YouTube Trends

Recently YouTube revealed their new service, Trends (www.youtube.com/trends), as daily insight into new, most shared and most viewed Youtube videos. While some people might disregard this as another way of self-aggrandizement of popular culture and another method of slipping advertising into your daily life, I was fascinated by the possibilities of a Google trends type analysis tool for YouTube videos.

Well, it turns out it's not as cool as all that unless some massive additions are still in the works. The orientation video on the splash page is little more than a glossy overview with some really, really terrible autotune singing. And the link to YouTube charts (as well as a few other areas of the site) hasn't been activated yet. However the most interesting thing I've found is in the top right corner, called "Discover Video Trends Near You...", a misleading site where you can actually browse the most viewed or most shared videos Globally or by major cities or countries. Most shared is the default search, so make sure you change it to most viewed using the link on the upper right of the interface.

You can also have it cross reference across the 3 locations you select to find how many of the top viewed/shared are in common between locations. I consistently found that all of the US cities and Canada had 7-10 of the top 10 listed videos in common with the Global results, whereas on the other side of the world (Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, etc.) often had 0-2 of the top 10 listed in common. This might be because of language difference (although the UK had 2 in common last I checked) or maybe people in Canada and US use YouTube more and internet users in other countries are more likely to use some other kind of video service. Or it means that people in the US and Canada are more likely to check top viewed results when browsing for videos to watch. At any rate, it is interesting to see what people in other countries watch for entertainment, even if it doesn't always make much sense to me.

Fate vs Free Will

About a week ago I had this dream about fate, free will, future telling and time travel. At the time it seemed revolutionary like I had discovered something noone had thought of. After I woke up and thought about it some more, I decided it was all very obvious and contrived and not at all useful. But, eventually I wrote it all down anyways. It is possible there was something more important that emerged as a result of these points, but maybe it is forgotten, perhaps for the better of all mankind. Who knows what actually conceiving all the implications of time travel would do to our adorable little monkey brains.

What is a Marine Protected Area?

Awhile ago I watched a CBC news program that featured David Suzuki and then Environment Minister Jim Prentice take a tour of the Gwaii Haanas Park. In the words of Jim Prentice: "Protection will extend from mountain tops to sea floor" The area is protected, according to the Parks Canada website, in 10 Kilometers offshore from the park in every direction, a total of 3,400 square Kilometers. This seems pretty extensive and good for the environment. But after mentioning this to my ecology professor Dr. Reimchen, the entire work seemed to upset him.

"It's a farce. The problem with the proposal of these Marine Protected Areas is that it doesn't include a ban on commercial fishing, which is entirely the problem why the area needs to be protected in the first place."

When I consulted the Parks Canada website further, this seemed to be true, at least in a lie of omission. Nowhere in the description of the Marine Protected Areas, or any information specific to the Gwaii Haanas Park, does it mention what exactly creating the MPA does or what it changes. From the Parks Canada website:

"A National Marine Conservation Area is a type of marine protected area managed by Parks Canada. The objective of the National Marine Conservation Areas Program is to protect, and conserve, for all time, marine areas that are representative of Canada's oceans and Great Lakes. The idea is to balance protection and sustainable use. The program is also intended to increase public understanding, appreciation and enjoyment of our marine heritage."

As usual lots of talk without saying anything. They state an objective without any concrete rules or regulation, because, well, there probably aren't any.

Are you liberal? Like veggies? Are you sleepy?

One of my favorite topics is Sociobiology. So favorite, that I got an honors degree in it. Along the same vain as this is Evolutionary Psychology. I've always had an academic interest in parts of psychology, although it can be a bit fluffy at times, and as my friend Joe once said "Be wary of any Psychology majors, everyone that's in Psychology is there to self diagnose." Taking this cynical (but believable) viewpoint hasn't stopped me from learning about psychology, and I was very interested to find out about a Psychologist called Kanazawa, inventor of the Savanna Principle and Savanna-IQ interaction hypothesis, related to the field of study of general intelligence (g).

