Years ago I heard David Suzuki speak in Halifax. He was on book tour for his, then recent publication, The Sacred Balance. He told many stories that night and he spoke for several hours about the fundamental connectedness of life. Meeting and listening to Dr. Suzuki had a lasting impact on me. I recall feeling…
The study that inspired the racist comments, and this post, is interesting because it helps folks who have a hard time seeing racism understand that it’s rampant in Canadian culture. The researchers sent off over 6000 resumes to potential employers in Toronto. Among many other findings, it was found that those resumes with English sounding…
Okay. I’ve been very critical of journalists and newspapers that are getting it wrong on climate change: here and here and here. But you should know that I have moments of being more, well, sympathetic with the modern journalist. I also believe that healthy journalistic institutions are essential for a healthy democracy. But our democracy…
This is a story about one of my moments of glory. Some of you know that some years ago I was fundraising for Greenpeace. One particularly cold winter day, I engaged a passerby in a conversation about global warming. The man who stopped to talk was quite charming but he clearly had no sympathy for…
Here’s a fun thing that you can try at home. It’s a simple form of media analysis. The result of this particular analysis leads me to think bad thoughts about Canwest. But that’s just me. Here’s what I did. First I went to the Calgary Herald website. But you can pick any online media outlet…
It seems like yesterday that I was writing my thesis and exploring my love of cognitive maps and mental models. I was doing this as a way of making peace with my competing sympathies for scientific realism and linguistic or global antirealism. Ahh, good times, philosophy. And my thesis was actually, in my not so…
I was at my local coffee shop yesterday, and Alison (sp? sorry) was wearing this cool shirt with a cool design on the front. When I noted that it was rather awesome she asked me if I recognized it. I didn’t. Turns out that it’s an old CBC logo. Well, sort of. It’s the image…
It is entirely possible for the meanings we create to be beyond our intent and within our responsibility. I’ve said this before, here. You have to read down a ways to get to it, and it’s so fascinating, that I thought I would repeat it. In the wild of human to human interactions, more meaning…
Today is a good day to think about our life support system. Our life support is our earth. It’s a delicate mixture of gravity, various nuclear forces that hold our subatomic and atomic particles together, solar energy, some electrical forces that hold our molecules together, a chemical soup composed of nitrogen, oxygen, carbon and hydrogen1…
One of the challenges of branding and marketing is working with and relying on the many subtle, implicit and subconscious layers of meanings that are formed in people’s minds. This can be particularly difficult for people who tend toward the more analytic, more pre-defined, or more explicit forms of communication. Let’s call the former maximal…
So last week I wrote about a bus ad that I photographed and posted claiming that it was racist. But I didn’t really speak to how or why it was racist. And it’s important to be able to say why.1 The tagline: “GREAT MEXICAN TASTE, WITHOUT THE RUNS” So the implication of this tagline is…
