Science fiction or science fact?

According to the news in the last few days, a patent has been filed for the basic genes to create life - not genetic engineering, the tinkering of existing life forms by adding/subtracting/changing genes, but genetic synthesis, designing and creating an organism from scratch.

So here as I'm reading bioethicists debating the morality of creating life through what we know of genomics, there's a patent being filed for that very thing.

As I sit here in my office, far removed from biotechnology hubs, I wonder what the effect of this patent application will be - will it get the public talking about genetics, sparking a debate and various regulatory agencies' efforts to produce guidelines for future research? Or will this news story slip back down into oblivion after this brief blip across the radar screen, opening the possibility that a single company will own the patent to life?

Meanwhile, James Watson - the discoverer of the DNA helix - has had his entire genome mapped.

Certainly the million dollar price tag won't have people popping down to the local gene bank to check out a new love interest, as they did in Gattaca, but it's certainly an interesting development arising out of the Human Genome Project.

It looks like science fiction is becoming science fact right now. And it seem to me there's far too little discussion by human beings in the aggregate about how this might affect our lives and our ownership of our own genetic maps.

Grounded

It never ceases to amaze me at how attached we can become to our habits... and the places where those habits are enacted.

Due to an injury, I've had to curtail my running in the last week. It's very disappointing because I was preparing for a long race, and was scheduled to complete a much shorter one last weekend. Not only will I not be ready for the longer race, but I couldn't even participate in the short one.


But was surprises me is how much I'm reminded of this everyday.

I don't think I'd realized how big a part of my life running had become. I look at the weather forecast but realize that it's less important to me now than when I'm running.

I drive past road construction, noting that they've finally laid the sidewalk and my first thought is, "oh, good, I can use this run again" but then I realize I won't be doing that any time soon.

I drive past the trail running park, thinking how much I can't wait to get back to it.

I see an ad for shoes on sale, and realize there's no sense shopping for them because I don't know when I'll be using them... I just know it won't be anytime soon.

I'm trying to stay positive and just concentrate on healing, but it's hard.

On the brights side, I can still hike, so we went to Drumheller's Horseshoe Canyon last weekend. It's a little bit of wilderness in the middle of farmland, and if you don't know it's there and turn into the parking lot, you'd never even see it. But once you get to the top of the canyon, quite a vista opens up.


I don't know what I found more fascinating - the contrast of green and sand.


Or the detailed formations.


And textures.

I also bought a second hand backcountry pack, so if I can find someone who wants to go overnighting it, I'm ready!

It's the sideshow that's the most interesting

I've been half-heartedly following the Stanley Cup playoffs. It's not that I've lost interest in hockey, it's just that I can't get excited by either the Ducks or the Senators.

By far the best part of last night's game was the commentary after the second period. Commentators expected it to be interesting, and it turned out to be amusing, though Don Cherry was certainly not up to his usual flamboyance - either verbally or in haberdashery.

Mmmmm... coffee

Understanding Coffee People. I think I recognize a bit of myself in two of these coffee types. Maybe I'm transitioning between the two...

Finishing touches

We're putting the finishing touches on our two work projects that will be launched next week. It's very exciting to see a project that I began right through to the finish!

I gotta say, I'm pretty impressed with what our team put together - it's a good feeling.

No man's land

There's a spot in the middle of Nose Hill Park that's so far away from the edges of the hill, that you can't see them. Standing in the middle, right about where that arrow is on the image, you can imagine yourself in the middle of a deserted prairie landscape. All you can see in a 360 degree turn, is a handful of homes on the hill across from you in Edgemont and the very top of the Telus building downtown (which you could convince yourself was a new age grain elevator, or at least the top third of it).

Very strange to know you're in the middle of a city of a million people and can't see the evidence of it.

How much fun you can have when there's no pressure to win

Youngest daughter plays on a community soccer team while middle daughter plays on a travel team. The difference between the two leagues was crystal clear on Tuesday night's games.

Youngest daughter's community game started ten minutes late because the opposing team was trying to get enough players to avoid forfeiting. They didn't, so daughter's team won by default. But they decided to play anyways, matching team numbers so that they fielded 6, then 7 player teams.

Knowing there was no pressure to win, they had a great time, clearly enjoying the game. And while they were a little less competitive than usual, they still worked the field. They just enjoyed it at the same time.

Older daughter's travel team game was a very different experience. They are still playing to determine their seeding, so it was serious. After it was all over, she was annoyed at some of her teammates actions, and the whole game was played far more seriously than the earlier one.

It wasn't quite as serious as the one going on behind us on the next field - two adult teams - where the ref finally had to threaten the coach with a yellow card to get him to stop questioning the linesman's calls. But the girls' game was still so much more serious than the earlier game where there was no pressure to win.

As a parent, I wish there was a way to get the girls to relax and play all their games like the score doesn't count. They have so much more fun that way!

Editing oneself

I've been working on editing a paper I'm trying to write over the last few weeks and finding it a fairly daunting task. Part of the problem is that I'm fairly significantly changing something I've already written (but which had a very different purpose in mind). It almost makes me wish I'd started from scratch instead.

But one of the most interesting things I'm coming to realize with this extended editing session is that I'm a bit scatter-brained. What I mean is, I find that sentences, or even whole sections, are well constructed and usable, but that I'm spending a lot of time rearranging whole paragraphs, or moving sentences around within them, to clarify what I'm trying to say.

So it seems I'm good at writing down an idea, but pretty bad at figuring out in what order those ideas should be placed. Seems a bit scatter-brained to me.

Constructions of knowledge

Having recently switched jobs from a classroom to an elearning environment, has gotten me thinking about the way knowledge is constructed in each of these places. It seems to me there are two models on which knowledge acquisition and dissemination are constructed: the "expert" model and the "searcher" model.

In the classroom, the traditional, and still the most prevalent model is what I would call an "expert" model. An instructor, expert in the subject, shares his or her knowledge with a group of assembled learners. Experts in this case have spent years and years accumulating their knowledge, which they are able to access at any time.

We all know examples of really fascinating instructors who can pull information out of their head on almost any aspect of their subject. These experts rarely seem to require lecture notes to remember things, and can answer any question asked on the topic (and some outside the topic at hand!) with a narrative that incorporates the question into a larger framework and seamlessly integrates into the lecture topic of the day.

These experts are afforded some respect for their knowledge. They are sought out by students (even if just by the fact that the educational institute tells the students to go to their class), and by their peers and recognized for their knowledge. They often have guaranteed jobs or are sought out by other educators, researchers, new scholars, or even by journalists looking for an "expert" news bite for a story.

Such experts don't only exist in educational institutions. We can all think of such experts that we've encountered elsewhere, whether they are sports statistic fanatics, collectors, or just amateur scholars of some subject that they care deeply about.

And that's one thing both professional and amateaur experts have (or are at least imagined to have): a passion for the subject of which they are an expert. This passion is understandably necessary. The process of becoming a recognized expert usually requires years of schooling, or at minimum years and years of study to accumulate that knowledge that they carry around in their head all the time.

These experts might use computers, and file cabinets and notes of various sorts to help them remember and locate information, but just through their long and extensive acquaintance with the subject matter, most of it is located right at their fingertips whenever they want: it's encoded in their memories and accessible whenever someone asks them a question.

In elearning, we regularly talk about SMEs - Subject Matter Experts - who provide this service to users of elearning. They are often this first kind of "expert" and they provide what they know to an instructional designer, or content manager, who then shapes the information for delivery in an electronic environment. So in some ways in elearning, the function of the instructor at the front of the classroom is split, with the SME providing the content, while the instructional designer provides the delivery mechanism.

