Working with computers can be pretty esoteric — after all, the reason why DFC exists as a professional team is because folks who prefer to focus on other things need our network-wrangling, cloud-tapping expertise (link: http://dfc.com/solutions/). That is the very same reason I have an accountant, and my accountant, in turn, has a dentist: everyone has a speciality; one that is often a mystery to the other professions!
 
Despite their differences, one commonality that I think ties together professionals of all stripes is a love of craft. I see this in the care David takes over the creation of our line of sauces. I see it in artist friends who put so much effort into the selection of a brush or photo negative. And, I saw it in a charming video from the Great Big Story people, about one of the most esoteric professions, mathematics, and how practitioners of the abstract science are OBSESSED with, of all tools, chalk.
 
Specifically, a Japanese brand of chalk, called Hagoromo Fulltouch, so prized for its smoothness, density, and line that one user dubs it “the Rolls Royce of chalk.” Mathematician David Eisenbud describes the almost cult-like initiation he had into the knowledge of Hagoromo chalk fondly:
 
“I discovered it when I went to visit the University of Tokyo and one of the professors there said to me, you know, we have better chalk than you do in the States and I said, oh go on, chalk is chalk. And so I tried it out, and I was surprised to find that he was right.”
 
Hagoromo chalk became something of MacGuffin for high-level mathematicians, and with its popularity being driven almost as much by scarcity as its near-metaphysical writing properties. Users across the world relied on business trips to Japan or sympathetic Japanese colleagues to maintain their supply — until the company went out of business in 2015. Says Professor Brian Conrad:
 
“I sort of jokingly referred to it as a chalk apocalypse. So I immediately started hoarding up as much as I could. […]

I was probably selling it regularly to maybe eight to 10 colleagues. I would reach into my cupboard in my office and pull out another box and we’d do the deal in my office. Yeah, we all had a chalk fix. And we still do.”
 
A Korean company bought up Hagaromo’s manufacturing machinery and formula, so the critical moment of the chalk’s extinction has been delayed. But the hoarding described by Prof. Conrad firmly underscores the close relationship between the practice of a profession — or an art — and even the most mundane of tools. The simplest solution can dissolve the barrier between a creator and the Zone; a piece of chalk can unlock a complicated theorem. What simple tool in your everyday arsenal is your Hagaromo chalk?

This Passover I indulged in one of my favourite holiday-themed activities, next to cathartically cleaning house: watching the classic 1956 movie epic The Ten Commandments. Between bouts of arguing the relative acting abilities of Yul Brynner vs Chuck Heston (Brynner for the win!), we got to talking about all the theories about the building of the pyramids. When I went to school, the leading theory involved thousands of slaves — much like the Israelites — using a series of dirt ramps to elevate the giant stone blocks required. (My daughter-in-law, on the other hand, is firmly in camp Ancient Aliens)
 
Though the Israelites in The Ten Commandments (and in the original source) weren’t on pyramid duty, slave labour was definitely a part of Ancient Egyptian society. But scholars have shown that specifically the Great Pyramids were more likely constructed by well-compensated artisans rather than slaves.
 
How they did it is another mystery to be unraveled; but I wonder if there was some engineering magic at foot, like that recently wrought by researchers at MIT and sculptors at Matter Design. These innovators have created a fascinating set of 3900 lb concrete bricks, which are so precisely calibrated that they can easily be moved by one or two people. This project, called Walking Assembly, was undertaken to explore how ancient peoples might have made their monolithic structures well before the invention of the crane. From the project description:
 
“Walking Assembly re-introduces the potentials of that ancient knowledge to better inform the transportation and assembly of future architectures. If a brick is designed for a single hand, and a concrete masonry unit (CMU) is designed for two, these massive masonry units (MMU) unshackle the dependency between size and the human body. Intelligence of transportation and assembly is designed into the elements themselves, liberating humans to guide these colossal concrete elements into place.”
 
The giant bricks are made out of variable-density concrete, which makes for an exact centre of gravity. Builders then tilt and roll the bricks into assemblages like walls and staircases. Check out the video of Walking Assembly in action here!
 
