Life Is A Terminal Disease

Happy Solstice II

2011-12-21T17:20:00.008-06:00

It’s been six months since my last post. Though in some ways I had tried to make an effort to write more, on a personal level, things have deteriorated rather badly. Though I had received permission to write-up last summer, the months ground on as I sought to bleed the various stones that comprise my thesis. If nothing, I think many folks will acknowledge that grad school can be a frustrating, unfulfilling and thoroughly demoralizing. The effect can be a sort of perpetum mobile of despair and lowered productivity, leading to more despair. The death of one of our beloved cats in late August only aggravated this.

RIP Erbie

Other than a brief dalliance with a couple of SSRIs over the last few months, my only solace of late has been my new interest in freediving. After a renewed and reinvigorated interest in scuba these last few years, the better half and I joined our local freedive club on a whim and have been hooked the last three months. We’ve only done pool training so far but we’ve already seen a two-three fold improvement in our breath holds. We look forward to trying out our skills in open water soon. We’ll be going down south early January to blow off some steam, do some scuba and hopefully some freediving, conditions allowing.

Last, and I have no words for this, the mighty Hitch is dead. His acerbic wit, cutting intellect and eloquence will be missed. He died as he lived, an avowed atheist. I hope I will have the resolve to stare death in the face the way he did – unwavering and defiant.

13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011

So put your antlers on, dance defiantly around the Yule tree and get with the merry-making. Happy Solstice all.

Happy Solstice

2011-06-21T20:56:00.004-05:00

Happy Solstice folks. Today we mark the happy happenstance in the northern hemisphere where the Earth's axial tilt in relation to it's orbit provides us the longest daylight period of the year. Hurray for the 23.4 degrees (that's 0.408 radians to you nehds) of tilt from the axis of rotation, and hurray to our tidal pal Luna for keeping our axial tilt, and therefore our seasons, stable!

Sadly I am stuck in doors preparing what I hope to be my final committee report before I defend and put this p!gfμk!ng PhD to bed. By bed I mean 1.83 metres under the earth. Alas I wish I were frolicking with my other verts outside, but lo, 'twas not to be.

So my friends, raise a glass and enjoy it while it lasts because soon we return to the ground from whence we came.

Life is a Terminal Disease.

A First for Canadian Politics

2011-05-03T01:19:00.003-05:00

Tonight was a first for Canadian politics. It was the first time that the leftist proletariat party became the Official Opposition. It was also the first time that the Liberal Party of Canada, oldest federal Canadian party, has been staunchly defeated, partly because of a muddy platform and partly because of incompetent leadership by the human incarnation of Count Chocula. On the other side, King Steve, soon to be Emperor Steve, and his rabid band of anti-intellectuals have formed the first authoritarian theocratic majority in Canadian history despite election fraud, document falsification, and being found in contempt of Parliament. For the first time in its history, Canada has elected a Green MP, someone I would have previously endorsed had it not been revealed a few weeks ago that their campaign platform supports complementary and alternative medicine*. The only happy news is that the sovereigntists have got themselves the boot, though perhaps this will set the stage for Duceppe’s role in Provincial Politics.

So our pal Steve managed to split the progressive vote, particularly in Ontario, thereby giving himself a majority. All in all, a good job by Stevie and his hate crew. Their vote suppression tactics of intimidating students, vandalizing property and impersonating opposition campaigns has polarized the votership so much that we find ourselves in the predicament we see toady.

Well played Steve-o.

I bet that when he gets home he’ll give himself a blow job as a reward for his hard work.

*There is no such thing as CAM. Either medicine works or it does not. If it does, then it falls under the category of medicine, if it does not, then it falls under the category of witchcraft.

When a princess kisses a horse does he turn into, uh, wait a minute…

2011-04-29T20:41:00.003-05:00

Oh, for the love of Voltron. So when I turn on the idiot box this morning, and flick to good old News World, all I see is bustles and lace for twenty minutes. Really? So I turn to News Net and see the same thing. OK, perhaps American news will satisfy my inner voyeur by giving me one of their famous live car chases. Oh CNN, how you do disappoint, all I see is a gilded carriage.

Why for the love of all things green is this wedding being forced down my throat from every Sky-daddy damned media outlet? Is it not enough that we’re ruled by these inbred entitled imbeciles that I have to watch Duke of Horse-Face suck a “commoner’s” lips off?

