Lessons from a Liberal-NDP Accord

Election 2015: Lessons from a Liberal-NDP Accord

The party with the most seats does not have to form the government!

As it looks unlikely that any party will have a majority in Parliament after the upcoming election, it is very important to get past single-party partisan politics and think about how a government would be formed. This article has some relevant history and interesting ideas! Neither the Liberal nor the NDP need to support a minority Conservative government, but they could cooperate to form a government, even if it is not a coalition.

How Long Would It Take to Watch ALL of Days of Our Lives?

This is a question that came up this week as I am visiting relatives for Christmas, two of whom are regular watchers of NBC's Days of our Lives daily soap. As of this post, 12 493 episodes have been aired.

I began by calculating the running time of all these episodes, making a few assumptions. From 1965 until 1975, the show was 30 minutes long, but from 1975 since, all episodes have been 1 hour (60 minutes) long. Therefore, I assumed in my calculations that roughly one fifth of all DOOL episodes are 30 minutes long, and that the rest are 1 hour long. By this logic, watching all episodes to date would take (0.2*12493*0.5)+(0.8*12493) hours, or approximately 11 244.

If one watched all DOOL episodes to date continuously, it would take them 468.5 days, just over 1.25 years! If we are more reasonable* and assume that it is your full-time job to watch DOOL, then at 40 hours a week it would take you 281.1 weeks or approximately 5.4 years with no break time to watch DOOL to what is now the current episode.

However, if you wanted to watch EVERY episode, and be up to date with the episode current to the time you finished watching, it would take you far longer, as you would be in a game of catchup. Luckily* for you, you can watch 40 hours/week while only 7 hours/week of new content is released.

One can solve for the total time taken to catch up to the present episode, in weeks, with the formula y = , since you are watching 40 hours/week and 7 hours/week of new content is added. This solves to  y = 11244/33, or approximately 340.72 weeks. This works out to just over SIX AND A HALF YEARS!

Given all of this, I would be VERY interested if anyone can find evidence that someone has watched every single episode of DOOL, as I would imagine that many people who have watched in "real time" from the beginning will have likely quit or died by this point. Leave a comment or email me if this person exists.

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* This is a relative term.

From the Archives: Cannabis Speech

For this post, I decided to pull an assignment out of the archives for posting because I believe it to be an excellent example of both an effective speech outline and a sound argument in favour of something. While I myself obviously have no personal interest in the legalization of marijuana, I found the topic's notoriety to be interesting academically, since I could see no realistic reason why it should not be as legal as alcohol or cigarettes. In researching for this speech, I also found out about many of its less obvious benefits, such as reducing the risk of breast cancer. All information is accurate as of the time the post was written, which was in my Grade 9 year (2012-2013). I dug it up recently as a result of an assignment in my Law 12 course.

One might also note that while this is the form of the speech as I gave it, the original was nearly twice as long and had even more arguments and talking points.

Kelowna ATIS "Merry Christmas"

Earlier this evening, I was listening to the Kelowna ATIS phone line (yes, I have odd hobbies; its at 250-491-0310 if you're interested) when I was surprised to hear it say "Merry Christmas". Naturally, I recorded this event, and have embedded it below, along with a transcript.





From the description:

This was taken around 20:00 local time from the CYLW (Kelowna International)ATIS phone line (250-491-0310) on Christmas Day, 2013. I am an avid ATIS listener, as my school is near the airport and I need the weather readings, and was surprised to hear the ATIS say "Merry Christmas". I therefore recorded it on my iPhone via a cable to my computer for posterity.

TRANSCRIPT:

Kelowna Airport, Information Quebec
Weather at Zero Three Two One Zulu
Automated Observation
Wind One Four Zero at Six
Visibility Niner
Niner Hundred broken
One Thousand Four Hundred overcast
Temperature Zero
Dew point Minus One
Altimeter Three Zero Three Eight
IFR approach ILS DME runway One Six
Active, runway One Six
Runway surface condition at Zero Three Zero One Zulu
One Hundred Percent bare and wet
Chemical Applied
Merry Christmas
Inform ATC that you have information Quebec

Unitarian Fellowship of Kelowna: November 3rd Service (BETA)

The mp3 file embedded above is a copy of an edited version of the "sermon" given at the November 3rd, 2013 Sunday service at the Unitarian Fellowship of Kelowna. I consider this recording to be in "Beta" (i.e. there are some kinks that need to be worked out), but so far as I can tell the recording (which is taken directly from the mixer's output) sounds fine. Enjoy!

Dreams of Mars (Draft 1)

Similar to my last post, I have again been assigned to write a 600 to 1000 word story upon a particular theme. In this case, I was to analyze the poem "Utopia" by Wislawa Szymborska, which won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1996. I was then to explore this theme through a 600 to 1000 word narrative. I have decided to post this narrative now, in its current form, because the most likely edits I will be making will be exclusively to meet school requirements, such as including certain types and numbers of different parts of speech. The full story is below.

A Night at the Roadhouse

I began thinking about a narrative set at a motel along the Eyre Highway due to personal interest in these very isolated roadhouse towns. I soon afterwards realized that this would meet the criteria of an upcoming school English assignment quite well. Below is the full story, fleshed out for the assignment.

NOTE: The assignment required me to start this with "it was a dark and stormy night". I didn't choose to do so on purpose.