Morning Smile

This made me smile on the way into work this morning. Or school. I'm never sure what to call it. It's both. Anyway, without further ado, here is a van which does not appear to be advertising anything:

Useful or Funny, But Not Both

In academia, no matter what your field, there are two things you spend a lot of time doing: reading and writing. I have always read quite a lot and over a wide range, so I had a pretty good feel for what sounded good and what didn't, but not much of a toolbox for identifying why something sounded good or bad or how to deal with my own bad writing. To that end, I took a technical writing class last fall. I'm not going to lie; it was painful. But also, enjoyable. And thoroughly useful.

It's funny how much bad writing there is in academia. The teacher of the technical writing class never tired of reminding us that her former life was as a technical editor at a peer reviewed scientific journal (she never did say which one) but that all the journals had since fired all their technical editors (editors are bad for the bottom line) and therefore anything written in the last 10 years or so is a lot more likely to be garbage. There is also the fact that English has all but been adopted as the universal scientific language. I don't know what the stats are, but I suspect the majority of scientific writers are not native English speakers. And, again anecdotally, the advents of the internet and text messaging appear to have basically destroyed what semblance of good writing most native English speakers might have had to begin with.

So, all this adds up to the fact that there is very little good writing out there in the scientific community. Which means that when you do find good writing, it stands out. At least to me it does. I genuinely feel that people who go out of their way to stand above the crowd in terms of good writing will be rewarded (with higher citation counts, hopefully).

A (now former) colleague who just returned to China after only 3 years in Canada obviously feels that way too. He has been asking me for help with some of his writing over the past few months. He recently sent me a cover letter for corrections. Never having written a cover letter for a peer review journal article submission before, I was a little fuzzy on what tenses to use in some circumstances. One of the best ways to learn about these sorts of things is to seek out examples. Sadly, this is not a topic on which the internet has much useful to say. However, to the internet's credit, when it's not useful, at least it is usually funny: http://www.devpsy.org/humor/manuscript_cover_letter.html

Maybe it's that I have seen the frustration that the writer is expressing, maybe it's because I spent 6 hours today supervising an undergraduate chemistry lab and inhaled a lot of fumes, but I found the above example laugh-out-loud funny. Your mileage may vary.

Have Your Cake and Eat It, Too

There's all sorts of stuff I could write about: I just got back from Halifax; I've been to two scientific conferences in the last 2 weeks; the gardens (there are two this year) are in and growing; there are countless other things in my head right now.

But there's something that's been bugging me for a while, and the way the markets are behaving right now has reminded me. It's like, deep down inside, people are terrified that the current system is broken, but they don't really know what to do about it because there is no alternative, so they're just swinging their money around panicky willy-nilly.

All the while, the so-called experts are saying that everything is fine, the system is on the mend. Nothing was wrong with the foundations of the old system, it was only some dead wood that needed removing. So go ahead and invest in banks and manufacturing and all those other things which led to the economic catastrophe. The experts can see the future and it is good.

But wait, aren't these the same experts who spent 6 months telling everyone that the financial meltdown wasn't their fault because "no one could have predicted it"? Ah, so, don't blame you for the crisis because you don't have a crystal ball, but listen to you now because you can forsee the recovery?

Well, which one is it, guys? Can you predict the future or not? Evidence suggests not.

It's What's For Dinner

Yay! Green things finally come from Ontario again! Not many; just asparagus and baby spinach, really. It's early in the growing season yet. In any case, in our ongoing effort to try to eat more locally, L and I had this for dinner last night. L had hers without the tomatoe sauce. It was de-freakin-licious, I highly recommend it.

And since I can't miss an opportunity to get up on my soap box, this is a friendly reminder that when you eat food grown locally in season you get fresher, more healthful, more delicious food and you put less pollution into the air. It's win-win-win. Your tongue, your waistline* and your lungs will all thank you. So next time you're at the grocery store, take a second to check where it was grown before you buy it.

* I'm assuming that you're choosing local produce over some processed thing full of junk ingredients, here.

Like a Better Me

I haven't been writing here as much as I'd like lately. There are a number of reasons for that. First off, I'm hellabusy being a born-again student; grad school is exactly like I remember my older friends/colleagues describing it. Secondly, a lot of my creative thinking drifts very quickly in the rant category these days and I'd like to spare my readers too much of that. And finally, sometimes I have trouble expressing my ideas in ways that are understood by people who don't spend all their time inside my head*.

So imagine my delight when I came across a very well thought out piece which expresses many of my very own feelings in crisp, compelling prose. It is actually the introduction to a book which I have now reserved at the Toronto Public Library. If I had to summarize the article, it would be a phrase I started using sometime shortly before the housing bubble burst: home ownership is the new serfdom. But that is a very cursory summary, indeed.

