He had only one major publication.
It was in Hebrew.
It had no references.
It wasn't published in a refereed journal.
Some even doubt he wrote it himself.
It may be true that he created the world, but what has he done since then?
His cooperative efforts have been quite limited.
The scientific community has had a hard time replicating his results.
He never applied to the Ethics Board for permission to use human subjects.
When one experiment went awry he tried to cover it up by drowning the subjects.
When subjects didn't behave as predicted, he deleted them from the sample .
He rarely came to class, just told students to read the Book.
Some say he had his son teach the class.
He expelled his first two students for learning.
Although there were only ten requirements, most students failed his tests.
His office hours were infrequent and usually held on a mountaintop.
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Monday, February 27, 2006
Saturday, February 25, 2006
Shake, rattle n' roll
Someone clever would have something witty to say about the news that an earthquake hit Eastern Canada yesterday, but I don't. I know there are fault lines all over the earth, but I never realized there were some in Ontario. Looking at a seismicity graph of Canada, it makes me glad that I've always lived in the part in the middle, you know, where there's no red dots.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
What is the odor of infinity?
Methinks there is a strong correlation between mathematical proficiency and poor personal hygiene.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
I spent the weekend on a planet far, far away
In honor of attending Boskone this weekend, I took the "which sci-fi crew would I fit best in" quiz:
The con was better than I had hoped for - there were some very intelligent people there - Cory Doctorow and Ken MacLeod were the guest speakers. I'd met Ken MacLeod once before at the PanCanadian Wordfest when as a volunteer for the festival, I picked him up at the airport and delivered him to his hotel. I remember him being very generous and a good conversationalist, and watching him speak here reinforced that sense.
In addition, the panels for the most part managed to avoid the infection of 'fan-speak' where fans celebrate their geekness by declaiming their difference from mainstream, denouncing the rest of the planet - the "mundanes" - as shortsighted and narrowminded, and generally raving about their favorite books. That was kept to a minimum, as were the number of costumes and several academics from the sciences, technology fields and literature were in attendance.
 | You scored as Moya (Farscape). You are surrounded by muppets. But that is okay because they are your friends and have shown many times that they can be trusted. Now if only you could stop being bothered about wormholes.
Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com |
The con was better than I had hoped for - there were some very intelligent people there - Cory Doctorow and Ken MacLeod were the guest speakers. I'd met Ken MacLeod once before at the PanCanadian Wordfest when as a volunteer for the festival, I picked him up at the airport and delivered him to his hotel. I remember him being very generous and a good conversationalist, and watching him speak here reinforced that sense.
In addition, the panels for the most part managed to avoid the infection of 'fan-speak' where fans celebrate their geekness by declaiming their difference from mainstream, denouncing the rest of the planet - the "mundanes" - as shortsighted and narrowminded, and generally raving about their favorite books. That was kept to a minimum, as were the number of costumes and several academics from the sciences, technology fields and literature were in attendance.
Thursday, February 16, 2006
hockey hockey hockey hockey
The Olympics are here, the Olympics are here, the Olympics are here, the Olympics are here!
I've been having fun watching Team Canada's hockey performances. No, I didn't get up for the 5 am match earlier this week, and I did have to teach during another one, but I enjoyed the women's tournament play earlier this week as well as the men's victory over Germany this afternoon. The German penalty killing of a Canada 5-3 advantage was impressive, but didn't change the final score of 5-1 for Canada.
I will miss the women's semi-final tomorrow because of other commitments, and might miss the men's next game Saturday am, but that's what the VCR is still good for, right?
Go Team Canada!
Wednesday, February 15, 2006
Miscellany
So I've been neck deep in reading for a conference paper I'm putting together. The conference isn't till April, but I want to get a draft of the paper done by next week, and overall, the reading/writing of it is going pretty well. But there's only so many hours I can look at it, so I take breaks.
I cleaned the oven during one.
