It’s time for a major rethink of advertising. In fact, an enormous rollback of this runaway industry is in order. It is clear that advances in machine learning and data harvesting have changed the game completely. But at the same time, knowledge about human limitations has also progressed. We now…

With the Trudeau government already struggling to keep up with its numerous promises, many environmentalists will follow the Green Party’s Elizabeth May and decry the Liberal government’s embrace of Harper’s weak and cynical carbon emissions targets. Quite incompatible with the 1.5 or 2 degree warming targets from the Paris agreement…

Lenovo’s T450s is another piece of high-production-volume hardware from a vendor with a fairly good reputation for Linux support … but a host of serious problems under Ubuntu’s flagship “Long-term-support” operating system. …

A theme among my posts since 2011 has been the challenges of being a GNU/Linux desktop user at McGill University but outside the departments (Math, Physics, Computer Science?) which support the OS. I believe those departments have eschewed the central university’s services and support and run their own. McGill ICS…

This is one of the geekier posts I’ve written, in the sense that the number of people for whom this might be useful is… small and they are not likely to search for it. In Canada, submitting an application to the government “Tri-Councils” for funding of research costs involves one…

I taught an introductory undergraduate course in environment, society, and sustainability this past term. We look at big-picture environmental problems from a mostly-social-science perspective. Early on, we started to compile a list of collective action problems of all kinds which society has already solved. …

It’s still hard to buy a turn-key or supported GNU/Linux computer. I keep trying, and I especially prefer to avoid paying what’s called the Microsoft Tax, i.e. the hardware-bundled cost of Microsoft software, which is how they have built and enforced their monopoly and, from what I can tell, thereby…

This may be my shortest blog post ever, but I’ve been wondering (even with Google’s help) for years why I cannot get my matplotlib graphics to display inline in ipython. This is not always desirable, since they’re not editable/zoomable like they are as pop-up windows, but it is often very nice. It seems that all I needed was to install one more package, “pysides”. Strange. In any case, with: sudo apt-get install ipython-qtconsole pysides

This is an interlude from my normal blog themes. Just a little bit of physics tells you, I think, how we will cook in a future in which energy is electric and a bit more precious. …