazette reported that Captain Trevett of the Hudson’s Bay Company steamer Labouchere, which was in harbour, consented to fire a gun at noon every Thursday, so that the citizens of Victoria could “regulate their time pieces and obtain the true time.” Two decades later, the Work Point garrison established a time-keeping routine by firing its time gun at eight or nine o’clock on Monday nights….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Walking regains recognition as a primary form of transportation

07. March 2015 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Keiran's World, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: cost of walking, economic benefits of walkable communities, health benefits of walking, pedestrians, perceived importance of walking, status of walking, transportation, urban planning, Victoria Times Colonist, walkable communities, walking

Photo © Giuseppe Milo, www.pixael.com

Last year, Paul Glassen, of Nanaimo, wrote to me:

“We all walk in the first couple years of life, many start cycling and riding buses in grade school. We don’t drive the auto until we are in our later teens. Why do we call walking, cycling and transit ‘alternative transport’? Clearly, they are primary transportation, and the auto is the alternative.”

Glassen’s reasoning plays on the order in which people adopt ways of moving about during their lives. As such, walking—by itself—would indeed be the primary form of transportation. Cycling or public transit would be the secondary and tertiary modes of transport, and driving, the quaternary (car-tenary) form. Crawling, abandoned once we’re upright, loses its initial place in our early years….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Slip, slide and shimmy: Earthquakes on the West Coast

The year has begun amidst a series of earth-shaking events.

Three earthquakes were reported for the Vancouver Island region on January 2. The biggest, at magnitude 5.4, occurred 211 kilometres west of Port Hardy, while two smaller tremblers occurred west of Port Alberni. Five days later, a 4.8-magnitude quake west of Port Alice shook the coast.

They form part of a regional swarm of earthquakes that began late last year, as the tectonic plates beneath Vancouver Island released rock-bending pressure. To add perspective, about 4,000 earthquakes occur in B.C. every year. Of these, only a few—like the larger January quakes—are felt by people.

As solid as the ground beneath our feet seems, when the forces that shape the our planet’s surface start squeezing it, the granites, basalts and sedimentary rock on which our region’s municipalities are built take on the consistency and strength of something like fine, aged Cheddar….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Pipelines prompt protests; Costs will accrue

Spectacular Skeena River Valley. Photo © Sam Beebe, Ecotrust

Enbridge first proposed Kitimat as the West Coast terminus of its Northern Gateway pipeline a decade ago. The company has been defending the choice ever since.

For much of the ensuing time, attention has focused tightly on that project.

Oh, sure, the deliberations and demonstrations about the Keystone XL pipeline project in the U.S. were noted, but, until recently, B.C. has concentrated on the Northern Gateway proposal….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Analyses show no easy environmental answers for
consumer choices

Coffee cups—reusable is more environmentally friendly if you use them often and for a long time. Photo © Marit & Toomas Hinnosaar, via creative commons and flickr

Back when I was young, a University of Victoria researcher published a paper that shifted the ground under my idealistic, environmentally conscious, fairtrade sock-clad feet.

The year was 1994. Scientists had published the first big studies documenting rapid, modern climate change. Alberta’s tar-sands companies had publicly accepted government bail-outs. Earth Day was big, and environmental education was the new cool, despite—perhaps in spite of—Canada’s conservative Fraser Institute’s statements that it constituted social brainwashing.

Chemist Martin Hocking’s paper presented an analysis of which type of beverage container was most energy efficient to use—paper cups, ceramic mugs, glass mugs, styrofoam cups, or hard plastic cups.

The answer surprised me and many others.

Conventional wisdom was that ceramic or glass—reusable—cups beat plastic or paper cups in eco-friendliness….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Germy everyday items spread the nausea and squeamishness

08. November 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Science Scribe, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: bacteria, elevator buttons, germs, keyboards, microbes, MythBusters, Nature Boy, office desks, sanitation, sneezing, squeamishness, telephones, toilets, Victoria Times Colonist

Elevator buttons: dirtier than a toilet seat. Photo © Dan Taylor, via creative commons and flickr

Nature Boy recently scaled back using his hands.