I did some laundry and cleaned up some receipts that had been piling up during another break. I found interesting things during both activities. In among the receipts I found some unused stamps and $10 (stupid monochromatic money - I would've seen a purple $10). In the laundry, when I pulled pants out of the dryer, I found an x-ray. Betcha you can't say you've found an x-ray in your dryer before! They're really durable - the image was still as clear as when it was first taken.
But this break I'm trying to write a letter that has to get written and finding it really, really hard. I've never written a letter like this before, so I'm trying out different tones and levels of formality, but mostly I'm not sure what to include or whether it's getting too long or is actually too short and needs to be more detailed. Grrrrrr. Guess I'll have to sleep on this one... maybe for a week!
I cleaned the oven during one.
I did some laundry and cleaned up some receipts that had been piling up during another break. I found interesting things during both activities. In among the receipts I found some unused stamps and $10 (stupid monochromatic money - I would've seen a purple $10). In the laundry, when I pulled pants out of the dryer, I found an x-ray. Betcha you can't say you've found an x-ray in your dryer before! They're really durable - the image was still as clear as when it was first taken.
But this break I'm trying to write a letter that has to get written and finding it really, really hard. I've never written a letter like this before, so I'm trying out different tones and levels of formality, but mostly I'm not sure what to include or whether it's getting too long or is actually too short and needs to be more detailed. Grrrrrr. Guess I'll have to sleep on this one... maybe for a week!
Monday, February 13, 2006
D-I-S-S-E-R-T-A-T-I-O-N
It still seems unreal. I was typing the word today when it hit me that it's no longer something "out there" that I'll have to do "eventually" - it's here, and I'll be working on it for the next couple of years. It's scary in a way, committing myself to one project for several years... and what I write will dictate the kind of job I am qualified to apply for when I'm done.
I think I'm beginning to understand how easy it would be to get bogged down at this stage because it just seems so hugely intimidating! It's certainly bigger than anything I've ever undertaken before, and even though I've probably written a dissertation-sized amount of seminar papers in my coursework, all this writing has to hang together in a way that seminar papers never had to.
On the other hand, I HAVE written this much before, so I know I can write that much. The quality of this work needs to be better. The chapters need to be connected in some way to each other as well. But it's also the opportunity to explore something interesting to its farthest extent, which is something not possible in a seminar. In seminars, the paper comes at the end of the term whether you're ready for it or not. Here, I can spend as much time as I want on what is interesting me, without a deadline hanging over my head.
BUT I also have to find something that is original. In the words of the university's regulations, "Each doctoral student must complete a dissertation that embodies the results of extended research and makes an original contribution to the field.This work should give evidence of the candidate ’s ability to carry out independent investigation and interpret in a logical manner the results of the research". In other words, it has to sound smart. Not to mention, it has to be something that interests me enough to work on it for the next four or five years as I write it and then (hopefully) turn it into a book (presuming I get that far...) It seems like a tall order right now. I'm trying not to despair.
I think I'm beginning to understand how easy it would be to get bogged down at this stage because it just seems so hugely intimidating! It's certainly bigger than anything I've ever undertaken before, and even though I've probably written a dissertation-sized amount of seminar papers in my coursework, all this writing has to hang together in a way that seminar papers never had to.
On the other hand, I HAVE written this much before, so I know I can write that much. The quality of this work needs to be better. The chapters need to be connected in some way to each other as well. But it's also the opportunity to explore something interesting to its farthest extent, which is something not possible in a seminar. In seminars, the paper comes at the end of the term whether you're ready for it or not. Here, I can spend as much time as I want on what is interesting me, without a deadline hanging over my head.
BUT I also have to find something that is original. In the words of the university's regulations, "Each doctoral student must complete a dissertation that embodies the results of extended research and makes an original contribution to the field.This work should give evidence of the candidate ’s ability to carry out independent investigation and interpret in a logical manner the results of the research". In other words, it has to sound smart. Not to mention, it has to be something that interests me enough to work on it for the next four or five years as I write it and then (hopefully) turn it into a book (presuming I get that far...) It seems like a tall order right now. I'm trying not to despair.
Sunday, February 12, 2006
Lazy blogger
From the archives:
Funny how two years later, I'm still feeling like I did in 2004 - cut loose, too many questions, afraid of the answers, and not knowing quite where to turn to for advice. You'd think after two years, things would change...
