Tom Notka

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@TheBreakdownAB Taking a lead from their horrid work in AHS.

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

Pat's the best. Let's hope he gets back on the air soon.

[Pat Steinberg @Fan960Steinberg]

Rambled so much I needed a Word document. Perhaps through some blurry eyes.

The support this week has been overwhelming.

Thanks for everything, friends. 🖤🩶❤️

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@RichardHanania 20% of people will be a royal pain the butt but 5% will cause many problems. If the US population has 340 million, then that makes for many problem people. Anti-vaxers included in that group.

[VisuallyBetter @Isuckatpicking]

So we can’t build solar power farms in Alberta because of “fertile farm land” but we can build an AI data centre the size of Stanley Park.

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@DarrenWHaynes It's clear that we need a new model to deliver sports on radio or via mobile. It's got to make sense on the business side but the programming has to improve to attract more listeners. It can be done.

[Paul J @PfjoJ]

@NotkaTom @oileafs @EricFrancis @Fan960Steinberg Dustin Neilson (who also does CFL play by play) started Edmonton Sports Talk, which streams live on iheart & other apps.
Jason Gregor started Sports 1440, which is on traditional radio waves, but also streams live.
Edmonton sports coverage is better than ever, thanks to those 2!

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@oileafs @EricFrancis @Fan960Steinberg How did Edmonton do it?

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@sarobertson_ I'm starting to think PP is losing his marbles. It's sad to see a man decline so much.

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

It would be nice if we could simply get clear and honest information like this from Elizabeth May @ElizabethMay and not the lies and stupidity we get from people like Andrew Sheer. @AndrewScheer It would help develop trust in our politicians, regardless of stripe.

[Fun Tom 🇨🇦 💂 @funtomvids]

🟥 Thank you Elizabeth May for this education on the tanker ban, and epic take-down of Conservative leaders and liars. 😌

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

Great post about how to keep yourself safe from the dangerous shift to Alberta's new driver's license. No thanks to the UCP who have taken this stance to make life more difficult.

[Dr. Lynora Saxinger MD FRCPC Infectious Diseases @AntibioticDoc]

Health numbers, licenses and caution:
the new Alberta ID cards and the quiet repeal/split of FOIP into ATIA and POPA. On paper, it looks like administrative housekeeping. There is more to it than that in terms of data epidemiology - it's a concern. Let's break it down. 👇
1/10

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Swiss farmers planted flowers between their crops and watched pest damage drop by over half. The UK is now running the same trial across 15 farms. The reason this works is embarrassingly simple.

A Swiss study on winter wheat found that fields with wildflower strips had 40 to 53% fewer leaf beetle pests than fields without. Crop damage dropped 61%.

The mechanism is simple. Wildflowers feed hoverflies, lacewings, parasitic wasps, ladybugs, and ground beetles. Those insects eat the aphids, beetle larvae, and caterpillars that farmers would otherwise spray for. A few meters of wildflowers hosts an unpaid pest control crew that would jump at the chance to whoop some aphid ass.

In apple orchards where no insecticides had been used for five years, plots with wildflower alleyways had 9.2% damaged fruit. Control plots without flowers had 32.5%.

The UK is now running a five-year trial across 15 farms placing 6-meter flower strips through the middle of fields, not just at the edges, because the beneficial insects can't reach the center of a large field otherwise.

This works the same way in a backyard vegetable garden as it does on a commercial farm. Plant native flowering species near your tomatoes, beans, and squash. The pests still show up, but the predators show up too.

Study doi: 20151369

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

Often something we "natural" Canadians rarely think about; the trials and tribulations of people from other parts of the world.

[Ali A. Rizvi 🇨🇦 @aliamjadrizvi]

Much of the world's increasing obsession with "identity" feels very alien to me.

I was born in Lahore, Pakistan -- my parents' first kid -- and before I was 6 months old, we moved to Libya, where two of my subsequent siblings were born, and then to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for about a decade.

I never truly felt connected to Pakistan, having never lived there.

I definitely wasn't Libyan or North African, nor British like the preschool I went to in Tripoli.

I pretty much grew up in Saudi Arabia, but never felt even remotely Saudi -- they segregated expats from the locals pretty strictly there at the time. I went to the American School in Riyadh, where there were kids from 80 different nationalities, mostly American and Canadian. Saudis were not allowed at the time to attend the school or vice versa.

I spoke American English at school even though I'd never even been to North America; a mixture of English and Urdu at home, though I had spent no more than a few summer months in Pakistan; and I spoke virtually no Arabic beyond a pre-school, semi-functional level. So I definitely wasn't Saudi and definitely wasn't American either.

Despite never having lived there, I still felt (purely for ethnic/heritage reasons) that I'm probably Pakistani -- but that’s only until I moved there for two years at the start of high school.

I was treated like an outsider, spoke broken Urdu, didn't relate fully to the culture, and found the optics of everyone being the same ethnicity disorienting -- a striking difference from my international school in Riyadh where having friends of all different shapes and colors and passports was my daily normal. Soon, it became pretty clear that I wasn't Pakistani either.

There were other things. My mom was a US-educated professor with a doctorate who wasn't allowed to drive herself to work in Riyadh, and often had to answer to much less educated men who had legal authority over her. And despite being raised Muslim, I became a staunch atheist (thank you, Carl Sagan on Betamax in '85!) who lived in at least two countries where saying that out loud was punishable by death. Years later, my 23andMe would show an uncommon paternal haplogroup pointing to both Ashkenazi Jewish and Bedouin Arab ancestry (I wish more people knew how much ancestral overlap there is between the two). Nothing felt like it truly fit.

That is, until I moved to Canada at age 24.

That's when I began to think of myself less as being "identity-less" and more as being "identity-free." (1/2)

🧵

⬇️

#CanadaDay 🇨🇦

[The Hub @TheHubCanada]

.@trevortombe: The biggest financial transfer in Canada that nobody talks about https://t.co/Is6omiZWRe

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@davidpugliese @OttawaCitizen What's the purpose of hiding the information? Was it protection in case Friedberg engaged in litigation??

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@JeromyYYC Good for you! I appreciate you being direct and standing up for what is right.

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@richardwarnica Of course! That's why The cons are attacking.

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

Did I get this right, @MarkJCarney? In BC you're using tax dollars to pay a corporation to offset their bad business decisions because they don't want to take a loss? No kidding. But this is a bad decision. You should be letting the market decide.

[Kathleen Ganley @KathleenGanley]

The speed and ferocity of the conservative response to Cowboy’s having to lower the volume at midnight on a Tuesday is truly something to behold.

Now imagine if the UCP cared that much about wait times in Emergency Rooms. #ableg

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@DesmondCole This outrageous. This is not what I assumed Carney to be.

[Tom Notka @NotkaTom]

@JMeddings Nice shot!