Although not a universal feature of elearning, one of the elements we frequently include in our programs are links to other web resources for learners who wish to know more about a given subject. These links lead them into the world wide web, from which they can continue to follow links, find new keywords and use those to conduct their own searches, or follow threads until they lead to new learning experiences.

This ability to navigate through the internet to learn is something that we as educators are beginning to recognize as a valuable skill, and are beginning to teach to students. This is what I would call the "searcher" model of knowledge. Knowledge is out there, and the smartest students will be the ones who will be able to use the resources they have at their disposal to search and find the information they need.

In other words, you don't have to be an expert, you just need to know where to find one on the internet. The sentiment behind this model then becomes "Who needs to spend years and years learning a subject when someone else out there already knows all this?" Now, from a certain perspective, the "searcher" model of knowledge is an efficient one, and certainly has a value for students who are beginning to enter a particular field. We often expect students to demonstrate a familiarity with the material in the field that they can only gain by rapidly acquiring it from other sources i.e. experts.

But the "searcher" model of knowledge construction can only carry a person so far. The adage about the student exceeding the teacher's knowledge strikes me as the kind of goal scholars-in-training should aspire to. If the only thing you ever do is search out the information that others have created (and posted/published) then the advance of knowledge will never occur.

I really don't think that knowing where to find information on the internet will ever produce new insights. I believe that moving beyond what others have done requires the kind of immersion within the subject matter that the expert attains. The expert becomes so immersed in her or his subject that it becomes an intimate part of life - not just the life of the study or the computer screen - but spilling over into other parts of life. The subject becomes something you see absolutely everywhere. That's what it means to be an expert. Because everything is there in your brain, not just at your fingertips, it infiltrates other parts of your life, emerging when you least expect it to connect seemingly disparate elements to create new insights.

Now, some of that last paragraph was conjecture - perhaps even wishful thinking. As I aspire to become an expert in a field, I'm certainly not at the point where my subject matter is second nature. I still rely heavily on EndNote to remind me what I've read, and I usually don't fully integrate what I've read with everything else that's filling up my brain until I've written about it. But I am starting to see the beginnings of this kind of expertise - where my subject matter begins to infiltrate every aspect of my life, leading me to look at everyday things around me in a different way. (If you've been reading this blog for a while, you might also be getting that sense with all these technology-related posts lately.)

What got me thinking about these two different models was a movie I watched on Victoria Day, you know, the unofficial first day of summer in these parts when we had that snow? Yeah, that day... (though at least is wasn't as bad as Thursday's record breaking dump!)

I was watching National Treasure, a movie I'd seen before and not been particularly impressed with, but the snow and holiday conspired to keep me from getting off the couch and doing something else.... I suppose it wasn't all bad 'cause it got me thinking about this post at least...

But, back to the movie. If you remember the plot, Nicholas Cage's character, Ben, is searching clues for a national treasure. He has spent his whole life tracking down clue after clue (and his father spent his life before that doing the same). In the course of all this searching, he has a acquired a lot of information, which he shares with other characters in the film, particularly his young sidekick who apparently knows none of it, which gives Ben the (annoying) opportunity to give a mini history lesson at every plot point of the movie. (Yeah, that's one of the things that I didn't like about the movie...) His arch rival in this search for the treasure is Sean Bean's character, Ian, who has oodles and oodles of money and is usually just one step behind Ben.

You can probably see where I'm going with this. Ben's spent his life acquiring the knowledge of the treasure, following an expert model of knowledge construction, while Ian uses money, the internet (his henchmen carry a wireless laptop everywhere they go), and Ben's trailblazing path, to follow - a searcher model.

The difference between the two models is nicely demonstrated in a scene where Ben figures out that the numbered code he found refers to individual letters contained within a series of correspondences housed in a museum. They send a boy into the museum with the code to pick out each of the letters, which the sidekick puts together to form a sentence, which is the next clue in the search. Ben and his buddies then head to the next clue.

Ian meanwhile has caught up to them and clues in that the kid is working for Ben. He interrogates the kid, but the kid only has the last word of the message - Stow. Ian punches "Stow" and "Declaration of Independence" into a search engine and quickly finds that Stow is one of the creators of the liberty bell (btw, after two hits from the movie, you'll get the same results). Ian arrives at the bell just after Ben and his friends have. Ben knew that Stow and Pass made the bell because he's immersed in U.S. history, but all Ian had to do was look it up on the internet.

Two different forms of knowledge. Notice how Ian's form relies on clues from an expert however. Without knowing WHAT to look for, he would never find it.

So you can guess who wins in the end. Yep, the expert. Who knows a thing or two that the searcher can't find on the internet, or even know to look for. And who employs a bit of misdirection that the searcher doesn't pick up on, because he's not expert enough to know that it's a misdirection (I could go on a rant about misinformation on the internet, but that's a whole other topic).

Intentionality

I've been reading Rodney Brooks' Flesh and Machines: How Robots will Change Us, which has some fascinating stories of the work he and other scientists at MIT have been doing with robotics and Artificial Intelligence.

One project in particular, is Cynthia Breazeal's Kismet. Kismet is a robot modelled on a developing infant. It is equipped with vision and speech, but like an infant, it's speech is babble and doesn't make sense (like an infant, it is capable of forming phonemes of English, it just doesn't string them together into recognizable words).

What does make sense when Kismet interacts with other people is the way it carries on a conversation. It responds when someone speaks to it, looks them in the face, will turn its attention to objects pointed to, takes turns "talking" with others, and generally acts in a lot of ways like an infant would.

In fact, the way that people talk to it is very much like how we talk to infants or small children, especially if we don't know them and are first encountering them. This video of a conversation between Kismet and a volunteer is especially interesting, and if you ignore that Kismet says nothing recognizable. It really does sound like Rich (the volunteer) is trying to talk to a child, which is what Kismet acts like in reality.

Very interesting.

Sunny days!

What perfect weather for a ride in a convertible... and I have one now!

We've been having some really nice weather - too bad it won't last - but for now, it's sunshine all the way. Makes me want to sit on a patio soaking it up, not working, but work before play, right?

I've gotta say I am delighted with our new car. I know new cars are always a fun novelty when you first get them, but this one's just fun too! I've been having a great time driving it and been having a great time at the gas pump too! At 60mpg and Diesel sitting at 20 cents/l less than gas, it costs me pennies to get around. Gotta love that.

One of the strangest things about this car is the responses of other drivers on the road. Although there are several thousand in the area, I've only seen three others in our little city on the prairie. Big city on the prairie has far more, but even there, people can't help but comment. Some people haven't seen one close up and just want a peek, but some are even more curious. I had a chat with a guy outside Timmy's the other day when he stopped to ask if I liked my car as I was climbing back in after getting my coffee.


I've had one really grouchy guy in a big truck think I was taking up too much space... but he was obviously having a bad day. Taking up space is certainly something this car doesn't do... in fact, our garage is so small that only a mini like it allows us to fit a second car in the garage.

Even having a flat tire is an amusing experience in the Smart car. Obviously, it's too small to carry a spare. I have storage room - enough for a couple of lawn chairs and a picnic basket, or a week's worth of groceries - but storage space is at a premium. So instead of carrying a spare, I carry that tire repair goop and a mini-compressor that runs off the cigarette lighter.

I got to try it out too - came back from one of youngest daughter's soccer games to find the tire flat. So I had to "treat" it right there on the side of the road. Took no longer than changing a regular tire, and there wasn't the grunting and groaning that sometimes accompanies the loosening of the lugnuts. It was actually kinda cool. Thank god they were able to repair the tire rather than replace it though - having a Mercedes import is costly - the tires are made in France after all, so they cost a lot more than a regular tire!

