1 Week, 7 Stories #35
Capturing time, making time, and no time left
Every edition features 7 stories, from the past week. I’ll draw on my background in media, journalism, agriculture, biotech, and renewable energy to come up with an interesting selection and to offer some context.
I was recently talking with someone considering purchasing a rural property and it brought back memories of my time on my own small ranch. As great as it was, working from home was a problem. Sit back and make the most of your high-speed internet connection to get a dose of rural reality to start this edition of 1 Week, 7 Stories.
Georgina, Ontario is a town of about 48,000 people and they received some good news this week because high-speed fibre is on its way. Yes, 2024 and only now will the town receive all the benefits of the latest technology. Not everyone will receive it in 2024 and the rest will have to wait until 2025.
As one resident put it, “Not all of L0E1N0 (the postal code) is going to get this service. The rest of the rural areas are left with whatever.”
The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives calls it “Faster internet as slowly as possible”.
I now live in Calgary where fibre-optic connections and 150Mbps download speeds are common and necessary if you are going to work from home. 3,000Mbps are available and affordable if you have the need. That is possible because with a high-density population it makes economic sense for internet providers to provide the latest and greatest technology. In rural areas or small communities, there is no sound business case to lay cable to service a few households. Worse case scenarios occur where geography and terrain work against the technology and the economics, leaving government subsidies as the best solution. Earlier this month the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission announced $271.9 million toward a 1,300-kilometre-long undersea fibre internet link for the communities of Iqaluit, Kinngait, Coral Harbour and Kimmirut in Canada’s North. In BC, with the goal of high-speed access to all underserved households and First Nations communities by 2027, the provincial and federal government are investing $830 million dollars.
Satellite internet is doable and affordable as an option but is fraught with problems. Download speeds tend to be in the 50Mbps range with 100 being exceptional. The lower end of the range is still not good enough to stream video content or conduct a reliable and robust video meeting. Upload speeds are usually in the 10Mbps range which creates latency and will mess with many tasks. Satellite technology is line-of-sight and when I was relying on it, getting that line of sight was tricky. Trees grow, winds blow, snow falls, and suddenly your ‘net is not! Starlink is more reliable, but it is not cheap. The top package can be up to $5,000 USd ($6,800 Cdn) per month to get 220Mbps and latency is still a problem. The minimum Starlink buy-in starts at $120.00 USd ($164.00 Cdn) monthly. Satellite equipment costs are always extra.
A report from the Institute for Research on Public Policy released in June examines the state of the Digital Divide in Canada and highlights an often-overlooked aspect. Income.
Low-income Canadians cannot afford the best service in big cities and fall even further behind the curve in rural and remote communities. Working or studying from home becomes difficult or impossible. Children lose ground in their education where reliable internet service is assumed by schools or teachers. Many of those low-income Canadians may have disabilities which could be more manageable if they had a good computer and internet service at their disposal.
Canada is headed in the right direction, but I wonder how many app and website developers really factor in less than 50Mbps internet into their design. Probably not many.
Here is a glimpse into the “on-the-ground reality of using the Internet in bandwidth-constrained environments”. It is an extreme example, but it drives home the challenges.
On July 9th Joe Bonsall passed away. Probably not a name most of you will recognize unless you are a country music fan. Or follow the latest developments in the treatment of ALS. Joe was a member of the Oak Ridge Boys for 50 years and it was ALS that finally made him put down his banjo and step away from the microphone. His passing was also one of those high-profile deaths that has the side effect of turning attention in some direction and in this case, it was towards ALS or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease after the baseball player who was diagnosed with it in 1939 and died in 1941. It is a fatal disease that destroys nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord. The exact cause is not known and there is no cure, but there is progress.
Just this week, researchers from the Sant Pau Research Institute in Barcelona said they have found a new mutation in one of the genes that may cause ALS. They began their investigation after noticing an unusually high number of cases in the La Rioja of Spain which also had familial connections. In the open, online access paper in BMJ Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, & Psychiatry, the authors say that the ARPP21 gene “should be reclassified as an ALS-causing gene, and included in genetic screenings along with other known genes”.