Saturday, February 12, 2005
Cartoons & Poetry
Plopping yourself in from of the television and watching cartoons for hours and hours until your mind is numb is a long established Saturday tradition in childhood.
I just walked past the tv where a cartoon character is discussing poetic form in William Blake.
I don't ever remember the Roadrunner or Bug Bunny discussing art, do you?
Thursday, February 12, 2004
Perhaps there's some cosmic message that I'm just not getting. The events of the last week seem to have multiplied.
I had a conversation with my advisor that began with her saying, while smiling, "So, we're meeting to plan the rest of your life"... which would be an accurate assessment of the conversation if by my life you mean my academic career. The meeting ending with me having the distinct impression that I need a new advisor. Not because I would not be able to get along with this one, no, certainly not - I have been drinking with the woman and it was all fine & good. No, the reason that I got this impression is because the areas where my interests lie, and more importantly, the areas that I might market myself under, don't really lie in any of her areas of expertise.
In part that saddens me, because I've liked working with her.
In part it scares me because I feel very cut loose. There's a piece of my brain that says I should celebrate such freedom - at least my advisor hasn't planned out my dissertation for me like a colleague's has (down to the title!) - but it's also a bit scary because I'm not sure who to turn to for advice now. Or who to approach as a supervisor. I have some suggestions, but I still feel like they're quite vague and not terribly helpful.
I also feel a bit out of my element - like I don't know anything.
I had gone into the meeting with a series of questions. I guess you could say that I got answers to those questions, but they weren't answers within the realm of what I had imagined they might be, and they generated as many, if not even more, questions in turn.
But I think the part that really gets me is that - I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up.
Funny how two years later, I'm still feeling like I did in 2004 - cut loose, too many questions, afraid of the answers, and not knowing quite where to turn to for advice. You'd think after two years, things would change...
Saturday, February 11, 2006
WMDs
Math teacher arrested at JFK.
At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered
to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight
while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide
rule, and a calculator.
At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said
he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement.
The FBI is charging him with carrying weapons of math instruction.
Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Gonzalez said. "They desire average
solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in
a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and
'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined
they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with
coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used
to say, 'there are 3 sides to every triangle'."
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had
wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have
given us more fingers and toes".
At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered
to be a public school teacher, was arrested trying to board a flight
while in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a setsquare, a slide
rule, and a calculator.
At a morning press conference, Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez said
he believes the man is a member of the notorious Al-gebra movement.
The FBI is charging him with carrying weapons of math instruction.
Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Gonzalez said. "They desire average
solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in
a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like 'x' and
'y' and refer to themselves as 'unknowns', but we have determined
they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with
coordinates in every country. As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used
to say, 'there are 3 sides to every triangle'."
When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had
wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have
given us more fingers and toes".
Friday, February 10, 2006
yeah, I know, this post IS pretty long...
So Slate has this interesting article about testing for bias. According to the researchers, it's impossible to lie on the test because it measures unconscious responses, and even a test taker who implicitly tries to throw the test will only marginally change the results because the test rejects time scores that are too low (which would indicate the test subject is thinking about the answers and trying to override unconscious associations).
The results are extremely interesting. The researchers found that
I found my results interesting:
You have completed the Gender-Science IAT.
Your data suggest little or no association between Female and Male with Science and Liberal Arts.
Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. The interpretation shown above is described as 'automatic association between Science and Male' if you responded faster when Science and Male words were classified with the same key as opposed to Liberal Arts and Male items. It is marked 'automatic association between Liberal Arts and Male' if you were faster when giving the same response to Liberal Arts and Male items. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic preference may be described as 'slight', 'moderate', 'strong', or 'little to no preference'.
You have completed the Race-Weapons IAT.
Your data suggest a moderate association of African American with Harmless Objects and European American with Weapons compared to European American with Harmless Objects and African American with Weapons.
Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. Racial profiling as a term, has been introduced in recent years to capture an old practice among law enforcement agents, especially police and immigration and customs officials: the selective stopping, searching, and interrogating of individuals who hold membership in groups that are believed to be more likely to commit particular crimes. In a sense, when psychologists study the nature of stereotypes, they are studying exactly this process in general terms: the degree to which knowledge about a group influences judgments of individual members of the group.
The various mental abilities that underlie the function of identifying that x is a member of category X, and remembering what Category X does and represents are vital – the ability to perceive and categorize, to learn and remember are essential features of human intelligence. But these very same processes so fundamental to our daily mental functioning can be implicated in the denial of equally fundamental rights to people who are innocent bearers of markers of their social group. The many instances of people who are wrongly suspected and accused is too great to mention. We point to only one case that has come to represent the sad consequences of well-intentioned profiling. Police officers in New York, shot and killed a citizen, Amadou Diallo, who they believed was reaching for a weapon. In fact, Amadou Diallo, was reaching for his wallet to provide identification to the police officers.
Our position, perhaps an unpopular one, is that the unconscious roots of profiling lie in every mind. In the Race-Weapons test you completed, we provide the occasion for recognizing the automatic association between racial groups and weapons relative to harmless objects. The result of this test probably underestimates the true extent of this association. In order to give every benefit to obtaining the alternative association (African American and harmless objects), we explicitly included examples of weapons that are not associated with that group (e.g., bayonets, swords, bombs, axes). When we demonstrate the bias nevertheless, we are revealing the strong association between African Americans and harmful weapons.
Racial profiling is first and foremost a mental act that can, given a supportive environment, result in errors that were unintended by those who perform them. The protections against such errors, given its automatic nature, will need to be more serious than requesting individual citizens and especially agents of the state to "just say no" to profiling
The second one I was really surprised by! The first - between gender and science - didn't surprise me. I figure that since I did science and I have a daughter interested in a science-based career as well as a husband in the sciences, that I wouldn't have any specific gendered associations with one or the other.
But the second one, the one where I associate (slightly) European Americans with weapons is interesting, since it seems to go against representations of bias in the media. The only thing I can figure is that because they used some images of weapons that traditionally aren't associated with African Americans (a canon, bayonetted rifle, hand grenade, mace) that I was drawing upon my enjoyment of medieval stories and movies rather than MTV in making my associations. I guess if I didn't like movies about chicks with swords, I might have scored differently!
All this thinking and reading about bias got me thinking about something that happened yesterday. (It might also be my opportunity to redeem myself, at least slightly, for that rambling post last week)
I went to lunch with several other grad students and a candidate for a Chair that our department is trying to fill. The candidate was curious about us and asked what we were doing, which meant I had to give a pithy one-sentence-in-ten-seconds kind of description of my potential dissertation. Not having thought through what it would sound like to other people, I described it as 'cyborgs and clones' - which doesn't really do it justice. As a shorthand in my own thinking, it works, because I know what I want to talk about, but to others it just sounds... what's the word for it?... oh, yeah, "crazy".
Certainly when I begin to think about who I will work with, it does sound crazy, but I'm starting to see some possibilities that I wasn't seeing last week when I rambled depressively about not knowing how I could pull this off.
If I had to answer that question now, I would say something like 'effects of late twentieth century technological developments on embodied identity in science fiction' which would at least get a bit closer (and sounds a bit more valid as a field of study).
Embodiment has long been a staple of literary criticism and discussions of gender, race, or disability in literature and culture inevitably at some point draw attention to the way our bodies are markers for these categories. This is what bias draws upon as well - associations of particular characteristics with particular visual images. When it is applied to people, it is often the visual image of the body that is half of the equation. Our bodies go a long way toward creating our identity and the identity other people ascribe to us. Some postcolonial theorists point to the way the body is used as a site on which categories of 'otherness' are imposed (as do feminists and anti-racism activists etc).
Cyborgs and clones have different bodies than we like to imagine humans as having - cyborg bodies are often marked by intrusions of machines
- think Star Trek borgs, which of course are very creepy, but that's the point, it's all about the anxiety produced by the "close coupling" of machines with our flesh -
but can also have their marks of difference hidden - think Keanu Reeves character in Johnny Mnemonic (based on the short story written by the creator of cyberpunk, William Gibson who also wrote the screenplay).