I started reading about him in this article with the provocative title "Smart People Do More Drugs -- Because of Evolution". The article overviews his theories, along with his most recent conclusion, that smarter people do more drugs because many of them are novel evolutionarily speaking. This is just one application of his Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis.

The Savanna Principle states that the environment that our ancestors participated in and which our brains developed and evolved around is very different from the environment we live in today. Kanazawa's example is how we perceive the color of a banana, which looks banana color under any level of natural lighting (sun or moon, day or night) but does not look the same under man made sodium vapor lights, because of how new they are evolutionarily speaking.

He goes on to apply the theory of General Intelligence to his explanation of the difference between our present day cognitive capacity and how it could have evolved from our ancestors. Much of our brain's evolution took place during the Pleistocene Epoch (~10,000 years ago), and was an incredibly stable time period for humans, where most were hunter-gatherers on the African savanna their whole loves over many many generations. Although most problems could be solved by genetic hard wiring and did not require a lot of conscious thought (hunger, finding mates, living within a social group), novel problems did occur that required improvisation and abstract thought. A good example he gives is a lightning strike, which people would rarely have to deal with since lightning never strikes the same place twice. They would have to figure out how to escape or stop the spread of fire, and make decisions whether they would have to move or rebuild where they were.

The problem solving skill that could be applied to novel problems, is referred to as General Intelligence and evolved out of the necessity to deal with infrequent but life threatening problems. This had to have happened regularly enough to be selected for, and was first postulated by Charles Spearman. He stated that variations in intelligence test scores could be explained by two factors:
1) Individual ability making a person skilled at a task
2) A general factor that governs performance on all cognitive tasks

General Intelligence is now more important in our current environment than ever, because everything is now evolutionarily novel and cannot be as easily dealt with by instinct.

The Savanna-IQ Interaction Hypothesis states that: less intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire evolutionarily novel situations, and more intelligent individuals are more likely to acquire evolutionarily novel preferences and values. As one example, Polygyny (a man with more than one female partner) would be evolutionarily familiar since it was more common in the past, but monogamy is relatively new evolutionarily. Evidence Kanazawa has collected indicates men with a higher IQ are more likely to value monogamy than those that scored lower. Using this llogic, he also theorizes that people with higher IQ prefer:

-Liberalism to conservatism
-Being awake at night (night owls) instead of being awake during daylight
-Vegetarianism
-Disinterest in evolutionarily familiar crimes such as theft and physical assault

I've read most (maybe all) of Kanazawa's papers, and there is a lot of repetition. Maybe most scientists do this, but it seemed particularly apparent, and I've read a few papers. He has a lot of supporting study data to back up his claims, but people in the fields related to sociobiology need to tread carefully. The science as a whole was virtually quashed out when Arthur Jenson suggested that there was a genetic correlation between race and intelligence. I couldn't help but thinking of this while reading Kanazawa's papers, and definitely if nothing else smacks of some personal bias by his position taken in how he analyzes the data.

The only real argument I have is with the idea that intelligent people always prefer liberalism to conservatism. Politics being much more complicated than black and white, we also see many intelligent people in political control of conservative party. If the conservatives were less intelligent, would they not be less fit to govern and manage government services and obligations, and also less able to compete with liberal parties during election times? There is also the issue of social and economic conservatism as two different aspects within the umbrella of political alignment and were not considered in his analysis. Like many scientists before him, he seems to be drawing grandiose sweeping conclusions with only bits of isolated data.

Saucyyyyy

I was out of tomato sauce and so went to buy some more. Being a cheap ass, I find Ragu to be most affordable. Only thing is, my regular flavor (which is also the cheapest, some flavors are more expensive) Tomato and Basil, was "light" tomato sauce - 33% less calories. Still having one of my old bottles I was able to do a side by side comparison:

Regular sauce: Water, tomato paste, tomatoes, soybean oil, dehydrated vegetables (onion, garlic, parsley), basil salt, natural flavor, spice, tomato puree, calcium chloride, citric acid, sulphites. May contain milk ingredients.