On the treatment side, new research published in the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology Journal was focused on controlling immune cells which play a role on the progression and severity of the disease. Working with mice, researchers infused purified B cells, which are immune cells known to produce antibodies. The results showed a delay in the onset of the disease and extended survival.
In Canada, researchers announced last month that they see hope for a potential cure for the ALS. Their study was published in the journal Brain, but Michael Strong, at the Schulich School of Medicine & Dentistry does a great job of explaining the work in this video.
These research projects are not even at the clinical trail stage to help the 4,000 or so Canadians living with ALS, but there are numerous trials taking place around the world. In Canada there are 10 recruiting trials, 2 active, and 2 not yet at the recruiting stage according to the ALS Canada website.
It is a complicated disease, but research and time may yet find a way to improve quality of life and perhaps even sure, ALS
“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot
With a pink hotel, a boutique, and a swinging hot spotThey took all the trees and put 'em in a tree museum
And they charged the people a dollar and a half to see them”
Big Yellow Taxi by Joni Mitchell, 1970
Both bad moves as Toronto found out this week when it received 97.8mm (3.85 inches) of rain which put it into the record books. It was forecast, but when the storm hit no one was quite prepared. When that amount of precipitation falls in a short period of time it must go somewhere fast. The ground quickly becomes saturated, so the water just lets gravity have its way and follows the path of least resistance. Pavement.
Toronto has about 5,600 kilometres (3,480 miles) of paved roads, not to mention sidewalks, plazas, driveways, and patios. Just like any city. Toronto sits in a basin surrounded by a Greenbelt which sucks up water, but it has a limit to how much it can hold. While I’m picking on Toronto, I should also add that the Ford government wants to open parts of that Greenbelt to development which means more pavement and fewer spaces capable of absorbing rainfall.
It is an all-too-common problem and flood resilience is a growing challenge for cities as changes to our climate brings more frequent and more severe storms. Better infrastructure to take excess runoff away is one solution, but ultimately, we need to get past seeing bigger storm sewers as the answer. More natural environments including parks, urban forests, rain gardens, and green roofs can start reducing rainwater before it goes anywhere. Underground storage not only captures excess but has the added benefit of providing non-potable water for irrigation or industrial use later. Leaving natural wetlands and waterways such as the Greenbelt intact and advocating for bringing buried creeks back to the surface in cities in important. Overall many of these ideas come together in what is sometimes referred to as “sponge cities” as you’ll hear in this CBC radio interview.
A US study published in the Open Access Geophysical Research Letters in 2020 found that when cities expand roads, sidewalks or parking lots by one percentage point, the annual flood magnitude increases by 3.3 per cent.
In my last newsletter I wrote about natural gardens which are one small part of the solution, but there is also a trend to pave over gardens by homeowners wanting to escape yard and garden chores. In London, England it has reached the point where the London Climate Resilience Review recommended residents should be charged for paving gardens and offered incentives to remove existing paving. The report also said that London is “not prepared for another major surface water flooding incident and lives and livelihoods are at risk.”
If we want to avoid power outages and “indoor waterfalls” in subways like Toronto just experienced we may need to look to the trees for some answers.
It might surprise you to know that one of the first unmanned aerial vehicles was back to 1935 and since then advances in technology have brought drones into everyday use.
A French drone and aviation enthusiast has patented a drone to scatter human ashes. (sorry, you mighty need an account for that one) and in the UK Aerial Ashes will use their drones for a “fitting farewell” for your loved one.
Also in the UK, the country’s Royal Mail service used drones to deliver mail to residents on two remote Scottish Islands this week.
Walmart is expanding its use of delivery drones and Amazon has received FAA permission to fly drones farther as part of its ‘Prime Air Service’.
Yet delivery drones are proving to be a bit of a bust.