But cruising with the top down on a sunny day, the cost of tires fades into the background and the savings at the pump more than make up for any extra costs for parts. Gotta say, I'm loving this funny looking little car!

Changing holidays

Funny how holidays change as you move through different times in your life. Like Mother's Day for example.

When you're a kid, you make mom a gift, and later on buy her something with your allowance, and all you can think about is how cool the item is - you do very little thinking about what she'd like. Then later as you get older, you start to put some thought into it, but sometimes you realize you have no idea what mom wants because you still can't see her as not-mom, as a person with interests and tastes.

Hopefully at some point you figure it out and she at least gets something she wants from you.

Then if you're female, you might end up a mother yourself. That changes the whole holiday. At first, your children's father is the one orchestrating everything, and it's this stage of the game that contemporary Mother's Day ads, newspaper articles, and feel-good (but sappy, poorly written) poems seem to imagine is the only way that Mother's Day gets celebrated.

As this Mother's Day approached, that was the message I got - that if you didn't have a toddler who ran you ragged all day long but then looked like a little angels after they fell asleep, then the holiday wasn't quite for you.

Having teenagers who keep you up half the night worrying doesn't work as good on cute Mother's Day cards... unless they're humorous ones I suppose.

Over the years, I've wanted to boycott the holiday because it seems like the enforced interaction of the whole family together just brought out the worst in the kids and a fight would break out, ruining dinner etc.

But this year, I got just what I wanted, and I don't think they make a Hallmark card for this one: a dinner with all my kids together and NO fighting. Perfect!

Insensitive dead matter

What do zombies and robots have in common?

Sounds like a bad riddle, but I think it's an interesting question. Perhaps I'm just a bit dense to not have thought about the commonalities before, but I hadn't really thought of zombies and robots performing any kind of similar function. I've never really made the connection between the two entities before, but reading this passage about robots got me thinking about it:

"Thoughtful machinery violates the equally obvious and sacred dichotomy of the living and the dead, a difference embedded in our mentality. The skills for interacting with living things, with feelings, memories and intentions, are utterly different from the techniques for shaping insensitive dead matter... Ancient thinkers theorized that the animating principle that separated the living from the dead was a special kind of substance, a spirit. In the last century biology, mathematics, and related sciences have gathered powerful evidence that the animating principle is not a substance, but a very particular, very complex organization. Such organization was once found only in biological matter, but is now slowly appearing in our most complex machines"

(Moravec, Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind 111)

That "animating principle" or spirit, is really what it all comes down to. It's the mind portion of the Cartesian mind/body dualism. And it's that dualism that lies at the heart of a lot of the objections to new computational (artificial intelligence) and biotechnologies.

The fears associated with these new technologies have a lot to do with a desire to keep human beings in a special category - one that can't be replicated by humans themselves, in other words, reproduction/production of new human beings should take place without technological intervention. That way that animating principle, spirit, soul, whatever you want to call it, can enter the body.

If humans are the ones to create new humans, then they would be responsible for providing that animating principle, spirit or soul, which makes us wonder whether it's appropriate for humans to take on a task that has always been seen to be the province of a divinity, or at the least, Nature. Part of the problem is that we don't know how to make a soul. We doubt whether we can do so. And even if we were to succeed in doing so, how would that make us any different than the countless other species on the earth? If humans are no longer special, then what's it all for?

At least that's how I read some of the arguments against thinking machines. I'm simplifying a bit, and perhaps conflating different arguments, but what it really comes down to is a blurring of the boundaries between human and anything else.



The fear of thinking machines that cross this boundary also strikes me as what's at the heart of fears about zombies (or Anne Rice type vampires, who are imagined to be dead in a traditional sense, reanimated by their inclusion in the vampire species).

Zombies also blur that boundary between human and not-human. After all, many zombie movies ask the question of whether zombies still belong to the human race. Take the questions Fido raises, about whether the enslaved zombies are still human, the echoes of former lives in the zombies of Land of the Dead or the end of Shaun of the Dead, or even the pathos of the Frank's infection and his recognition that in a few short seconds he will become a danger to his daughter in 28 Days Later.

Of course 28 Weeks Later opens tomorrow (the reviews emerging today are mixed at best), which is probably one of the reasons I made the connection between Moravec's discussion of robots and the status of zombies. But zombies also blur the line between human and not-human, just as thinking machines would.

Robots and zombies. A strange mix, but when you think about it, they both share a troubled relationship with humans.

Bad combination

Computers can be frustrating.

People can be frustrating.

People using computers in a way that doesn't work = extra frustrating.

The limitations of our brains

Apparently there is a linear correlation between ape brain size and troop size. In other words, the larger an ape's brain, the larger the size of the troop it naturally forms.*

Interesting.

Extrapolating from the ape data, that means humans would naturally form communities of no more than 200, which seems to actually be the case with self-contained non-hierarchical societies.


Apparently our brains can really only handle tracking that many individual personalities. In small groups, it's possible to know who to trust and who you can't because their reputation develops quickly and everyone knows it. If you've ever lived in a village or small town, you can see that happening quite naturally.

So how do we live in such large societies? Social roles. We've invented institutional roles e.g. priest, policeman, king, teacher, criminal, in order to create a kind of short-hand that allows us to live in such large groups. Instead of having to know thousands of individuals, we just need to know several hundred social functions. Of course we've had to develop a large set of rules and conventions to govern interactions between different groups, but by labelling people according to their position in society, we are able to interact with that many more people.

And of course we can switch from one category to another. And we occupy different social roles in different contexts. But as I think about it, I probably know the personalities of a couple hundred people (at most) but more than that would be overwhelming. Allocating some of the people I interact with to the shorthand of social roles certainly makes it easier to deal with the large groups we live in.

It also makes it easy to forget how many people we really do live with. I know as I go through life, I really only pay attention to the people who I come in contact with. I forget that there are hundreds, or thousands, or even millions, standing in the wings, where I can't see them. They're going through their lives the same way I am - interacting with only a tiny portion of the number of people in a given space.

It's easy to forget that everyone of those apartments in that block is home to at least one person. As I drive by the apartment block, all I see is the building, one of many that I pass on my journey. Trying to imagine all those people in that building, multiplied by all the buildings I might drive past on one short trip to the store would be mindboggling. The numbers alone get large very quickly, let alone trying to imagine personalities to go with all those bodies. No wonder we only attend to a small portion of the population that we interact with. Otherwise we'd spend all our time worrying about social interactions.

Our brains are limited in this capacity to deal with information. Even with external brains like address books, PDAs, or even business card collections, we are often reduced to this kind of short hand to organize all the social interactions we have in a given day. I guess it's not a bad thing, just an interesting human limitation.

*Hans Moravec's Robot: Mere Machine to Transcendent Mind p4

Comics

I know I complained about learning all kinds of new software programs a while back, but mostly I was just grousing about having to learn so much in so little time. What I have learned is some pretty cool stuff.

One of the software programs I've been learning is called Comic Book Creator. It's a pretty neat little program that provides templates for creating comic book pages (or whole comic books for that matter) either from stock images, or your own photos or sketches.


We're using the program to create introductions to a series on personal finance for youth. We figured the comic book format might be one way of engaging the young adult user's attention, and the images are accompanied by an audio track featuring the voice of the character who walks user's through each of the modules of the program.

The one on the left is the introduction to the module on employment deductions and benefits.

It's been great fun learning to use the program but I quickly realized that writing a comic book - even if it's with mouse clicks and drag and drop rather than a pen - is a very different kind of writing than anything I've ever done before. And since I never read comics as a kid (only as an adult - yes, I do do a lot of things backwards...) I felt like I didn't have a really good idea of what makes a good comic book.