He stopped coughing and sneezing into them during the SARS outbreak in 2002. He now spews his sputum and microbes into the insides of his elbows. This prevents him from spreading his viruses to everything and everyone he touches.

It’s all part of his civic/civilized duty, he says.

Then he cut back on direct contact with certain fixtures in public and semi-public spaces—toilet-flush levers, washroom and drink-fountain taps, and telephones that he hasn’t personally sanitized.

Too much television prompted the escalation of Nature Boy’s no-hands policy. According to MythBusters, the popular Hollywood-effects show where the hosts shoot and blow up things—all in the name of proving or debunking common wisdom, each square centimetre on an office telephone can harbour more than 10,000 microbes, while a square centimetre on a public water fountains can hold as many as one million bacteria.

By limiting direct contact with those fixtures, Nature Boy limits the microbes he picks up from those surfaces. He instead enlists go-between materials, such as tissue for the washroom fixtures, or pencil or pens to call out from telephones. As for holding telephones—“I prefer the speaker function,” he says, waving the eraser end of a pencil at me.

This squeamishness is entirely out of character for Nature Boy. He does, after all, spend his time handling dog-poo-eating banana slugs, being peed on by turtles, and swamping around for bullfrogs. He also knows there’s more to him than himself—his body contains many more bacteria than human cells.

Nonetheless.

He recently added elevator buttons to the no-touch list….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Hemlock’s poison part of plants’ arsenal against being eaten

25. October 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, In the Field, Science Scribe, Vancouver Island, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: cooking herbs, evolutionary arms race, herbivores, herbivory, parsley, plant defenses, poison hemlock, Socrates, Vancouver Island, Victoria Times Colonist

Our benign climate welcomes yet another uninvited transplant to the region. Poison hemlock joins hundreds of other invasive plant species that make themselves at home here.

Like some of those other plants, it contains toxins. Unlike most of them, it resembles a common cooking herb, and can be easily mistaken and ingested as such.

Native to Europe, poison hemlock gained lasting notoriety 2,413 years ago as the poison used to kill Greek philosopher Socrates. In 2002, two people went into respiratory arrest and were hospitalised after eating parts of the plant.

Poison hemlock is to be handled with care and gloves. Consider the precautions part of the evolutionary arms race between plants and animals….

Read the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Food habits differ for us compared to the U.S.

13. October 2014 · Write a comment · Categories: 14 Column Inches, Victoria Times Colonist · Tags: Agriculture and Agri-Foods Canada, Canada, eating habits, food, food guide, serving size, Thanksgiving, Triscuits, U.S.

On a visit south of the border some time ago, I found myself staring at the nutriional-information panel printed on a box of Triscuits.

At first, I stared without really looking—after all, the “Low-Sodium Triscuit” product sold in the U.S. is the same as the “Low-Sodium Triscuit” product sold in Canada.But something about the information penetrated the fog of my inattention and focussed my penetrating powers of pointy-headed perspicacity on one line:

Serving size: 8 crackers

Now, I’m hardly a Triscuit expert, let along a Triscuit-packaging expert, but in that moment I was pretty certain that number wasn’t what this particular pointy-headed Canadian gal remembered the recommended Triscuit serving size to be. It seemed … generous. I vaguely recalled a smaller serving size listed on boxes of Triscuits north of the border.

Was I mistaken?…

Find out by reading the rest of this editorial at the Victoria Times Colonist….

Keiran's World

Passing and keeping time in Victoria’s early years

Walking regains recognition as a primary form of transportation

Slip, slide and shimmy: Earthquakes on the West Coast

Pipelines prompt protests; Costs will accrue

Analyses show no easy environmental answers for
consumer choices

Germy everyday items spread the nausea and squeamishness

Hemlock’s poison part of plants’ arsenal against being eaten

Food habits differ for us compared to the U.S.

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