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After two semesters at SFU, and now starting my third, here are some random things I’ve noticed in comparison to being in school in 2005.

In no particular order:

• Wikipedia is mentioned A LOT more.

This is obviously some what to do with the fact that when I was last in school (2005) Wikipedia had ~500,000 English entries^{[citation needed]}. Now in 2010 it has ~3,278,000 English entries. Of course it’s not just a shear increase in volume, over those 5 years those original 500,000 entries have been refined and expanded.

Also, before a certain demographic jumps at me, there is a great and overwhelming understanding that everything on Wikipedia may be completely inaccurate. It’s typically brought up as a “for more information on this topic which is completely tangential from our actual course material check Wikipedia” or “If you’re having trouble understanding topic X then Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation, with graphics and links to more explanations”. It’s not (surprise, surprise) like everyone thought it would be waaay back with people citing it as a legitimate source.

That said, there are of course certain people that don’t understand this. Life is statistics.

• Cellphones are more ingrained.

People forget to turn their ringers off in class, which blows me away. Apparently I’m the only one though, the professors must have given up trying to care and just give a scowl and move on. But people have been forgetting to turn off their ringers ever since cell phones could fit in pockets. What I mean by more ingrained is that when it rings, the people don’t check to see who’s calling - they just silence it. Back when it was more novel to have a portable phone, everyone always looked to see who it was -- which gave the impression of evaluating the social worth of taking the call over ignoring it and doing whatever they had been doing when it went off.

Also by ingrained, I mean that EVERYONE has one. To paraphrase from one of my professors this past semester “If you’ve already seen this, it will likely be pretty boring for the next 20 or so minutes. Please feel free to text your neighbor, just try and keep the chatting down so as to not distract the people who are new to this material.” Not to mention the ability to text Google.

Text Google? This is 2010, not 2008. As a rough estimate I’d say 75% of students have “smart phones”. Now we can look up the vaguely related Wikipedia article as soon as its mentioned. And we do.

• The professors are...different.

My first semester my “professors” were 2 grad students and an “instructor” which is a postdoc who has no research responsibilities but appears to be used by the university to offset the cost of wasting valuable professors to teach introductory courses.

My second semester my professors were actual professors. One gave the distinct impression that they had no taste for teaching. By taking this (required) course we were wasting valuable research time god damn-it! Actually I had another professor who gave this vibe in an even stronger way. I transferred out of his section though.

Conversely, I did have one of the greatest teachers I’ve ever had in my life this past semester. In a 3 hour class I would go in knowing either nothing but the name of the topic we were to cover, or knowing just what a quick Wikipedia skim had taught me. At the end of the lecture I would leave thinking “Why did we just talk about that for 3 hours? I’m fairly sure I’ve known that stuff inside and out my whole life.” Those 3 hours were spent in mostly a lecture format but with a heavy encouragement of questions. Those of us that took advantage of that probably got the most out of it.

Which brings me to my next point...

• Small class sizes really do make a difference

This is something they tell you at Kenyon, but you have to take it on faith. I think the largest lecture hall there is some where around 150 seats. I saw signs outside of a 200+ seat lecture hall at SFU the other week saying “CHEM 101 Final. Surnames L-T”.

In the bigger classes the professor can’t talk to you, they can talk to everyone or no one. In smaller classes I can ask a question and I can get an answer. Probably more importantly, if the format of the small class has become comfortable then not only can I ask a question, but the answer I get might not come from the professor -- it might come from another student (another I!) This has some pretty great ramifications for everyone involved.

Once Upon a Time

It’s taken me a long time to get to the point where I feel I can begin to explain this, so here’s the start:

Once upon a time there were two brothers. One brother, Elliot, liked to play with computers and math, and he really liked to make the computers play with math. The other brother, Tom, liked to make pictures, but what he really liked to do was to look at the pictures other people had made. Fortunately, the brothers ended up going to a wonderful school where they were able to study that which interested them.