So I turned to Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics for some hints about what makes a good comic. If you have any interest in comics (or graphic novels if you prefer that label), McCloud's book is an excellent read. It's a combination of history, art lesson, reading theory and entertainment. It taught me a lot about what kinds of things work best in comics. I certainly didn't exploit all of them when creating the visuals for our project - I was more concerned about reaching our learning objectives and hitting the points we wanted to in each section - but it was interesting to read how different comics are from literature.

For example, in literature, the more detail one gets, the more one tends to identify with the protagonist, particularly in first person narration. But in comics, McCloud showed that the more detail the artist provides - the more specific the character's features become - the less the reader identifies with the character. It's a case where "everyman" emerges most strongly through a lack of detail, rather than the wealth of detail that usually creates character identification in literature.

I suppose there are some cases where a sparse narrative could create a sense of identification with the character in literature, but I can't think of any off the top of my head. If you think of one, let me know, because there's part of my dissertation that will engage with this question of detail and character association, and I'd hate to have egg on my face about this proposition...

But learning to put together a comic book page has been lots of fun, even if I complain about how much work it's been!

He's back!

It's that time of year again.

Dracula Blogged is starting up again. If you've never read Stoker's novel, or you want to re-read it, the blog format is a really fun way to read it.

If you're bored with Stoker, you can always check out other literature-turned blogs, such as Samuel Pepy's diary. (Again, a very different reading experience than in book format)

The real Computer Monster

This is such an amusing video on so many levels!

The names of each component that cookie monster eats are fabulously idiosyncratic, and the machine's careful inventory of associated costs for each part speaks volumes about the connections between economics and technology.

But mostly it's just fun because it's cookie monster!

Encounters with beasts

Today was the first time I'd gone trail running in several years. In the Boston area, there just aren't very many trails.

Luckily, there's Nose Hill Park. But man! does it have a lot of ups and downs!

When we were first looking for places to live, we looked at one place that was only a few blocks from the park - that would've been really nice. But I live much farther away now. So I have to drive to get to the park now. Today I remembered to bring running gear when I went to the city so I stopped in on the way home.

At a little more than 11 square kilometers, the park dwarfs Central Park in NYC (which is only 3 1/2 square kms), and has the added bonus of no muggers!

There are however plenty of off-leash areas, which is fine most of the time, though at one point I was approached by a dog whose owner was nowhere in sight. It looked friendly, and turned out to be so, but it gave me a moment's pause, especially after reading a story in the paper last week about a jogger who needed stitches after being attacked by two dogs.

I've started carrying my cell phone while running for just that reason (and because I'm a bit of a klutz and you never know when I'll injure myself). In the newspaper article, the woman also had a cell phone with her and called 911, but she was busy enough fending off the animals that she couldn't make her location understood to the dispatcher on the other end. In her case, it was passersby who saw her dilemma and called for the help that arrived.

Maybe it's a bit paranoid, but anytime I encounter a dog not on a leash, I wonder what it will do when it encounters me. I've had several such encounters. Most of the time the dog is uninterested, but I've also had unattended dogs try to play or give chase, and it always gets me wondering what would happen if the dog I encounter doesn't want to play.

But on the trails there were nothing but friendly dogs, and even a couple of white-tailed deer who ran off with their tails held high when I came near. I realized how much I miss the additional challenge that trail running presents.

But boy do my glutes hurt now after all those hills!

Not so sneaky neighbour

I had to giggle at my neighbour's actions a moment ago. I was in the kitchen getting more coffee, when I heard a power tool start up.

Just outside my window, the neighbor was cutting branches off a bush that overgrows from our property onto hers. She cut four or five branches off, bagged them up, looked around, then disappeared back into her garage.

I think she was trying to be sneaky about it.

They did their yardwork this weekend. Several hours of it with various power tools. So why didn't they trim this bush then? I can only assume it was because they didn't want me to know they were trimming it.

Which of course made me laugh, because I really don't care what she does with the branches that overgrow her property. And if she'd bothered to ask, I would've told her to cut away!

Not to mention she wouldn't make a very good spy because she hasn't noticed that for the last eight months we've been living here that I work from home.

But such an example of human folly (silliness?) made me giggle at its absurdity.

Lapses

Haven't been posting much. Partly because I've been busy after the Boston trip. Not only with catching up on the work I didn't get done while gone but with trying to respond to all the great feedback I got on the work I presented while there. So posts have been sparse. I won't promise there'll be more in the next while, but I am aware I've been a mostly-absent blogger.

Translating life into celluloid

Spent most of yesterday shooting interview segments for a project we're working on (furiously, since it's due to be finished ASAP!)

I played the part of interviewer, which was a lot more fun and interesting than I thought it would be. Waking up Friday morning, I wasn't really looking forward to the day. I was a bit nervous about the interviewees - both of whom I'd never met, only chatted to via email - and I was really hoping we would get the footage we wanted out of the session.

I was also nervous because the last time we taped a segment for this project, there were several logistical hiccouphs, and I didn't want to go through those hassles again.

It certainly didn't help that the first thing my boss says to me when we get there is that one of the interviewees called another project member (who isn't even closely involved in the project anymore) to say that he wasn't coming. I was a bit annoyed, since I'd sent the guy an email at the beginning of the week, and called the day before to confirm, only to have to leave a message saying call me if there are any concerns. But he didn't call me - he called this other guy who wasn't even going to be there for the shoot!

And finding out I was down to two interviewees instead of three made me even more nervous that I wasn't going to get all the footage I wanted.

I'm really glad the cameraman we regularly use is well experienced, because he often has some really good ideas for getting what we want out of any taping. Yesterday was no exception. In fact, at one point I had to laugh because he threw out this great question, which yielded a really good answer from the interviewee that will be perfect for the project!

When I complimented him on the question, he looked a bit puzzled then told me he hadn't made that question up - it had been on my question list all along! Sure enough, I looked through the list again and realized I had indeed written that question. And it was a damn good one. Fancy that! Guess that's what happens when you write the questions months in advance of the actual taping...

Now I just had to wait for our camera guy to sort through the footage, clean it up a bit, and then we'll select the parts we really want to use.

Disappointed but not surprised

Disappointed at the Flames loss in double overtime of game 6 to be eliminated from the playoff race. Not surprised. They've been playing hot and cold all year and really need to get their away game under control. But there's always next year...

Maybe now I'll get more work done... though this elimination comes just before soccer season starts, which means weekends full of games...

Hot Fuzz

My daughter tells me this sounds like the name of a Killers album, so she got confused when I first told her we'd gone to see it.

Since I loved Shaun of the Dead (I still need to figure out a way to write a paper on it... maybe next year's PCA...), I figured this movie might also amuse.

It certainly isn't the same movie, but there's enough shared talent between the two that if you like Shaun of the Dead, you're bound to like Hot Fuzz. But if you found the dark humour of Shaun of the Dead too much, or even bordering on too much, then you might not like Hot Fuzz.

The movie is darkly humorous. There were several times that I found myself laughing while thinking "I really shouldn't be laughing at this" but the humour was enough to overcome the internal censor and we laughed through the movie. But like I said, you gotta have a dark sense of humour. Take the movie too seriously, and it crosses over from funny to horrifying.

Learning curve...

I'm sitting here utterly puzzled by an email that my boss just sent me. He and our communications guy are talking about the webpage where all the stuff I'm creating will be hosted. That's fine. And as far as I'm concerned, they can chat all they want. I don't really care about the details of the web design. I just create and "manage" the content.

BUT, they're asking for my input. And I've never put together a webpage before (I really don't think playing with Blogger's templates counts) so I really don't feel like I'm qualifited to say anything. If I'd actually made a webpage, I'd jump in with my opinion, but I don't really have the time to learn that skill right now.

