Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

Learning and teaching

Thesis proposal reading continues to dominate my information diet, but I bought a couple of unrelated books today.

Penny Le Couteur and Jay Burreson’s Napoleon’s Buttons — recommended by my friend Myshka — describes the influence of seventeen molecules on human history. I’m about 60 pages in and have been finding it entertaining and reminiscent of James Burke’s Connections television series (he also talks a lot about coal tar and the rise of synthetic chemistry) and Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire.

I also got Naoki Higashida’s Fall Down 7 Times Get Up 8: A Young Man’s Voice from the Silence of Autism, which was recently reviewed in The Economist.

Term time is rapidly approaching. In addition to my PhD research, I will be working as a teaching assistant for a second year “U.S. Government and Politics” course, which I did previously in 2013/14. I also applied for TA jobs in “Introduction to Peace, Conflict and Justice”, “Quantitative Reasoning”, and the “Canada in Comparative Perspective” course I have helped teach three times already. I’m done with coursework and comprehensive exams, so a double TA load should be manageable. It’s pretty important given that I haven’t had a paycheque since the spring, and my funding package as a sixth-year student is cut in half.

Expletives do not suffice

In one of my most boneheaded moves ever, I lost my wonderful Fuji X100s camera at the Canadian Political Science Association conference.

I was at a morning panel on “Natural Resources, Energy, and Climate” and because the desks were small I put it on the one behind me. At the end of the session, I walked to my next event, sat down, realized I didn’t have the camera, and rushed immediately back to find it gone.

I checked both the Ryerson and Congress lost and found locations and asked all the nearby staff members. I also emailed everyone on the panel, in case one of them picked it up.

The camera’s serial number is 33A04584 and it is clearly labeled in two places with my name and email address. Perhaps someone picked it up and has yet to contact me.

It’s an extremely painful thing to lose: worth about four months of my rent or well over a quarter of a year’s tuition. Over 4,000 photos I’ve taken with it since I got it in November 2013 are on Flickr.

[Update: 7:30pm] In a hugely relieving development, one of my fellow audience members — recently appointed to a tenure-track job at uVic — saw the abandoned camera, picked it up, and has now restored it to me.

Grading, writing, and applications

In the next couple of days I have a lot to wrap up.

For the ENV381 course where I’m working as a TA, I need to finalize the details of my assignment grades, calculate participation grades, and grade one last batch of final exams.

I am applying for three summer positions: internships with The Walrus and The National Post, and a Google Policy Fellowship at the Citizen Lab. They’re all long shots but worth a try.

Finally, I need to finish writing and editing my paper for the graduate ethics conference on May 5th.

I’m also trying to make the most of the last few meals of the term at Massey College.

The comfortable spring

As far as weather goes, this is the nicest time of year in Toronto. The days are long and bright and the temperature mostly varies between warm enough to be comfortable in a t-shirt to cool enough to be comfortable in a light jacket. It’s easy to spend hours outside, whether undergoing physical exertion or just sitting and reading. I keep the windows of my room open most of the time.