I am pretty staunchly anti-monarchist as it is, but between this, and the prorogation fiasco that Earl Steve of Harperland pulled off, my vasculature boils with the blood of a free republic.

Bring in proportional representation. Bring in an elected senate. Bring in separation of church and state. Bring in the separation of legislative and executive branches of government and bring in an elected head of state. Off with their heads. It’s time for a new republic, the Republic of Canada.

Some thoughts about Christmas

2011-01-04T20:19:00.003-06:00

Ahh, Christmas, the commercialized commemoration of the birthday of a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who may or may not have existed, about whom writings may or may not have been forged and whose divinity is questionable. A Jewish apocalyptic prophet (of whom there were many in the first century CE) who unwittingly spawned a new religion apart from and distinct from Judaism – a case of theological misunderstanding. This was a man who was simultaneously immortal, mortal, eternal, corporeal, ethereal and also his own father. In modern times we celebrate the birth of this god-man by fueling the greed of our offspring by telling them an omniscient elf (dragged across the sky by cosmic ungulates no less) will visit them on Christmas Eve and shower them with gifts for good behaviour or otherwise punish them with coal for their misdeeds¹.

Ahh Christmas, a time carefully chosen by the early church to coincide with and hijack pagan solstice holidays once celebrated all over Europe and Asia Minor. A holiday to celebrate the end of the darkness was usurped by a holiday to worship one head of a tritheistic spiritual hydra.

Ahh Christmas, for me a time of forced family gatherings and contrived ceremony and tradition where we are all obliged to mutter the ritual incantations and pray to the almighty anthropomorphic creator for a good year ahead - a time when I keep any and all utterances to myself and attempt to remain calm as parents lie to their children about the wrathful elf who will magically descend chimneys across the globe risking self-immolation to bring them crappy Chinese-made toys.

Ahh Christmas, a time when the culmination of the holiday begins with the celebration of the cutting of the genitals of the divine man-god on the holy day known as The Feast of The Circumcision², or more commonly, New Years Day.

I guess the world really does rotate around the end of a divine prick.

1. In some European traditions father Christmas descends on the houses of naughty children and beats them with sticks. Santa terrified me as a kid – more so than god.

2. The feast day is still celebrated in the Eastern Orthodox, Lutheran, Anglican and Catholic traditions.

Good luck Friend

2009-10-13T18:20:00.009-05:00

And so it came to pass, on the morning of equinox, autumn, 2009, we set forth on a journey that would enrich America and impoverish Canada. On that morning, a son of Canada, a mad biologist - a doctor of evolutionary biology, would descend to the unwashed southern masses to spread the gospel of Carlo:

Observe, hypothesize, test, repeat.

Having defended his PhD he looked south, to the National Institutes of Health, to complete his training.

Carlo is one of the few persons who lives and breathes science. For him it’s not just an occupation or an esoteric philosophy, but a way of life that can be applied to history, language, art and even Guitar Hero. During his time completing his PhD, Carlo and I became friends. Despite being a few years his senior and having worked in science longer than he, his ambition, maturity and singular focus on science often impressed and occasionally intimidated me. Indeed, his attitude impressed and perhaps intimidated some faculty. During his four years at Mac he published three (soon to be four) papers as primary author and several others as a second or internal author – more than some professors during that same period. During that time, Carlo taught himself programming, statistics, and became intimately acquainted with the minutiae of evolutionary theory. While most of us would be at the local bar on Friday pounding back car-bombs, Carlo would be deciphering the inscrutably obtuse PAML documentation just to get a jump on the week.

That said, Carlo always made time to help out and to have some fun. In the time I knew him he put in six to seven days a week at the lab, read a new book every fortnight and still managed to get in several dozen hours of video games in per week. Once in a while he even accompanied me to a metal show or out for an evening of drunken silliness.

