Canada ... population growth or lack thereof

Over the last few years it seems that I've hit the age where are a few jokes about singleness tossed in my direction from time to time. When around families with small children I've heard questions like "have we scared you off from having kids?" a number of times. I don't really take such questions seriously, but at the same time it sometimes still bothers me that they're asked - even if in a joking fashion. To be honest, I'm probably more positively inclined now to the idea of having kids at some point in the future than I was of the notion in the past.

The recent release of the latest Canadian census results have brought this idea to mind again. Some newspaper articles seem pleased by the growth, whereas others have sounded at least somewhat worried. Canadian population growth really only seems to be coming through immigration at this point, with the average Canadian woman having approximately 1.5 kids. This is a subject that occasionally comes to the forefront at work/school and there people seem to think of immigration as some sort of panacea. I, on the other hand, tend to agree with Tim Challies' assessment of the situation:

All-in-all, many Western nations, Canada among them, are effectively committing suicide--or at the very least are knowingly and willingly radically altering themselves. By refusing to have children, people are allowing their nations to decline. The low birthrates can only drive a nation downward. The Canada of the future will looking very little like the Canada of my childhood and the Canada of today. As native Canadians refuse to procreate, we will have to continue to encourage immigration in order to sustain our nation's economy. This will be increasingly important as the generation of baby boomers hits retirement age and expects the pensions they have been paying for for all the years. Someone has to be able to fund their retirement. But there will be fewer people to do so unless we encourage immigration. But this becomes a vicious cycle, for fewer people will immigrate to a nation when they know they will have to pay high taxes to fund social programs for people they do not know and care nothing about.

Wednesday is pi day

Some people pass the time in some ways and some in others. There's the relatively well known examples of people memorizing sequences of digits in π - the current Guiness memorization record stands at 67,890 digits, although unofficially a news story on π day mentions an unofficial record of about 100,000 digits.

Here's a weirder clip from the article:

A software engineer in Virginia named Mike Keith wrote a poem to pi, a "piem." A love letter, in a way. To say that it is a something to behold is an understatement: It is nearly 4,000 words long — and the length in letters of each word corresponds to pi's digits.

*grr...* Daylight savings time

Just a reminder to you all that today and tomorrow are a good time to gripe about this phenomenon of daylight savings time and having to change settings on clocks.

A few weird things...

Since I got tagged a week or two ago by Shawn I figured that I'd spit out a few things... perhaps more weird than obscure and in some cases merely unexpected by a few of you. Some of this may be known to some of you (but not others).

  1. Some people say that they're terrible at remembering names, but somehow I think that I have most of them beat. I graduated from high school and got halfway through undergrad before memorizing the official spelling of my own middle name. That's both better and worse than it sounds. Worse: My middle name comes from one of my grandparents (but I always just called him grandpa). Better: It was a question of a single letter, and there are people out there with both spellings, albeit only one of which can be found on my birth certificate.
  2. When I flew home for Christmas I found that my family had been debating whether or not I'd end up doing something while I was there. Weird thing #2: I avoid New Year's Celebrations - they're just too anti-climactic. I was thinking of changing that this year since I'm not home all that often, but I was sick that day and so the streak of 4 or 5 years continues.

    Of course, there are other important festivities through the year that shouldn't be forgotten about. One can't forget the excitement of pi day (Interestingly just today a search engine redirected someone to Rotundus based on a search query about that topic. pi day is less than a week away at this point, so it might be a good time to make your pi day party plans. There may still be time to order an "I love PI" t-shirt if you don't already have one.

  3. National anthems annoy me. I'm not talking mere boredom here - they annoy me enough that if I'm somewhere in the vicinity of a TV that no one else is watching and a national anthem is being played I'll run around the room looking for a remote just so that I can mute the thing (even if I wasn't really watching the TV either). I don't really care what country's anthem it is either.

    Perhaps it's a Canadian thing. When Roger and I caught a Flames game back in February the Canadian national anthem was sung in Cree instead of English - not many people were singing along, but that didn't seem too much different from the norm at such events.

  4. People know that I've a fair number of books kicking around, but it might surprise you what some of them are. At the moment the largest book in my collection in Calgary (weighing in at 2142 pages) is actually a French-English dictionary (specifically this one). It's not necessarily a particular weird book for a person to possess, but somehow I suspect that most of you would be surprised to find that I own such a volume.

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