Despite their divergent interests, the brothers were very alike in many ways. One trait the brothers shared was that when presented with a challenge, they were compelled to take it. Sometimes this helped them be great at things. Other times this caused them to do things like swim in the ocean on a cold Christmas day in order to keep a “days of swimming in a row” streak going, or nearly freeze to death in order to have “first coffee of 2010 on top of a mountain”. You might say the brothers were obsessive in this way, once the challenge was laid out for them, it was very difficult for them to ignore it.

One wonderful thing the wonderful school they attended made them do was satisfy a diversification requirement. So even though one brother loved fine art, and the other brother loved functions, they each had to learn about the others interests.

This diversification requirement is how Elliot found himself to be in a Survey of Architecture course his junior year. Elliot had enjoyed the other Art History course he took, but had a difficult time preparing for the tests. He felt the tests were too much memorizing other people’s opinions, and he wasn’t good at that. Luckily, memorizing dates was also deemed important, and dates are numbers so he liked that.

On the first day of Elliot’s course, the professor said something that blew his mind, “There will be five tests including the final, each test will be worth 25% of total grade and I will take your best four scores. So, in theory, if you do well enough on the first four tests you don’t have to do the final.” The challenge was out there.

Incredulous, Elliot called Tom, “Is he serious!? I wouldn’t have to take the final?”, “Yeah, and, better yet, you wouldn’t even have to go to the last three weeks of class. It was like that when I took his course, I made sure I had my ‘A’ by the first four tests.” Now, even if these were two regular brothers, that would probably have been enough. For the only thing more enticing than a challenge is a challenge the other brother has already accomplished.

For the next ten weeks Elliot looked at pictures and memorized everything. He could name the parts of every type of Greek order and mimic a tour of a French cathedral. The reward for his diligent studying came when he received his fourth test back. Like it’s own brothers before it, it had a nice big ‘A’ at the top. With the challenge accomplished and his ‘A’ secured, Elliot then did what any logical 20-year-old would do: he stopped going to class.

This was probably not what the professor thought would happen, but then the professor was probably not thinking about teaching challenge obsessed brothers. The brothers believed they had won; and technically they had: they both had passed the course with the highest grade possible -- what more could you ask for?

Such is the naivety of 20 year-olds. (And thus, by extension, the naivety of your 26 year-old author)

Some time after this the brothers were talking about the way the architecture course had been structured when Tom said, “..and of course, thanks to that I have no knowledge of modern architecture.” This momentarily confused Elliot: why wouldn’t Tom know about modern architecture? Hadn’t he beaten the class too?

Then it dawned on him: the course was taught along a linear time scale, you learned about older things first and newer things last. So, because he had worked so hard and stopped going to class with three weeks remaining, he too had no knowledge of modern architecture.

This gap in knowledge didn’t bother Elliot in the slightest. In fact, if pressed, he probably would’ve told you that modern churches have the same architectural layout on the inside as renaissance churches. Why would Elliot need to know about modern architecture? People seem to be obsessed with the classical stuff anyway. That’s all they ever talk about. No, this blackout of knowledge wouldn’t be an issue for Elliot. Not at all.

That is, until one day about a year and a half ago. Elliot was walking down a street near his apartment in Calgary and noticed something very peculiar. There were two apartment buildings, next to each other, and when he looked at one he felt a deep and inexplicable disgust. And when he looked at the other he felt a calming evenness of neutrality.

This was a very strange sensation for Elliot, he had never been in either of the buildings and knew no one that lived in them. Why would he have such a visceral and emotional reaction to two buildings? It was illogical. For all Elliot could tell, both buildings did equally adequate jobs at staying upright and providing shelter to their inhabitants -- why would one make him feel sad inside?

Elliot, in the way that he does, pondered this for some time. During this time he noticed that there was a third possible reaction, some apartment buildings made him feel happy inside. While this further served to confuse Elliot, he was at least glad he had found a way to make the experience positive and he began to keep track of happy-feeling buildings in the city.

