Blessed by the Potato

We have something living under the front porch of our house. I don’t know what it is… originally I was thinking some small burrowing animal, since the hole was pretty small through the winter and early spring. But recently there’s been a lot of extra activity around that hole that makes me wonder. A few days ago, the extension cord we have plugged into the outdoor socket near the hole was dragged in, and rather forcefully at that: the cord had been pulled partly out of the socket, and it’s a pretty tight socket. I couldn’t think of any animal that would be very interested in taking an extension cord into their burrow: it’s not a very cozy object, it doesn’t shred into bedding well, it’s not edible, and it’s not even very good for lining the walls or blocking the door. Then, the hole was widened. Significantly. The dirt was cleared clean down to the concrete underneath the porch, and the 2×4 pieces of wood used to help hold the porch up were pushed out, all together making the hole nearly 10X the size it was just a few weeks ago. That could be due to whatever creature lives under there being big, or it could be that something else has tried to go after it down there…

Right now, the leading theory is that a large rabbit is living under there, with a raccoon or groundhog as a close second & third theory. In a distant fourth place is the thought that we have gnomes living under our deck. It explains the need for power, and the clean swept concrete. If I start seeing piles of copper bolts piling up outside the burrow, then I’ll know it’s gnomes (and also that they’re skilling up engineering, possibly to make a mechanostrider).

I woke up this morning (and here, I use the word morning very loosely, since it was actually 6 pm — a great night; I managed to get nearly 15 hours of sleep) and had a very peculiar realization. I’ve gone through the last few years of my life without any more Star Wars movies to anticipate. I knew that somehow, life had… changed… in the past few years, and that the future seemed just a little less bright. But never before had I quite been able to put my finger on it. Of course, I lived through similar times before (the 80’s and early 90’s), but back then we didn’t really know that more Star Wars movies were possible. The slow, measured release of prequels and alternative cuts had simply become a way of life for so long, that it’s tough to find the groove in life afterwards. There’s always the remote hope that the often-rumoured follow-up trilogy will be made (and in fact, considering the franchise is basically a money mint, and that there’s already enough source material in the books and video games to throw together a few movies, I’m surprised they aren’t already in production), but really, this is the shape of things to come.

I also realized that I now have pretty bad spring allergies. I’ve had bad ragweed/fall allergies for a long time, but this spring runny nose thing is pretty recent. I’m also amazed at Reactine. It’s such a tiny pill, yet it completely dries me out for a day. It really makes one respect the power of chemicals.

The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform has finished its deliberations and decided that Ontario needs an updated, fairer, more proportional electoral system. To keep the options simple, they’ve also deliberated on the alternatives and settled on Mixed Member Proportional. This fall, on October 10th, as part of the general provincial election, we will have a referendum on whether or not to change to this new system. The bar has been set high: rather than a simple majority, the Premier has stipulated that to change the electoral system, the vote must be at least 60% in favour provincewide, and at least 50% of the ridings must be in favour (that is, over half the people in over half the ridings). I’m hoping this will go through; while MMP wasn’t my preferred voting system, it’s still a big step up from first-past-the-post. Although party lists give me the heebie jeebies sometimes, at least the “proportional” part is kept to 30% of the seats. Of course, BC had a similar referrendum not too long ago, and despite being supported by a majority of the people, the motion died just short of the 60% threshold.

While there has been some media coverage of this long, slow process, it certainly isn’t at the forefront. I don’t even know if it will gain much (or at least, enough) ground in the collective consciousness for people to really know what the referendum is about when it falls upon them. So, I hope you all will learn about it, and start working it into your conversations at work and elsewhere… get people around you thinking about this sort of issue, and, hopefully, preparing to vote yes in the upcoming referendum!

Other news today out of the federal government is that they’re also planning on banning incandescent lightbulbs…

Finally, I’d just like to say that over at XKCD the algorithm constantly finds Jesus. The algorithm fears velociraptors, yet constantly finds them.

It’s been a long time since I’ve had to deal with rush-hour, weekday Toronto traffic, so when I faced that grim spectre yesterday I wasn’t really prepared for it. Of course, it was a particularly bad day, with several accidents on the 401, and an accident in the TTC shutting down the subway. Plus the nice spring weather meant construction popped up everywhere.

Nonetheless, I was really amazed at some of the crazy driving I saw. In particular, on Sheppard right at Doris a car was abandoned in the left lane (westbound), and that caused a major blockage all the way back to Bayview. Who just abandons a car like that, especially right at an intersection. It couldn’t have at least been pushed onto the less busy side street?