The designers also cite play as a key aspect of their creation — and the manipulation of the bricks looks fun, in a jungle gym kind of way! It’s possible ancient builders, enslaved or artisans found ways of engineering their materials for maximum efficiency in the way these modern creators do. Whether they had fun is anyone’s guess.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that there are some things you can DIY, and some things you can’t. I myself grew up in a very handy household, but even my father handed down the sage advice of always hiring a professional for at least two aspects of maintenance: electricity and plumbing. Pallet planter? Go ahead. Roman blind? Have at it. But anything involving serious risk to life and limb was out.
 
Which is why I am full of admiration for the inventiveness of a certain homebrew community I read about this week. In the Soviet Union, car ownership was sporadic and limited to the basic, quasi-nationalized brands of cars that were less than reliable and even less than affordable. So, what was an Eastern Bloc car enthusiast to do? According to Jalopnik, build their own — from harvested parts, chunks of other machines entirely, and raw materials like fiberglass and glue. Misha Lanin writes:
 
“Resources aside, each homemade car is an incarnation of the creator’s automotive dreams, whatever they may have been — air scoops and spoilers and three-figure top speeds, morning commutes not on the dinky trolleybus, family mushroom picking trips deep into the woods.

Like the $19 million Bugatti La Voiture Noir, these cars are one-offs. But the La Voiture Noir is almost destined to endure a solemn existence, probably hidden for most of its life in a Swiss cave, languishing alongside various other supercars, some valuable art, and the Large Hadron Collider. The homemade cars of the Soviet Era were built to be driven, and driven often. (That’s primarily because those who built them had nothing else to drive.)”
 
Lanin further tells the story of a collector of these extremely limited-edition DIY vehicles, referred to only as Yura. Yura once displayed his own ingenuity when called upon to transport a new acquisition — a meticulously designed, but long mothballed, racing-style car its builder dubbed the Virus — from Volgograd to his home in St. Petersburg, a nearly 1700 km trip. Yura hitched the Virus to the back of another of his collector’s items, a sleek yellow car he called the LamborZhiga. With a minor jackknife on the way, Yura got his cars home — and remains one of the few deep appreciators of this lost art of automotive magic out there.
 
While I’d probably be terrified of driving one of these cars, I can recognize that they filled a need — and also scratched a creative itch. We at DFC are no strangers to building things from the ground up. Even in computing, if there hadn’t been someone to DIY the first iteration of some of our key concepts and products, where would we be now?

In my time with DFC, I have worked with lots of intelligent humans: clients, suppliers, colleagues, and friends. What I enjoy most about all these connections is that, when it comes to smarts, everyone has different strengths. Some excel at spatial know-how, others emotional intelligence, still others are wizards of scheduling. It makes for a great mix!
 
Often, after a long day working with among human intelligences, I’ll look into the eyes of my dogs, and wonder “How smart are you?” Over at iai News, Ali Boyle (a philosophy research fellow at the University of Cambridge) grapples with just that question — showing that it’s less about the animals that are its subjects, and more about the humans asking it.
 
One way humans have tried to assess animal intelligence is by correlating it to trainability. I’ve done this with Jill: she excelled at the scent tracking course we put her through a few years ago. While it takes a certain kind of smarts to make the connection that “scent!” equals “treat!”, other kinds of animals don’t train well because they are not interested in that equation. (Like an octopus, that might prefer to steal light bulbs or squirt water at its trainer!)
 
One fascinating question about animal intelligence vs. human is if animals possess “episodic memory” like we do — the ability to recall events from your past, like a trip or a wonderful meal, rather than cold hard facts learned. In short, it allows humans to create a narrative of our lives. If animals are without this ability, so fundamental to human intelligence, can we even conceive of how they might organize the world?
 
“Some think [episodic memory] is intimately connected to both imagination and foresight – the ability to mentally travel into the future and ‘play out’ possible future events. […]

This makes it tempting to think that if animals lack episodic memory, they don’t have ‘selves’ constituted by memories, and they are ‘cognitively frozen in time’. But here we should exercise caution. It may be that simply having episodic memory prejudices our response to this question. The loss of episodic memory would, for most of us, be devastating. But, as it turns out, there are humans who lack episodic memory – and they are not very different from the rest of us. Their deficits are often not discovered until late in life. In fact, to these individuals, it often comes as a complete shock that other people can mentally relive past events. It seems odd to suppose that these individuals lack selves, or are cognitively frozen in time and that this has gone unnoticed.”
 