Clones are more like Johnny Mnemonic in that the technology they incorporate - genetic engineering - isn't always visible. To put it simply (too simply perhaps), clones are threatening because they look like us, just like fair skinned African Americans who were able to "pass" for white even though their genetic heritage was different.
Both clones and cyborgs then represent figures onto which we can project our fears about the destruction of the body, the question of what makes a human a human, about fears of contamination, and fears of categorization. This is the kind of thing I want to work on.
I know my description here is very loose, and doesn't do justice to the complexities of some of the issues I've only briefly mentioned, but it's the kind of project I could see myself working on for at least two years, and the kind of project that I'd like to showcase when shopping myself around when it comes time to hit the job market. I haven't decided yet if I want to pigeonhole myself into the 'literature and science' field, but there certainly is plenty of overlap between what I'm envisioning and the kinds of projects that fall within its scope.
You can wake up now.
The results are extremely interesting. The researchers found that
88 percent of the white subjects who take her test show some bias against blacks. The majority of all subjects also test anti-gay, anti-elderly, and anti-Arab Muslim. Many people also exhibit bias against their own group: About half of blacks test anti-black; 36 percent of Arab Muslims test anti-Arab Muslim; and 38 percent of gays show an automatic preference for heterosexuals.The Slate article focuses on race bias, but if you follow the link to the test site itself, there are many more categories (14 in all) including sexuality, weight, gender-career, and even weapons bias. So I got curious and took a couple.
I found my results interesting:
You have completed the Gender-Science IAT.
Your data suggest little or no association between Female and Male with Science and Liberal Arts.
Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. The interpretation shown above is described as 'automatic association between Science and Male' if you responded faster when Science and Male words were classified with the same key as opposed to Liberal Arts and Male items. It is marked 'automatic association between Liberal Arts and Male' if you were faster when giving the same response to Liberal Arts and Male items. Depending on the magnitude of your result, your automatic preference may be described as 'slight', 'moderate', 'strong', or 'little to no preference'.
You have completed the Race-Weapons IAT.
Your data suggest a moderate association of African American with Harmless Objects and European American with Weapons compared to European American with Harmless Objects and African American with Weapons.
Your result, reported above, is already corrected for the order in which you took the parts of the IAT. Racial profiling as a term, has been introduced in recent years to capture an old practice among law enforcement agents, especially police and immigration and customs officials: the selective stopping, searching, and interrogating of individuals who hold membership in groups that are believed to be more likely to commit particular crimes. In a sense, when psychologists study the nature of stereotypes, they are studying exactly this process in general terms: the degree to which knowledge about a group influences judgments of individual members of the group.
The various mental abilities that underlie the function of identifying that x is a member of category X, and remembering what Category X does and represents are vital – the ability to perceive and categorize, to learn and remember are essential features of human intelligence. But these very same processes so fundamental to our daily mental functioning can be implicated in the denial of equally fundamental rights to people who are innocent bearers of markers of their social group. The many instances of people who are wrongly suspected and accused is too great to mention. We point to only one case that has come to represent the sad consequences of well-intentioned profiling. Police officers in New York, shot and killed a citizen, Amadou Diallo, who they believed was reaching for a weapon. In fact, Amadou Diallo, was reaching for his wallet to provide identification to the police officers.
Our position, perhaps an unpopular one, is that the unconscious roots of profiling lie in every mind. In the Race-Weapons test you completed, we provide the occasion for recognizing the automatic association between racial groups and weapons relative to harmless objects. The result of this test probably underestimates the true extent of this association. In order to give every benefit to obtaining the alternative association (African American and harmless objects), we explicitly included examples of weapons that are not associated with that group (e.g., bayonets, swords, bombs, axes). When we demonstrate the bias nevertheless, we are revealing the strong association between African Americans and harmful weapons.