I've already learnt four new software programs for this job - all cool, and I'm glad I know how to use them, but still time consuming - and I don't think I have time to learn web page design... even by template.

We're already on a time crunch with this project because it got delayed and we had to ask for an extension from the funder just to try to scramble to finish it.

And because we're in a time crunch situation, I've been asked to convert some art work to flash for the web page. How'd I get myself roped into this, you ask? Well, in the past we've used another guy to do it, but he's backed up, and since I have the software that can (should?) be able to do this (it was part of a package that I haven't yet used), I'm going to give it a try once I get the artwork. But that will make software package #5 to learn.

Now, of all the people out there, I'm the last person to balk at learning something, but I'm starting to get some kind of strange ennui, a kind of software-learning fatigue... Wish me luck figuring out an answer to this email...

LETS GO FLAMES!

Probably the best compilation video I've seen to date.

Travel Notes

Back home. Nice to sleep in my own bed. As wonderful as the best host can be, it's always better to be home.

My friend AK writes these wonderful travelogues anytime she goes somewhere. I can't say I have the same gift. (Perhaps she'll write one when she moves to her new fabulous job?) But there were a few moments to ponder.

While waiting by the baggage carousel - between Immigration, which we'd just passed through, and Customs, which we had yet to clear - we had the following conversation:

Daughter one: "Okay, I just heard someone say the word 'purgatory'"
Me: *laugh*
Daughter two: "What's purgatory?"
Me: "It's the place where you wait to go to heaven or hell."
Daughter two: nods in understanding

At one point in a very long security line, I distinctly heard someone whistling the circus tune, you know the one, the calliope speciality... made me giggle.

Pop quiz: What's worse?

A little kid who kicks the back of your seat for the entire flight because they don't know any better?
Or a really tall man who constantly kicks the back of your seat because he can't comfortably fit in coach?

Whew!

So the grad conference is over!

For the most part, I'd say it was a success. There are always things that you wish had gone better, but most of the things that I wasn't happy with were the kinds of things that you can't do differently because they depended on the people-factor that you don't have control over.

Looks like we'll probably do this again next year... though I'm not sure if I'll be of use to them or not.

I thought tomorrow was going to be the hard one...

Today was one of those days that you can't wait to have end. It feels like nothing has gone right, which is frustrating in itself, but when you're not on home turf, there's no place to really retreat to so it's hard to recuperate.

It's been a combination of illness, bad transit connections, bad phone connections, technology that's not working, and a sense that I'm just all alone in all of it.

At times like these, all you can do is duck your head, keep going, and pray for sundown... Let's hope the conference tomorrow goes smoother than today!

This is the best part of it all

“It’s interesting that science fiction emerges right at the time when science and literature are diverging”

Yes. Certainly. This is an interesting observation. But aside from an interesting throw-away kind of comment that one might insert into some kind of literary cocktail party chatter, what are the implications of this observation?

And more importantly, WHY did science fiction emerge right at the time when science and literature diverged? I hadn’t really thought about the why of this question till tonight, when I had a couple of 18th century specialists point out that literature and science was certainly alive and well in the 18th century, long before the end of the 19th when science fiction is supposed to have emerged.

Now it’s true that Frankenstein and The Last Man might be legitimately called science fiction, but it strikes me that there is a difference between those novels and the ones of say H.G. Wells and his followers. I’ll try to describe some of those differences in what follows.

I don’t want to get into a discussion of genre, but I did spend much of the bus ride back to the hotel after this question came up over pizza pondering why science fiction did emerge right about when science was trying to distinguish itself from literature. (I think it’s safe to propose that it was science that did the leaving in this relationship, even if both agreed that it was time for it to go.) In the late nineteenth century, science certainly was trying to distinguish itself from literature, mostly because it saw the activities of literature as being too close to its own 18th century roots, where scientific arguments were often based on metaphysical arguments. In the 19th century, there’s a return, or a real embracing, of Baconian principles of empiricism and proof as the bedrock of scientific advancement. (I’ll leave aside Popper’s complication of empiricism and hypothesis for now since I don’t want to tangle with the philosophers and he comes along later anyway…)

So one of the things that scientists in the 19th century are trying to do is to distance themselves from metaphysics and philosophy and create disciplines that can stand rigorous experimentation. (Not that many of the nineteenth century scientists were rigorous – just look at scientific race theory of the period!) But that doesn’t seem to me to offer an explanation of why science fiction arises during this period.

One possibility that occurs to me is that science fiction was a kind of apologia for science, a way of explaining it to the layman, now that it was becoming a specialized set of disciplines that no longer catered to the everyday person in plain language. The generation of jargon, and emergence of specialized scientific societies that spent more time conducting internal meetings than publishing their results for a lay audience tended to give science the appearance of secrecy. Some 19th century scientists like Sir Francis Galton even encouraged such secrecy and imagined scientists as a superior category of social being, almost priest-like in their power to explain the world.

I suppose science fiction is in some way an apologia for science, but so often in the science you find in say Wells, there’s less cheerleading and more cautionary tale, with narrators who stand outside the scientific establishment trying to understand it. I’m particularly thinking of the Island of Dr. Moreau here, but even something like The Time Machine or some of his short stories like The Star might even be appropriate texts for this purpose.

In the case of these kinds of texts, the engagement with science presents the reader with a set of consequences if a particular scientific discovery or trend is followed through to one conclusion, and it leaves the reader to decide whether or not this would be a good thing to happen in the future or not. There’s lots of science fiction that does this, particularly in the subgenres of dystopia/utopias – think 1984 or even Brave New World for particularly potent examples.

But even so, why is the science still a big part of these texts? In The Time Machine for example, the whole difference between Eloi and Morlocks is a comment on a growing division between leisure and working classes. But then why is there so much more to the text? Why the descriptions of the other trips? Why the fairly involved description of the far future in which the sun is dying? If the text is supposed to just be a criticism of contemporary (19th century) social dynamics, why the rest of the physics? I think part of the answer lies in a similar text – Fritz Lang’s Metropolis – and how it visualizes the same situation of workers below and leisure class above.

But I’m still left asking the question, why now? Why does science fiction emerge just as science and fiction begin to diverge as categories?

It may just be that I’m partial to “technology” as an answer because my work is so involved with technology, but I’ve gotta wonder if it’s more than just science that’s at work in the emergence of science fiction. Perhaps it should be called “techno-fiction” or something like that, since it strikes me that there’s a different set of technologies at work in 18th century science than there is in 19th century science, and perhaps it’s the technology that’s at the heart of the difference between literature and science in the 18th and 19th centuries. After all, when Lang imagines this divide between working and leisure classes, he does it specifically through the context of machinery and a robot.

But to get back to the distinction between the centuries, I’m not saying there’s no technology in the 18th century – of course not! Shelley’s creature couldn’t come to life without the practical apparatus that puts the science of electricity into a format that can be exploited to make people’s lives easier. (I realize this is a pretty bare bones definition of technology, but I’m more interested in technology’s proximity to techne than to machines)

Technology certainly grows during the nineteenth century, but the way that it grows isn’t particularly spectacular. I’ve read theorists who have wondered at the relative lack of scientific fervor surrounding the Crystal Palace exhibition in the middle of the century, but I think what might be missing in such an argument might be the global implications of technology development that go beyond the boundaries of the center of the British empire. At home, technology perhaps wasn’t very spectacular. But reading through a list of inventions of the nineteenth century, I’m struck by how many of them could fall into the categories of transportation and telecommunications. Both are kinds of technologies that make the world a smaller place and bring us in close proximity with people who are very different from ourselves.