Then, a bit further on, there was a police car trying to make it through an intersection behind me. It took him about 10 seconds to clear the intersection because people just weren’t stopping or pulling over. I pulled over as soon as I saw the lights in my rear-view mirror (just over a block from the intersection — a few seconds of driving if he finally got a chance to get up to speed) and 3 cars passed me for it (this was on a single-lane, too)!

Well, I’m fast approaching the end of my first year in PhD studies. So far, it seems to be going a lot better than my Master’s ever did. I never got a scholarship for my MSc (aside from tuition support), and there was even some disagreement about whether or not I was eligible for one. The applications take a long time to write (think days), especially if it’s your first one and you don’t have anything writen to work off of, no choice quotes to incorporate. So I checked and asked to make sure I had the minimum 80% average (despite how well I did in some of my classes, my overall average was just scraping 80). I checked to see if my 2nd year organic chem or 3rd year biochemistry (taken in my 3rd and 4th years of undergraduate respectively, the years that count for calculating scholarship averages) would count against me, and if my 1st year anthropology would count for me. I was told the 1st and 2nd year classes wouldn’t count (which was good: orgo hurt me far more than anthro helped), and was especially bouyed by the 90% I had in my graduate level stats class. Needless to say, I was shocked to receive a letter after submitting my applications that I had basically wasted my time and wasn’t even eligible for a scholarship — apparently it wasn’t the average of my 3rd and 4th year classes like they said, but rather the courses I took in my 3rd and 4th years (so 2nd year orgo did count), and what’s much crazier, is that the MSc course I completed didn’t count, because they don’t start counting graduate courses until your second year (due to a preculiarity of starting in January, I was pretty much the only first-year MSc student with a graduate class).

So, in case you haven’t already heard, I’ve been offered 3 Ontario Graduate Scholarship awards already for my PhD (only one of which I was able to accept — it’s a neat trick of chronology and starting in May that let me apply twice for my first year :) and was just recently awarded an even more prestigious NSERC scholarship. Not only is it worth a fair bit more than the OGS, but it’s also a 3-year scholarship that’ll take me right to the end of my PhD. No more wasting a week in the fall just writing the application essays!

The first year of my MSc was neat, I learned a lot and got some neat prototypes built for another project… but had made no progress on my own research (just wasted some time trying one technique that didn’t work). In fact, a lot of the PhD comics cut a little too close to the bone for my MSc. By contrast, now I’m using clinical equipment (harder to schedule time, but it also has a much more comprehensive support plan — we can’t afford to have it go off-line) and there’s a lot more expertise within the group so I have resources to draw on. Already we’re running subjects and collecting data, which is really exciting! (Beyond the fact that I’m actually running subjects though, I can’t tell you what the data is, because that would be premature disclosure). In fact, one of the biggest obstacles I’m facing now is just getting people to come in late in the evenings or on the weekend as volunteers. It’s tough now that some of the first year students are minors, so we can’t just force them to volunteer to get marks in first year psych :(

I’ve even got some teaching experience now (as painful as that was at times)

Oh, and I now issue a public shaming for Joce & Steve. They were going to come to London and be our first visitors. We cleaned the house, got the guest bed set up, and even ordered in some nice weather… but they inexplicably cancelled on Thursday. For further background, Joce lives outside of Toronto, and Steve outside of Windsor. London is of course halfway between the two, so it wasn’t even hugely out of their way. The reason I got was “Also, by the time Sunday rolls around I just want to drive straight home and sleep in my own bed.” That’s pretty weak Joce, and for that: shame. I mean, here we’ve got this really cute house closer to Toronto than most of cottage country, halfway to Windsor and Detroit, and no one’s seen it. I just want to show it off (especially before summer sets in and we might have to face the prospect of bugs) and see my friends :( I mean, am I being unreasonable here? We’ve got friends who moved across the country to Vancouver, Ft. McMurray, Halifax and Thunder Bay, and they’ve all had more visitors than we’ve had in London. Would it help if I said that London has an airport, so you can fly if you’d rather not drive?

All kidding aside though, I can’t really blame you for not coming in, Joce. I mean, my own parents haven’t come in to see the place yet, and I’m the only one of my siblings who’s moved out so far. In the 4 years I lived in the apartment, I had 3 visits from each of my parents, and one of those was the move in! So if my parents, who regularly drive the same distance to the cottage (often going there and back the same day) haven’t come to visit, I can’t very well hold anyone else to task for not visiting. Like we say around here “London’s a great place to live, but I’d hate to visit there.”