Some for technical issues and some for more sinister reasons. In Florida a Walmart drone was shot down and a man is facing charges. He said he thought he was under surveillance and shot the drone once with a 9mm pistol. It is considered a felony that could result in up to 20 years in prison. In 2022 residents of a town in California vowed to shoot down Amazon delivery drones. Meamwhile the good people of Glendale, Arizona did not vow to shoot them down, but they did tell Walmart last year to pack up its drones and go somewhere else.
The other problem is simply a matter of practicality.
Drones tend to make sense in remote areas – especially areas where medical or humanitarian aid is needed. But for an urban area or areas served by traditional postal services, couriers, or parcel deliver companies, not so much. In an Information Week article, an analyst was quoted as saying that “Before drone deliveries become commonplace, issues with safety, privacy, and airspace control must also be resolved". Forbes magazine went so far as to suggest that drone delivery is a red herring, but that “eye in the sky” data collection was the valuable piece of the technology being exploited. (Maybe the Florida man had reason to be worried!)
A column in this week’s Globe & Mail may have best summed up the role of drones for just-in-time parcel delivery “…really, when you are completely honest, do we really need robotic technology to deliver home goods, clothes and dinner to our front doors?”
PepsiCo says its food and beverage products are consumed by people around the world more than one billion times a day. That is a lot of product grown or manufactured in a lot of places with a significant impact on the environment.
While I will keep my skeptics hat firmly in place, it does seem like the company is trying to reduce the impact it leaves, if for no other reason that it makes economic sense. It announced this week that it will work with Yara, an international chemical company specializing in fertilizer, to “drive the adoption of regenerative agricultural practices”.
Yara is still a chemical company so don’t get the idea that this is a niche, organic, deal. However, Yara is known for lower-carbon products made from renewable or low-carbon ammonia. According to the Royal Society green ammonia is an important part of a zero-carbon future and PepsiCo will supply its farmers with Yara’s fertilizer.
Many consumers are doing their best to make sure the food they buy is ethically produced and in an environmentally sound manner, but as costs for food continue to go up that is not always easy. Rising food costs are a global issue and are happening for a number of reasons, including input costs.
If companies the size of PepsiCo can reduce costs across the supply chain, and reduce emissions from production, then maybe I can take off my skeptic’s hat long enough to be optimistic for the future.
The last story for this edition of 1 Week, 7 Stories got its start from an unusual source and ultimately encompasses more than a week and more than the news.
I was watching the Q & A program Jeopardy! this week and in the usual chat with the contestants one was with a grad student who studied meteorites as part of her work. She said the oldest one she had handled was the Murchison meteorite which was 4.7 billion years old. About 200 million years older than the earth. It exploded over Murchison in the state of Victoria, Australia in 1969, just 2 months after the Apollo 11 moon landing. Some of the grains inside the recovered fragments were even older at 7 billion years old.
I cannot begin to grasp that amount of time or what it must be like to handle something that predates the very planet you live on. For archaeologists, finding and handling ancient artifacts gives them a look into the past, but a 4 to 7 billion year old piece of rock is much more than a look into our past.
It goes beyond the sense of kenopsia which is an eerie or forlorn atmosphere. That comes from the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows which is a book of made-up words for emotions we don’t have the words to express. It is equally beyond nostalgia which comes from the Greek to return home and feel pain. Homesickness.
As tactile and superstitious creatures, handling ancient artifacts can also evoke the biblical sense of “If I but touch his cloak, I will be made well”
How we sense time can sometimes defy logic says an article this week in SciTech Daily because modern physics suggests time is an illusion, yet we are ruled by it every day. We often say there is a time and place for everything, but psychologists generally agree that our perception of time is subjective and our brains shape how we experience time and our sense of reality. An article in Salon offered a first-person account from someone with a brain injury which interfered with the ability to perceive time to the point where everything became “yesterday”. A whole new way of living in the here and now!
Analysis of the Murchison meteorite found that it contains amino acids, the building blocks of life, as well as purines and pyrimidines, the basic components of RNA and DNA. Technology for analyzing the fragments means that we continue to learn something new from the meteorite which completed a journey of billions of years when it found our tiny blue dot and ended up in small town in Australia.
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