Light sauce: Tomato puree, water, diced tomatoes, diced onions, sugar, salt, garlic powder, calcium chloride, dried parsley, dried basil, spices & spice extract, citric acid. May contain milk ingredients, sulphites

Seems like the only difference is instead of adding soybean oil as filler, they add sugar. The light sauce has 0g of fat, while the regular sauce has 4.5g (per 125 ml). The regular sauce also has 11g of carbs, with 3 being fibre 5g being sugar and 3g of starch. The light has 12g of carbs with only 2g fibre 9g sugar and only 1g starch. The light sauce had a higher daily recommended intake of Vitamin A and the regular was higher in calcium and iron.

The light sauce definitely tasted sweeter and was much more runny. The soybean oil probably also helps thicken the sauce and hold it together better. I don't really like eating sugar in everything that goes in my mouth, so I'm probably gonna stick with the regular sauces.

I hope you don't have any plans for your corpse

I've been watching Geniuses of Britain, a documentary series covering important scientists from the UK since the 1800's like Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Stephen Hawking, as well as more obscure people you may not have heard of. Anyways, they cover an evolutionary biologist William Hamilton, who spent a lot of time studying altruism in animals, particularly colonial insects. He invented Hamilton's Rule, which states that a costly action should be done by an organism to help its relative if
C < R * B
Where C is the cost, R is the relatedness between the two organisms, and B is the benefit to the recipient.

Anyways, he eventually died of malaria related complications. The documentary stated that he expressed before he died the hope that his body would lay out unburied in the amazon jungle floor where he would be interred by burying beetles. This never happened and he was instead buried in a plot in some ritzy overpriced graveyard in jolly old England.

I couldn't help but think this kind of sucks. Was he asking too much? Did they all agree that his idea wouldn't be proper? Did his relatives or collegues sneer at the idea, his idea of what he wanted to happen to his own body?

There is a somewhat similar theme in Sophocles play Antigone, where the sons of disgraced King Oedipus further disgraced themselves by fighting to the death on opposite sides of civil war. The brother on the losing side, Polyneices, is decreed be the new King Creon to not be buried and instead be carrion for scavenging animals, the worst thing that could possibly happen to a body. And in ancient Greece, this was a big, big deal. Antigone defies King Creon's orders and buries her brother with honor, with the penalty of death on her herself. OH MY GOD HE DISAGREED WITH YOUR VIEWPOINT, BETTER DESECRATE HIS CORPSE SO HE KNOWS WHO'S BOSS. Like the relatives of W.E. Hamilton, Creon knew what was best for his corpse, possibly sending his soul into torment for all eternity. You sure showed him.

Anyways, I hope you don't get too attached to any romantic ideals with your body either, cause the odds aren't in your favor they are gonna happen, no matter how good of a person you were when you were alive. I got my fingers crossed by the time they get around to my corpse cremation is going to be mandatory because there are better uses for land besides a treasure trove of decaying corpses in overpriced boxes.

Stand up straight!

I draw this simple little comic about the continuing adventures of the tin man and scarecrow. I don't consider myself an artist, but I see it as good practice for drawing and writing story and dialogue. Anyway, the art is really simple, and i try to draw it pretty quickly and one time I drew the tin man with a quite curved line, and he looked really slouchy and wrong. I didn't think it was a particularly huge curve to the line either, but the difference was dramatic. He looked quite pathetic, broken and unlikeable.

This made me think more about my own posture, which is something I've been more conscious of over the last year or so. Good, or 'neutral' posture is when the 3 natural spinal curves are present, and ears, shoulders, hips, knees and ankles are all vertically aligned. As you can see in the picture, only a slight misalignment is bad posture.

