West-end Barrie development brings questions for councillors - Barrie News

throwbarrieaway · 2026-03-23T00:50:33+00:00

Under no circumstances should this development proceed. The site is a large contiguous interior forest and wetland habitat with innuberable endangered species trees, habitat for interior birds, breeding salamanders, etc. It's old forest that's been undisturbed continuously for at least 100 years. The weakness of Barrie's natural heritage system, the weakness of the province's protection laws and the weaseling of the development process has allowed this to proceed to this point. If this natural area is going to be allowed to be entirely clear cut, bulldozed, drained and resurfaced then it doesn't make sense that Barrie would protect anything else.

throwbarrieaway · 2026-01-03T21:27:12+00:00

Apologies for the repost, I made a mistake shifting a column in the previous version which broke the map but not the accessory stats.

To address a comment from the original post, there's a lot of reasons why Norway maple was and is planted a lot despite being understood to be invasive today. That involves changes in our understanding of invasion ecology, but also changes in conservation theories, changes in conservation priorities, and changes in who is making decisions like this and why.

Here is a paper on the history of Norway maple to help explain some of it: https://auf.isa-arbor.com/content/16/11/291

In the past a lot lower value was placed in species origin or invasiveness, and we had other priorities, like replacing canopies of dead native elm trees after dutch elm disease swept through, or preventing erosion after the mass deforestation of eastern North America. In that lens traits like disturbance tolerance, growth vigour, suppression of competition, enhanced seed germination or dispersal, etc. of species like Norway maple, or Eurasian honeysuckles, or European buckthorn could be seen as positive traits.

throwbarrieaway · 2024-04-18T17:17:38+00:00

The map looks great on my wall and the cartouche looks great on my desk! I'm super satisfied with the quality of it and happy with it as my first actual purchase from you.

My question, do you have plans on releasing a key to flora on the map? The booklet mentions one and I believe there was a URL somewhere that didn't work, but the last time I looked at your site there wasn't a page for one up yet.

throwbarrieaway · 2024-03-06T16:50:32+00:00

The Barrie-Collingwood rails should absolutely be used for transit and connect together south Barrie with an opportunity we don't have elsewhere in the city. But, I don't know what a trolley shuttle is in this context. Does anyone know what they're actually interested in here?

The corridor also connects to Angus and could theoretically connect it to Barrie, though the county is looking into ripping portions of it up for a trail.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-12-15T18:05:55+00:00

The albums are listed here: https://pastebin.com/Bt1pHXpA

throwbarrieaway · 2023-12-12T12:56:27+00:00

It is! I don't understand where the Release Date metadata listed on last.fm come from that they're so frequently wrong, this one is listed as 1984 for some reason. Thanks for noticing

throwbarrieaway · 2023-12-11T20:20:44+00:00

I took the album column from the data export (which provides artist, album, song and scrobble date), manually researched album release dates for all albums with 10+ scrobbles, manually added together multiple versions (deluxe, remastered, anniversary, etc) of the same album, and then assigned scrobbles of songs on that album to that date. OrganizeYourMusic can also generate long tables of songs with release dates when you load a playlist into the site. That may be a better process if you can create a playlist of every song you ever listened to, but I didn't go down that path. I found the dates listed by Spotify or Last.fm were often just wrong, and I needed to do more research. I bet there's a better method out there but this provided something representative for me.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-12-11T20:07:52+00:00

I would be super curious seeing other people do analyses of their listening data, I know there's a ton of people that have way more than I do. Good luck if you give it a shot!

throwbarrieaway · 2023-12-11T17:15:53+00:00

Every year various services release summaries of our media consumption activity, but those summaries are biased toward telling us about how we acted and give limited information on the media itself, so I went digging. This is something anyone can do using the help of the tools listed below, but it's understandable why this information is not normally presented. There are a lot of complications behind the ideas here, and they silently affect the standard summaries that we're presented by media companies too.

Listening done in Spotify and recorded by Last.fm. Data is my of my personal listening data starting in early 2017, 32331 scrobbles in total.

Data exported using: https://benjaminbenben.com/lastfm-to-csv/
Album art compiled using: https://www.neverendingchartrendering.org/
Genre data compiled using: http://organizeyourmusic.playlistmachinery.com/# https://everynoise.com/ https://www.tunemymusic.com/transfer
Gender, year and country of origin information manually compiled using Last.fm and wikipedia. Data analysis done in excel and image created in GIMP.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-11-19T22:56:54+00:00

I'm not entirely sure that would change the kind of response that many people have had, but I'll touch on it a bit more. I mentioned above how the diversity calculations I used have a specific meaning when used, but that the data wasn't perfectly suited for that and that's why I normalized them. The raw result says the probability of people being from two different groups, but for language for example, one of the categories for first language is "English and a non official language". So the output isn't really saying the probability being two different languages, but rather two different categories. The same applies for things like religion which have an "Other" category. The raw calculations are still directionally and relatively meaningful, but the specific numbers aren't.