***

Setting out on the nine hour drive, we were both apprehensive, Carlo because of the bright sparkling adventure ahead of him, and I because of my fear of being rogered rectally by bellicose border guards. Thankfully, the latter never happened. After the move, we drank bourbon and sipped potato vodka. We reminisced about the past and mused about the future. We listened to Behemoth and Between The Buried and Me and The Locust. The next day we returned the truck and I left for home. On my nine hour journey home (two stop-overs and lots of waiting) I grew a bit melancholy. One rarely meets someone like Carlo. I will miss our discussions. In a span of five minutes, our conversations could go from differential sexual selection pressure, to hyperdrive motivators, to the benefits of using the line-gun against necromorphs, to the disappearance of megafauna in Australia, to the creative use of dissonance by Psyopus.

Lately my days seem drab and uninteresting. Even though I know that we will still stay in touch, things seem a little more grey than usual. Being around Carlo, one always learned something new. Perhaps that’s what I'll miss most.

Good luck Carlo. You will be missed. Thanks for being a friend.

Carlo and I rockin’ out at our pal Ba’al-Zebub’s place on one of our numerous ‘Redshirt Phrydays’

Banff impressions– days one and two

2008-03-12T01:55:00.010-05:00

I have now officially been at the conference for the third day. Although Sunday had the keynote address and opening remarks, I judge it to be the wind up to the conference proper, i.e. the grueling ~14 hour day schedule I alluded to in the previous post. I jus recently got back from the last talk (incidentally by the person who had scooped me last spring) at 10:40pm. Indeed I am feeling craptacular because for whatever reason I had decided to stay at the bar until 2pm – after my three beers and three martinis. Since breakfast is served between 7am and 8:30am, I didn’t get much sleep. Indeed the plan was generally ill conceived given that I had my poster presentation today, compounded by the fact that my actual poster was hastily (and perhaps also ill) conceived. Rather than give a play by play, I’ll try to give some general impressions and anecdotes from the last two days.

The place

This is my fourth time in Banff – both the park and the city. I still marvel at the sights whenever I leave my room or head out to the talks or to meals. It’s hard to believe that anyone could take this for granted. Generally, the Rockies are magnificent and the town is quaint but somewhat overbearing in its quaint touristy pretentiousness. On Sunday night I had sought out some action in the two local bars where I’m staying and finding no one (unusual for this type of conference) I decided to head out to buy a disposable camera since I had forgot my digital at home. Earlier on Sunday I nearly walked into a deer (I wasn’t watching where I was going) quietly grazing the shrubbery outside my temporary residence. I decided I needed some apparatus to capture these things for posterity. Later that night after finding the bars deserted I headed to town to acquire my camera.

After some searching I found the SafeWay, bought my camera and headed to the liquor store to score some cheap non-monopoly sold booze.

No such luck. As free-market economics would have it, given that Banff has a captive market and that it is a tourist destination, booze was very expensive. The cheapest 26er of uncle bobs bathtub distilled gin was ~$28, approximately $5 more expensive than in Onterrible. Premium brands such as Bombay Sapphire or Tanqueray went for over a $10 mark-up. After leaving in disgust I headed back to the conference centre via a convoluted and more scenic route. Having not seen Banff at night (other than being really smashed the last time I was at a conference here), I was taken aback by the shear number of Euro and Aussie trash collapsing intoxicated on the streets. Although I suspect there is a building code requiring all commercial architecture in Banff to adhere to strict esthetic rules, this does not preclude every establishment from displaying flashing neon signs advertising bars, Xtereme sports gear or tattoo and piercing shops. Given the relative sleepiness of the town during daylight hours, the drunk 20-somethings and Nevada style signage was a little surprising. But the town is home to 8000 residents and sees 4 million tourists per annum. What can one expect?

As an aside, today I saw a doe and fawn right outside the conference building, not 5m away from me. Naturally I forgot to bring my disposable camera with me.

The meeting

In my previous post I had alluded to how my presence at this meeting, a meeting on cell signalling, is a bit strange since I no longer do research in cell signalling. Since the resumption of my PhD, I have been working on gene expression. Nevertheless, the talks have by and large been rather good and this year sport a significant foreign component, hosting speakers from UCSF, Oregon, Oslo, Heidelberg and places besides. The problem though is that many felt redundant and none so far have been relevant to what my research interests. As an aside, most of these talks were put on by PIs sporting 30 man operations and budgets (and associated technology) large enough to pay for the Iraq war for a week. Some of the crazy things that I have seen in relation to real time imaging, confocal microscopy, single molecule detection, etc. has been discouraging, given that my lab, nor even my department or perhaps university has the resources to perform studies of this calibre. Moreover, it saddens me that McMaster, once a powerhouse in signalling and basic cancer research, has suffered such a blow in expertise and esteem in the last five years with its successive emigrations of expertise and grants. This year there were three representatives from Mac, including me. There was a larger contingent from Kuopio Finland. Moreover, there was also a second contingent from Turku Finland…

And Heidelberg Germany...