I had always hoped that doing yoga every day would help balance my muscles and give me more natural posture, but I guess even that cannot erase a lifetime of sitting in front of a computer. I feel like I am constantly trying to sit up, and push my neck back so it is hovering over my shoulders, which seems to be the worst of it. Sometimes it actually hurts holding my head in the right position, the whole thing is difficult but important!

Rifflandia Spotlight: DJ Longshanks

So despite swearing "NEVER AGAIN" I got another wristband for Victoria's music festival, Rifflandia. I was apprehensive, due to the fact that it's not possible to see all the bands you want to see, and you have to plan things out so you get to see what matters most to you. Also it cost $80 after HST THANKS GORDON CAMPBELL I WON'T FORGET THIS.

I'm not bitter. Anyways, long story short, I missed Chali2na because it was WAY busier at the Phillips brewery shipping lot than I thought it would be, (badass venue) but other than that most of what I wanted to see was at Lucky bar, so not so bad right?

Well anyways, fast forward to Saturday night. When I arrive DJ Weezil was tearing shit up, weird music and he's also wearing a nylon on his face, but it's cool because I like hearing new weird music and he's trying, and being original in the process. After this is a set by Longshanks, the local resident Lucky DJ. He plays behind the bar so other acts can set up more easily.

I don't know if you've ever been to Lucky on a Saturday night, but it was pretty much the same thing. That is, people trying to dance, wanting to have a good time, but have difficulty.

I've always been pretty picky about my music selection. Right now I listen to a lot of bass music (dubstep, glitch, etc) and lesser known hip hop. For most of my life I would refuse to dance unless the music was good, but I've learned that most people don't share my taste, and also I really like to dance, so by now I will pretty much always comprimise and dance to whatever's on, although my style of dance may reflect how I feel about the music. Long story short, when the dance floor would clear during Longshanks sets (he also played after tanlines while they took apart their considerable amount of equipment) myself Cody and Lana would take liberal use of the dance floor by throwing punches, kicks and elbows (as well as occasionaly throwing in Lana's trademark double-kickpunch-headbutt). This happened several times over the course of his sets, including one time where absolutely everyone on the dance floor had stopped dancing, I am not even exaggerating a little. I've been to Lucky enough times to know this was not a freak occurrance, but a staple Longshanks occurance as he plays pretty much every Saturday.

This got me to thinking some more, how did he get this killer time slot at what is one of Victoria's more consistantly popular bars? Did his father own Lucky bar? Did he have some sort of blackmail evidence to be used against the owner at a moments notice? So, I dusted off my electronic sleuthing gear and took a look (I opened google and typed in dj longshanks). Here's what I found.

-Longshanks was asked to take over the regular timeslot as he works at Ditch records and "Is so into music"
-He has a girlfriend - sorry ladies
-He knows he trainwrecks on a regular basis
-He is heavily involved with getting many electronic DJ's to show up in Victoria, including the Subdivision showcase at Rifflandia this year
-He is from Winnipeg (incidentally I predict Winnipeg will be the new Montreal AKA cool and hip city everyone will be moving to)
-He seems kind of shy in his interviews

Initially I started this research so I could rip into him and expose him as some sort of egomaniacal self glorifying DJ, but then I realized I'm an asshole. He's actually a nice guy who cares a lot about music, who got into DJing sort of on accident. I do hope he is able to improve as a DJ and gets better at playing music that will keep the crowd more enthused, and play more music I like obviously because I have great taste in music. Hopefully someday I will stop being an asshole and actually talk to him in a way where we can both learn something and not just end up hating each other and taking it personally.

Why am I Where Now?

I almost joined the army once. The police force too. Back when I first moved to Victoria I was scared, malnourished, and desperate. And with my university degree, i would start at some sort of officer status just involved in supply logistics. Fortunately Mike, my roommate at the time talked me out of it.