Now this is nothing new for the British; they’d been running roughshod over the rest of the world for a long time already, taking over large sections of land inhabited by other peoples. But when you’ve got a far flung empire that takes months to traverse, very few ordinary individuals come in contact with that far flung world. The empire is all just very theoretical – an “out there” that has no relevance for everyday life. But with the perfection of steam locomotives or the invention of the telegraph, it becomes much easier to connect to far away places. It’s no coincidence that Around the World in 80 Days is produced at the end of the nineteenth century!

I also think it’s no coincidence that the “invasion” narrative becomes popular shortly after the emergence of science fiction as a clearly identifiable genre. Technology is able to present science through a visual representation of the object – the machine, the gadget, the marvel – while the technologies that are being produced provide more and more people with encounters with strange and unfamiliar objects, people and places. Remember, although photography has its roots at the beginning of the nineteenth century, it’s only in the final decades with Eastman’s development of film to replace the photographic plate, that the medium really takes off and becomes a practical method for recording, including travel records and its use by ethnographers and anthropologists.

So I’m thinking that science fiction emerges just when science and literature begin to diverge because the professionalization of science presents itself in part through the marvels of technology. Scientists are able to secure their position as arbiters of a new form of knowledge – distinct from literature, history, philosophy, or other disciplines they may have associated with in the past – because they were able to embody that science in technology. In the period, the technologies that were most prominent were those that helped the expanding empire attain its goals of increasing its reach. But these also brought the English into closer proximity with the non-English occupants of those colonies. So there’s a general anxiety about the shrinking of the world that these technologies are bringing into being.

We thus end up with the “science and technology” phrase that seems so prevalent. When was the last time you heard someone talk just about science after all? It seems more and more that technology – the practical application of science – is inseparable from that science. When we want to distinguish between science-technology and science that is free from practical application we call the latter “pure science” as if technology adds a taint that science needs to free itself from. But no one does talk about “science” as a stand alone term. It is either science-technology or pure science, but no longer just science.

That’s one of the reasons why I think technology is actually the thing that drives the development of science fiction in the nineteenth century. There is something about the practical application of science (embodied in technology) that ignores the softer side of it, the social implications of those developments, and it is those social applications that science fiction seems to want to engage with. Through literature, the ethical and social implications of science, and its technologies, can be communicated with the general public, presented to them to debate their relative merits and to perhaps even though such contemplations, form the future trajectory of further scientific developments. Maybe that’s why science fiction emerges just when science and literature are diverging. Because what’s going on as science diverges from literature is that it is becoming embodied in technology, and maybe this embodiment means that there’s a lost opportunity to think about science as before, in a metaphysical way. Maybe science fiction offers the opportunity to look beyond the technology that science produces to examine some of the larger problems surrounding it. Maybe it’s not the very best answer, but maybe, just maybe, it’s a start.

Sometimes the technology ain't so hot

So as you might have figured out by now, I'm not at home. I've returned to Boston for a whirlwind of conferences, meetings, and other bureaucratic bits and pieces.

In the six months I've been gone, the MBTA has managed to make bus riding an even more unbearable experience than it used to be. How? By incorporating new technology.

They've produced a new "charlie" card that you pretty much need for any kind of getting around the city. They used to just have them for the T, but now the buses are all converted. You can still pay cash, but you can't transfer, so if you're going any distance, you need one of these cards. Problem is, buses are built different than subway stations.

At a subway station, if you're behind somebody whose card isn't scanning, you go to the next turnstile and presto! you're in. In a bus, there's only one entrance.

Yeah, you see where I'm going here... so some guys pass won't swipe means the rest of us are still standing outside the stupid bus waiting to get on. On top of that, the card swipe is also slower than the old bus pass swipe, or the passing over of a transfer.

Before, at some of the busier centralized stops, they would open both front and back doors, and you could show a pass or transfer to get on through the back doors. That way you load passengers twice as fast. That's not possible now, and even through the one door, things are slower because the cards don't scan well. I've seen it happen a handful of times in four bus rides, so you know it's happening all over.

When it gets bad enough the driver just waves the person through. I wonder how much money the MBTA is losing in equipment malfunction after they obviously spent a significant chunk of change converting the whole thing over?

Dilemma

I like visiting other places, and I like seeing people I like, but I hate the process of travelling. What's a girl to do?

Mostly I dislike air travel. I like it for the same reason as everyone else - the speed - but I dislike the lines, I dislike the strict requirements to have all my necessary paperwork all lined up, and I don't like the time in the aircraft. Too much close comfort with strangers. Even when travelling with family, there's just still too many strangers intruding into my space with their noise, their kicking the seat (how can you tell there were kids on the last flight) and yes, even their smells.

But I like attending conferences. And I like the fact that I'll get to see friends. But the process of getting here always makes me nervous, annoyed, and usually leaves me feeling ill.

It doesn't help that Boston is uncharacteristically cold for April and will remain so the entire time we're here.

So it's a dilemma for me. I hate travelling, but generally like being other places. Unfortunately, to get to other places, you gotta travel...

Patience is a virtue

So about three weeks ago, we started seriously shopping for a second vehicle (we'll have to return the truck we borrowed soon). We went down to the dealership, saw the model we liked in the actual showroom, and put a deposit on it.

Then we went home to decide if we were going to buy or lease it. Both options offered the same interest rate, so it was a matter of figuring out what was the best taxation scenario for us - it will be a work vehicle some of the time.

The salesman called us every day, and I told him the same thing every day for several days "we're still thinking about it".

When we finally decided, I called him. Turns out patience in making this decision was a good thing. In the time while we were thinking, the manufacturer dropped the lease rate by 2% and the federal government announced a $1000-2000 rebate on all energy efficient vehicles sold, starting that day.

Nice, eh?

So we're paying much less for the lease as well as getting a rebate from the government to encourage us to buy this car. How cool is that?!

And the car? One of these


(no, that's not my house - it's a stock photo, but it is the same model and colour as the one we bought)

I think people in Calgary can relate

Letter to the Transport Authority

Gentlemen:

I have been riding trains daily for the last two years, and the service on your line seems to be getting worse every day. I am tired of standing in the aisle all the time on a 14-mile trip. I think the transportation system is worse than that enjoyed by people 2,000 years ago.

Yours truly,
A Commuter


Dear Sir:

We received your letter with reference to the shortcomings of our service and believe you are somewhat confused in your history. The only mode of transportation 2,000 years ago was by foot.

Sincerely,
The Railroad


Gentlemen:

I am in receipt of your letter, and I think you are the ones who are confused in your history. If you will refer to the Bible, Book of David, 9th Chapter, you will find that Balaam rode to town on his ass. That, gentlemen, is something I have not been able to do on your train in the last two years.

Yours truly,
A Commuter

"The head casket, please..."

Fido is one of the better films I've seen recently. That's not to say I see a lot of films, because I don't see more than the average person, but if you asked me for a recommendation, I'd tell you I really enjoyed Fido.

Now it's true, I like zombie movies... but this is a very different kind of zombie movie. The premise of the story is that a radioactive particle shower from space sweeps across the earth (can anyone say H.G. Wells or John Wyndham?), causing all the previously dead people to come alive. The Zombie Wars ensue, with municipalities then fenced and gated to keep the zombies outside. But this radioactivity of course remains, so that anyone who dies even within the compound, comes back as a zombie. Funerals thus become expensive because you have to purchase two caskets: one for the body, and the other for your head (which of course has to be cut off to prevent you from becoming a zombie). Hence the post title.

What makes the story absolutely delightful is that it takes place in a kind of alternate history 1950s, where moms stay home and bake pies, little boys innocently play baseball, little girls go to ballet or jump rope, and war heroes are bigger than life. The next door neighbor, a veteran of the Zombie Wars, is more Cary Grant than Rambo, to give you some idea of the tenor of the story.