And Utrecht Netherlands…

And Oslo Norway…

Taken from Gold et. al, 2007 ¹.

Nevertheless, as meetings go, this one is pretty good, though a bit inbred over the years with heavy representation from Toronto and Montreal. For the first time since teacher’s college I decided to put on the charisma (what little I have) and try to mingle. Generally things have gone OK, though I have been trapped in a few awkward situations with overzealous grad students. Despite my best efforts however, mingling has been tough to do since one only has the opportunity during meals or after the talks are over - meaning after 11pm.

The other stuff

There were going to be a number of unpleasant things with which I knew I would have to deal at this meeting. One was the said business of my former supervisor who failed to include me as an author on a paper that arose as a result of my MSc work. I decided to confront my former boss (non-aggressively) over lunch on Monday and the conversation went something like this:

Necator: Ex-boss, for the sake of my mental well-being, why was I excluded from the X paper?

Ex-boss: None of your work appeared in the paper.

Necator: I cloned a partial X cDNA from RT-PCR DNA, did the phage screens to pull out the full-length clone and created a number of the constructs that were used in the paper.

Ex-boss: Oh, yeah but they had to be rederived.

Necator: Why?

Ex-boss: We lost them.

Necator:???

How convenient. Never mind that I have the constructs in my freezer at home, nor that I provided detailed sequences for the oligos and said constructs, nor the fact that they had the oligos to begin with, nor the fact that were at least one -20C and -80C stock – but I digress.

Today I had to present my shoddily assembled poster. With a raging headache (for which I’m solely responsible) I had to put on a stiff upper lip and give’er. To my surprise I discovered that there was a poster in my numbered slot on the presentation board. Incredulous at the utter moron who was numerically challenged, I barely stopped myself from tearing down his/her poster and pooing on it right there in the poster room in front of onlookers. It’s a good thing I didn’t. Upon inspection of the program my poster was listed under two different numbers in two different sections – as was that of two other students. Therefore there were two slots and three posters. With little time, I grabbed a few push pins and stuck my poster on the drywall directly opposite my numbered slot(s) and hoped people wouldn’t think I was a complete simpleton.

So there I was, standing like the village idiot by the wall, not the poster board, with the numbers 57/58 by my poster, presenting a poster that had nothing to do with signalling. I had initially hoped I would be sandwiched beside some really hot sh!t poster so that I could merge inconspicuously into the background. But now people were clammering over each other to take a gander at the buffoon who decided to stick his poster to the wall. As though this wasn’t bad enough, the PI who had scooped my work last spring showed up to interrogate me. The situation was unexpected to say the least. Given that this is a predominantly a Canadian conference on SIGNALLING and he is an American not working on signalling, his presence was more than unusual. It’s as though the fates not only choose to kick me in the balls when it’s convenient but they also actively seek me out. Again to compound the insult, it turns out that he’s also performing the same experiments that we decided to include after the scoop, meaning he’s out to scoop me again. Only difference is that he has three post-docs and an army of grad students to make things go. My boss only has me.

Well, so it goes. 2008 is looking utterly awesome. After being scooped three times, it looks like the fourth time I have been politely informed that I’m going to be scooped. I may be starting to believe in a deity, and he seems like that genocidal misogynistic, misanthropic Old-Testament prick after all. Now all I need is the BH to turn into a pillar of salt. Knowing my luck I'd have neither Tequila nor lime.

__________________________

If one stares at this stereoscopic protein model properly, in the fashion of the magic eye pictures, one can see the image in 3D. It’s a trick I picked up while in a crystallography lab. This structure was not presented at the meeting. However, the PI for the said work is here presenting other data. I needed something sciency looking but I’m tired and got tired of looking.

