April 2004

Hello friends,

Sorry about being late this month. I had to file the yearly tax return. One of the things an Israeli has to get used to in Canada is their attitude to laws and regulations. The rules are not that different, but the approach is. In Israel, laws are decided by people whom are not always trusted. Here, every public place has its rules, and once they are set no one argues, like in a religion. For example, while preparing for the driving theory test, I came by a question which asked why the driver should do something. The correct answer was "because this is the law". Imagine how many people in Israel would be puzzled by such a non-tricky question, and note the subtle way in which they educate people to respect laws without giving a convincing reason.

After education, the next layer in law enforcement is the police. Unlike in Israel, here you don't see soldiers on the streets, but policemen are very visible (at least downtown). The police here use a variety of vehicles. Their white Ford crown Victoria police cars look exactly like police cars from American movies (or the other way around). They also use police bicycles, police snowmobiles, and even horses. There is a special parking police that deals with "parking crimes". I even saw a policeman on a horse filing a parking ticket in his notebook computer.

One thing you should know is that Toronto, and Canada in general, could be a heaven for thieves. Some people leave their cars open, and even their home doors open, or the back yard's door open. People leave their wallets and keys on their desks. I even saw a shop that left merchandise outside over the night because they were lazy to take it in and out every day.

A question I was wondering about is whether the police have real work to do. I got the answer the hard way: my bag was stolen from my locked office at the university, in the middle of the day. In Israel, when the cell phone of the head of the Mossad is stolen, nobody gets excited. But these things are not supposed to happen here, or at least that's what I was thinking. A week later a professor's laptop was stolen from his office, and it was clear the thief wasn't looking for data. A short time afterwards the campus police arrested someone which they believed was the thief. I didn't get my bag back, but I was impressed.

Last week Sir Tony Hoare (the inventor of quicksort) visited our department and gave a talk. He had a dream 40 years ago of building a compiler that does formal verification, so the programmer will be sure that the program will do what it is supposed to do and his manager could sleep better at night (you know, programmers are too tired not to sleep because of such reasons). He is still dreaming about it. It all boils down to one point: in a complicated system with countless rules, there is no way (even theoretically) to make sure that all rules are being complied with. As Ronald Reagan said: "Even Albert Einstein reportedly needed help on his 1040 form".


Ady.