Racial profiling is first and foremost a mental act that can, given a supportive environment, result in errors that were unintended by those who perform them. The protections against such errors, given its automatic nature, will need to be more serious than requesting individual citizens and especially agents of the state to "just say no" to profiling
The second one I was really surprised by! The first - between gender and science - didn't surprise me. I figure that since I did science and I have a daughter interested in a science-based career as well as a husband in the sciences, that I wouldn't have any specific gendered associations with one or the other.
But the second one, the one where I associate (slightly) European Americans with weapons is interesting, since it seems to go against representations of bias in the media. The only thing I can figure is that because they used some images of weapons that traditionally aren't associated with African Americans (a canon, bayonetted rifle, hand grenade, mace) that I was drawing upon my enjoyment of medieval stories and movies rather than MTV in making my associations. I guess if I didn't like movies about chicks with swords, I might have scored differently!
All this thinking and reading about bias got me thinking about something that happened yesterday. (It might also be my opportunity to redeem myself, at least slightly, for that rambling post last week)
I went to lunch with several other grad students and a candidate for a Chair that our department is trying to fill. The candidate was curious about us and asked what we were doing, which meant I had to give a pithy one-sentence-in-ten-seconds kind of description of my potential dissertation. Not having thought through what it would sound like to other people, I described it as 'cyborgs and clones' - which doesn't really do it justice. As a shorthand in my own thinking, it works, because I know what I want to talk about, but to others it just sounds... what's the word for it?... oh, yeah, "crazy".
Certainly when I begin to think about who I will work with, it does sound crazy, but I'm starting to see some possibilities that I wasn't seeing last week when I rambled depressively about not knowing how I could pull this off.
If I had to answer that question now, I would say something like 'effects of late twentieth century technological developments on embodied identity in science fiction' which would at least get a bit closer (and sounds a bit more valid as a field of study).
Embodiment has long been a staple of literary criticism and discussions of gender, race, or disability in literature and culture inevitably at some point draw attention to the way our bodies are markers for these categories. This is what bias draws upon as well - associations of particular characteristics with particular visual images. When it is applied to people, it is often the visual image of the body that is half of the equation. Our bodies go a long way toward creating our identity and the identity other people ascribe to us. Some postcolonial theorists point to the way the body is used as a site on which categories of 'otherness' are imposed (as do feminists and anti-racism activists etc).
Cyborgs and clones have different bodies than we like to imagine humans as having - cyborg bodies are often marked by intrusions of machines
- think Star Trek borgs, which of course are very creepy, but that's the point, it's all about the anxiety produced by the "close coupling" of machines with our flesh -
but can also have their marks of difference hidden - think Keanu Reeves character in Johnny Mnemonic (based on the short story written by the creator of cyberpunk, William Gibson who also wrote the screenplay). Clones are more like Johnny Mnemonic in that the technology they incorporate - genetic engineering - isn't always visible. To put it simply (too simply perhaps), clones are threatening because they look like us, just like fair skinned African Americans who were able to "pass" for white even though their genetic heritage was different.
Both clones and cyborgs then represent figures onto which we can project our fears about the destruction of the body, the question of what makes a human a human, about fears of contamination, and fears of categorization. This is the kind of thing I want to work on.
I know my description here is very loose, and doesn't do justice to the complexities of some of the issues I've only briefly mentioned, but it's the kind of project I could see myself working on for at least two years, and the kind of project that I'd like to showcase when shopping myself around when it comes time to hit the job market. I haven't decided yet if I want to pigeonhole myself into the 'literature and science' field, but there certainly is plenty of overlap between what I'm envisioning and the kinds of projects that fall within its scope.
You can wake up now.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Along with payphones and water fountains...
...let's add photo albums to the list of disappearing things. I've been organizing photos that have been sitting in boxes over the last few days and having a bitch of a time finding the kind of photo album I want.
Sure, with digital photos you no longer need negatives - I can understand having difficulty finding negative pages (though I've had no problem finding pages for slides... which I didn't think *anyone* used anymore). But people still make prints of their digital photos, don't they?
