Ottawa Fun, Food, Coffee

Nightlife

There’s a couple of gems in this city. Of special note is Zaphod Beeblebrox, a bar themed after the Hitchhiker’s Guide. It’s basically the everything bar. The clientelle runs from chauch to scene, and the music from industrial to indie. My favourite to date.

Also of note is Babylon on Bank Street. It’s, as far as I can tell, one of the only divebars/hipster hideouts in town. Sunday Mod Nights are like a watered down Ice Cream Social. It’s the only place I’ve seen the hip congregate en masse. Aside for that night, they’re without a home as far as I can tell. Yes, they don’t even flock to the Soviet Union themed bar. Fascinating.

Food

Apparently Ottawa has a good food scene. I’m starting to understand the lay of the land a bit better. For any newcomers, you’re basically stuck to shitty Irish pubs and diners. Seriously, that’s 80% of the bars and food at first glance. You really need to look to find the gems.

So far I’ve discovered some of the best pho I’ve ever had. In Chinatown (a theme?), Pho Thu Do is rather epic. At typical pho prices, you get more noodles and meat than I’ve ever experienced, and a carafe of tea. And it’s delicious.

Best cheap pub is hands down Hooley’s. Their specials often include a $5 appy (which will fill you), and a $3.75 pint. I’m a regular on pierogi Thursdays. $10 for a filling dinner and pint? Please!

Also incredible is the boringly named Shawarma Palace. Look at these servings. Look at them!

Shawarma Palace noms.

Kinda pricey at $13 total, but oh so worth it.

Coffee

There’s a derth of indie shops around where I live unfortunately. Bridgehead is a local chain which is nice, but only has one hour wifi. Second Cup wins for the chains, because of it’s infinite wifi, and occasional french vanilla coffee.

The nicest indie shop I’ve found so far is Raw Sugar in Chinatown. They also host music nights, workshops, and various queer/activisty things. I met the owner on my first visit–seemed nice enough. We had a short discussion over why her coffee shop should have wifi.

Fortunately down the street is Umi Cafe, which while not as nice (e.g. does not have chandeliers in the washroom), is still plenty nice, has infinite internets, and Tuesday games nights.

Oh, and everything has the HST. No one in Ontario cares.

Adventures in Ottawa

I recently accepted my first ever non-Vancouver gig as an intern in the five-person Canadian Alliance of Student Associations office in our nation’s capital, Ottawa.

WS 0564

I’ve been orienting myself to the city for the past week, thanks to the ol’ census and Google Maps. This city is quite a bit younger than Vancouver, thanks to two universities and a parliament, its density is half that of Vancouver’s, its mean temperature is roughly the same, but its temperature variance is far far greater. The biggest urban difference thus far is that downtown is architecturally abhorrent, and has no residential, meaning it’s a concrete graveyard by 6pm (I suddenly understand Jane Jacobs).

I’ve been learning the regional vocab. For instance, the humidex explains why yesterday was as hot as Kandahar. Thankfully, the Egyptian Method kept me cool in my non-AC’d interim sleeping quarters.

Office Muk Muk

Day one was spent getting a quick car tour with my new boss, then beers with friends. One of these friends has been on the hill for a while, and is an insider with the leader of the opposition office. He mentioned what I’ve just been starting to notice. The hill is like undergrad, without the partying. Parliament is a very young place, filled with summer students, recent graduates, and the idealistic youth. There’s also a strong base of former student association executives around. Who knew.

Day one at work was great. I’m basically a nerd-generalist. I’ll be doing some research, some numbercrunching, some idea-generating (20% independent project time!), some on-the-hill lobbying, some web design, and, of course, some data entry (I am the intern, after all.) I’ve already got two independent projects thought up of–one I got over beers with my boss.

I’m off to venture from my base of operations (nearby AC’d coffee house) to the bedroom sauna. If you want me to comment on anything in particular, drop a line in the comments.

Open Data App Idea: Rotten Apples

When I first heard of GPS-enabled smart phones, I got an idea for an app. I’ve long been a student of the local health authority’s food inspection website. If you’ve never been, go now and find your favourite restaurant. By and large, most places in Vancouver are pretty good, but there are outliers.

