Some Thoughts and Statistics on the New Seaport Farmers’ Market in Halifax

November 13, 2010April 6, 2011Digital Citizen Leave a comment

The new Seaport Farmers’ Market in Halifax is almost in full swing now. It is now open 3 days a week, Fri-Sun, and much longer each day than the half day before at the old market that was open just once per week Sat morning. The future intent is for the new market to be open 6 days a week, though the farmers will only be there for 3. The other 3 days will only have craft sellers. It’s a nice big space and I love it, although I hear the busking musicians are disgruntled due to the open space leaving all of them to be heard so they have to compete to get above each other (The Coast, Sep 9 2010). Hey, I like the music and appreciate its contribution to the ambiance of a farmers’ market, but it’s a new farmers’ market building, not a concert hall.

I love the additional selection and larger stands, though I have to curb myself on the cooked food. It smells and tastes great, but just see how much raw food you can get for the same amount of money on a cooked plate, and you’ll not only see the value of labour to your food costs, but also where many of those cents to your food dollar that’s not going to the farmers end up going. Going there with someone who might expect you to buy something, which includes yourself, is also going to be costly with all the potential little craft trinkets you can buy for significant others, kids, etc. It’s great to see all the stuff, but is hard to resist. So far, I have bought nothing other than raw food from the farmers.

I’ll leave with some statistics about the farmers’ market scene in Nova Scotia and the Seaport Farmers’ Market, from various sources like The Coast paper and the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

40 Nova Scotia Farmers’ Markets Sep 2010, few opened all week
New farmers’ market is in an R-2000 building (NRCan designation) that uses 85% less energy and 50% less water than old market
R2000-standard PDF
New farmers’ market is twice the size of old market (which is still open) at 4,000 sq feet
10,000+ visitors per Saturday (August figures, but is still as crowded as far as I can tell)
Total vendors increased by at least 50% between new and old markets opening, though not all are food vendors
NS Community Supported Agriculture farms (CSAs) and farmers’ market bring in about $90M a year (and growing) to farmers (includes prepared foods, possibly crafts, so can’t just take it against farm gate)

Facebook’s Friendship Page Feature Gives Everyone New Spying Capabilities!

November 6, 2010March 19, 2011Digital Citizen Leave a comment

Facebook rolled out a creepy new feature called Friendship on Oct 29, 2010. Good intent, bad results. Lay another brick in the road to Hell that is paved with good intentions! Here is a review and some counter-measure suggestions. This feature is a stalker’s dream! But it’s the same for just the casual “troll” curious about creeping on people… like maybe jealous friends, ex’es, significant others, family, etc.

**What is this Friendship Page feature?**

This creates a page showing all the public wall posts, comments, photos (based on tags) and events that two friends have in common. This goes for any two profiles which have common things to share, not just friends you have in common. It’s all based on what people choose to share in their privacy settings, that they have in common.

In plain language, it’s like being able to ask Facebook to show me all the interactions between person X and Y which is not protected from me, with one click of a mouse, then getting the results in an organized online report, summarized where each result has a link to the full information instead of just thumbnail, first few sentences, etc.

Whoa!!! R U kidding me???

Remember the days when you had to work to be a creep? When you had to browse through all the wall posts, photos, events and such, filtering out all the stuff by people you’re not looking for, to find what you were looking for? That’s all said and gone now. You can just click on a link now and voilà! It’s all there for you, in more details than you could have ever hoped to find in the past, like events two friends RSVP’ed together! I bet the FBI, CIA, MI5, CSIS and other secret intelligence services could only wish they had such a convenient tool to track people! Well, take CSIS out of that list. I’m not sure they’re either secret or intelligent enough to qualify.

Can you imagine your significant other doing this to someone who interacted with you a bit “friendlier” than s/he would have liked? Can you imagine Parents doing this to their kids and one of their kids’ friends? Can you imagine that person you’re dating wanting to know more about another “friend”, or an “ex” via all your Facebook interactions with him/her since you could not tell all, even if you wanted to? You couldn’t hope to have a memory like these Friendship Pages!

Worse, the stalkers, Internet trolls or 5 types of Facebook trolls are just in heaven these days! That include those behind bars who have Internet access!

