Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

10 years in Toronto

I had a dream the other night where I flew back to Vancouver, opened up my computer, and then realized with great sadness that I didn’t have a lot of friends to reach out to there anymore. It has been a long time now since I have traveled a long distance or flown. I’ve certainly felt aware over the years that reticence or refusing to travel has had adverse impacts on my career as a civil servant and later as a PhD student. I could have stayed much more in touch with fellow Oxford alumni if I had made it back to England for my graduation and subsequently. My years of the MPhil in Oxford are now in some sense distant in my mind, though it was 2005-07. Those were intense years and a remarkable group of people, some of whom I continue to exist in social media friendships with and think of very fondly, albeit with the distance of many years and often some children as well on their part.

I’m glad to be steadily progressing toward measurable endpoints with the dissertation. Task 14/59 complete for necessary objective A, and so on. It creates a strange routine in life for me, but it’s probably more of a shifting of what has always been a strange routine in some ways. I can be more inclined to experiment just for the sake of novelty and curiosity than to try to maintain a strict routine, though I know some people live extremely happily in all sorts of other lifestyles.

Anyway, it’s all a demanding task and unaccountably tiring, but I think I will have a draft manuscript by early August.

Climate activists targeting a bank

Toronto350.org asked me to photograph their action outside the Toronto Dominion (TD) bank shareholder meeting downtown this morning, protesting continuing investment in fossil fuel projects.

The electrical system on my 5D3 flickered and died, despite fresh batteries. This is the first time I’ve ever really had to use the backup body, and my 5D2 rose appropriately to the occasion. I’ll take the 5D3 to a local camera service shop since I bought it used and it’s years outside of warranty.

April

I have one last blast of grading for my current TA contract: then I have dedicated the summer to completing my dissertation, getting chapters to committee members, implementing their proposed changes, and getting it defended as soon as possible.

I’ll be trying to write every day at home, starting with the completion of data analysis.

30 papers left

If the plan to finish the PhD by the end of August holds — along with the pattern of never getting a summer TA position — this batch of second year political science papers will be the last undergraduate essay grading I ever do.

That would be most welcome. While there is a nurturing sort of grader who focuses on finding something to approve of in each submission, my approach is to hold firm sets of criteria in mind for each range of grades and then work to fairly assign each paper to the right one based on the ways in which it is insufficient according to the criteria for a higher one.

Actually teaching people how to improve their writing would require a lot more one-on-one interaction than U of T provides. When students want to meet about their papers I set aside an hour for each one, which rapidly becomes unpaid since I am not assigned anywhere near that many hours for student contact. Still, it is worthwhile because it shows how students at every level of skill can benefit from detailed engagement with exactly what is expected in a university paper: whether that is finding a few scattered pieces of an argument that could have been presented in a convincing and well-supported way, or adding more nuance and consideration of counterarguments to a paper than is already very strong.

Understanding al Qaeda

I’m now halfway through Ali Soufan’s Anatomy of Terror: From the Death of Bin Laden to the Rise of the Islamic State. Like his earlier Black Banners it’s both informative and accessible, going into considerable detail on the motivations and internal deliberations and conflicts of jihadi terror groups. While Black Banners was much more about Soufan’s personal story, Anatomy of Terror is structured around the lives of a succession of important figures in the emergence of al Qaeda and the Islamic State, including Saif al-Adel and Abu Museb al-Zarqawi.

It’s important history to understand, especially from the perspective of analyzing western foreign and security policy over the last 15 years or more. I’ll post some especially interesting quotes one I get through with the book.

This sort of reading, which doesn’t relate directly to my teaching, coursework, or research, is a vital form of relaxation for me. It’s intellectually engaging and complex, but for me doesn’t produce much of an emotional response. I also find that I get through it very efficiently, in frustrating contrast to things which I really need to read but sometimes struggle to get through every paragraph and page of.

Rolling dice with neurons

One virtue of anxiety is sometimes you do come up with a new approach to solving a problem the 1000th time you think it over, even if you haven’t learned any pertinent information in the interim.

The new approach is probably bad, but at least the rate of new ideas never falls to zero and so there is a corresponding value, albeit with diminishing marginal returns, to rumination. When presented with complex, unforgiving, long-term problems, that may be indispensable.