Is There Such Thing as Coincidence?

Here's a little revelation that we had last weekend over green beer.

Come summertime, 3 of us in my close circle of friends from the Tdot will be living far from home.

I will be living in Edmonton.
LMD will be living in London.
Cleavers already lives in Toronto.

All 3 of us will be living a great distance from our families.

My family is *effectively from Toronto.
LMD's family is *effectively from Edmonton.
Cleaver's family is *effectively from London.

(*Effectively in this instance refers to the fact that the closest international airport is in said city).

Each of us will therefore be able to visit one person when we go home, and the other when they go home. How weird is that... especially considering the great distance across the world that we will be moving?

How the View of the World Changes

I know that many of you who are reading this are going to know what I'm talking about: as soon as you learn that you are going to be teaching a certain class, the way that you view the world changes. How can you incorporate things that you know or see into your curriculum? How are you going to set up your course? If you were a student, what material would you want to know and how would be the best way to learn it?

This has now happened to me. Now, I've always had in the back in my mind the knowledge that I will eventually be teaching S & P. So that's taken care of: lots of examples and personal anecdotes for that one. But it turns out that one of the courses that I will be responsible for is Research Methods. Seeing as I haven't taken a research methods course since 1994/95, I only have a fuzzy recall about the actual content that one learns at this point of education. So for the past several weeks, I've been wondering: what am I going to teach?

Yesterday, after a conversation with Kevin, I have an idea. Well, Kevin gave me the idea, when he was hollering praises of Latex.

"Latex is awesome," he said. "I wish someone had forced me to learn it as an undergrad".

Thus my first course requirement was born: all students must submit documents as latex pdfs. This may seem like an unreasonable request, however, taking into consideration that:
a) Latex is freeware and available for all platforms
b) The learning curve of Latex can be steepened by supplying pre-formed templates, and
c) Many other sciences (eg. Physics, Computer Sciences) require all documents to be written in Latex,
I think this is a brilliant. It also eliminates all of the problems that people have with different formats of paper (how to adhere to APA formatting, for example), because it is built into the latex template.

Latex is also a great program because it teaches logic. A WORD PROCESSING program that teaches LOGIC.

Brilliant.

Hard to Believe in This Day and Age...

... when scientists are working towards storing all published books on a device the size of a pinhead and determining the function of the 3 billion chemical base pairs that consitute humanity, that only now has the first photograph of a Giant Squid in its natural habitat been caught:



First picture ever. Of an animal that is almost 10 metres long and that we've known about since ancient Grecian times. Pretty fucking cool.

I'm Drooling

So now I'm going to wait to get a new phone so I can get THIS
and at the same time, I may purchase one of THESE

Why can't I make more money?

What At Absolutely Numb Moron

Did anyone else see what that stupid fuck with his beady little eyes said this morning during his press conference?

"What I intend to do is lead an investigation to find out what went right and what went wrong," Bush said. "We still live in an unsettled world. We want to make sure we can respond properly if there is a WMD (weapons of mass destruction) attack or another major storm."

He ACTUALLY took this as an opportunity to push his own ridiculous agenda for WMDs. And he mentioned this BEFORE the possibility of another natural disaster. For Christ's sake, even his own father said that everything in New Orleans was FUBAR due to Federal incompetence.

Hey George, here's what went wrong: YOU. YOU went wrong. YOU are the one who took out funding from science and funnelled it into that debaucle overseas. YOU are the one that is responsible for ensuring that the lower-class citizens cannot afford any form of transportation or access to information in a convenient manner. YOU are the one who is not accepting help from any other countries, including Cuba (who has offered to send 1100 physicians but has yet received a phone call back). For fuck's sake: they're Communist. Accept it. Drop this retarded embargo and let them help.

The only good thing that will come out of the New Orleans disaster is that there isn't a chance in hell that the Republicans will win the next election. Only 3 more years.

Ahhh... Small Towns

Apparently, Mark (who indeed served me many nights at the Creamery) doesn't read my hometown paper, the St. Marys Journal Argus (See the upcoming events for Wednesday, August 31st). Kevin thinks they may be trying to be ironic. I know better.

An Ode to Mike the Chicken

Apparently, this is an allegory for Michelle and her Ultimate abilities (her words... not mine):



His name was Mike. He lived for 18 months. And, every year in Mike's hometown, they have a festival that is dedicated to him. Somehow, someday, I'm making a pilgrimage to Fruita, Colorado to play in the Mike the Headless chicken Golf tournament. I want the t-shirt.