I’ve started reframing the intelligence question when I look at Samson and Jill. It’s far more interesting to think of the mechanisms by which their minds were formed (as a result of evolution, and sensory inputs unique to their canine bodies), and why they work the way they do. Even though I may not be able to comprehend their experience (and vice versa!) the question does bring us both, as intelligent creatures, closer together.

As a country-dweller, porcupines are second on my list (after fishers) of Not Cool Local Animals, judged by the main criterion of how much they can hurt my dogs (link: to story of Jill vs. Fisher).
 
Porcupines are herbivorous rodents who are native to most of Canada and the western United States. They are each covered in around 30,000 sharp quills (actually modified hairs), which they release as a last-ditch defense when physically attacked by a predator. When we first moved to the DFC ranch, our dogs made the unfortunate decision to go after a porcupine; which, as thoroughly suburban canines, they had never encountered before, and as, well, just canines, they immediately believed they could eat. Let’s just say that the vet bill, which sets a seemingly reasonable rate of a buck per quill removed from your dog’s face, quickly balloons when there are hundreds of quills involved.
 
So, I’ve long thought porcupines’ painful, tenacious quills to be a problem. But researchers are now looking at their physical properties as a naturally derived alternative to surgical staples in humans. Current surgical staples injure tissues themselves when being applied; also, their curved structure can give infection a foothold. But modeling a new innovation on the porcupine quill might change everything. From KQED Science:
 
“North American porcupine quills pack a hidden punch: microscopic, backward-facing barbs.

“They’re reducing the penetration force and increasing the pullout force,” said Karp. “It’s pretty neat.”
 
The research team likens the ease with which a staple, barbed like a porcupine quill, could enter human flesh to slicing a tomato with a serrated knife (yay!). They’re also looking at creating these staples out of biodegradable material — if the staples’ main asset is their barbed stickiness, then I definitely don’t want a doctor to have to dig one out of me.
I always love it when we look to nature for solutions to our human problems. Mother Nature has had several million years to get things right, after all! And though I have always respected porcupines, I now have a new appreciation for them. If only I could get Jill and Samson on board, on both counts…

Procrastination gets a bad rap: as a demon outside of ourselves, sitting on our extremities, preventing us from picking up a pen, or a broom, or a copy of TurboTax, like we know we’re supposed to. It’s that little imp that has had me up making a total of three separate cups of tea while I attempt to compose the very sentence you are currently reading.

But, as I’ve written in this space before, procrastination is actually linked to deeply set survival mechanisms in the human brain. Previous research has pointed to a battle between your limbic system (“fight or flight”) and prefrontal cortex (the slower, more rational future-planner) as the crux of procrastination. But just because procrastination is a natural response to perceived danger doesn’t mean it’s appropriate all the time. (Like when you spend a week trying to pick up the phone to book a dental cleaning.)

The New York Times has a fascinating deep dive into procrastination-as-self-harm, and how, as such, it’s actually more of an emotional regulation issue rather than a productivity issue. Researchers say it prioritizes a quick repair of bad feelings sourced in self-doubt, boredom, anxiety, etc., over the long-term happiness of successfully completing a task.

“But, of course, this only compounds the negative associations we have with the task, and those feelings will still be there whenever we come back to it, along with increased stress and anxiety, feelings of low self-esteem and self-blame. […]

But the momentary relief we feel when procrastinating is actually what makes the cycle especially vicious. In the immediate present, putting off a task provides relief — ‘you’ve been rewarded for procrastinating,’ [professor of psychology Dr. Fuchsia] Sirois said. And we know from basic behaviorism that when we’re rewarded for something, we tend to do it again. This is precisely why procrastination tends not to be a one-off behavior, but a cycle, one that easily becomes a chronic habit.”

So how do we shake off the demon? Forget Getting Things Done or Pomodoro or any number of productivity-focused techniques — counter-intuitively, they won’t help procrastination.

We have to address the very unpleasant feelings procrastination is trying to help us avoid. According to the researchers in the NYT profile, that means finding a “Bigger, Better Reward” for our brains than putting things off. This can involve dividing a big task up so we get more frequent “hits” of reward. Or forgiving ourselves for the times we do procrastinate, so we’re not compounding our bad feelings by beating ourselves up. In short, recognizing that we’re human — and that it’s not a bad thing — can help us overcome our most human of protective mechanisms.

