Happy New Decade!

AskNelly has been on an extended blogging vacation. Deeply immersed in graduate studies, freelance projects and some travel, my time has been diverted onto other initiatives.

As the snow falls quietly outside my window, just a short time into a new decade, I find myself thinking about slowness and storytelling – both of which will rise in popularity this decade. (good antidotes for recessionary times)

My own stories of late are quite trivial, but I’d like to share two that came to my attention this week. They are each quite beautiful, definitely worthy of your time. They are proof that even in the most disillusioned days, life can be interesting and magical.

* Miracles in the Rubble. – It’s being reported that on days 5 and 6 after the Port-au-Prince earthquake, 20 people have been rescued amongst the rubble. Think about the likelihood of this for just one moment…….. People buried beneath tons of concrete, submerged so deeply that no person could in fact hear their cries for help all week. 5-6 days without water, food, light, or communication with anyone. Over 120 hours of jostling between fear and hope.

This video is of a Haitian woman rescued yesterday, after being buried under a local bank for six days.  Six days! Her husband never lost hope, one truly amazing story amidst such a horrific week. “Did you think you would live?” asked a reporter as she was rescued. “Why not?”  Here’s a video example of one person’s will to live – one of the 20 such stories in the past day. (video)

* One of Life’s Little Mysteries. Yesterday marked the 201st anniversary of the birth of poet Edgar Allan Poe. For close to six decades, every year, an anonymous person has visited Poe’s grave in Baltimore on Poe’s birthdate, leaving roses, and at times a half consumed bottle of Cognac. This year, the mystery person did not show. This article explains further, one of life’s little mysteries, that shall remain unsolved.

Wishing you well, wherever you may be. I hope you enjoy these two stories.

Yesterday, I decided to watch the news hour on podcast. It had been more than a year since I watched an episode of television news. I’m admittedly not a tv guy, and prefer to read my news.

To make it interesting, I decided to keep stats on the newscast, breaking down the coverage by category, and by second.  Be reminded that I watched a podcast, so the 36 minutes and 44 second podcast contained no commercial breaks; therefore, this chart signifies the content breakdown, as I’ve categorized it. 36 minutes and 44 seconds equals 2204 seconds, but my results are taken from 1969 seconds of content, as I excluded air time that was without categorical content.

Below are my results:

- 32% of the content covered death/murder, and 11% covered fear/local crime. That’s 43% of the entire program dedicated to telling us how crappy our world can be.

- 16% *local news should be taken with a grain of salt. What constituted local news was 144 seconds about a landslide in someones back yard in Delta, 130 seconds about parking lot congestion at Disney on Ice, and 39 seconds previewing the Grey Cup. In a metropolitan Vancouver of 2.5 million people, these are the three local stories of the day? The Grey Cup got less than 1/3 of the time of the bad parking lot story – something’s amiss there.

- The weather also received 16% coverage. 16%? Is this coverage for people too lazy to look outside? Have TV viewers not caught on to Google, or weather.com? Parents, don’t ever let your kids pursue a career as a television weather reporter – this career is on its last generation and exists largely for nostalgic reasons.

- 9% celebrity gossip is dedicated mostly to Tiger Woods’ car accident, and a couple that crashed a White House party. (This news is boring for golf fans, who already know Tiger has never been the straightest driver.)

- Olympic news received 6% coverage, while global news got only 5%.

- I found it odd that local politics received 2% coverage, while death/murder/crime got 43%.

- 0 seconds of coverage about science, technology, the arts, or any human performing a good deed.

Anyways, there’s my crude and not-so-scientific analysis of the news hour from November 29, 2009, via podcast. No wonder I tune out television news – why would I subject myself to a show where 43% of the content tells me about deaths, murder and crime? No wonder people think the world is a horrible place. I’d like to recommend the news hour change its name to either Not News, Bad News, or, my personal favorite, The Isolated Bad News Hour.

When you have nearly 7 billion people in this world, you can safely assume someone somewhere is doing something ugly this moment. But for every person doing something ugly, I bet there’s tens or hundreds of thousands doing something beautiful. The news hour conflicts with my personal reality of the world, which is why I have to write such blog posts, in order to stomach watching it.