"Do you really want people telling you what to do all times of the day? Do you really want to wake up at like 5 o'clock every morning, and be involved in the slaughter of innocents?"

No I didn't, and I don't. It was easier deciding not to become a cop, because of the stigma of the social life of police officers. The average person doesn't like hanging out with them for some strange reason. Nevertheless, sometimes I still wonder what it would be like living my life that way, that is, pretty much the complete opposite of what my life is like right now.

While I will miss out forever on those experiences and where those choices would take me, I can at least use my imagination to think about it. That is what gives us a leg up on the other animals that don't spend as much time considering what if scenarios, and is also a curse when you can't make up your mind, maybe because you are contemplating too many possibilities.

And thats' what makes books, movies etc. so great. It gives you a chance to live a different life for a little while. I think it is some sort of release for our mind, not just escapism but having that moment of "aah it's like that, glad I'm not that guy" that might make you feel just a bit better about the choices you made that brought you where you are. It can also leave you wanting to give other people that experience, maybe a story of what if i had done this that nobody would have ever contemplated before, because it could not have even happened to them. It never happened to you either, but it might have.

So apparently Vancouver ruled for new wave music in the 80's

If you know me you know I'm no fan of the 80's. I don't like the clothes, the makeup, the hair, pretty much anything to do with style. And certainly the most memorable thing to not like about the 80's was the music. Despite all these prejudices, somehow I ended up loving the Payola$ hit Eyes of a Stranger.

The song is just really well put together and actually sounds great. The 80's was a lot about experimenting with meshing together different genres of international music and trying to make use of synths and other digital equipment, most often just mashing stuff together without regard for actually trying to make it sound good. I'm sure there are other gems scattered within all those massacred musical notes, but someone else can wade through that swamp and try to find something actually good.

I'm kind of leery of listening to the rest of the album because it will probably make me hate them. It'll probably happen someday. Apparently the two main artists Rock and Hyde met at high school in Langford, which is now a degenerate cultural wasteland of a suburb, but I'm sure was a nice place to raise kids 30 years ago.

Hmm what else. A payola is when a record exec bribes a radio station to play a song that is disguised as just being a song played as part of regular play, or playing it more often than they normally would. People seem to perceive a song as a hit based on how often it's played. The Payola$ decided to use the name during the punk explosion of the 70's...maybe because their favorite punk songs weren't getting any radio play? Maybe their name was an indication they would sell out given any possible opportunity....I guess I do like them better than Rancid.

On the Media

A big push in the cbc news over this past year has been to get feedback on how to improve their layout to please people that want to watch cbc, and hopefully attract new viewers in the process. And they did change their layout; Peter Mansbridge got a new space age desk where he stands instead of sits, and logos continuously twist and turn behind him as if by some unseen news or tv wind. For the most part I had no complaints, and I actually liked when they split up major news components as standalone segments you can watch from their website, so I can catch At Issue when I want some perspective on current Canadian politics, or not watch Rex Murphy's masturbatory drone at all, ever, any of the time. But, like the webcasts of the Daily Show, there is now advertisements embedded between every segment.

The commercials are still not nearly as long as on tv, but I feel like I'm being weaned on the 7% rule. I heard from someone or read it or something that people will pretty much always adjust to about 7% overall change for a given period of time. So I think the end game of webcasts is that it will end up looking exactly like television, which has been honed as an advertising paradise over televisions 60 years of history.

One other thing, obviously when they were finding out people's comments, NOBODY mentioned that they wanted actual journalism, actually answering the 5 W's and all that. I watched a piece on the rebel upsurgance in Thailand with the red shirts, and all they did was talk with someone in Canada who is going to Thailand and showed how she watches cbc news....seriously? Not once did they say what the fighting was about, what the issues are and perspective from both sides. There was just some footage from embedded journalists with the Thai army showing how the army methodically moved in and shot some people.