Ever wary of people thinking he is crazy, Elliot chose to share this experience with only a few people that he was sure already thought him crazy. Their reactions were partially predictable: a look, or tone of, “you’re crazy”. But also, an inquisitiveness, a push. Questions. “Why do you like that one?”, “What do you think makes nice ones nice?”, “What about this one?”.

For a long time, Elliot couldn’t answer any of those questions -- which further bothered him. Answering the questions became a new challenge for Elliot.

Googling didn’t help, as he didn’t know what to search for. Eventually, Elliot realized he had two questions to answer, if only as a start: what qualified a building as a happy-feeling building or a sad-feeling building, and why does that actually cause a tangible response in him?

To try and answer the first question, Elliot tried to find commonalities within the building types. This was pattern recognition, this was something Elliot was good at. After working at it for some time Elliot started to find the pattern, and he realized that part of the reason he couldn’t Google for help was because he was missing the words he needed. He didn’t know the vocabulary of modern architecture and it was patterns in architecture that appeared to make the difference.

For the second question though, Elliot thought that if he could adequately cope with the first question, that it would some how make the second just go away. That, if he were able to analyze a building and pick it apart, it would amputate the feeling. In reality, the opposite happened. Analysis just amplified the feelings, rendering them in higher resolution. Now buildings could be neutral, but leaning toward sad. Or, just as possibly, happy and leaning towards very-happy.

Elliot was just as confused as ever, but felt like he was making progress. While initially he was frustrated for having skipped the classes that would’ve given him the vocabulary he needed, he realized that his investigation in to the issue was opening up new doors for himself. Doors that would take him on explorations of knowledge far beyond an appreciation of high-density residential architecture.

And that exploration, the endeavor to answer those two questions, is where our story will continue...

Please be patient, it has taken me 18-months to be able to sufficiently express this problem and to begin to explain the answers I’ve found thus far.

Cardiac Hill

On the drive from Calgary to Vancouver with all my stuff, Brian and I were discussing how some places get really cool names, but when you find out the story behind them it's really quite plain. Dead Man's Flats east of Canmore was what spurred our discussion.

However, there's a trail on Burnaby Mountain called Cardiac Hill that is completely deserving of it's name. Holy crap is that trail steep. I "ran" up it today, and tried not to run down it. It's hard to go down. There are actually little branches off the trail that work as run-away lanes like for trucks on the highway.

That run caused a nap this afternoon.

Low and Slow

You know when you cook something, meat especially, and you’re in a rush or you don’t know what you’re doing so you turn the heat up higher and try and cook it quicker. It doesn’t work though, it just cooks, or even burns the outsides and leaves the insides un-touched and raw. Then you learn that low and slow is the key, and you eat like a king.

That’s the difference between rain in Calgary and rain in Vancouver. In Calgary it flash rains and everything looks wet, but it’s not. In Vancouver when it rains, you hear the drops hit and you can tell they’re not in a rush. Everything is wet to the core.

Japadog

I finally got to Japadog.

I didn’t have much to do today after class, and the transit route from Burnaby to Tsawwassen makes you transfer downtown, so I hunted down a Japadog.

I actually don’t remember what I had, other than it having a pork-based sausage in it. It was quite tasty. I look forward to trying (some) of their other offerings.

Anyway, check out the picture, I sure as hell didn’t have the Fish Terimayo.

“Fish Sausage? You may need 911? No guarantee”

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump

The day after I went to the Dinosaur park, I drove down to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump. The drive was about 2 hours and just as fascinating as the drive to Dinosaur park. I guess all drives out of Calgary are pretty much the same unless you head west.

Anyway, about an hour and a half into the drive I started to see
strange sticks coming out of the ridge on the horizon. It being Alberta, I just assumed they were oil derricks. But as I got closer and closer (but still 30 or so km away) more and more of them came into view. It seemed like waaay too many to be oil derricks, also they seemed to be way too tall and skinny. For a brief instant I considered it to be a horde of attacking Ents from Montana.