When we first started out, DFC was primarily in the hardware/software business. Since then, we have moved to include networks, security, and bespoke business solutions. I see DFC’s trajectory as a metaphor for the development of computing at large. Time was, you got the unit first (whether out-of-the-box or DIY) and then futzed around figuring things out and building muscle memory. In short, in the chicken or egg metaphor, the egg of hardware came first, before the chicken of skills.
 
In today’s modern and connected world, having computing skills are taken for granted — but what happens if you’ve never even seen a computer? Ghanaian information and communications technology teacher Richard Appiah Akoto is subverting the binary: successfully teaching his students how to use a computer, without a single computer to practice on.
 
The mother of Mr Akoto’s invention is the fact that public schools in Ghana lack the significant resources of private schools. His enthusiastic Facebook posts about his work went viral last month, and the BBC has produced a video of his teaching in action. In it, he replicates the standard working screen of Microsoft Word with chalk and a ruler on a blackboard, then guides his students step-by-step through its processes by pointing at each function. He also explains how to use a mouse, and a keyboard, by drawing them too. Watch the video here.
 
Mr Akoto is dedicated to making sure his students pass the national ICT exam and compete with students in the future workforce from larger cities, and whose schools have computers. His students, like those in a computer-filled lab, still need some wrangling — but mostly due to lack of context for what they’re learning.
 
“It’s sometimes challenging. You will draw, and expect the student to do the same thing, but you go around to inspect it in their books, and they will be doing a different thing,because they are not familiar with the features.” Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9rtFiZ7unw
 
“Definitely those in Accra [Ghana’s capital] will pass the exam because you cannot compare someone who is in front of a computer, who knows what he is doing with the mouse to someone who has not had a feel of a computer mouse before.”
Link: https://qz.com/africa/1217879/a-ghana-teacher-shows-microsoft-windows-on-a-blackboard-is-a-viral-sensation/

Upon hearing Mr Akoto’s story, Microsoft pledged to send his class one computer, gratis. Several other donors have since stepped up to fill the need for as many desktops as possible. While the donated computers will take his students far, I think Mr. Akoto’s ingenuity is the greater gift — showing kids that limits can be dissolved by outside the box thinking.

Out in DFC country, we are definitely spoiled when it comes to quality food — especially dairy. In particular, some of our province’s best (in my opinion) cheeses can be found a stone’s throw 
 
This cheesy reality got me thinking about how responsiveness to context is deeply necessary for business success. Artisan cheesemaking makes a lot of sense in a marketplace that values that kind of handmade attention — like in our area, where The Frontenac Arch is literally a UNESCO-designated protected environment, and sustainability is a community concern. But in a world where you could have a gorgeous salty squeaky perfect cheese curd, or a slice of blue so delicately aged you’ll want to put it in a museum, why would you “waste” your time with a floppy square of American cheese or hunk of Velveeta?
 
I didn’t pick the much-maligned Kraft Single or its melty cousin for effect: one of my favourite newsletters outlines the history of processed-cheese, and, friend — It’s all about context. American cheese was actually invented by a Canadian, James R. Kraft. It being 1916, the American military was in search of a cheese-like product that would remain edible after shipping to troops then engaged on the battlefields of World War 1. When the soldiers’ context changed after the end of hostilities, their taste for the orange squares did not, and American cheese entered the civilian palate.
 
The invention of Velveeta was economy-conscious as well:
 
“Emil Frey, the Swiss-born inventor of Velveeta, honed in on another problem that processed cheese could solve — waste. While working for the Monroe Cheese Factory in New York state, he developed a way to melt and combine scraps from imperfect wheels into a new cheese using whey as an emulsifying agent. Et voila, Velveeta. Kraft quickly purchased the brand. As the American appetite for uniform, pre-packaged food grew, the company rolled out innovation after innovation: Pre-sliced cheese in 1950 was followed by individually wrapped Kraft Singles in 1965 and Velveeta Shells and Cheese in 1978.”
 
So the presence of processed-cheese on our shelves is not necessarily a sign of cultural stagnation but of cultural — and business! — adaptation. As an American by birth, I can respect the opinion that a Kraft Single might make the best grilled cheese, or Velveeta the most nostalgic mid-century cheeseball. But as a Canadian by choice… A gooey slice of some local Madawaska wins every time!