Last point, they have taken to showing DEAD BODIES on the news. They announced 6 rebels were killed while footage was shown of a soldier covered 2 dead people in plain clothes. Is that what people asked for? More real footage of dead bodies? Really?

merging virtual and reality

The progress that is being made in games like WoW and Farmville tell us important information about progress that has been made in psychology and social engineering. Specifically rewarding types of behavior with virtual items like money, items, etc. The implications of where this is going is quite frightening, such as rewarding people for watching/remembering advertisements, or even for reporting friends and family for things they have done against the state.

If what I'm saying is too vague to be sensible, then watch this episode of TED Talks. There are lots of times modern society has been compared to 1984, and this is just one example of many. The implications about the direction society is headed, barring any natural disaster, can seem pretty overwhelming. But we need to remember that throughout human history people have always been stuck in shitty situations, and so there is no reason we can't be happy regardless of the situation we are in.

The Rot of Parliment

Imagine waking up next to this face every morning. I've been doing just that in an attempt to watch Question Period for our Canadian parliment. I've tried convincing politically interested friends to do it with me, but so far noone has been able to tolerate more than 20 minutes or so without walking away, becoming interested in anything else, or screaming and raging within inches of punching my monitor screen out. If you want to give it a try, just head to this website, but the odds are good you may have the stomach for it.

People are interested in politics, but their apparent disinterest indicates otherwise. After talking to them about it, the problem isn't the issues themselves, it's how they are dealt with. Question Period is supposed to be a way to get information from the Canadian government and get them to account for their actions. Unfortunately, there seems to be no obligation for the minister questioned to actually answer the question. Instead it is a lot of backtalk, accusations, subtle and not so subtle insults and honking about what a great job they are doing. The questions asked aren't always objective either and often try to trap the person answering the question, which is probably what started the behaviour in the first place. Either way, it has become a skeletal farce of angry shouting bureaucrats, where really very little gets accomplished. Ask anyone and they will tell you bureaucracy sucks for a wide variety of reasons, but sadly we have not created any better system that balances representation, due process, and thoughtful action.

I may keep watching it through the summer, or I might give myself a little vacation. I find myself mentally tuning out the droning Bairds and Prentices and Odas with their robotic reading and rereading of party rhetoric, but the ineffective hammering repetition of the opposition parties doesn't really encourage me either. Does the fundamental pillars of our parliment need to be redesigned from the ground up, or is there some way to wade through the bog currently in place and make something usable a few minor but well placed adjustments ?

malt liquor

I was doing some research on malt liquor for a writing piece, here are some of the interesting facts I found:

Pro-Drinking Messages and Message Environments for Young Adults: The Case of Alcohol Industry Advertising in African American, Latino, and Native American Communities


-->

-"Malt liquor" was first documented during Roman times, and was produced without preservatives, thus inducing people to consume it while still fresh. Malt liquor and other Germanic beverages, were scorned by the rich. They were considered the drink of the poorer classes in Gaul, the Barbarians and mountain people.

-A content analysis examined 1,000 of the most popular songs in 1996-97 across five genres of music popular with youth. This study found that 17 percent of all the lyrics contained references to alcohol and that alcohol was mentioned more frequently in rap music (47 percent) than in other genres such as country-western (13 percent), top 40 (12 percent), alternative rock (10 percent), and heavy metal (3 percent). Overall, 22 percent of songs with alcohol mentions referred to beer or malt liquor, 34 percent to wine or champagne, 36 percent to hard liquor or mixed drinks, and 31 percent to generic terms such as “booze.” A common theme was getting intoxicated or high (24 percent), although drinking was also associated with wealth and luxury (24 percent), sexual activity (34 percent), and crime or violence (13 percent).