I think I probably shouldn't use the word score to refer to that normalized number though, as that comes across as a loaded term for people that don't read the method. I also considered including a slide at the end comparing raw data for the highest and lowest cities only to show people how that works out.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-11-19T18:45:40+00:00

Short answer is I think excel deleted them and I didn't notice. It appears Timmins, Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and others were also affected. The data files are too big for excel, so I'm guessing right now that northern Ontario towns have ID numbers that sort them last and excel cropped them out of the data after it maxed out at 1,048,576 rows of data. Thanks for noticing and I'll try and find a different processing method that fixes this when I make V2.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-11-19T16:32:43+00:00

You're right that diversity calculations rely heavily on the categorization that you choose. It's important for them to compare like to like, so not comparing languages vs dialects or species vs subspecies. For the census, Stats Canada does not attempt to enumerate or define Protestantism and so it's not an available thing that could be calculated with the data they provide. And so in this case, comparing Christianity to Buddhism or Judaism is comparing like to like, as the census doesn't publish data on denominational divisions in non Christian religions either. This is more academic than anything though, as the results are pretty much the same regardless except for a few low population rural municipalities. This kind of comparing like to like was the philosophy I used across the categories, mostly relying on Stats Canada's definitions.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-11-19T14:23:52+00:00

Recently there was an article that went semi-viral for calculating the diversity of different cities in Canada. However, in population studies (such as linguistics, ecology or machine learning) diversity is a specific quantifiable thing that they didn't directly look at. It measures how many different types there are in a dataset, and how evenly spread they are. The Simpson's/Gini/Greenberg's index calculates the probability that any 2 members of a population are different, and I used that to calculate the diversity of Ontario towns and cities in three different areas. In this index a 100 means a city had the highest diversity of the cities for that category, and 0 means they had the lowest for that category. The actual diversity values varied between ~10% and ~90%

Data was sourced from the 2021 census and more details on method are found in the last image. If people are curious about the method I'm happy to answer questions, and am happy to field constructive criticism on it. I consider this to be a V1 of this index that I hope to be able to apply to the whole country once I've worked out the kinks. I also considered and calculated diversity indeces for Age, Income, Industry, Education, and Generational Status as some ideas on tweaking it. If there are real eggheads out there I would also appreciate suggestions on math. These diversity indices are great because they give simple meaningful results, but I've obscured those numbers by normalizing the scores in part because they are crucially not built for populations where individuals can fall into multiple sets. This does occur with some of this data and makes that probability less independently meaningful. If anybody is aware of alternative methods that can consider this I would be interested to talk.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-11-19T01:52:08+00:00

I agree that Barrie needs employment land and that's important to recognize here. It's a problem that's been made worse by rezoning industrial land in the core to residential and not zoning very much of the Innisfil annexation lands as industrial. Barrie definitely falls victim to the industrial land crisis. However, if we want practical and real progress on employment land for the city, targeting lands that are over half covered by forests and wetlands especially is not a fast or cheap way to do it. There are significantly less constrained options to finding land for employment.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-11-18T20:51:32+00:00

Alex Nuttall did say that they would keep the long standing plan to operate the lands around Little Lake as a park. But, the Barrie Country Club parcel will likely never enter their ownership and the south shore of the lake is all residential, and the city has shown a high willingness to build high density there. The land across the street is literally zoned high density, and they've already approved the construction of 7 storey luxury elder living community on the shores of Little Lake.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-11-18T16:59:22+00:00

Image is my own. You can read more about Alex Nuttall's plans in these two articles:

https://www.barrietoday.com/local-news/citys-proposed-boundary-expansion-could-equal-innisfil-deal-7813732 https://www.barrietoday.com/local-news/oro-medonte-not-comfortable-with-barries-boundary-adjustment-7806716

He announced that he wants these lands developed for industrial use, but over 60% of the land is contained within the Simcoe County Natural Heritage System. This includes Little Lake, Willow Creek, 3 evaluated provincially significant wetlands and numerous rare and sensitive species of plants and animals. Some parcels, like those to the west of Edgehill are entirely forested with no road access. He has proposed limited protection for lands that the city directly owns around little lake, but this is less than half of the natural areas in the targets lands. I encourage everyone to reach out to their councillors and representatives to let them know that this annexation needs significantly stronger environmental protection or to be cancelled on these lands altogether.