What this data needs, aside from conforming to an open standard, is apps on top of it. One I’d love to see, Rotten Apples, dings at you when you’re in an eatery that… is less than stellar. You would be able to customize how severe things have to be before you get dinged, and the information that pops up. It could also ding at you when you’re making a good choice (though you will be awfully spammed in that case–most places are stellar.)

A simple app which would go a long way in keeping eaters safe, and eateries accountable.

What Are You Aiming For?

The past three months I have spent on myself. Having just graduated from a life in academia, I’ve had the freedom to meet with those I haven’t seen in a while, catch up on reading, and most importantly, relax.

Many of my friends have asked, “what are you aiming for in the coming years?” I could never rummage together an adequate answer. My interests are varied, and I enjoy doing many things. Looking at my library card shows I have out books on food, education, geopolitics, and data visualization. Looking at my RSS reader shows I follow the courts, economics, music, fashion, and design.

I started answering the question with “I want to get into policy and research.” In what realm? “Something tech related,” but that answer was really just a comfortable placeholder. It only describes one of my interests–it misses over half of my headspace.

I was born in the late 80′s. I was raised in the middle of the telecommunications boom. As such, my childhood was spent in a world like my mother’s, and my adulthood is being spent in a very different world. When I was in elementary school, the cellular phone was a gimmick; now government forms have two phone fields (with one, ‘home phone’, being left empty). In elementary school, Doom was between me an the imps; now it’s between folk all across the world.

Living in the chokepoint between generations has irritated me, because the future of the young is being delayed by the olds’ ways. Fortunately though, this lends me the opportunity to bring my mother’s world into the world of my children.

I think I want that job. I want to be a generational translator. I want to translate the systems created by our parents into a language that’s understood by the collective conscience of the next wave.

Math Needs More Heroes

To start a thought: Dan Meyer on Math Needing a Makeover [vid], Arthur Benjamin on Changing Math Education [vid]

One of the sidestreams I feel morally (and financially) obliged to follow is the state of math education in the world.

There’s a sense of crisis in North America’s math community. Our kids are graduating from high school with less breadth of knowledge, and less knowledge within their breadth. Consider British Columbia’s high school math curriculum over my lifespan. When I was in grade 8, my brother had an introduction to calculus in his Math 12 course. When I took Math 12, we didn’t touch it. Those who just took Math 12 had a weaker curriculum still, with no cross-province predictive results.

To their credit, some in academia resist these changes, but their fight for numerical literacy is being fought on the wrong battlefield. While math educators are narrowly-focused on breadth and depth as the end goal, while the public is hammering on inspiration and utility as the means. Because of this detach, we’re all losing.

The disconnect is embedded in how math professors think about instruction. A strong majority of the math hours taught at UBC are in what the math community calls recipe courses. A recipe course is one where the student’s goal is to master the means of assessment instead of the concepts involved. In other words, to study, one need only memorize which formula to borrow from the formula sheet (a symptom of a recipe course), and how to apply it to the questioning.

Students leave these courses uninspired, and unfamiliar with the concepts at hand. Students often earn their grades in two days of preparation, with all understanding vanishing days later. These students, seeing no value in those two days, would have been better served with Mathworld and their tuition back.

What suffers in the end is literacy. Less breadth, and less depth. Professors groan, continue to push for more recipes, and continue to be ignored. Instead, what is needed is more heroes who focus in on the motivation and utility problem. How will I connect the abstract to the everyday? How will I inspire understanding? These are the questions that really ought to be handled first-hand, if North America really wants to remain in the forefront of the knowledge economy.

Breeding Radical Independence

To start a thought: Mark Lilla on The Tea Party Jacobins

I’ve met two people in the past month whose drive and groundedness I highly admire. I couldn’t figure out why they were the way they were, and why I felt attracted to their personalities, but it quickly dawned on me: these two were radically independent, despite their relatively young age, and this radical independence was bred into them.