Despite what we may think (from watching the news), murder and crime are not highly prevalent in our society. Sure, crime is ugly, and it occurs, but considering all that happens in the world in a day, crime is merely a rare event that exists within massive populations.

Perhaps watching crime on tv is a sort of defense mechanism, preparing us for the worst life has to offer. If I need a dose of preparation, I know where to turn.

* A more detailed description of my news hour experience.

Time Estimated Seconds Category Description

00:00-00:51. 51 secs. * fear * Lead in. Pedestrian killed, bad news for a home, 4 murders near Seattle.

00:52-03:23. 151 secs. * death * Float Plane Crash

03:37-06:34. 177 secs. *death * Pedestrian Hit by Car

06:40-08:15. 95 secs. *weather * Weather

08:15-10:39. 144 secs. *local news *Landslide in someone’s back yard in Delta. Couple can’t afford this.

10:40-13:00. 140 secs. *death * Gunman in Lakewood, WA shoots 4 police officers. Killer on the loose.

13:03-15:35. 152 secs. *fear * Stabbing Victim in Victoria. 26 year old stabbed in leg by home intruder.

15:38-17:42. 124 secs. *Olympics * Canada Pavilion in Vancouver – building awarded to American firm.

17:43-18:17. 34 secs. *BC Politics * BCNDP Conference in Vancouver. Moe Sahota chosen to represent party.

18:18-18:30. 12 secs. *celebrity news * Tiger Woods Not a Good Driver. This is nothing new for golf fans.

19:00-20:47. 107 secs. *death * Father kills his two children in Calgary.

Green Grass is everywhere - This is Scotland

The grass is always greener on the other side.Neighbor’s got a new car that you want to drive.

It’s true, isn’t it?  Many of us truly believe the grass is greener on the other side. I used to believe in this wholeheartedly, and it took travelling to about 20 countries before I realized that green grass exists everywhere, not only in our minds.

A Gallup poll this week proves that people believe the grass is greener on the other side. How many people? About 700 million of us worldwide. The question asked was if we’d like to migrate internationally permanently.

Leading the way, perhaps not surprisingly, was Sub-Saharan Africa, with 38% of the adult population wanting to move. One of the oddities I found in the results was that the most ‘unhappy’ seem to be the Europeans. Half of the estimated 80 million adults in the EU would like to migrate outside their own country but within the EU, something I found odd, considering Europeans tend to migrate far less frequently than their North American counterparts. (Europeans may travel more, but North Americans move far more often) Perhaps this result is a reflection of Europeans’ lack of migration.

The least interested in migrating?  Asians. Only 10% expressed a desire to “migrate permanently.”

The top 5 net-migration index would be Singapore, Saudi Arabia, New Zealand, Canada and Australia. This top 5 didn’t surprise me at all, people in the developing countries expressing a desire to move to where they believe the best financial rewards are. (network theory must play a role here)  45 million said they would like to migrate to Canada, which would more than double the current population of roughly 34 million.

But is the grass really greener on the other side? Well, such judgments are personal, of course. I’d argue that for most people, the grass likely isn’t greener on the other side. We just think it is. Then we get to that other side, and within a few months begin thinking the grass is greener on the side – you know, the side we just came from.

The grass is green everywhere. My grass is likely no greener than yours, and vice versa. If we both have green grass, then we are fortunate. And if we already have green grass, why do we bother searching for grass that’s even greener? We should learn to be happier with what we already have.

Matrysokka doll set - photo courtesy Augustin Rouchon

As a child, one of my few indoor toys was a set of Matryoshka dolls.  The image right features a set of 9. I remember having only 6. (perhaps 3 were lost along the way)

If you are unfamiliar, each doll is a 2-piece unit, so that it can be opened and another smaller unit can fit inside. In the image, the smallest doll can fit inside the next largest, and so on, so that all the dolls will fit inside the largest one.

Many of my childhood hours were spent innocently sorting and fitting the dolls into one another, in what seemed at the time endless combinations.

Now some 30 years later, I realized just the other day that I continue to display matryoshka-like behavioral patterns.

Unconsciously, I constantly place, sort, and organize our household items inside one another. An inspection of my cupboards will reveal pots, plastic storage devices, cups, and even recyclable products, all sorted like matryoshka dolls. My recycle products are perhaps the most neurotic – the large box of corn flakes houses two 2-litre milk cartons, which house two 1-litre yogurt cartons, which house 500ml cartons of tomatoes, with 250ml cartons of orange juice concentrate inside, which are then stuffed with cardboard from toilet paper rolls. It seems that I recycle Matryshoka-ly.

