Today was world teacher day. They were talking about it on the radio this morning as I pulled up to the high school I’ve been subbing at lately. Nobody inside mentioned it directly to me, but they did have Nanaimo bars in the staff room to commemorate the day.
When I think of world teacher day, and I’ve heard this said many times by others, I like to think “every day is world teacher day”. Which I suppose means, there’s never a bad time to thank a teacher.
A Lethbridge couple was identified as the husband and wife that were killed in a grizzly bear attack in the backcountry near Banff last weekend.
Colette Derworiz writing for the Canadian Press (via CTV News):
Colin Inglis said his nephew, Doug Inglis, and Jenny Gusse, both 62, from Lethbridge, Alta., died in the bear attack on the weekend. Their seven-year-old border collie named Tris was also killed.
…
“I got an actual phone call from Garmin saying that the SOS had been activated and that somebody had actually entered into the inReach (a message) that said, ‘Bear attack bad,'” he said Wednesday in an interview from Edmonton.
…
Inglis said he was told that a bear spray canister had been emptied and that there were signs the couple tried to scare off the bear.
“There was a struggle and the struggle didn’t stay in one place,” he said. “But, in the end, both bodies were back together.
“They were reconnected. That’s who they were. They were together in life, always.”
My wife and I each have friends that were aquainted with one or both of them. Such a traumatic and heartbreaking story.
Parks Canada sent a team out and immediately put the bear down.
Parks Canada said the team, which is specially trained in firearms and wildlife attack site investigation and forensics, encountered a grizzly bear that displayed aggressive behaviour and charged toward them.
It was killed and a necropsy showed that the 25-year-old female bear was old, underweight and had bad teeth. DNA samples from the bear confirmed it was responsible for the attack, and it was not collared, tagged or previously known to wildlife staff in the park.
Because of the recent antitrust case against Google, this story about the search giant altering search queries in order to make more money has come to light. It’s almost too much to believe:
Megan Gray writing for Wired:
There have long been suspicions that the search giant manipulates ad prices, and now it’s clear that Google treats consumers with the same disdain. The “10 blue links,” or organic results, which Google has always claimed to be sacrosanct, are just another vector for Google greediness, camouflaged in the company’s kindergarten colors.
Google likely alters queries billions of times a day in trillions of different variations. Here’s how it works. Say you search for “children’s clothing.” Google converts it, without your knowledge, to a search for “NIKOLAI-brand kidswear,” making a behind-the-scenes substitution of your actual query with a different query that just happens to generate more money for the company, and will generate results you weren’t searching for at all. It’s not possible for you to opt out of the substitution. If you don’t get the results you want, and you try to refine your query, you are wasting your time. This is a twisted shopping mall you can’t escape.
Google dropped the “Don’t be evil” motto when it changed its name to Alphabet but apparently hasn’t been living up to their new motto, “Do the right thing”.
Update: It has been noted that this is an opinion piece and the sources haven’t necessarily been vetted. Google’s statement via platformer:
Google does not delete queries and replace them with ones that monetize better as the opinion piece suggests, and the organic results you see in Search are not affected by our ads systems.
Ukrainian officers captured a Russian tank which started malfunctioning. They called Russian tech support to see if they could coax them into helping… and what do you know, Russian tech support helped fix the problem.
David Axe, writing for Forbes:
So when a Ukrainian tanker with the callsign “Kochevnik” ran into problems with his captured Russian T-72B3—problems local expertise couldn’t immediately solve—he called Uralvagonzavod tech support. And incredibly, the help line actually helped.
A drone photographer captured the wild moment when a shark charged into a giant school of stingrays off the coast of Florida.
Although there appears to be thousands of them, the shark went away hungry.
Cabel Sasser went down a Disneyland rabbit hole to discover the code name for Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge area and its crowning attraction Rise of the Resistance.
This is a very short post about a very short journey. It starts with a new (to me, as of today) theme park fact:
The code name for Disney’s Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge area was “Delos”, and the code name for its Rise of the Resistance attraction was “Alcatraz”.
The interesting part (if you’re into Disneyland minutiae) is the steps he took to discover this bit of trivia.
September 30th is Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The holiday is also sometimes called Orange Shirt Day and recognizes the legacy of the Canadian Indian residential school system. Wearing an orange shirt on this day honours both the indigenous children who never returned home and also the survivors of residential schools, as well as their families and communities.
The schools in Lethbridge (and across the country) have been doing activities and presentations all week building up to this day. I think it’s so important that we continue to collectively acknowledge the harm that residential schools caused.
Both my son (4) and daughter (5) have been very concerned about the stories they’ve heard about the woman1 who had her orange shirt taken away and not given back. They seem to have a pretty good, age appropriate, understanding of the traumatic impact these schools imparted.
I want to point out though, as Canadians share in the collective guilt of the day, one glaring omission is the often-overlooked, deeply disturbing role that the Catholic Church played in the atrocities committed at residential schools. While the reprehensible actions of the church in exploiting children within its congregation are widely acknowledged, it is equally vital to recognize the dark chapter of history where indigenous children, torn from their families, were also subjected to the church’s predation.
I don’t doubt there were also many abuses in residential schools outside Catholic control, but from the sounds of things2, that’s where the bulk of the sexual exploitation happened. I think acknowledging the church’s role should be a a major part of the truth in “Truth and Reconciliation”.
As we come together to commemorate Canada’s National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and wear our orange shirts in honor of those affected, it’s essential that we acknowledge the elephant in the room — the painful role played by the Catholic Church in these grievous acts.
Last night Andrea and I hit up the concert of two time Juno award winning musician Dan Mangan at the Yates here in Lethbridge. He puts on a fantastic show. About halfway through the night he explained that the show was being recorded and a link would be sent out so that we could all have a copy if we want to listen again later. In the age of (basically) free digital storage… why not?
I’m back into the swing of things as a substitute teacher. I don’t have much to say about it other than now that I’m back teaching high school I remember what it’s like to really love what you do.
On that note, here’s an inspirational cartoon I saw in the class I was subbing in today:
The other day, while looking through an old hard drive of mine, I found a folder called “Random Internet Fun”, which was full of random comics and animated gifs that I suppose I collected over the years. I’ll post them here for posterity…