Even for normal people, this Facebook Friendship page can enhance the 10 Ways Facebook can ruin your relationship (Collegecrunch.org) by making the features that are the reasons all the more accessible and organized.

How do you access this Friendship Page feature?

The easiest way is to go to someone’s profile and look on their Wall for the See Friendship link next to the Comment and Like links on various Wall posts, and click on the link. I’m not sure why some Wall posts have the See Friendship link and some don’t, but it’s there for many posts. However, you can see Frienship Pages for people who are not your Facebook friend, which is the creepiest part of this feature to allow spying beyond just your friends, and vice-versa on you by people who are not your Facebook friend.

After you get to the Friendship Page, to the top right is a more convenient feature where you can type in two friends’ names, aided by Facebook’s drop down menu to guess which friend you’re talking about as you give it more letters in typing out the names. Facebook guesses with people you know, people you have common friends, who live in the area, etc. While this feature limits the people you can input to be just of your Facebook friends, finding the See Friendship link on people’s wall does not!

What can you see on these Friendship Pages?

More than what Facebook says you can! One feature more is the common friends those two friends have in common. Of course, everything that shows up, whether a wall post, comment, photo, event RSVP’ed together, etc. there is a link you can click on for more. The page you initially get is an Overview of what the page fully contains. You can then click on links to the upper left, below a photo (if the two have a photo together) or an icon of two heads, to filter out features like Wall posts, photos, comments, etc. Talk about helping creeps to be organized!!

What can you do to prevent being super-spied on with this Friendship Page feature?

Nothing that would prevent this feature from being enabled. All you can do is minimize its impact on you with these solutions.

Adjust all Facebook Privacy settings to “Only Friends”. If you do this, at least only your Facebook friends will be able to creep on you.
Purge your Facebook friends list. Ask yourself this… who would I want to be able to creep on me with the Friendship Page feature? Anyone you have a strong reaction against, throw them out or take Step 3. Purging your Facebook Friends list is good to do on a regular basis, anyway, to keep people who can view your profile in full to those who know and trust to some extent. The link I provided at the start of this bullet offers some assistance with questions you can ask yourself to determine who you might want to remove, and why it’s no big deal if you’re wrong to get them back. This was before this Friendship Page feature came out.
Customize Facebook Privacy settings to “Only Friends” and Block certain people. If you’re not cool with removing certain people from your Facebook friends list, even though you’re not comfortable with them creeping on you with the Friendship Page, block them in your Privacy setting for whatever you don’t want them to see. That could be pictures, Wall posts or comments. I don’t believe the RSVP feature works, though. It’s hard to check, but that would be the one I would be concerned the most because that person could see future events you RSVP to in common with another friend, and not just past ones. Can you say stalking assistance? I would recommend you make a list of people you keep as Facebook friends who you would not be comfortable with creeping on you, and just add them to your “block” list for each Facebook feature like photos, Wall posts, etc. I’d just sooner take them off my Facebook friends list if I were you, if I’m going through that much trouble.

If this Facebook feature changes to limit access, or you know other ways to counter it, please let me and others know by leaving a comment.

In the mean time, Facebook safely and try not to creep, even if it may be very intriguing. If you don’t like people doing it to you, don’t do it to others.

p.s. I find it interesting Facebook rolled out this creepy feature just before Hallowe’en. Unfortunately, it won’t go away just because Hallowe’en has gone away. Who the hell at Facebook let their engineer Wayne Kao add this to the site anyway???

300 Million Golf Balls Lost or Discarded in US Each Year, Each Needing 100 to 1000 Years to Decompose

November 13, 2009November 13, 2009Digital Citizen 2 Comments

Ball-hawk-collection Christina MacFarlane of CNN reports that 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States every year! There were no numbers for world estimates, but you can bet it’s a lot because there are a lot of countries in which golf is being played. I think double the 300 million, would be a conservative estimate. The US might like to play “us versus the world” in those team golf tournaments like the Ryder Cup, but that doesn’t mean they have half the golf players, courses and balls in the world.

Furthermore, each golf ball is estimated to require 100 to 1000 years to decompose naturally. This is according to simulations done by research teams at the Danish Golf Union. It had to be simulations because the golf balls of today haven’t been around 100 years.