Even when I travel, my bag is packed like I once organized my matryshoka dolls. Small shirts will be folded inside larger ones, which will be placed inside jackets. Shorts are placed inside pants. Shoes will always be stuffed with small items. etc. etc……

Am I today, repeating the behaviors I practiced as a child with the matryoshka dolls?  Or am I just trying to use space effectively?  Why do I perform this sorting unconsciously and habitually, like it’s something I am programmed to do?

We have plenty of space downstairs to store cardboard boxes – we probably use 10% of what’s available – yet I still stuff smaller boxes into the larger ones. Small suitcases are stored in larger ones. Small bags stuffed into bigger ones.

Whether matryshoka dolls had anything to do with one of my adult quirks will of course never be known. I’m of the belief, as I type this, that there’s a connection. Old habits die hard, as they say.

A friend of mine turned 25 today. Like many mid to late 20somethings, she’s worried at being one year closer to 30. In 5 years, she’ll discover that when she turns 30, she will happily wave goodbye to her twenties.

Besides childhood birthdays, and ones that grant us new rights like voting, driving a car, or drinking alcohol (legally), many birthdays are quite insignificant. You likely won’t organize a giant bash for your 27, 34, 43, or 52nd birthdays.

Most of us only get excited about the birthdays that are divisible by our number of fingers; 30, 50, 60, 65. At 80, each birthday becomes significant again, every one a bonus exceeding the average life expectancy.

If you are celebrating an insignificant birthday this year, like your 28th, 34th or 42nd, and aren’t too excited about it, remind yourself that simply knowing the date you were born is worth celebrating……

Many people in our world don’t even know their birth-date or their age, an unfortunate reality for many who live in areas with high mortality rates. (due to conflict, war, disease, famine, etc) To many, a birth-date is an approximation, something they will never know, and may often question.

I used to consider most of my birthdays insignificant, until I realized that simply knowing my birth date is worth celebrating.

The Nobel Committee managed to trump all the news of yesterday. Guess if you award Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize, it will dominate the media-waves, even on a day when it competed with John Lennon’s birthday, NASA bombing the moon, and Marge Simpson gracing the cover of Playboy.

My first reaction to hearing the Nobel news was like most peoples….. huh? The news seemed premature, and I thought Google had miraculously transported me to a 2015 web page. The Obama presidency is so fresh, and despite good intentions and numerous diplomatic efforts to date, time has not yet allowed his work to bear much fruit.

Expectations are of course (unrealistically) high for his presidency, especially given the fact that he’s inherited an epic-sized financial crisis and two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, not exactly ideal starting conditions. But despite these obvious handicaps, Obama has already initiated significant diplomatic efforts towards peace in the Middle East, nuclear disarmament, and a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. People around the world want change on these three issues, which effect all of us, either directly or indirectly, and Obama seems committed to see these issues through.

Perhaps this award is the bump that Obama needs, and a way to remind us of the change he’s been advocating. By awarding the President of the U.S. the Nobel Peace Prize at the beginning of his term, it sets a new metric that his term(s) will now be measured against. We will now judge his presidency not only by his actions as a U.S. President, but as a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. What’s one more expectation anyways?

Some people are surprised by this selection. I’m of the opinion that it’s a superb choice.

40 years ago, John Lennon asked us to Give Peace a Chance. Yesterday, the Nobel committee asked the same of President Obama. What remains is for us to give Obama a chance.

FYI –  U.S. Presidents, diplomats and statesmen have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize many times before, including: Theodore Rosevelt, Elihu Root, Woodrow Wilson, Charles Gates Dawes, Frank B. Kellogg, Cordell Hull, George Catlett Marshall, Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and Al Gore.

With recent MLS data coming out last week, it was time to update my data on Canada average home prices by province, and city.

I’m in the process of compiling comprehensive data on Canadian housing prices from the past 5-15 years. It’s a lengthy process. If you have any references which would assist me, please email them to asknelly at gmail dot com. Thanks!