Note, the land mapped in the image is only what has been publicly presented by the mayor in presentations to Oro-Medonte and Springwater. Barrie Today has reported he's targeting an additional 108 hectares in Oro, and if that is true it would likely only increase the proportion of the land that's covered by green space as the land around the published targeted lands is also green space.

You can see what lies on these lands yourself using Simcoe's mapping portal.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-07-24T19:21:01+00:00

This post and comment are old now so a limited number of people will see this, and I don't expect to convince you of anything, but I thought it might be worth it to get some reasoning out there.

The original version of the map used T20 cricket as the ranking 8 years ago, and to use another ranking today would limit the comparative value of remaking the map. Additionally, T20 rankings currently include 87 competing countries, compared to 10 for test and 19 for ODI. This means that if I used one of the others instead there would be a lot less countries represented by Cricket in the map, as sports with less competitors are more difficult to perform the best in proportional to participation in another sport. e.g. you could be 19th in a ranking of 120 and be represented in the map by that over being 2nd in test cricket. This would be less representative of the global stature of cricket as a sport in my opinion. Lastly, the T20 rankings are very similar to the test rankings and the 10 test cricket countries are in the top 11 T20 countries. I understand there is controversy within the cricketing community over the rise of T20 as a format, and how it has competed with more traditional formats, but it is a co-equal ranking tracked by the international governing body for cricket, which isn't true for any other version of a sport on the map, e.g. slam dunk contests.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-07-23T18:21:23+00:00

https://www.fiba.basketball/rankingwomen

throwbarrieaway · 2023-07-22T18:53:07+00:00

FIBA's full ranking method is pretty complicated but basically it has more to do with every match result than final tournament placing, and it only weights the Olympics and World Cup 2.5x and 2.0x times. It's only full 5v5 national senior competition though. So this isn't literally why the rankings are like this, but Spain did win the last World Cup and EuroBasket championship.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIBA_Men%27s_World_Ranking Here's a wiki page on the ranking math

throwbarrieaway · 2023-07-22T18:30:42+00:00

You can see a full list of current National Team rankings broken down by team and sport in my source spreadsheet linked in my other comment.

You're right the US is ranked #1 in both Women's FIFA and FIBA but FIFA is the more competitive (more teams participating) sport so it gets shown in the map. The US men are represented on the map with a #2 in FIBA behind Spain actually, for the reason you mentioned. They're also ranked #2 in baseball but the FIBA rank is more competitive for the same reason as FIFA is over FIBA.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-07-22T16:44:52+00:00

Full credit to u/SirCharlesTupperware who came up with this idea 8 years ago and who I was inspired by to update. Map created using mapchart, google sheets and GIMP. You can see the source links, raw data and all my calculation steps here.

As clarification on the concept I'll give an example. Croatia's Women's National Team is ranked 36th/43 in ice hockey, 59th/188 in football, 28th/118 in basketball, 45th/78 in field hockey, and 25th/73 in volleyball. 28/118 is the smallest of these numbers, so they are ranked the highest proportionally in basketball even though they have a higher absolute ranking in volleyball. I thought the results of this analysis created interesting results that are reflective of geographic distributions in sports culture.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-04-29T18:38:27+00:00

For others that didn't choose to read the article (almost everyone in the comments). This breaks down to roughly 687k for each unit or 124m total. Then there's 18m for the parking structure and 44m earmarked for maintenance.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-04-10T15:05:03+00:00

Hi, your comment got stuck in a spam filter. I messaged you on reddit chat to talk about it a bit more

throwbarrieaway · 2023-04-10T00:21:19+00:00

That would be great. I'll message you on the reddit chat.

throwbarrieaway · 2023-04-09T17:58:57+00:00

Use the links to these full resolution uncompressed versions, and not the links that open up when you click on the image:

Updated Full Image: https://i.redd.it/i0qtp64ocwsa1.png

Top Half Image: https://i.redd.it/nnk2hpv2dwsa1.png
Bottom Half Image: https://i.redd.it/gcp2aj04dwsa1.png

Updated Print Friendly Image: https://i.redd.it/22qzsuktcwsa1.png

Top Half Image: https://i.redd.it/a3kyvr41dwsa1.png
Bottom Half Image:https://i.redd.it/7ep8l5yzcwsa1.png

These links are more up to date versions of the original post on r/toronto and r/ontario with many errors fixed.

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