In case you don’t think golf ball pollution is a problem, though, scientists who scoured the depths of Scotland’s Loch Ness in a submarine recently, hoping to discover evidence of the prehistoric Loch Ness monster, found hundreds of thousands of golf balls lining the bed of the loch!

That’s hundreds of thousands of golf balls!

Maybe the golf fanatics know about golfing around Loch Ness, but I sure as heck didn’t think there was that much golfing around there. At least not so close that hundreds of thousands of golf balls would be in the lake. It’s not like everybody shoots with the range of Tiger Woods, and even then, that’s not that far to get a golf ball into the loch!

Given the pollution of that magnitude, the poor monster is probably dead from either being pelted by stray golf balls, or having swallowed some in searching for food and picking up large morsels of things at the bottom.

Unfortunately, the pollution of golf balls is not just the presence of those balls. What’s in them is very bad for the environment.

The Danish Golf Association has found that during decomposition, the golf balls dissolved to release a high quantity of heavy metals. Dangerous levels of zinc were found in the synthetic rubber filling used in solid core golf balls. When submerged in water, the zinc attached itself to the ground sediment and poisoned the surrounding flora and fauna. Then, removing a partially degraded ball from a lake or woodland area could result in further damage to the wildlife. It’s not all that simple as picking them up, though a few hundred thousand under water could be rather difficult.

So what can we do about the golf balls? Well, the easiest thing would be to stop playing golf. Golf balls are the least of golf’s environmental impact. Look at these statistics about golf courses from 2004… never mind 2009.

1.8 million kg of an arsenic-containing pesticide, monosodium methanearsonate (MSMA), banned in India and Indonesia, is applied every year to golf courses and cotton fields in the US to control weeds

2.5 billion gallons – Amount of water it would take, per day, to support 4.7 billion people at the UN daily minimum, or the amount of water used, per day, to irrigate the world’s golf courses

23 – Number of golf courses in Japan before World War II
3,030 – Number in operation or soon to open in 2004

8.2 kg – Average amount of pesticides used per acre, per year, on golf courses (18.0 lbs), compared to just 2.7 kg (1.2 kg) used in the same time and space for agriculture (667% difference)

6,500 cubic metres (6.5 million litres) – Amount of water used by 60,000 villagers in Thailand, on average, per day, or one golf course in Thailand, on average, per day

150,000 acres – Current area of the wetlands of the Colorado River Delta, which now receives just 0.1 percent of the river water that once flowed through it, or the area that could be covered to a depth of 2 feet with water drawn from the Colorado River by the city of Las Vegas, which uses much of that allotment to water its more than 60 golf courses

Don’t forget all the travel, whether vacation or golf carts, involved and the emissions from it!

Really, is golf really worth all that?

Sure, the golf fanatics would say yes. But what if I were to tell you some other sport had that impact? Or every other sport out there had it since why put it on just one sport? Would you allow people to play that sport then?

But on the golf balls pollution issue, UK law maker Patrick Harvie had this advice:

“Keep your balls on the fairway or invest in a stock of biodegradable balls.”

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Reading Level: 7.1

I Pledge to Reduce my Possessions by 3X my Weight for Earth Day. You?

April 21, 2009January 7, 2023Digital Citizen 3 Comments

Final Tally

-30 lbs (old university books donated to Dalchem library)
-12 lbs (clothes donated and some CDs sold)
-15 lbs (old stuff cleaning out for Parents’ visit)
+5 lbs (books bought)
-95 lbs (329 CDs, cases and notes @ 0.2875 lbs each)
-4 lbs (two wire CD stands)
-3 lbs (two small pots)
-4 lbs (Canon Rebel XT, battery, case, instructions, etc.)
-8 lbs (clothes)
-59 lbs (books)
-10 lbs (scanner)
-20 lbs (large lamp)
-47 lbs (more books)
-21 lbs (still more books!)
-20 lbs (paper samples from my design days)
+8 (new guitar + soft case)
-6 (old guitar + soft case)
-32 lbs (misc stuff donated)
+8 (net gain from replacing 9 year old microwave which stopped working)
-12 (misc stuff thrown out)

Net

-377 lbs (goal was -330 lbs)

I DID IT!!!

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