This line chart below lists average residential home prices sold by MLS in several Canadian cities. The data includes the majority of months between December 2007 and August 2009. (You will see some data points are missing, such as Sept 08, Oct 08 and Nov 08)

Average residential prices sold by MLS, Canadian cities

As you may notice, this chart teaches us very little about the historic prices in each city, as the time interval is too brief. The prices are however quite stable over the past two years. The chart does provide a good comparison though of how prices compare from city to city; you can see that the average home sold in Vancouver, can almost buy you three average homes sold in Quebec City. (the winters are warmer in Vancouver; that must be why!)

The line chart below describes the national average of Canadian home sales prices, according to MLS. These are the average price of all homes sold in Canada by month, from February 2006 to August 2009. Again, I am missing a few months of data at this time, so this chart is not to be used as an accurate historical reference.

Again, this post is an ongoing project of the Canadian housing data I am currently collecting. I am trying to gather the average home sale prices by Canadian city, and province, for the last 5 to 20 years – the reason for this is because I haven’t found another site on the web with comprehensive historical data. Please email me if you have any information you could provide. And because my data is incomplete at the moment, please take these images above for what they are; works in progress.

Thank you.

*all figures used are from the Canadian Real Estate Association

Facebook was fun at first. Re-connecting with old high school friends, touching base with random people from the past. My Facebook honeymoon was brief, yet pleasant.

But after re-connecting with everyone, the site lost all appeal to me. There are numerous reasons why I had to dump Facebook.

The primary reason was because using Facebook was altering my dreams. (Perhaps you’ve also noticed this?) I’d awake, realizing that my dreams were occupied with childhood acquaintances that have no influence in my present day life. Dreams filled with both your closest friends, loved ones, and some guy I met at a picnic in 1998, just didn’t feel right.

If you spend 20 minutes on Facebook just before bed, it’s easy for the subconscious mind to draw connections in your dreams. We of course often dream about what we experienced in the hours before sleeping. Facebook constantly reminds you of your past, which is in conflict with one who prefers living in the present.  Don’t get me wrong, I like to reminisce. But I prefer reminiscing on my own terms.

There are additional frustrations that I have with Facebook. The 80/20 rule applies to content submission, meaning a small minority of ‘friends’ occupy all the social space. People who submit volumes of content are most likely to have lives which are not so interesting, hence the time they have to devote to such endeavours. If you’ve got time to write “I’m enjoying Paris so much!” on your Facebook wall, then you’re not exactly enjoying Paris – you’re in fact in front of a computer in Paris, updating your profile, so that people know where you are. You should instead be enjoying a glass of red, along with some fresh cheese and breads in Le Quartier Latin.

Sure, there are pros to Facebook. It’s a great tool for keeping in touch with friends and family; it’s photo-sharing feature is very user-friendly. It’s a great collaboration tool with the potential to make positive social change. Because we use it for different reasons, it features various benefits to each of us.

But I feel that for many it’s become an addiction, with people spending hours per week on the site – hours that would be better spent meeting your friends in person.

The group environment means status updates and wall posts lack depth, and are more about keeping up appearances and posturing. At a time when people are already deprived of outlets for expressing their emotions, it further suppresses our deepest feelings; so many things we want to tell everyone we know, but just can’t in such a censored environment.

Events which are quite meaningful are losing their stature; people post announcements of the birth of their first child to everyone, instead of taking the time to contact all their close friends personally, with the once in a lifetime news. Some say it’s a sign of the times, our virtual and real worlds merging. But for me it’s not intimate enough – I feel that it’s a habit thats leading to a deterioration in how we interact. Perhaps I’m just old fashioned.

I dumped Facebook because I wanted my life, and my dreams back. I’ve been happier ever since.

I can’t stand Fw: chain emails.

To me, if it’s in a chain mail, it’s most likely fake, stupid, not funny, or promoting falsehoods. This week, I received a ridiculous one titled Fw: Some Good Shots…, which included a variety of fake images reinforcing certain stereotypes.

Who believes this crap?

Fw: Some Good Shots included this fake image (left) of a shark trying to eat a helicopter, claiming it’s been nominated by National Geographic as “THE photo of the year.” National Geographic is a magazine of very high standards, not likely to publish photos that look photo-shopped by an 8 year old.