Scrapbooking seems to be all the rage, but I don't want all kinds of other crap. I just want a photo album that will hold photos and allow me to add extra pages when I want to. Is that too much to ask? All the stores I've checked that I would expect to have them don't carry albums like this anymore, and even a web search came up empty.
It occured to me that I haven't bought a photo album since coming to this country. Maybe I'll have to wait till March when I go back across the border to find the more of the same kind of photo album I've been using. Different photo albums in different nations? Strikes me that's an awfully weird thing to be different in different countries, but who knows?
Sure, with digital photos you no longer need negatives - I can understand having difficulty finding negative pages (though I've had no problem finding pages for slides... which I didn't think *anyone* used anymore). But people still make prints of their digital photos, don't they?
Scrapbooking seems to be all the rage, but I don't want all kinds of other crap. I just want a photo album that will hold photos and allow me to add extra pages when I want to. Is that too much to ask? All the stores I've checked that I would expect to have them don't carry albums like this anymore, and even a web search came up empty.
It occured to me that I haven't bought a photo album since coming to this country. Maybe I'll have to wait till March when I go back across the border to find the more of the same kind of photo album I've been using. Different photo albums in different nations? Strikes me that's an awfully weird thing to be different in different countries, but who knows?
Monday, February 06, 2006
I am astounded!
So, every week I check out what days the Flames are playing. Then I check my local listings only to find that they're showing a different game. (the Bruins and the Flames often play the same day, which means I'm usually SOL)
But tonight? Tonight is different. Tonight, for some reason I cannot fathom BUT am not about to question, OLN is broadcasting the Sharks-Flames game! There is a hockey god!
Saturday, February 04, 2006
Rambling...
So, going into the oral exam, I expected I would be asked three kinds of questions: to clarify things in the written exam that weren't clear or only partially developed, to answer questions that I was prepared to answer but hadn't for the exam, and to explain how this all works towards my dissertation.
The first type of question I certainly got, and think I answered the three or four that were clarification questions okay. The second, where I answer questions I was prepared for but didn't write about, I did mostly okay, but one of the questions given to me asked me to reference a specific author, and I spent too much time (at least it felt like too much) trying to create an argument about that specific author.
The third question, about the dissertation, really didn't get discussed at all. Our only discussion of the dissertation came after they congratulated me on passing the exam and told me to keep working and prepare a prospectus right away. When I outlined what I had in mind - in about 30 seconds - suddenly the composition of the dissertation committee, which I thought was pretty set - unravelled. They did tell me to stay away from a transatlantic treatment of the subject, but anything more than that is up in the air right now.
I'm living with it. But it does make me question whether I should undertake the project I'm considering.
(I know that was all rather vague, but if you're really interested in it, well, I guess you'll have to wait till I have a better idea myself - sorry)
The first type of question I certainly got, and think I answered the three or four that were clarification questions okay. The second, where I answer questions I was prepared for but didn't write about, I did mostly okay, but one of the questions given to me asked me to reference a specific author, and I spent too much time (at least it felt like too much) trying to create an argument about that specific author.
The third question, about the dissertation, really didn't get discussed at all. Our only discussion of the dissertation came after they congratulated me on passing the exam and told me to keep working and prepare a prospectus right away. When I outlined what I had in mind - in about 30 seconds - suddenly the composition of the dissertation committee, which I thought was pretty set - unravelled. They did tell me to stay away from a transatlantic treatment of the subject, but anything more than that is up in the air right now.
I'm living with it. But it does make me question whether I should undertake the project I'm considering.
(I know that was all rather vague, but if you're really interested in it, well, I guess you'll have to wait till I have a better idea myself - sorry)
Thursday, February 02, 2006
I just can't win
I gave up going to the gym at school in favor of the one near home. Now that we have a second vehicle, I can get there easier and it costs the same. And I figured it could only be good for my ego to no longer be running on a track next to people twenty years younger than me.
I just came back from my grown-up gym. The place was crawling with Bentley students.
I just can't win.
I just came back from my grown-up gym. The place was crawling with Bentley students.
I just can't win.
Wednesday, February 01, 2006
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