A bit farther down the road and I could start to make out some detail on these giants. “Are they moving? WTF? Ohhhh they're wind-mills. ... Wow there’re a lot of them.” Not wanting to really focus in and count while driving, I estimated there to be about 50 or so. I continued in to the Head-Smashed-In site.

Now I already had a feeling that I wouldn’t be super impressed with the Buffalo Jump. It’s just a cliff for crying out loud. So that’s probably why I got so distracted by the huge wind-farm. After I parked at the site parking lot, I got out my binoculars and counted 197 wind-mills. It was obvious though that there were more hiding behind the ridge.

Stifling my fascination with the massive wind-farm, I went up to the Head-Smashed-In site. The museum is actually really cleverly built into the side of the cliff. Good job Mr. Architect.

Actually, there was one kind of strange over-sight to the design of the museum. You walk in on the ground floor, but it’s designed to be viewed from top-to-bottom, so you have to rabbit around taking a few stair cases and elevators to the top. Then you go outside the cliff, uh, Buffalo Jump.

The view from the observation area is cool.
But you’re not looking at the actual jump if you’re looking at the view, you’re looking at the last things the buffalo looked at. The buffalo jump is actually the 10m tall cliff right next to you. Which, is actually fascinating in it’s plainness. It’s a great example of how something can be so dependent on context. By itself it’s just a cliff, given the context and the sites 5,000 year history it’s actually quite amazing.

Once I was done up on the cliff (taking pictures of the wind-farm), I wandered through the museum. I ate a Buffalo-smokey because I figured it was culturally the right-thing to do. Bought my post-card, and jumped in the car to head to the wind-farm.

The wind-farm was actually a bunch of wind-farms. I guess it’s easy for the power companies to realise a site is a good wind-farm site when other companies are putting up their wind-mills. Pays to be a lazy prospector.

I found a small ‘viewing area’ which provided a bit closer look at the wind-sucking giants. The site said the largest wind-farm (aka: group of wind-mills owned by one company) was at 114 wind-mills. But in the next field there were some more under construction with the same logo on it, so I’m guessing the plaque was out of date. Sadly, because there were so many different companies represented I have no idea how many wind-mills there actually were. I know my count of 197 was low, but I can’t be sure by how much.

I think wind power is really cool. But, I can’t believe we can understand all the effects it has on the environment. Sure, right at the site it’s pretty minimal, but if we take all that energy out of the wind, well... if we left the energy in the wind, where would it end up? Is there some place in the middle of the country that now has perfectly still air because we took away their little bits of wind energy? I know that’s not the case, but it sort of shows my point. Weather is a complex system, and we’re minutely changing some of the variables. But, because it’s a complex system, all you have to do is minutely change a few variables to completely fuck with it. I love green power, but I hope wind-mills don’t destroy the universe.

Been there, done that, got the post-card

A while ago I was surfing the webs and found the wikipedia article on the UNESCO World Heritage Sites. I had no idea that these existed or why, but immediately thought they were a pretty good idea. After looking at the list for a while I came up with two conclusions.

1.) I should visit as many of these as possible in my life time
2.) There are 3 within 2 hours drive of my apartment (until I move, of course)

It just makes good sense. From the Wikipedia article “The programme catalogues, names, and conserves sites of outstanding cultural or natural importance to the common heritage of humanity.” So, if I’m going to go visit a provincial park, which I like to do, why not visit the ones that fit that definition, instead of the normal ones that are just mind-blowingly pretty. A park that is beautiful AND culturally significant? It’s like walking on the Mona Lisa’s face. Amazing.

To catalog my quest to visit these sites I’ve decided to collect a post-card from each site. Post-cards are great because the pictures were always taken on the most beautiful of days, so even if I visit on a rainy day I get a perfect image to take home and they are cheap, which is a word I would use to describe myself if I was trying to avoid describing myself as broke.

There is a slight problem in that I’ve already visited a few sites, namely in Greece. However, while I remember going I don’t remember being as impressed as I would be now that I’ve had two semesters of Art History. So those are going to be do-overs.