Into the mix throw an ingenious scientist who invents a collar that suppresses the flesh-eating desires of zombies. Without the threat of him eating you, a zombie can be put to all kind of wonderful uses, and a new servant class is born.

Now, little Timmy has some questions about zombies, like whether they are dead or alive, but his father discourages any talk of zombies after having had to kill his own father who became a zombie. Thus "we don't talk about grandpa" matches the repressed gender role his mother is forced to play and his loneliness and need for a father (which in turn lead to several pitiful looks on Timmy's part).

Mom (played by Carrie Moss) decides it's about time they got a zombie; after all they're the only people on the block who don't have one, and Timmy grows close to the zombie (Billy Connelly of all people), who he names Fido.

Fido gets in trouble, and so does Timmy, but his relationship with his mother grows stronger, as does his affection for his zombie... in short, after a conflict, they all live happily ever after... well, most of them.

The movie wouldn't work the way it does if it wasn't set in what looks like our past. Imagining the same scenario in the future would just produce another stock zombie movie, but this one has a great balance of drama and comedy that made it a unique movie-going experience for us this weekend.

Who's in charge here anyway?

Does anyone else think this story about a school banning MySpace at school and at home ridiculous?

I have a hard time believing 99.9% of parents are behind this move. While I can understand the concerns about such social networking sites, as a parent I would rather the policing of my child's use of such sites come from me, not their school.

Have we really become so afraid of the big wide world out there that we're willing to let other people tell us how to parent too?

A Hard Day's Night of the Living Dead

I've found many of these remixed videos amusing over the years, but this one takes it to a new level. Hope you enjoy it too!

The Good Dog Walker

Finding myself living in a city in which dog walkers outnumber runners, I'd like to offer the following tips to those ubiquitous canine ambulators:

1. Pooper-scooper - I don't think I need to explain...
2. When walking a puppy or other high strung dog, put your body between it and the rapidly approching runner, who looks like a game of tag on a fast approach to a high spirited hound...
3. Pooper-scooper
4. A well behaved dog on a long leash is fine... until that leash extends more than 20 feet and I'm trying to negotiate a way over it.
5. Pooper-scooper

For my part, I promise to move to the edge of the pathway when passing, call out which side I'm on, and will otherwise do everything in my power not to excite, antagonize or otherwise bother your dog (or you). I'd call that fair...

To con-fer

I spent the last two days - very LONG days actually - at a grad conference.

About halfway through the first day, I found myself thinking "I've been to so many conferences already... why have I never been to a grad conference?... this stuff is great!"

It might help that it was held at my alma mater, so I knew some of the profs who stopped in, and I actually got the chance to chat with my MA advisor, who I haven't seen for years because she was on sabbatical and then on another leave, so she hasn't been as active in the department in the last little while. She didn't recognize me at first, but then when she did, she was very generous and kind, asking about my program now and inviting me to come by and chat with her about my current projects, which I'm certainly going to take her up on! (this despite the fact that my dissertation is no longer anywhere near her area of expertise!)

I also got an offer from one of the organizers to forward their 'to do' list to help us with our grad conference we're organizing for next month, which will also be a huge help with our own efforts to get this thing going.

But that wasn't the best part of it.

The best part was the students and the presentations. There were some really exciting papers, and the only one that I found really difficult to follow (and thus not terribly interesting) was the one in French. My French isn't good enought to have gotten more than the most rudimentary sense of what the paper was about. If I'd been able to read it, perhaps I would've gotten more, but my mastery of the spoken language is minimal, so I didn't get much out of it.

There was a woman presenting on the novel - Never Let me Go - that I'm presenting on next month at another grad conference, so I was really interested in her talk. Her title hadn't given any hint about what she was talking about, but I recognized the epigraph she began with right away, making me perk up at the end of a long day... Her approach is of course different than the argument that I'm making in the paper I'm presenting, but since I'm also going to be writing about the same novel in the dissertation - which is the whole reason for a dry-run discussion of it at a conference - I'm going to check out the theory she used to see whether it might also suit my purposes.

That was probably the only presentation that intersected with my own research interests, but there were many other presentations that I found fascinating as well, including one from another former MA student now returning as a doctoral student. We did recognize each other, but he was in the creative writing program and I in the literature program, so we'd never been in the same classes, but it was neat to hear what another graduate of the program was doing.

And the best part was the Q&A period. See, at most conferences I've been to, even the most collegial of ones always run the risk that the questions from the audience will not be true questions, but some pompous academic taking the opportunity to spout on about their own research. Those kinds of questions get really boring, both for the other audience members as well as the presenter; and they take up time that others who might have genuine inquiries could be using to ask those questions.

Even my paper went over quite well. Considering I was the very last person on the program, ending my talk only moments before the promise of free pizza in the campus pub (on St. Paddy's day on top of that), I actually got several questions and comments, and the back and forth that the discussion generated seemed to result for a genuine engagement with the paper. It was a very positive experience! Certainly much better than my second conference experience where the only question I got after my presentation was along the lines of "Are you related to so-and-so? Because I'm looking for my sister who was adopted a birth and I was hoping you were her" Huh? How is that a question worthy of the Q&A after a presentation? Ugh!

But that was another story. Yesterday's presentation went very well, and I was immensely pleased! Now all I'm hoping is that the conference we're holding next month will come off even half as well...

What does the world need another English major for?

This was a question I asked myself many times even while I decided to major in English literature. I wondered how useful such a degree might really be in the real world.

Today I was in a room with three people who majored in English: a music producer, a project manager, and a tv/radio personality.

... I guess the world can use English majors after all!

How bizarre, how bizarre

Sunday, I went running in shorts and a t-shirt.

Today I shovel snow.

There's a saying in Calgary: "If you don't like the weather, wait 5 minutes"

40 days

In 40 days, all this conference stuff will be over. Whew!

Not really the proverbial 40 days, but it did find it an interesting coincidence when I added them up that today was the day I decided to blog the conference.

So, in 40 days, the interdisciplinary grad conference that we decided to launch this year, will be over - success or failure, it will be over. When I signed up for this thing, I underestimated the nature of the work. Not the amount, but the way it's been spread out and the length of time it seems to take to check any one thing off the to do list.

It of course doesn't help that I'm 3,000 miles away from all the other committee members. It also doesn't help that we've never done this before, so none of us are really clear on what needs to be done. And we spend a lot of time telling each other what we're envisioning... or at least I do. It seems to take forever to email ideas back and forth, waiting for people to read their email and have time to respond to it.

But it is coming together. We do have a really good group of people working together. And it's funny how my expectations for the group haven't necessarily panned out. Group members are responding differently than I expected them to, which makes for an interesting dynamic.

The biggest challenge is everyone's busy-ness. We've divided all the tasks into groups and everyone has taken on a chunk, but for some people, that means they're doing a lot during one short period of time (including all the post-conference stuff that'll need to be done!) It makes it challenging. So does the long distance. But I'm trying to be patient, and not count the number of emails I send trying to stay in the loop. Hopefully once it's all done, we pull this thing off and don't have to think about it till next year (which is whole different story right there)!

Hockey thought of the day

A hockey player without a stick is a bit like a one-legged soccer player.

For rebeckler

Because another one is scheduled to roll into town tomorrow and to answer rebeckler's question of what's a chinook? (I think she had at least four ???? though, and yes, you guessed right that it's a wind), I dug up the following:

According to the Weather Network:

The term Chinook comes from an Indian word which means snow eater. The Chinook wind is a warm, dry wind that descends the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains and sweeps across the foothills and other parts of Alberta. When it moves over heavy snow cover, it can melt and evaporate a foot of snow in less than a day. Also, the temperature rises sharply, sometimes over 20 degrees Celsius in one hour. On average, southern Alberta gets 20 to 30 Chinook days per year.