I’ve long been able to sniff out people with untraditional upbringings. This case was no different. One of these friends grew up without a father, and her mother jumped city while she was in the tenth grade. Despite the obvious hardship of growing up without support, she managed to flourish in her new found independence. The other friend grew up in a divided household with an abusive father. She broke free of the cycle of abuse, found refuge outside of the domicile, and has trailblazed away from the path fate had set up for her.

These two women embody what is the ideal of our western democracy today. They are the personal yeomen of the twenty-first century, forced to find their own freedom, who have created an individual ethos for themselves alone. The nuclear family is an antithesis to breeding radical individuals, and time is favoring the latter.

And About the Fish

And there I thought: how should I end this off? I had spent ten minutes writing this essay, and had only five minutes left.

“And sorry for not attending class this term. As you’ll read in the pages prior, the best gift this degree has granted me is the ability and drive to self-learn.”

I signed, and handed in the statistics exam. The final exam of my undergraduate. Thanks, UBC.

The Best Award Ever

The Science Undergraduate Society gives our four $250 awards to students who have demonstrated “above and beyond” leadership in their community. I was nominated this year, and selected to receive one. Having no decorations to my name from campus, this was a big honour.

The day of the reception while getting dressed up, I got an email saying I was retroactively disqualified from receiving the award. This was because of a clause in the SUS rulebook saying current members of SUS council are ineligible. Having just administered their elections, I was an automatic member of council. They only gave out three awards this year.

The icing on the cake? I wrote that rule when I was SUS Director of Administration three years ago.

So my past leadership and present leadership, when put together, prohibited me from getting a leadership award. That’s a much higher honour than whatever $250 can buy.

Editorial Policies of an Amateur Journalist

UBC Insiders has launched into a beast we only dream’t up over a beer, then a phone call, then an email, then a bbq. While we’ve encountered a lot of bumps we didn’t anticipate (for instance, the revenues column in the budget turning up 0), our most important planning, around our editorial, has worked out pretty well. Here’s some of the principles I’ve personally developed, and some of them we commonly accept.

1. The goal of the blog is to drive the debate. We’re politicos. We have opinions. We believe the status-quo is insufficient, and we use the public eye as a tool for change. We do not apologize for opinion.
2. Educate through exposure. It’s easy to say things. It’s not easy to quote sources. We will seek out original sources and provide them raw–not only to make our point, but to show how the sausage gets made, and make it less intimidating.
3. Assume readers speak the language, but give them a dictionary. In trying to make campus more learned, we deliberately use the talk that’s used by those on the inside. Though, with our dual mandate of education, we will provide links to where the reader can learn more.
4. Only report the issues that matter. It can be hard at times, especially when it means we might get scooped by one of the message-forwarding blogs, but we don’t publish rumors or personal conflicts. If we get scooped, we get scooped, but if we can state “the rumor is false”, then we’ve done a greater good. As a rule of thumb, the AMS does not matter.
5. Editorial autonomy. Editors retain their own integrity. One cannot block another’s right to write. We do this for efficiency and for efficacy. Less collaboration means less work, and more independence means wider, stronger connections. We each have universal access to everything, though.
6. Find the story early and define it. The most effective advocacy starts from scratch. If you can take something from nothing and frame it in your way, you’re pretty much done.

Those said, the zeroth editorial principle we have is that the site comes second. There are times when it can just take over, but if things get rough, we’re friends, lets get a beer and talk about life. Only four more days until we go into more relaxed mode (and we know to relax in four days, because of our research.)

A Fascination: Food Policy

There’s no sector as seemingly innocuous, yet profoundly important as food policy. The impacts, especially on health, range an entire state. We could become happier, healthier, and more importantly, more cultured by encouraging diets based on the recently dead, instead of the injected, killed, frozen and microwaved. As a result of all this watching and reading, I’ve personally cut my meat intake by about a third. After watching, you’ll understand why.

Some video primers:

Mark Bittman on “what’s wrong with what we eat”.

Ann Cooper’s emotional appeal to changing the diet of kids.

Bittman, again, and Ezra Klein on America’s diet. (my favorite of the bunch)