Even more amazing to me is that people forward such crap. National Geographic posted information about this hoax on its web-site years ago. They claim that every day, hundreds of people visit their site because of this fake image.  (Guess I was one of them)

What’s unfortunate is that whoever created the fake image, stole a remarkable photo of a breaching great white shark to do so.  That photo was the work and good fortune of South African photographer Charles Maxwell, who captured the image as the shark attacked a seal. Visit his website at www.underwatervideo.co.za – the original photo of the breaching shark is on the homepage.

Perhaps what’s even more unfortunate, is such email fwds reinforce false myths like sharks are out to kill us, when in reality it’s people who are out to kill sharks. In 2006, all the sharks on the planet killed a total of 1 human being, while humans killed 38 million sharks. This fake photo would be more realistic, if it showed humans hunting sharks by helicopter.

I assure you that sharks are (justifiably) much more afraid of us, than we are of them. We are actually driving sharks to the brink of extinction – 90% of their global population has been killed in the past decade.

When sharks do become extinct, will we blame such emails for leading us blindly? Or will we just go on believing that those pesky sharks were out to eat us, and our helicopters, anyways?

*To learn more about sharks and the risks they currently face, I strongly recommend the documentary Sharkwater, by Canadian Rob Stewart.

In 2007, only one person in the entire world died from a shark attack. (a vacationing swimmer in the South Pacific) 341 people however, died slipping in the bathtub. It seems death by shark attack is an annual occurrence, and death by bathtub slip occurs daily.

Yet most of us actually believe that sharks are deadly, blood-thirsty creatures that gobble up swimmers daily. It’s amazing how one 1975 horror film can obscure our judgement, even 35 years later. Out of the roughly 360 shark species that exist, only 4 have ever been involved in a number of attacks on humans.

Here’s some U.S. causes of death stats to consider:

- Deaths per year by sharks – 1
- Deaths per year by vending machine tipping – 2
- Deaths per year by dog attack - 16
- Deaths per year by slipping in the bathtub – 341

In other words, the chances you or someone you know will die from a dog attack, is 16 times greater than a shark attack. It’s even more likely you’d know someone who died by having a vending machine tip on them, and 341 times more likely someone you or someone you know will die slipping in the bathtub.  Bathtubs are far more dangerous than sharks in the ocean.

Consider this even more perplexing statistic……. In the United States, dogs bite approximately 4,700,000 people per year, leading to almost 1 million hospital visits. Sharks on the other hand, bit only 39 people in 2006. (Maybe my girlfriend’s fear of dogs isn’t so crazy after all – she’s 120,000 times more likely to be attacked by a dog, than a shark!)

Lots of attention has been paid to Michael Vick, the NFL football player who ran a dog fighting ring and served some time in jail for his actions. He admitted that his operation lead to the death of 6-8 dogs. I believe what Vick did was wrong, and that dog fighting should be illegal. He’s lost all respect I once had for him as a football player.

But the scale of what Michael Vick did is very minor relatively. While killing 6-8 dogs is horrible, it’s nothing compared to two other crimes against animals that are currently happening around us – the killing of sharks for their fins (38 million sharks per year!), and the killing of harp seals in the Canadian Seal Hunt (275,000 per year).

Death of animals totals

• number of dogs Michael Vick admits may have died on his property – 6-8
• number of seals killed in 2008 Canadian Seal Hunt – 275,000
• number of sharks killed for the fins annually – 38,000,000

Canadian film-maker Rob Stewart loves swimming with sharks

38 million sharks per year are currently being pulled from the water, having their fins removed, and then being tossed back into the water, still alive and unable to swim. They sink to the bottom of the ocean, where they die slowly. Their total global population is estimated to have decreased 90% in the past decade, an alarming rate.

A very powerful documentary on this problem is Sharkwater, made by Canadian Rob Stewart (photographed left). Much of the cause for their deaths is the demand from China for shark products – if anyone can figure out a way to get Chinese people to stop consuming shark fin soup, please let Stewart know.

We’re confused about death. Dogs present a much greater danger to humans than do sharks, yet we get more upset at the killing of 6-8 dogs, than we do 275,000 seals, or 38,000,000 sharks.

I strongly encourage you rent Sharkwater the documentary – it’s one of most visually-stunning, and important, documentaries I’ve seen in years.