Show Notes
Every day we wake up and go about our business. Life changes—mostly imperceptibly, incrementally, crawling season after season. We accept new streets, new buses, and new buildings as normal. What once was a field of flowers is now a parking lot, to paraphrase the famous song by Joni Mitchell, and before long, you might never know a field existed. However, something happens when you visit a place over a very long period—like dots on a slow-moving ticker tape, you see the change as flashes. A decades-long timelapse. This is the case for me with my visits to the country of my birth, Sri Lanka. Every few years for 45 years, I have experienced the inexorable change wrought by globalization, industrialization, and urbanization. I can stand on a road in a metropolis and remember the field. I can saunter down my parents’ once-sleepy 1970s suburban laneway to bask in the shadow of a 20-story high-rise. In Canada, I visited the Athabasca Glacier for the first time in July 2002. The glacier reaches the Icefields Parkway in Jasper National Park, one of the tongues of the Columbia Icefield. My last visit was 20 years later, in July 2022; the glacier had retreated so far that you had to walk 20 minutes from where I had seen it in 2002. When it comes to our environment, in my lifetime I have observed three truths. Firstly, humans change their environment. We are a species of terraformers. We have been doing this since we gathered in groups however many epochs ago. To ask us not to explore, to socialize, to make our environment better for our own survival is akin to asking us as a species to concede defeat. Secondly, our environment has changed at our hands so massively, how can we not expect the knock-on effects to have an impact—like that butterfly causing a hurricane? Thirdly, nature is far more resilient than the would-be terraformers. In 2019, I stood at the center of Chernobyl: nature had grown back; trees were exulting in the lack of humans. It is not the world we should be frightened for; it is ourselves. We make it sound as if by becoming a green society we are doing it for the planet. The truth is always: we are doing it to save our children, nature will survive and come back as weird and even more wonderful without us. Unfortunately, the first truth has shown me that if we are to address the second and third truths, the biggest movers need to be our governments and industry. We can all do our part, for sure, but the biggest gains lie in more sustainable ways to change how we build out our environment, produce energy, and of course, travel, so that we can indeed circle the globe and be one human family. The human story is one of technological advance, from the wheel to flight. We’ve made our world smaller, our minds bigger, and our hearts wider. It is with that optimism that I know we can, and must, solve our challenges. It is why I am very happy when I see startups like the one my friend and former Supermetrics colleague, Kurre Stålberg, is a part of: Carbonaide. In This Episode In this conversation, Kurre takes us inside the industrial world of concrete curing—a sector responsible for a staggering 8% of global CO2 emissions. We discuss how Carbonaide is trapping carbon dioxide into concrete making the concrete “harder, faster, cheaper, and greener”. We also dive into the reality of the “wild west” carbon credit markets, where only a fraction of sold credits are actually delivered , and Kurre shares his unique experience as a software engineer using an “army” of AI agents to build industrial platforms almost single-handedly. Topics Covered: * The 8% Problem: Why cement production is so carbon-intensive. * The Solution: How Carbonaide primes concrete to “vacuum” up CO2, curing blocks in hours instead of days. * The Carbon Market Reality: The difference between buying “futures” and buying actual sequestered carbon. * AI as a Force Multiplier: How Kurre shifted from “developer” to “project manager” of AI agents to scale his output. Li
More from Tales under the cat tree: Imagination and Adventure
From punk music to album cover art, from opening for the Blue Oyster Cult to writing an album in 19 days; these are the stories of Dan Moore and Johnny Nolan in our history of Newfoundland's alt music scene. This episode traces the history of Dan Moore who played with bands such as Sheavy, Wizards of Kaos, Afterforever, Festered Corpse, Howl, and more in St. John’s Newfoundland. This is the fifth of the episodes Johnny Nolan and I have co-hosted chronicling the history, music and stories of Newfoundland’s alternetive music scene in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s. We feature the following music with permission: * Psycho Flower by Festered Corpse * Whipping Post by Afterforever * Supa Hero by Sheavy * White Face by Wizards of Kaos * Tale of a Broken Heart by Hardliner Please also check out the art of Dan Moore at https://tales.dups.ca/p/ep73-dan-moore-of-sheavy-and-wizards-of-kaos