-There is an energy drink called Four Loko Malt Liquor Energy Drink

-Malt liquor, in particular, is heavily advertised and promoted to African American young adults. Malt liquor brews typically contain between 4.5% and 6% alcohol compared to 3.4% to 4% for regular beers. While the beer industry has seen declines, the U.S. beer market share of malt liquor went from 5.7% in I980 to 9.5% in I995. Malt liquor sells best in African American and other ethnic minority markets.

-Gangsta rap performers such as RUN-DMC and N.W.A. have made the image of the 40 oz. malt liquor bottle a popular symbol of masculinity. A particularly explicit advertisement featured Ice Cube asserting that St. Ides "Gets your girl in the mood quicker" and "Gets your Jimmy thicker."

The following is a radio ad for St. Ides malt liquor:

Mmmmm,I need some refreshin'

when I finish manifessin'

Too cold to hold Bold like Smith and Wesson ...

Ice Cube's in the house don't you know me

Pour out on the curb for the homies.

-In March I992 Hornell Brewing Co. of Brooklyn, New York intro-duced "Crazy Horse" malt liquor as part of its celebration of the American West themes. Subsequently, the American Indian Movement (AIM) and Honor Our Neighbors Origins and Rights (HONOR), Inc., called for a nation-wide boycott of "Crazy Horse" malt liquor. The brewers have stated that they are honoring the memory of Crazy Horse with the product and that they are not targeting Native Americans.

Cubism

On the weekend my friend and I started watching this old documentary series on art, called The Shock of the New, where they cover a range of art history and brief but interesting descriptions of different art styles and interpretations. The most interesting of these, and something I want to read more about is cubism. I never understood surrealist art like Picasso, but the idea of cubism is that you are trying to show the viewer more than one side of something in a two dimensional painting. I never understood where they were getting the ideas to draw the way they did, but it makes so much sense now. Futurism is also pretty cool, how they are trying to express motion or the passage of time in a single picture as well.

It made me think, what phase in art history are we in right now? They have names for periods and categories for every progressive style, except i dont' think they have one for us yet, because we are still in the middle of it?

Beautiful danger

I used to really obsess about the weather. When I first moved to Victoria I found it so bizzarre that it was, more often than anything else, 11 degrees, summer, winter and in between. I started using the weather network maps and resources, following the jet stream and checking weather and temperature patterns. It is obvious probably to most people, like it is obvious to me now that being surrounded by the ocean ends up having a regulating effect on temperature and other weather anomolies. Living where we are on the tip of the island, we are in between a few different major weather patterns, and so end up having much nicer weather than the rest of the island a lot of the time. Of course it could also be related to the ley lines running through Victoria, but maybe I'll talk about that another time.

Anyhow, we were ejoying the weekend of sunshine being offered to us, but after only a short time in the sun someone remarked of my friend i was hanging out with "Wow your face is really sunburned." We were only outside about 15 minutes.

This prompted me to go back to my beloved weather website, this time checking out the UV report. The index, which is dynamically updated, was resting at 6. And while 6 doesn't sound like much, after studying the scale this was considered "high"...although the scale goes all the way to 11+, EXTREME, which I would assume would cook us all inside our houses whether we're wearing sunscreen or not. Yes thats right, summer hasn't even started and we are getting astronomical UV ratings.

Take another look at the pictures at the start of this post. On the left is ozone averages from 2000, and on the right is the most recent ozone map. Most of Canada is right now in the 425-450 Dobson Units (units for measuring ozone concentration), except for southern BC (including Victoria), Ontario, Quebec and some maritimes. The other interesting anomole is over iceland/greenland, which I can only assume is due to the volcanic activity. According to the 2000 map the area is usually in the range of 475-500 DU, but is currently in the 300-325 DU range. And according to this website volcanoes create holes in ozone and can destroy ozone.

The good news seems to be that the ozone layer seems to be in better shape than it was in 2000, unless ozone just becomes more concentrated in summer perhaps. At any rate, I may need to invest in some sunscreen instead of just ducking indoors when my skin starts to sizzle.