randomosity

Makes Sense

Appar­ently, when the going gets tough, Cana­dians turn to law­yers. I have semi-arbitrarily qual­i­fied the two world wars as national crises (yes, we could argue over what other crises may well have faced the nation, but for sake of simple con­jec­ture I will use these), and examined what occu­pa­tions emerge amongst our elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives. Dur­ing both world wars, mem­bers of the legal pro­fes­sion end up as the dom­in­ant non-Parliamentary career in the House of Com­mons. There is only one other point at which they are the dom­in­ant occu­pa­tional group…
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Inform­a­tion Aes­thet­ics points to a great back­ground art­icle on the visual rep­res­ent­a­tion of taste in Rata­touille (a movie I abso­lutely recom­mend — great story, superb anim­a­tion). I watched these sequences and didn’t think much about them — but what a great ques­tion : how can one visu­ally demon­strate the sen­sa­tion of taste? Addi­tion­ally, how do tastes sound — the anim­a­tions that Michael Gagne cre­ated for the movie were used as inspir­a­tion for the accom­pa­ny­ing soundtrack. Is this a sign of sens­ory con­ver­gence? That fla­vours will com­bine and pro­duce an entirely new visu­al­iz­a­tion makes abso­lute sense, but how do you account for syn­ergy or for cata­lytic beha­viour. What a won­der­ful chal­lenge to be presen­ted with and to muse about.
There is a lot more to dis­cover at Michael Gagne’s site. His work had appeared in a string of well known pro­duc­tions. Moreover, Gagne is a Québe­cois and Sheridan gradu­ate — so won­der­fully close to home.
I won­der what smell looks like?

Greener Green­land

Intel­li­gent Power Strips

V. Cool

In an earlier post, I pondered the occu­pa­tional com­pos­i­tion of the House of Com­mons and its implic­a­tions on policy mak­ing. This posts casts an his­tor­ical gaze on the occu­pa­tions of MPs at Con­fed­er­a­tion com­par­ing the struc­ture with the cur­rent and hypo­thes­iz­ing about the evol­u­tion over the past 160 years.
As I men­tioned earlier, I had a sense that law­yers were a more dom­in­ant force in earlier times and that busi­ness men and women pos­sibly have a more decis­ive role in policy mak­ing today than earlier. This chart:

shows the occu­pa­tional com­pos­i­tion of the Cana­dian Par­lia­ment in 1867.
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A col­league and I were dis­cuss­ing an anec­dotal per­cep­tion that there has been a shift from rely­ing on law­yers to craft policy and laws in Canada towards reli­ance on busi­ness. This post pon­ders how our elec­ted rep­res­ent­at­ives self-identify them­selves and what effect their prior occu­pa­tion might have on their policy mak­ing.
This tree chart shows the com­pos­i­tion of the cur­rent House of Com­mons by occu­pa­tional classification:

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