How do sex scenes written in English translate into Finnish? Let’s talk to Anna-Maija Ihander about translating fiction to Finnish. A few years ago, I read one of Finland's most celebrated post-war novels: The Unknown Soldier or Unknown Soldiers by Väinö Linna. The copy I read was a modern translation into English by Dr. Liesl Yamaguchi. As a foreigner living in Finland, I have been told that Finns have regional dialects but it's not something I can make out, certainly I don't know the cultural signficance of each of the dialects and how Finns themselves perceive them. The translator's note at the end specifically talked about how she had translated the conversations and for a native western English speaker, the book rang true. As a foreigner working in Finland and as a native english speaker working with many nationalities, I question how my tone, choice of words, and choice of expressions map and translate into my colleagues' mental models. At work though, the language I am concerned about is what I would call functional English. What about the much more complicated world of fiction translated into Finnish? In Unknown Soldiers, I had read Finnish fiction translated into English. However, the world of English media vastly outnumbers that of Finnish and in most book stores there is a large variety of English to Finnish translations. With that in mind, I invited Anna-Maija Ihander, a translator of fiction and entertainment, to talk about her experiences. If words create the worlds we live in, how do these words create worlds in different languages? Let's find out. Show notes: https://tales.dups.ca/p/ep72-not-lost-in-translation
Recently in Germany, the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland (AFD) won more votes than any other party in the province of Saxony-Anhalt. In many parts of the world headlines rang that Germany was returning to the days of the 1930s. That's not really the case, but at the same time, it is the case that right-wing and other extreme ideologies are on the rise in western democracies from USA, to France, to Sweden, to Finland. I sat down for a conversation with my friend, former professor, and collaborator, Dr. Erwin Warkentin, who is living in Berlin as Berlin goes for an election that might swing to the complete opposite of the AFD if polling is to be believed. His point was that we weren't quite back to the 1930s, but much more perhaps to the 1920s. How did we get here and where are we going if we use history as a teacher? More show notes: https://tales.dups.ca/p/ep71-1920s-and-german-politics-today
What happens when you put hundreds of student journalists in a hotel in the middle of winter somewhere in Canada? We explore the Canadian University Press and student journalism in the 90s with Alayne Armstrong. Back in the early 1990s we didn't have Google. Most of our news came via mainstream media, whether that was television channels, radio, or newsprint. Cable news was starting to take off. However, that didn't mean that you couldn't have alternative voices. Most campuses in North America had a free student press, funded by newspaper advertising and usually run by the student union. Canada had something unique. Canada has the oldest student organization in North America and longest running student news service in the world with the Canadian University Press or CUP. The organization was setup in 1938 and continues to today. When I wrote and edited at Memorial's newspaper The Muse, we were members of CUP and the Atlantic region version, ARCUP. Student and alternative voices were and I believe, still are critical in society. We were not afraid to question the status quo, whatever that might be. We forced conversations whether you liked them or not, and we were a safe space for otherwise silent voices and ideas. But being part of CUP meant also learning from so many students across Canada. So it's my pleasure to welcome Alayne Armstrong, one of the presidents of CUP. She was president during my 1993-94 year otherwise known as CUP 56.
This is a combined episode combining Episodes 27 and 28 Today’s episode was originally broadcast in two parts but this time I have combined both into one omnibus episode. Please see original show notes, including pictures here: https://tales.dups.ca/p/ep69-reprise-bioware-stories Direct Links and episodes below Ep. 27: BioWare Stories Part 1 - Releasing the BioWare Community and Neverwinter Nights Duleepa Wijayawardhana Ep. 28: BioWare Stories Part 2 - The flood and shipping Jade Empire Duleepa Wijayawardhana