What if?

My copy of Randall Monroe’s What if? book arrived from Amazon today, and I spent a pleasant couple of hours in the Upper Library going through it. Right from the disclaimer it is quite entertaining:

The author of this book is an Internet cartoonist, not a health or safety expert. He likes it when things catch fire or explode, which means he does not have your best interests in mind.

Toronto friends are welcome to borrow the book and learn about bullet-sized pieces of material with neutron star density; the effects of draining Earth’s oceans; the plausibility of eradicating the common cold through global quarantine; and similarly practical matters.

Love and counterintelligence

But here’s the point. He had made another choice too. He had decided to cast himself as the victim, the wronged, the deceived, the rightly furious. He had persuaded himself that he had said nothing to me about the laundry basket. The memory had been erased, and for a purpose. But now he didn’t even know he’d erased it. He wasn’t even pretending. He actually believed in his disappointment. He really did think that I had done something devious and mean. He was protecting himself from the idea that he’d had a choice. Weak, self-deluding, pompous? All those, but above all, a failure of reasoning. High table, monographs, government commissions – meaningless. His reasoning had deserted him. As I saw it, Professor Canning was suffering from a gross intellectual malfunction.

McEwan, Ian. Sweet Tooth. 2012. p. 31 (emphasis in original)

Related: Self Deception

Fall 2014 coursework

With two core seminars and some electives behind me, I am nearly done with my PhD coursework. The one PhD requirement I still need to meet is one term of political theory. To that end, I am planning to take “Markets, Justice and the Human Good” with Joseph Carens this term.

In order to satisfy the requirements of the Environmental Studies Collaborative Program, I will also be taking “Environmental Decision Making” with Doug Macdonald and Becky Raboy.

At the same time, I will be a teaching assistant for “Canada in Comparative Perspective” with Pauline Beange.

That should leave a reasonable amount of time for the main business of this year: producing a research proposal for my dissertation, assembling a committee, and getting the proposal approved by them and the department.