I spent some time looking at a few graduate programs today, and I’ve realised a few things.

I’ve really known this all along, but I’m definitely prefer being an annonymous student in the back of the class to the keener up front on a first name basis with the prof. Maybe just metaphorically. I still sit up front after all. The idea of defending a Ph.D thesis, for example, is a little daunting. But of course I know I certaintly won’t get myself anywhere if I don’t try.

Today I was concentrating on degrees which combine Philosophy and Physics. I don’t think the two are mutually exclusive by any means, but it’s very difficult to find universities that have programs that deal with the connection. They all tend to be largely Philosophy programs concentrating on Philosophy of Science, whereas I would like a program founded mostly in current physical theory with philosophical considerations.

Yes, I am a scientific elitist. And though the term has negative connotations, I really can’t shake myself away from it. Philosophy without being based in science is, I think, completely uninformative. Even worse, I found myself scoffing at every Department of Philosophy web site that mentioned “research”. There are no discoveries in Philosophy. Indeed it’s a common criticism to call string theory philosophical.

I guess the main thing holding me back right now is just that — this feeling that anything philosophical is inferior. A Ph.D in Physics holds a lot more weight with me than one in Philosophy. Not just because everybody tends to be impressed at the difficulty of the former, but I really feel that you can say more with science.

Nonetheless, just as Philosophy without physics is meaningless, in some sense so is physics without philosophy. Maybe that’s what I can write my thesis about. For now I just have to see how my philosophy minor goes, and try to decide what to do for grad school.

Google came very close today to being the final one stop solution to my everyday internet needs. But alas they couldn’t pull through in the end.

I just noticed, for one, that their support section does not have a search box. Curious to say the least.

Gmail is far superior to Hotmail in almost every way, but one feature that’s been lacking has always just stopped me from making the switch all together. That was filtering incoming emails into different folders. Yes I know Gmail has “labels“, yadda yadda, better than folders, yadda yadda, more than one per message, yadda yadda…. Well it isn’t enough!

I only just realised today that Gmail allows you to set filters and have messages bypass the Inbox entirely. (They specifically didn’t have this when I joined, and I just haven’t looked since then.) That, combined with a very well designed ability to send emails from different email addresses within the same account has now not only killed Hotmail for good, but also my McGill Webmail. The funny thing is I discovered this almost exactly thirty seconds after emailing Google and telling them they should have this feature.

Even cooler than that is the new (to me) Google Toolbar. I may be a bit slow on my upgrades, but I’m loving this new Bookmark button. I’ve been uploading archives of my favourites links to this website just so I could access them from other computers, but now Google can handle it all.

Guess what the one downside is… those stupid labels again! Putting a label on something puts it into a submenu in the Bookmark dropdown menu, but there’s no support for submenus (sublabels? subdirectories!). For a guy with 450 bookmarks in over 30 folders, subdirectories are a necessity.

Google’s the best search engine around, but their oft mentioned tagline “Search, don’t sort” really gets on my nerves. Why can’t it be both?

Two disgusting and terrible things have happened to me this week.

The first is that I found out that McGill named their online course evalution tool “Mercury”. This is terrible because they had an open contest to find a name, and were offering an iPod as the prize. Literally two seconds after reading the email, I thought “Hmm… everything else is named after a god, so this should be named after the messenger god, like the guy with wings on his sandals in Disney’s Hercules.” I knew Hermes was the wrong pantheon, but I could easily have looked up that Mercury was his Roman equivalent. Curses!

The second terrible thing is Hotmail. I had had a bad customer service experience with a certain company, so I wrote an email to complain about it and ask again the question which didn’t get answered in the first place. The next day I log into Hotmail and start checking my Junk mail before erasing it. I always check since I once erased an email from a friend I hadn’t spoken to in months. There were no messages that looked like they were written by not spam software, so I clicked “Empty”, clicked “Report all as junk”, and clicked “OK”. Then, as the next page was slowly loading, I saw, nestled between the free viagra samples and a thirty minute law degree, “Ticket #15813 Re: Bad customer service”. And you know there’s no going back once you click OK in Hotmail’s junk folder. Curses again!

I think I’m finally starting to get to a point where I can make some references to things I believe in. I have lots of ideas about philosophy, science, ethics, and the univerise in general, but they’re all just a big mess in my head. I’m never able to argue anything coherently and I’ve always hated that.

Though there are things that they all say that I disagree with, I’m finally discovering that men like Bertrand Russell, David Bohm, and Alfred Korzybski had ideas that fit very well with what I think I probably believe.

One problem I’ve had quite a lot with how physics tends to work is that there’s far too much emphasis on the mathematics. It seems as though many people take it to be that the universe works the way it does because it is governed by math. It’s certainly an elegant idea, and I’m certaintly not going to deny that the universe behaves very much in accordance with mathematics, but I cringe at the idea that it is governed by it. Never does an electron solve for its equations of motion before deciding which way to move.

I think this is where Korzybski’s general semantics can really come into play. Mathematics could be considered a map of the universe, but of course is not the universe itself. Yet I’m not sure if I’m willing to commit entirely to this. Physics — mathematics — might be unique in being the only map that, once we had a unified theory, you could get all the information you needed about the universe is you just poke at it long enough.