Wikipedia's entry for Chinooks in Alberta is interesting, including the following facts:

In most recent winters (since the 1980s), chinooks and warmer weather have all but banished winter to just a few spells of sharp cold of one or two weeks, and some midwinter months have averaged high temperatures over 5°C (41°F), similar to the West Coast of British Columbia, where Canada's warmest winters are found.
In Lethbridge, chinook winds can gust in excess of hurricane force (120 km/h or 75 mph). The winds gusts can be strong enough to shatter car windows through air pressure differential. On November 19, 1962, the winds there gusted to 171 km/h (107 mph) in an especially powerful chinook.
In Pincher Creek, the temperature rose by 33°C (60°F) in one hour in 1962. Also, trains have been known to be derailed by chinook winds there.
Calgary is also well known for getting many chinooks, as the Bow Valley in the Canadian Rockies west of the city acts as a natural wind tunnel funneling the chinook winds.

For some, the chinook is a mixed blessing. While it's great to get relief from the cold, persistent chinook winds can fool plants into germinating thinking that spring has arrived, and the changes in air pressure can negatively affect people. Not to mention all that melting snow creates a heck of a lot of slush! The Mountain Field Guide notes some of the effects the Chinook winds can have on people and the landscape:

Relief from sub–zero temperatures
Highly strung people may begin to shake or fidget
Susceptible people may get headaches or suffer nervous disorders
Psychologically, many people fell “better”
Wood may split due to extreme dryness
Fire hazards are increased
It may cause violent grass or forest fires, or cause small fires to spread quickly.

You can tell a chinook is around by the distinction chinook arch that forms in the sky above Calgary, which looks especially nice at sunset.

The newest thing in computing?

I've been reading Nicholas Negroponte's Being Digital, a book that's been recommended to me by several people, so I thought it was time to pick it up. I found the following passage interesting:

The general interface with personal computers has been treated as a physical design problem. But interface is not just about the look and feel of a computer. It is about the creation of personality, the design of intelligence, and building machines that can recognize human expression... The challenge for the next decade is not just to give people bigger screens, better sound quality, and easier-to-use graphical input devices. It is to make computers that know you, learn about your needs, and understand verbal and nonverbal languages... The burden of interaction today has been placed totally on the shoulders of the human party. Something as banal as printing a computer file can be a debilitating exercise that resembles voodoo more than respectable human behaviour.

Having recently purchased a replacement computer with Windows Vista (the only choice outside of going with Mac), this debilitation is making itself felt. For example, our (new!) printer does not have the drivers for Vista, meaning we cannot print directly from the new computer!

Sad thing is, Negroponte wrote that passage in 1995. We're now past the decade during which he proposed that we make computers more useful, and they've become more of a burden on the human user than ever before! At least with my C64, I knew exactly what I was getting and if I didn't know how to get it, I knew I had to go back to my BASIC code book and figure it out. Now? I haven't a clue. I can turn in on, then I usually just hope for the best!

Innocence and precocity

Answers provided by Grade 2 students:

What's the difference between moms & dads?

1. Moms work at work and work at home & dads just go to work at work.
2. Moms know how to talk to teachers without scaring them.
3. Dads are taller & stronger, but moms have all the real power 'cause that's who you got to ask if you want to sleep over at your friend's.
4. Moms have magic, they make you feel better without medicine.

What does your mom do in her spare time?

1. Mothers don't do spare time
2. To hear her tell it, she pays bills all day long.

What would it take to make your mom perfect?
1. On the inside she's already perfect. Outside, I think some kind of plastic surgery.
2. Diet. You know, her hair. I'd diet, maybe blue.

If you could change one thing about your Mom, what would it be?

1. She has this weird thing about me keeping my room clean. I'd get rid of that.
2. I'd make my Mom smarter. Then she would know it was my sister who did it and not me.
3. I would like for her to get rid of those invisible eyes on the back of her head.

CYA

So I had this long rant about my job that I - thank god - saved as a draft after writing because, well, that's what drafts are for - to let you cool down before posting or sending something disastrous. Now the post itself wasn't particularly disaster-causing and not even very caustic. It was even rather nicely constructed, and dare I say a tad witty... of course I can say that, you've never seen it so you have to take my word for it!... But I decided it prudent not to publish it.

Suffice it to say I've been busy... and not always in a good way.

Today I did something new. Do I dare admit it?

Sure, why not?

Today, I created a series of powerpoint slides. There. Now I've admitted I've never used powerpoint before. Yes, I know. Everyone has used powerpoint. Even little children know how to use powerpoint. Your dog probably scratches out his requests for walks and doggie treats using a powerpoint presentation complete with sound and graphics.

But I've never used it. That is, till today.

It's a pretty nifty program, though it is constraining in its formatting, regardless of how many choices you're offered. That's part of the reason I've never used it before. I've sat through too many powerpoint presentations that bored me out of my mind. I never wanted to inflict such boredom on others.

In an effort at full disclosure, I wasn't actually creating a presentation today. What I was doing was creating individual slides that I could then save as JPEGs so that they can be mated with the video and audio files we'll be producing for our latest project. So I didn't mess with slide transitions, or animations, or sound, or anything like that. But for a first time, it was kinda fun. Maybe I'll have to rethink my aversion to the program...

Fainting Goats

It was one of those 'you have to be there' moments, but these fainting goats came up in conversation at a party last night. So I thought I'd share them.

Snow is definitely worse than sand

Certainly as a vacation destination, I'll take sand over snow pretty much any day. But I suppose that's because I grew up in snowy climates.

But that's not what I was thinking about today. I was thinking that snow is definitely worse to run in than sand. Easier than in sand above the tide line, but definitely more difficult than sand below the tide line. Not only is the snow an obstacle and a shifting surface that you have to negotiate, the additional challenge of snow is that the snow we have now has been subjected to wind and sun since it fell, so it has a little bit of a crust on the top. But it's not thick enough that you can run on top of the snow. So when you run through it, the crust makes the slippage of your foot as you break it unpredictable. First you lurch to the left, then the right, then the heel, then the toe. It breaks your cadence and makes for a challenging run, that's for sure.

I was so excited about the possibility of running outside again. A chinook has finally blown in after some below seasonal temperatures, and the snow has stopped falling after a week of constant shovelling. The city here is really pretty good about clearing the walking trails, so I figured it would be the perfect day to go.

Alas, the city very efficiently cleared the snow several days ago, but the south end of the canals is all exposed land - housing developments are non-existent or just beginning - so there was a lot of drifting. At first I hopped over the drifts, actually enjoying myself, but then I turned a corner and the pathway was nothing but drifts! After ten minutes of slogging through them to come to a clear path again, I came to the conclusion that I'd rather run on the beach, than in snowdrifts!

Famous Puppet Death Scenes - Scene: The Feverish Heart

We spent our weekend pleasantly, celebrating the mid point between birthday and Valentine's day. This production was one of the activities for the weekend.

Yes, I realize this is the third time in the last half year that I've blogged about a puppet production. It's really just coincidence, since I'm not deliberately seeking out puppet productions. This one - Famous Puppet Death Scenes - is a hard one to describe however, so I leave you to just enjoy the clip. We were delighted with the show, but it is so unique that there's no frame of reference to use when describing it. I first heard about it through an article in the newspaper describing how it was a big hit when it played in NYC, and since it's a homegrown group, that seemed all the more impressive.

I really do wonder why it seems puppets are so attractive right now - perhaps it has something to do with their materiality, or with the presence of the puppeteer within the production. I don't have plans to see any more puppet shows though, so you should be spared further puppet talk at least.