One year in and we are can sort of see the light at the end of the tunnel. With a COVID vaccine on the way, we can take comfort that many of the restrictions we see today will be toned down. But, with vaccines having an efficacy rate of up to 95%, that could still potentially mean  a lot of cases after everyone is inoculated. (5% of Canada's population of 35 Million = 1,750,000 potential cases across the country after vaccination, but herd immunity will slow down and prevent infections)  So it is prudent to think that there will still be the need for some COVID precautions after mass vaccine campaigns are finished. But beyond COVID, there are other reasons we might want to keep up some precautions. This time last year, Canada had reported over 26,000 cases of the flu, and this year there were 57 ... IN THE ENTIRE COUNTRY!!! Clearly, with a bit of prudence, there can be a significant drop in communicable diseases. At the start of the summer of 2020, people were venturing outsid...

This past week the University of Ottawa installed new exterior recycling bins on campus. Now I promised myself I wouldn't cry so please bare with me while I pay homage to the old bins before getting on to the new ones. I really liked the old exterior recycling bins that we had on campus. Yeah they had there short-comings; they broke really easily, they were separated bins (I'll talk about that I a minute), and quite frankly they weren't a very good design. But they also represented one of the first real risks that we took to improve recycling on campus. Unlike any bin before it, and unlike the new bins, the old bins were transparent, you could actually see right through them. I know this doesn't seem like anything new today, considering Toronto is littered with transparent bins, but when we installed those old bins on campus, to my knowledge we were the first in Ottawa. Of course the benefit of doing this is that the transparent bin forces people to put things i...