Lost Cookies

So one weekend ago, me and my friend baked Viennese crescents. But Lost nerds that we were, we made The Numbers. We burnt about half the baked goods but that’s besides the point.

Mug ‘n Jello

So if you’ve seen the episode of The Office where Jim puts Dwight’s stapler in jello, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Last week, one of my coworkers went on vacation and we attempted to do the same thing to his favourite mug. The above shot was taken when we were cooling the jello layer by layer so that the mug would be right in the middle.

Unfortunately, when we tried to take it out of the bowl, the jello split and that was the beginning of the end.

Next time, we’re using gelatin.

Winter Wonderland?

I love snow. Not really the traffic chaos it causes but everything it represents. Snow angels. Skiing. Snowball fights. Making big gigantic snowballs. One can’t really live in this country and avoid it. Well, maybe in Vancouver. But then there’s a lot of rain. You can’t make rainballs, though.

Bay of Quinte

So for work, I did a week-long water quality survey at Bay of Quinte, near the eastern part of Lake Ontario. It was great, except for the one day where pouring rain makes it difficult to work outdoors. Note: Sharpie markers are NOT waterproof. But it’s a beautiful area and I was really happy to be there, even though we worked till midnight processing the samples in a makeshift hotel room lab. And I don’t think I should post a picture of that. You’ll have to make do with a shot from outside the hotel.

Seston Cookies

Seston is what you get when you filter a known amount natural water collected from a lake, or stream onto a little white filter. Then you dry it at 80 degrees Celsius. Weigh it. Then essentially burn it at 500 degrees Celsius. Weigh it again.

Sound stupid? Well, that’s what most science is like. A lot of work for very little information. The difference in the weights just tell you the amount of organics and water content in the water sample. But here’s what they look like when you do like 100 of them at the same time. Cookies!

O Canada, You’re 142!

I hope you’re not starting to mellow with age. In fact, the Globe and Mail says you and your citizens are doing quite the opposite.

Indeed, who cares about the Queen (or any future Kings) if we have poutine, butter tarts, and Nanaimo bars? And not that we like to toot our own horn or anything, but we’re doing okay in this shoddy economy, thank you.

In fact, how strangely appropriate is my shot of a lone, tiny Canadian flag standing right in the middle of a couple of giants that look ready to destroy each other? (Okay, I lied. This shot was taken in the heart of the financial district in downtown Toronto. Canadian banks have no need to destroy the competition. Actually, I think they like each other so much that there is some legislation somewhere that prevents them from merging and becoming one Big Bank.)

Anyway, maybe Canada is part of the new world order, maybe not. But it makes me pretty proud today to be Canadian and living in a boring country with insanely expensive cell phone bills, megacities that need a transit system, and really good hockey players. At least I still have access to fresh water and air. For now.

Closed Doors Open

Several weeks ago, a whole bunch of (cool) buildings in Toronto opened up their doors to the public. Normally, these buildings are only accessible by people that, um, actually work there. Like the Don Jail and the TD Building. I just love these events because it brings you a bit closer to your own city, and finally figure out why that building is built in a particular way or what kind of history it holds.

A Day at the Zoo

Spent a day at the Toronto Zoo looking at animals. As neat as these things look, they’re poisonous. And you would hardly know because the poisonous are those little fur-like things that are barely visible.

Going to zoos for me have always been kind of interesting, yet depressing. The animals look so bored all the time. And even though a lot of them (like gorillas) are part of captive breeding programs and will never return to their native habitats, I’m also kind of glad that they’re alive for the time being so we can remember that humans aren’t the only ones that inhabit this planet.

Trekked and Lost

*spoiler alert!*

Within a span of one week, I saw Star Trek and the 2-hour season finale of Lost. That’s a lotta mystery and sci-fi.

Star Trek was amazing, period. A great (and ridiculously good-looking) cast and solid script (to a non-Trekkie) that mixes drama, humour, and action.  And red matter? I remember that from Alias. Two more movies have already been green-lighted, I really can’t wait.

Lost was a bit shocking. Deaths (?), and pseudo characters running around. And more things sucking up other things. The long elusive Jacob did all his work in a span of 40 minutes? And some not-so-subtle hints to religion and the Bible.  I can’t believe I’ll have to wait until 2010 to find out what is seriously up with this mystery island.

So with season finales and the start of the blockbuster season, summer is officially here!

Attacks and Defenses

Let’s start with the defense: I passed my master’s defense exam 2 days ago (yay!). However, unlike undergraduate exams where you finish the paper and immediately forget everything you crammed the night before, graduate exams require corrections to your dissertation.

It’s like “Congratulations, you passed!”, but you didn’t get every question right, so you get to spend the next few days (sometimes weeks?) rewriting the parts you got wrong so that your thesis will become an irrefutable body of academic work that will withstand the scrutiny of time. Or dust.

And believe me, it’s the absolutely last thing you want to do after being grilled for about 2 hours by a panel of 4-6 professors (in my case, it was 4).

So since that fateful day, I’ve been making corrections to a 24,000-word document that no one may ever read again. Maybe one. But that person will realize from the abstract that it has nothing to do with what they were looking for.

Which brings me to the attack on graduate education in an op-ed by a religion professor at Columbia. He calls for an overhaul of the system, some of which I agree with. Like how graduate degrees train students for jobs that largely don’t exist. It’s true; how many jobs out there require an intimate knowledge of some molecule’s mechanistic pathway in the environment? However, I can’t imagine myself getting a degree in “Water” or “Space” as he suggests. I think it wouldn’t work for undergraduates at all.

As a coda, I find that I generally get 2 types of questions when people find out I’m done my M.Sc. — 1) What’s next? PhD?, or 2) You must be happy to be done! Back to the real world, right?

1) Maybe. I admit, I like learning. Working a job where something is the same everyday scares the living daylights out of me.
2) Is school not part of the real world? I mean.. we ARE trying to do research and figure out what’s going on with the world..right?