Even though it’s comparatively old news I still remain utterly fascinated by cryptocurrency. Thinking about the concept and its mechanics never fails to be a mind-expanding exercise. But recent events have shown that, no matter how pie-in-the-sky the new economy and its currency gets, it can still be brought down by something quotidian: security.
 
In this case, too much of it. Quadriga, a cryptocurrency trading platform based in Vancouver, collapsed in late January, due to the company’s inability to access its investors’ funds. To summarize how that works, very loosely: In order to reduce the prospective damage from being hacked or otherwise compromised, cryptocurrency exchanges frequently keep the majority of their investors’ funds in “cold storage” — a heavily protected, offline, virtual holding pen. When trades are scheduled, the funds are moved into a “hot” (i.e. internet-connected) “wallet”; once the trade is complete, the new total is moved back into cold storage. 
 
As part of Quadriga’s security measures, only one employee knew the password to unlock cold storage: founder Gerald Cotten. This worked well enough for the company until the 30-year-old director died unexpectedly while on holiday in India on Dec. 9. Quadriga held back the news for a month while they tried to extract $190 million CAD of its increasingly impatient investors’ money from the clutches of their own security measures. Cotten’s widow ransacked his devices for anything that might look like a password. An RCMP I.T. specialist was put on the case. And then, it gets complicated.
 
“A report released late Friday by court-appointed monitor Ernst and Young […] indicated six so-called cold wallets used to store digital assets offline have been found, but all of them are empty. […]
The monitor also found 14 user accounts on the QuadrigaCX platform that were “created outside the normal process,” using a number of aliases.

The monitor said it remains unclear how the accounts were used and whether the recipients of the withdrawals can be identified.”
 
Nova Scotia (the case’s jurisdiction) has gotten the Supreme Court involved, and between that body and Ernst & Young, have managed to trace and extract around $30 million so far from a handful of other exchanges that have been found to be holding transactions on behalf of Quadriga. But an untold amount of investors’ money may just be gone.
It’s hard to tell how much of this is actually hinky, versus the standard murkiness of trying to deal with crypto. As time passes, things do seem to be getting clearer: I’m glad the unpleasant rumour that Cotten faked his death to escape creditors has now been disproven. The unprecedented nature of not only the company itself but its current troubles means that it’ll likely be slow, careful going for a while. A lesson we regular-type investors can draw from this? A (block) chain is as strong as its weakest link. If that link is impenetrable… the blockchain is out of luck.

I found myself the in the GTA a couple of weeks ago, talking up our David & Sons barbecue sauce at local heroes Seed to Sausage’s new location. After a long day’s work meeting, greeting, and (facilitating) eating, I decided against the long drive back to the DFC ranch. Instead, I stayed overnight at my middle son, Ben’s, apartment. He and my daughter-in-law are cat people, and they have a beautiful, friendly calico kitty named Margaret — or so they insist. I couldn’t tell because she manifested to me as a white, black, and orange streak that went under the bed at warp speed. We figured she smelled Samson and Jill on me or otherwise knew I was a friend of canines and traitor to cat-dom.
 
I was struck by how little I know about cats in relation to dogs, simply because I live day-in-day-out with the latter. Indeed, I might even have been tempted to call Margaret a psychopath due to her behaviour. Erroneously, it turns out: Sarah Zhang over at The Atlantic has an interesting take on why that might be the case. And it has a lot to do with our human priorities.
 
“There’s always an implicit comparison when we talk about cats as aloof little jerks, says Mikel Maria Delgado, a postdoctoral researcher on cat behavior at the University of California at Davis. And that comparison is with dogs, which humans have spent thousands of more years domesticating and molding in our image.

Cats, she pointed out, simply don’t have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog (or human) can. So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion. But that’s just its face. Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails. Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable — and even nonexistent — until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.”
 
Additionally, some have argued that, where dogs are attached to people, cats are attached to places. What we humans see as another check mark in the They-Secretly-Hate-Me-And-Want-Me-Dead category, is simply a result of how cats socialize — and really just serves to uncover our bias as pack animals (like dogs!).
 
Though I have a newfound empathy for cats, having spent the night as the target of Margaret’s Eye Beams of Discomfort, I’m still resolutely Camp Dog. Though, in the long run, it may come back to, um, bite me. Where do your loyalties lie, dear readers? Dog, cat, or fabulously Other?