I found the article by trying to learn more about a particular guest blogger on boing boing after being taken in by some of his posts. He puts very elegant words to some pretty complicated thoughts I've had: it's like reading what I would write if I were a better me. Which sounds a bit vain, but really, if you stumbled across an author like that, wouldn't you bask in your discovery for a little while?

Set aside a good chunk of time before clicking the link: the article is a bit long, but I think it's well worth sticking with. I strongly encourage you to read it, if only so that some of my rants sound a little less insane and baseless the next time we speak. And maybe it will stir in you some of the same thoughts and feelings it did in me.

Introduction to Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back.


* As a solipsist, I know that everyone spends all their time inside my head. Unfortunately, not everyone else knows that.

Guilty Pleasures

In the last few years I have learned a lot about nutrition. My first foray into that controversial cesspool of knowledge was a book called The Longevity Diet. The idea goes something like this:

In the 30s, an Italian researcher needed dwarf mice for an experiment. So he starved them and sure enough they were tiny. However, a strange thing happened: they lived 50 to 60% longer than normal lab mice. Nobody really paid much attention to this til years later. Now there have been experiments performed on a variety of different types of organisms and it turns out that if you greatly reduce the amount of food a creature eats, it lives longer. Unfortunately, as primates tend to have long lifespans, it's hard to say yet whether this effect actually carries over to humans.

I usually get one of two reactions to this: 1) you are insane; 2) it only feels like you live 50% longer if you don't eat a lot of food. However, living longer is not the real reason I think this book is important. If you eat only the very minimum amount of food required to survive, you have to be extremely careful about what that food contains: simply starving yourself is going to have the opposite effect. So the calorie restriction people have done a lot of research into what things are very important in human nutrition and done an excellent job of compiling that information in the Longevity Diet.

Not a day goes by that I don't hear about the obesity epidemic. I'm never really sure what causes it: ignorance, stupidity, or laziness. I expect the reason varies on an individual basis and exists as a continuum. The internet, however, is perfect for fixing the first cause and so, many people have put up blogs and suchlike in the name of educating people about what they're actually eating, or, in some cases just guilting people into eating better.

If I'm busy, I forget about food. Then, along comes one of these delicious looking links and bam, I'm drooling all over my keyboard thinking "mmm.... blizzard." Or worse, wandering down the hall to the snack machine wishing I had some gravy and cheese curds to put on my overpriced bag of doritos.

I suppose the one consolation in all this is that, whether or not they are helping curb the obesity epidemic, they are at least helping to spur the economic recovery, one chili-cheese-pizza-dog at a time.

21,108 Days Remaining, 13,305 of Them Happy

I got a very strange email the other day. The subject line was: [Reminder] 10,000 days alive @ Sat Apr 11, 2009. After racking my brains and asking a few friends if anyone had hacked my google calendar, I eventually concluded that I set this reminder myself. I used to work with a lot of time data and it would have been a trivial task to write a little computer program to tell me the date of my birthday + 10,000 days. Today, Earth Day, April 22, 2009, I am 10,011 days old.

According to the Happy Planet Index survey, this means I have 21,108 days remaining. My overall score was 54.7, which I have equated roughly to "years of sustainable happiness." If we assume that I've already used up some of them by living happily 2/3 of the time, then I have 13,305 days of happiness remaining: about 2/3 of the total days I have remaining, which is a comforting thought.

I stumbled across the Happy Planet Index , ironically, not really thinking about Earth Day at all.

GDP is frequently used as an indirect measurement of happiness. And whenever you can only measure the success of a goal indirectly,i.e., by measuring something which is related to the goal, sooner or later, there will be a subtle shift in efforts from achieving the ostensible goal to achieving increases in the thing being used as a proxy for that goal. And so, in an effort to measure how happy people are, we measure the GDP. Except that somewhere along the line increasing GDP replaced our happiness as the end goal. And now, the entire economy is hell-bent for election on increasing GDP without regard to how it affects our happiness.

There has got to be a better way, I thought. So I started looking into it. It turns out that the wikipedia article for GDP contains a list of alternatives to the GDP. I strongly urge you to check out any or all of them. The one that struck me as including most of the things that are important to me while still being simple enough to calculate with real data was the Happy Planet Index. It includes both subjective happiness and objective sustainability.

So if you didn't do anything else to celebrate Earth Day, go take the test. And if you did do something to celebrate Earth Day you'll get a better score on the test. And isn't that the important thing? Getting a better score?