Femion

Parting thoughts on DISP

I’ve been home from university for over a week now. What a waste of a week. I cleaned some of the junk out of my room to make room for my university textbooks. I read the three issues of Wired arrived while I was at university. I solved Myst 5. I went to the gym and pool a couple of times. It sounds productive – had I done it all in one or two days, not a week.

I also applied for several jobs and dropped off my resume at a number of places as soon as I got home, but so far I’ve been turned down or told to wait a week. So another week like this one will be wasted. I went from two weeks stuck in my dorm room and studying all day long to hanging around in my room, wasting time.

Parting thoughts on DISP – it’s been an interesting year. It really isn’t the Dalhousie Integrated Suicide Program. Sure, the workload is more than it was in high school (I should be able to testify to this, I was in 1510 – all sciences, eight courses + research project, nothing dropped), but it wasn’t unmanageable (but maybe that’s because I have neither a job or an exciting social life). I liked all my profs, even if I sometimes doubted their abilities to teach (IE: Hoffman’s lectures being a direct recitation of the calculus textbook, Ruddick’s inability to answer a physics question without confusing himself and filling the blackboard up with irrelevant scribbles). The field trips were fun, but the worksheets accompanying them were strange and unproductive. And I worry that the calculus and physics I took this year were too easy and that next year will be too much of a challenge.

Okay, so in my defence of DISP I’ve probably given the impression that I was being sarcastic. Not so. DISP was a lot of fun. What I got from this year was an introduction to every major field of science, even those I’m steering away from (psychology and earth science), the experience of doing a research project in the university setting, many memories and friendships that I hope will last throughout my time at Dalhousie.

Take DISP if you love school, science, and teamwork. If not, it will be the Dalhousie integrated suicide program.

Life Update!

It's Patrick Stewart on I, Claudius. Why this picture?

Because I'm reading I, Claudius right now. And just because it's Captain Picard with hair, and the hilarity of Captain Picard with hair fits the mood of my life right now.

So... unimportant post about my life. I'm pretty happy because I finished my first exam of the final DISP exams. So I played frisbee in the freezing cold with Ryan, Paul, Dinas, and Bobo because Bobo's sister called him and wanted some people to play frisbee with. And then after stopping everything that he was doing, rounding up players, and walking over to the field, he didn't call her back and tell her he was going to be there. Ah, the joys of sibling relationships I will never know. Then Bobo and I watched Shut Up and Sing, the Dixie Chicks documentary. And then I went home and giggled about Patrick Stewart with hair.

Gazette #22 - Just in time for Easter: Defending Christians

Bluffing the Biblical Bones

As some Catholic once said, this isn't a story about religion versus science, it's a story of religion versus bad science.

Dal Changes the Sheets

I live accross the road from a giant mattress.

No, seriously. The Wickwire field is made out of gravel, covered by a fake, spongy surface of recycled tires. It's quite interesting to walk accross.

And every year they have to rip up all the tires, smooth out the gravel, and replace the field. This was what it looked like a few weeks ago.

The turf was ripped up and left in giant mounts on the field. Here's a closer view:

Carbon Nanobaby of awesomeness

Since January I've been working on my DISP research project. We (me and Bobo and Logan) got to use the furnaces and sputtering machines in the a research group at Dalhousie that focuses on nanomaterials, batteries, and fuel cells.

In short, it was a really cool experience. I specialized in operating the Scanning Electron Microscope, and took all the images of the carbon nanotubes. I hope that I can work the SEM again as a volunteer next year.

Anyway, over the weekend I made a webpage for our team's research project. This was a DISP assignment, but you can see a copy here.

I'm quite pleased with myself about this webpage. I created all the images, and wrote (most of) the html, css and javascript by myself, from notepad. It's like my baby. My Carbon Nanobaby of Awesomeness.