Woke up today to find the streets outside my house filled with tens of thousands of Sikhs celebrating (as I later found out) Khalsa Day. The gorgeous weather, the lack of responsibilities on a Sunday afternoon, the bright colours, and everyone’s infectious enthusiasm and generosity (there was free food and drink everywhere!) made for pretty much a perfect day. There was such a great sense of community, and I felt like I was part of the vibe too, even though I didn’t understand anything that was going on. It was amazing to see everyone out, especially all the volunteers who devoted their time to come out and hand out water and snacks to people, or even to hold garbage bags and clean up after the event.

At some point this summer, make a point of going to a parade. It’ll do your soul good.

Some more pics my friend Colin took after the jump.

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The BBC has reported that a Sudanese man was forced to marry a goat he was found fucking. Says the story:

Mr Alifi, of Hai Malakal in Upper Nile State, told the Juba Post newspaper that he heard a loud noise around midnight on 13 February and immediately rushed outside to find Mr Tombe with his goat.

“When I asked him: ‘What are you doing there?’, he fell off the back of the goat, so I captured and tied him up.”

Mr Tombe was told by the village council to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars ($50) to Mr Alifi. “We have given him the goat, and as far as we know they are still together,” Mr Alifi said.

I must start by saying that by doing this without paying for cable, you are in effect “stealing”. While I don’t want to publicly endorse theft, I will still show how to get cable just in case your provider makes a mistake, or if you want to adjust connections to get clearer reception. Use this information for whatever personal ends you may have.

Legality aside, I do think it’s bullshit that you have to pay for cable TV. To me, television should be like radio – that is, either free and paid for by advertising, or without advertising and carrying a subscription fee. That’s my moral justification anyway, there are many more excuses out there if you even feel the need. On to the good part…

Cable signals are sent to every house, all the time. This is excellent for people who don’t want to pay for them. Those houses without cable subscriptions have filters installed which prevent the signal from leaving the cable box and entering your house. These cable boxes can take many forms, but are generally plastic structures located on front lawns or attached to the side of your house. Many neighbourhoods are wired so several (usually 3) houses connect in one box, so your box might not be on your actual property. These boxes can be especially hard to find in townhouse complexes, but they’re around, you just have to do some looking. Here are some examples, including a box with the cover removed:

Once you find your box, you need to open it up and remove the filter. Filters are tubes of metal which block some or all of the signals passing through them. For example, “basic” cable is provided by attaching a filter which prevents the higher channels from passing through, so if you are already paying for a basic package, removing your filter can upgrade your cable for free. The pictures below are a few filter examples – the red filter limits you to basic cable, the smaller silver filters block signals altogether.

Now that you know what you’re looking for, hooking up the cable is very simple. As you can see in the above pictures, several houses connect within one box. Each input is labeled with address numbers, so finding yours shouldn’t be too hard. Otherwise, just remove filters until you’re getting cable in your house. The very simple process is pictured below, although you may need pliers to unscrew the filter from the cable box. After removing the filter and connecting your cable directly to the box, you should be able to receive every cable channel in your house. If not, you may need to look for a second box, as some houses have filters installed in both a box on the side of the house as well as in a box on the street.

That’s the basic process, it will work anywhere as long as you can find your cable box. Please don’t hesitate to reply with any questions, comments, or tips.

On Wednesday I went on a tour of the Honda plant in Alliston. They build Civics there. 800 of them every day, in the one plant I toured (they make 800 more in the other one, plus assorted other models). When you think of the sheer volume of vehicles that actually represents, it’s pretty staggering. But even more staggering is actually seeing it happen, and realizing that cars are not simple products. They are in fact, very, very complicated.

Even a simple 4-cylinder engine has upwards of 40 moving parts, and an entire car is the culmination of thousands of individually engineered parts designed to work as one system. The body panels are formed by gigantic hydraulic presses. The tooling dies for each panel are massive blocks of machined steel weighing dozens of tonnes, and costing millions apiece. The panel fit tolerance on the assembled exterior panels is about one millimetre. Every station on the shop floor has just enough material to last until their next shipment, so the shop floor is a flurry of supply carts carrying parts carefully organized in chronological order. The robot arms, conveyer belts, supply carts, and workers all come together in a pretty captivating dance. It was mind-boggling stuff.

What’s most impressive about this, though, is that automakers are able to deliver a finished product for $15,000. It doesn’t take more than a few pieces of limited-production “designer” furniture to equal the bill of a brand new car (which warrants a whole other rant, really). Car companies are able to do this partly through efficient manufacturing, but mostly because they’re producing vehicles in such enormous volumes so that they can take advantage of economies of scale. While this is clearly unsustainable in an open-loop system where the final products inevitably end up in the landfill, it offers hope for the future. It turns out that a lot of sustainable technologies are a lot simpler than what we use on a day to day basis - an electric motor has exactly one moving part. Battery chemistry already exists for viable electric vehicles, it just happen to be prohibitively expensive because of the volumes involved. One Tesla electric car uses 6831 lithium-ion cells, just like a laptop battery. We make a lot of li-ion consumer electronics, but once enough companies take the plunge and use batteries for transportation, costs will necessarily drop enough to make it reasonably affordable.

There’s no good reason for cars to be as cheap as they are, except that we make a lot of them. Sustainable technology is only expensive until we make enough of it to matter.

While my last public transit post turned into a bit of a commie rant about social good, I realized that aside from the big picture, I kind of enjoy taking public transit just as a matter of course. When I’m coming from Humber it takes me at least an hour to get anywhere I want to go, so it’s definitely a significant chunk of time out of my day. There is no denying that cars are faster. But it’s a little bit sad that speed is such a driving (no pun intended) priority for everyone. Taking the bus is a chance to think, read a book, doodle, jot down rants in my sketchbook (as I’m doing now), have an earnest conversation with friends, or take a nap. There’s something to be said for time to yourself where the circumstances of your timing are completely out of your control. It’s liberating to know that since you can’t speed up the bus, there’s really no point in worrying about being late. Society tells you time is money, so when you get down to it, taking that extra time to chill out on the bus is something of a luxury, now isn’t it?

Also: talking to strangers can be really illuminating. I’ve always wondered why we feel so awkward about striking up a conversation for fear of bothering someone. Chances are you’ll never see them again, so if you offend them, big deal - they’ll get over it. And if you don’t offend them, there’s a chance you’ll meet an awesome person.

*Busyness as in being busy, not as in business. Though the etymology there is shockingly clear, and more than a little depressing when you think of it. But I’m running the risk of turning this into another pinko spiel, so we’ll end it here.

I was talking to one of my friends about the site the other week and she mentioned that she wanted to make a comment, but she was afraid to sound stupid in front of the “smart” people already in the discussion. That made me a bit sad, since that definitely was not our intention in making the site. I don’t want to dumb down what I write, since I have too much respect for you guys, but at the same time, the last thing I want to do is to load my posts down with wordy jargon to sound pretentious and stroke my Internet ego (e-litism?). That was part of the reason for the “Authority” post, though that one was mostly to try and rustle up some more links for the resources page.

Whenever you say something, I expect (and certainly hope) that you will be judged based on your ideas. There are things that are right and wrong, no matter how po-mo I’m feeling. However, people who judge you based on how you say it are pricks. So speak up! The more people involved in this, the better it gets for everyone.