Feb

20

A six alarm fire near Queen and Bathurst

News / Toronto

There is already quite a lot of buzz around the huge fire that basically incinerated a whole block in downtown Toronto. I haven’t heard if anybody was hurt during the massive fire but I sure hope not. I am sure I’ll learn more about it on the news today as I saw two helicopters flying over the area for quite a while. According to blogTO,

Over 50 fire vehicles have joined the fight. Early reports suggest that at least eight stores have burned, one unit has collapsed, and more structure appears to be on the verge of coming down. [...]CityTV reports that National Sound, Suspect Video, and Duke’s Cycle are amongst the shops affected.

Anyways, for those of you out there curious as to what a “six alarm fire” really means, go check out the explanation: How big is a 10-alarm fire?. Here are some pictures of the even from the condo… You can see much closer pictures on blogTO. Let me know if you have more news, photos, etc.

Fire at Queen and Bathurst in Toronto at 10AM
The fire was still going on strong at around 10h30 this morning.

Fire at Queen and Bathurst in Toronto at 2h30PM
Right around 2h30, the fire was under a lot more control, but the water was still going.

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Feb

19

Tour de Bloc 2008: Ottawa, Ontario

Rock Climbing / Tour de Bloc

Bonnie on problem #4Once again, Coyote Rock Gym raised the bar for the other gyms and provided us with an amazing competition. They really are the veterans of comps in the Eastern region of the “Tour de Bloc”. What makes this competition so good is not only Jody’s devotion (not to mention all the setters and volunteers) to top quality problems, but also the location of the gym, which makes it easily accessible for climbers from both provinces. The field is becoming stronger and it’s really good to so many good boulderers make it to a non-regional competition. As usual, the finals were really close and only one or two holds separated the finalists in the end. I must, however, give some props to Yves and Katerine who upped their game and clearly deserved to win the competition.

Without further ado, here are the results from Saturday’s finals. If you are looking for the full results, you should visit the gripped forum.
Bonnie on problem #1Women’s Finals:

  1. Katerine Martin
  2. Melissa Lacasse
  3. Eva Pepin-Helie
  4. Kerry Briggs
  5. Bonnie de Bruijn (Photos)
  6. Erin Ford

Men’s Finals:

  1. Yves Gravelle
  2. Jo Audy
  3. Ayo Sopeju
  4. Sebastien Gardner
  5. Dustin Curtis
  6. Sebastien Lazure
  7. Mark Stirling
  8. Dave Voltan
  9. Noah Zielinski

If you are curious, the photos of Bonnie on problem #1 and #4 were taken by Frank Lebeau. Here are a couple of links in case you are interested in seeing more from Frank. He’s a great photographer, he even took photos for our wedding last summer!

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Feb

14

Google Talks: Human Computation

Science

A Google Talk from Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Carnegie Mellon University, where he also received his Ph.D. in 2005. The video is already two years old, but the subject is still very interesting.

The basic idea is to use “wasted human cycles”, as Luis calls them, to solve problems computers can’t solve yet. Luis defines our interactions with computers to be very parasitic (in which we are the parasites) and wants to shift it to a more symbiotic relationship. In order to show how important and relevant the topic is, Luis goes on to compare how much time people played solitaire online to how much time it took to build the Empire State Building.

Luis is a very good speaker, which makes this talk even more interesting. It’s easy to follow, with just the right amount of details, you’ll see, it’s hard to stop watching! Let me know what you think.

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