My Dad ran their maintenance department for years. Later, my brother Rob took over.
My brother Randy and his partner Val live in the Coop now.
I post as there is a massive construction renovation happening. All units are getting new front and back decks. And I saw plenty of work being done on the roofs, siding with new insulation, windows and doors.
All good ➙ BUT it’s a mess while under construction.
It’s a massive complex.
I recall playing tag in the original construction site when we were kids. It opened 1971.
It’s a Trudeau era non-profit housing cooperative. In 2025 it might just be the best value housing in Calgary. Here are the benefits for tenants. This coop worked. Socialism at its best.
Here are a few photos of the mess in C block May 2025. 😀
Sometimes you really don’t want to see how the sausage is made. 😀
For countries where water is plentiful (Canada) and industries where water is a huge fraction of costs, desalination is probably not viable for industry.
BUT for countries where water is already scarce, or for industries that don’t depend mainly on water, bringing desalinated water is completely plausible. Prices continue to drop.
I recall having a hot shower in Saudi Arabia. Great water pressure. … Wondering where the H2O was coming from.
Mr. Beast is a 24-year-old normal guy from Kansas.
A University dropout.
His YouTube channel reached 112 million subscribers on November 17, 2022, making it the fourth-most-subscribed on the platform, and the highest as a non-corporate identity.
Aside from his philanthropy, everyone studies his simple but effective VIDEO storytelling.
(clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats)
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their contributions in the development of a method for genome editing.
It’s called the CRISPR/Cas9 genetic scissors.
Based on how bacteria fights off virus attackers, in future CRISPR will be used to fight coronavirus variations.
Most people my age know about Watson and Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. But I certainly couldn’t explain anything about CRISPR before reading this book.
Once again, Walter Isaacson made a complex story entertaining with this 2021 biography:
The bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci and Steve Jobs returns with a gripping account of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues launched a revolution that will allow us to cure diseases, fend off viruses, and have healthier babies.
When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the code of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn’t become scientists, she decided she would.
The development of CRISPR and the race to create vaccines for coronavirus will hasten our transition to the next great innovation revolution. The past half-century has been a digital age, based on the microchip, computer, and internet. Now we are entering a life-science revolution. Children who study digital coding will be joined by those who study genetic code. …
After helping to discover CRISPR, Doudna became a leader in wrestling with these moral issues and, with her collaborator Emmanuelle Charpentier, won the Nobel Prize in 2020. Her story is a thrilling detective tale that involves the most profound wonders of nature, from the origins of life to the future of our species.
Most worthy — perhaps — is Feng Zhang. But he and his boss Eric Lander come off as BAD GUYS in this book, unethical in their collaborations.
ONE bit of good news. When COVID-19 was announced early 2020, both Zhang’s and Doudna’s companies changed research priorities towards developing CRISPR-based coronavirus tests. Both were successful and both hope to make simple at-home tests ready for market in 2021: Sherlock and Mammoth.
The most entertaining of the CRISPR giants is geneticist George Church. When the movie is made, he’ll be the fan favourite.
Emmanuelle Charpentier is an intriguing personality, as well. I’d read her biography.
If you’re celebrating seeing Donald Trump and the worst of his deplorable followers driven off social media, thank Stacey Abrams.
She devoted years to building the Democratic Party in Georgia. Wrote a book about voter suppression and co-produced an Amazon Prime documentary, “All In: the Fight for Democracy.”
People in the know credit Stacey Abrams for flipping the 2 Senate seats from Republican to Democrat.
NOW the Biden team has control of all 3 branches of government for 2 years.
NOW the Biden team can enthusiastically regulate BIG TECH.
NOW Twitter, Facebook and pretty much every other major platform is banning Trumpy hate speech.
Hundreds of Christians, Jews and Muslims came together at the Tower of David in Jerusalem to sing Bob Marley’s “One Love” in Hebrew, English and Arabic.
Great decision in an era where dictators and toddler-dictator-wannabes call all criticism FAKE NEWS.
Time magazine’s 2018 Person of the Year title goes to the “guardians and the war on truth.”
The honour has been given to four journalists and a newspaper that Time says “are representatives of a broader fight by countless others around the world. …
The “guardians” are:
Jamal Khashoggi, the prominent Saudi journalist who was killed in that country’s consulate in Istanbul on Oct. 2.
The Capital Gazette in Annapolis, Md., where five people were shot and killed at the newspaper’s offices in June.
Maria Ressa, a detained Philippine journalist who is head of independent news website Rappler.
Reuters journalists Wa Lone, 32, and Kyaw Soe Oo, 28, who have been jailed in Myanmar for nearly a year.
Rick McCharles 