Toronto’s 50 most dangerous intersections for cyclists
Bloor, Queen, Dupont and Avenue show up a lot. See the data here.
Bloor, Queen, Dupont and Avenue show up a lot. See the data here.
Remembering the March on Washington (via)
(via)
Apparently needs independent confirmation. Doesn’t sound like a fun job, doing that.
Wow.
I guess I missed this one last week! More Elmore Leonard-worthy back story re: our mayor.
New mag dedicated to long form journamalism.
RIP.
“The Television Adjustment Act of 2013 would solve this problem [the glut of quality TV shows] by paying the people who make television to stop making it.” Or, you could send them to Canada. We don’t seem to have the same problem.
Legal blog Groklaw shuts down because of NSA illegal surveillance. (via)
free ebook (via)
That’s a big drop.
Juan Cole
A big one in The Star, also see this in the Globe.
People haven’t realized that Toronto Life is just a giant nest of trolls. I really shouldn’t link to them, but they’re kind of adorable.
Yes, they are. Safer drivers and walkers, too. Contains other interesting stuff: cycling injuries in Ontario dropped 64% between 1998 and 2009; cycling is one of the safest physical activities out there. Think about that next time you plan to canoe or badminton to work.
Fascinating!
Studies have shown that tipping is not an effective incentive for performance in servers. It also creates an environment in which people of color, young people, old people, women, and foreigners tend to get worse service than white males. In a tip-based system, nonwhite servers make less than their white peers for equal work. Consider also the power imbalance between tippers, who are typically male, and servers, 70 percent of whom are female, and consider that the restaurant industry generates five times the average number of sexual harassment claims per worker. And that in many instances employers have allegedly misused tip credits, which let owners pay servers less than minimum wage if tipping makes up the difference.
Note that this is not a reason to NOT tip; abolishing tipping has to be done at the restaurant level at the least.
Bruce Schneier again. (via)
Bruce Schneier
A little tech-jargony but interesting, especially the part about the new Bluetooth stuff coming in iOS 7 and what it will mean for mobile payment.
Argues that most sci-fi movies are “anti-sci-fi” because technology is the antagonist in them. Interesting idea, but I think it’s slightly misguided. There are a couple things going on:
1. Sci-fi has been appropriated as the window dressing of choice for Hollywood summer tentpole films, but the real genre of these films is action. They are only sci-fi because it can be flashy, gives the writers more leeway and a lot of the content the films are based on is sci-fi.
<p>2. If sci-fi is a story in which fictional technology appears, and stories tend to have conflict, odds are the tech will wind up having some negative aspects to it. It’s a gross simplification to call 2001 dystopian just because it contains a killer robot. It also contains a space hotel and benevolent aliens guiding human evolution! The story itself doesn’t have to love all technology in order to qualify as sci-fi.
Planner Jack Diamond gives the definitive case against the great Scarborough subway adventure
It’ll always be the Dome to me.