There are many things piled up on top of my piano that cause me no end of trouble. Just yesterday I found Edvard Grieg’s Morgenstemning wanted me to play a six note chord with one hand. I did it, quite simply, by cheating. It works but it’s kind of embarassing when somebody who plays piano properly (and not just for kicks like me) happens to be watching.

Ever since I started to learn it, I’ve done nothing but cheat with An American Symphony. Syncopation is my nemesis. Actually, I can handle your average syncopation. Two quarter notes followed by two eighth notes in the left hand while the right hand plays dotted quarter notes in 12/8 time is my nemesis. Today I tried playing the real rhythms, but gave up after the third staff.

I’m going to go back to just making it up as I go along. I figure as long as I don’t let anybody look at the sheet music, they’ll never know. Don’t tell anybody. It’ll be our little secret.

I think I have most of it figured out now. There are probably going to be a few broken images lying around, not all the features I want are installed, and my footer thinks it’s a sidebar in FireFox, but I thought it was good enough to kick the Blogger bucket for good. Hello WordPress!

Oh, anybody does notice anything weird, or liked the way something was layed out before better than it is now, just leave a comment to let me know. I’m still settling in so a lot of the design is up in the air.

Now I promise I’ll stop writing geeky techno entries about stuff nobody cares about, and get back to my staple miscellaneous entries about stuff nobody cares about.

By the way, my dad seems to think strings are conscious omnipotent beings. I just thought I’d throw that out there.

Yes, WordPress is ridiculously easy to install and start running. No more difficult than Blogger, in fact.

The problem is that Blogger is evil, and so converting from Blogger to WordPress is ridiculously difficult. The moral of the story is don’t even start with Blogger, just go straight to the good stuff.

I think I’ve spent quite enough time on it for today though. My window is open and it smells like a campfire outside. That either means people are having campfires or the woods outside my house are on fire. Either way, I’m going for a bike ride.

I love the bus.

Sure, at $2.25, it costs me three times more to take the bus from UNBSJ’s campus in the deep dark woods to the gym downtown after work than paying for parking if I drove my own car, but it’s worth every penny. (Actually, the gas to drive the extra six kilometers probably more than makes up the difference, but that doesn’t count.)

I could wax on about a few different reasons, but the big one is just the fact that once you get on board, you’re going where the bus is going and you don’t have to worry about a thing. Even if you’re running late, you can’t rush or stress out. All you need to do is sit there and watch the world happen around you.

Even without talking to anybody else, I feel connected in a strange kind of way. Today I saw someone get on in an residential area, then off again in front of Zellers.

I thought to myself, “I’ve taken the bus to Zellers before. I wonder what they’re going to buy.”

What’s always bugged me about Blogger is simply having to rely on an external system to update my website. For as much as I’ve been able to, I’ve always used features and programs that I could host locally, so that they were in my complete control. The message board is an example of this.

Since I have access to all the files, I can change nitpicky details as much as I want and customize new features as well. Oh the miracle that is open source.

This is the reason that I chose Blogger over LiveJournal and Xanga. What Blogger lacks in a user community, it makes up for many times over in the simple feature of letting you edit the raw HTML of your template. In the case of the other two, you have to pay to get this feature, if it’s even available at all.

Despite the advantages, Blogger is still an external service, and lately that has been causing problems. For the last little while I hadn’t been able to publish updates to my blog since there was a problem with my FTP server. Also, sometimes Blogger just sucks.

So to make a long story short, my FTP problem has been fixed and a few posts that I had tried to publish since late June are finally visible. The corollary is that I will soon be switching to WordPress. The open source revolution continues.

I remember during the election campaign that there were only a couple things Stephen Harper promised that I would be okay with. One of them was reinforcing Canada’s sovereignty in the arctic.

It’s only been in the last few years that I found out that most countries (if any) don’t recognize Canada’s claim to the waters around our northern islands as internal waters. I’m not sure exactly why this is unsettling to me. Perhaps it’s just because I’ve always taken for granted that that whole area was ours.

On the surface it doesn’t really matter that much right now, but the northwest passage is becoming more and more of a reality every year. I don’t know how far down the road it will be, but eventually the area could become a well used shipping route. Even now there are rumours of American, Russian, and other countries’ submarines in those waters. I think this article has a great idea on how to deal with that particular threat.

And there are environmental concerns. If Canada does not exercise soverignty over these waters, then we have no way of controlling traffic, pollution, and protecting life native to the region.

My problem is mostly that I just don’t know what the international standard for these things are. The water between Hawaii and America are definitely not internal waters. What about the stretch between Kyushu and Okinawa of Japan? Honshu and Shigoku? Australia and Tasmania? There’s a set distance out from the shore you have to go before hitting international waters, right? If you apply that to the arctic islands (which you probably should), do you end up with regions outside our jurisdiction? Or do you hit the neighbouring islands first?

The population up there is pretty scarce, but there are villages as far north as Ellesmere Island. I think as much of the area as is possible should be protected, perhaps as a national park, or at least with safeguards in place to protect the natural environment from… well, ourselves.