So, realising I had this amazing opportunity of living so close to so many sites but for only a few more weeks I decided to act! Hence, my trip to Dinosaur Provincial Park. (The first thing I learned on this trip was that there is no ‘h’ in the word “Provincial”)

The drive out was pretty laid back. Prarie driving is kind of weird, you could be driving through anywhere: Ohio, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Iowa, Delta. It also meets this strange paradox of being entertaining and boring. There’s nothing to really look at, but because of that you (as the driver) can actually take time to look around.

After taking a bunch of seemingly random turns, and wondering how I still had a cell-phone signal, I all of a sudden came upon a gigantic gorge. Gigantic. “Oh.”

This is where dinosaurs went to die. Luckily for us, this is also where rivers went to run. As the Red Deer river runs through the park, it erodes the soil and exposes fossils. Lots of fossils. 500 specimens covering 39 species. Including 5 different Dromaesauridae species, including two new and unknown species. In pop culture terms these are “raptors”.

Q: What’s scarier than a raptor?
A: A raptor + the unknown.

The park was amazing, but, some what bitter-sweetly most of it is closed to the public. Actually, more sweetly than bitter. Protect the place damn-it! Also, this gives me a great excuse not to have hiked much of the park. I love hiking and all, but let me tell you, the mosquitos out there! Holy shit. Jurassic Park is so much more believable after getting bitten forty times per minute. If I was a dinosaur getting bitten that often I probably would’ve jumped in a big mud puddle too.

I went to the Drumheller Field Museum to collect my post card. I also decided to wander about their exhibits. I may be broke, but $3 is totally worth it to support the conservation of the park. Infact, $3 is worth it just to take pictures of the raptors and make all the stupid comments I attached to their pictures on my facebook album.

While I was lining up to pay my entry fee, there was a family ahead of me in line. The young boy of about 8, looked like he was really into the whole dinosaur thing. With a completely serious look on his face, he asked the girl at the cash register about the skeleton hanging above our heads:

Boy: How do they know it’s a Gorgosaurus and not an Albertosaurus or even just a young Albertosaurus
Girl at cash register: Hahaha... That’s a great question, in fact our palentologists can’t even decide on that. They’re not sure if Gorgosaurus is even it’s own species or if they’re all just young Albertosaurus’.
Boy: *walks away shaking his head with a really disappointed look on his face*

Science, it works, but some times it takes a while to figure out.

The trip around the field museum motivated me to make the drive to Drumheller and visit the real museum. The Royal Tyrell Museum is about 2 hours away from the park and still an hour and half away from Calgary. Needless to say, I put some clicks on the Fit.

Drumheller seems to have taken the dinosaur thing and run with it. There are dinosaurs every where. Including the worlds largest dinosaur, a gigantic model of a Tyrannosaurus. You can climb the T-Rex and view the town from it’s open mouth. I opted for a shot from my rolled down car window.

$10 more to get into the real museum, but again, totally worth it. After a few rooms of “whatever” exhibits you get to a room which is exactly what you (and by you, I mean I) expect. A dark room with exhibits all around the perimeter, in the center a full Tyrannosaurus skeleton ready to bite your head off. The surrounding artifacts all seemed to be either T-Rex or Raptor related. Yes, this is exactly what I had come to see.

The museum also had a few special exhibits going on. One on Darwin and Evolution, and the other on the Burgess Shale.

One of the great perspectives I got from living in Ohio for seven years was that not everyone believes in evolution. Beliefs to me are for Santa, you believe for a while, then you grow up and understand the truth. Apparently this isn’t the case for other parts of the world.

What I noticed in all the exhibits, but obviously more strongly at the Burgess Shale and the Darwin exhibits is that they discussed evolution as a fact. As an assumption you made before you came to the museum. It was axiomatic. It was refreshing.

These two exhibits didn’t make much for taking pictures, so I didn’t.

After them it was the standard bones-in-poses. I took lots of pictures, highlights are in my facebook album.

All together it was a great day. A literally jaw dropping view of the badlands and good science to mentally chew over. Perfect.