Bored in Banff

2008-03-09T19:51:00.001-05:00

So I’m here – in Banff for my conference. It has not started out well. Due to my crazy schedule the last few weeks I was unable to prepare for much for this upcoming conference. My poster has ended up being rather hastily assembled and I‘m not altogether happy about showing data that has not been published (due mostly to my currently delinquent supervisor). Because of the BH’s ongoing disability, she and I spent all of Friday afternoon/evening and all Saturday planning, packing, shopping, cleaning and cooking so that I could leave and not be freaking out that she is OK. I got to bed at midnight ‘old’ time – meaning 1 am ‘new’ time and had to get up at 5am to make the plane. Naturally, due to my insomnia, I actually didn’t sleep at all; mostly I stared at the ceiling and alarm clock in an alternating fashion.

Hamilton airport is a funny place. It’s sort of like the old movies with everyone clammering onboard the plane by ramp and not via the cool docks (or whatever they’re called) to which we’re normally accustomed. Moreover, there are no carts (that I saw), and parking is outside so I had to haul my ski bag, luggage poster tube and back pack across 50cm drifts of snow (no joke) to get to the terminal. There was a delay because of a computer glitch (never a good thing on planes I reckon). Naturally I didn’t sleep on the plane. Near the end of my flight I managed to piss all over the bathroom when we ran afoul of some turbulence during my “whiz”. When we landed I met up with an old former colleague who promptly mooched a ride from me and my rental car. I felt pretty good about it because I thought she might be able to help me navigate. Little did I realize that she was directionally challenged and frequently mixed left and right. We managed to get thoroughly lost in Calgary.

Since I arrived in Banff things have been OK. I managed to catch two hours of Zzzzzz’s and had a fairly nice dinner, other than the part when I ran into one of my old supervisors. There was some awkward small talk and staring blankly culminating in a half-arsed invitation from said supervisor to have a beer with him - which should be fun given that he was the one who made excuses to not have me back when I returned from my leave of absence.

I had hoped that I would have some time to work on my linux/Perl skills while here in Banff on account of the fact that I’m here alone and that I know no one. The wireless modem that I was told would be available is not and so my wifi challenged linux cannot connect to the intarweb and so I’m essentially f#cked if I want to consult the forums for how to do stuff – like getting my f#cking wireless working. So for now I’m stuck in Windowsland. So right now I have three 14 hour days ahead of me. Seriously, the program starts at 8:30am and goes to 10pm each day. What’s that about? On top of it, none of the talks are in my field, nor is my poster. Good times.

Thanks to google images for this swell pic.

Oh, and I forgot my camera, which is a shame since Banff is pretty nice.

Sorry for being a whiny bitch. I guess it could be worse – like Somalia.

Metal Meltdown: Back in the studio again

2008-03-04T15:52:00.006-06:00

I have been pretty and busy and haven’t been posting much on account of said business. Science is going like science goes (badly mostly), my parents have been moving and required help, my boss is sending me alone to a conference unrelated to my work as his delegate and at night time I have been in the studio.

I have a few things to write about the studio. Most non-musicians don’t realize how much work and time (and money) is spent in the recording studio to bang out just one song. To my plebian band mates, who thought that recording eight songs was a terrific idea, I can only blame their poor short-term memories for forgetting pour last more modest efforts. Thus far we have spent nearly every day of the last three weeks in studio. This means that my daily schedule looks something like this:

Wake-up 8am

Go to the lab 9-10am (sometimes later)

Take the BH to physio 4pm

Make/eat dinner 5-6pm

Go to the studio 6-7pm

Get home 12am

Pre-production/samples/lyric writing/going over material for the next day 12am-3am

Going insane (anytime)

Yes, you read it right. Waking up at 8am – SLACKER! But I’m also going to bed fairly late and to compound this I have (and have had for years) pretty sever insomnia – so sod off. But I digress.

The studio is not a place where one comes, plugs in one’s instruments and everyone jams out Kumbaya with a few microphones and then calls it Miller time.

First, there is no tape. With the advent of direct to disk recording, 95% of the world’s albums are recorded direct to a hard drive. Second, every instrument is recorded separately. Third, setting up the sound for an instrument can take hours (in the case of guitar) or even days (in the case of drums). To take an example from this recording, it took the engineers (there were two during the initial drum set-up day) eleven microphones and six hours to make our drummers drums sound like drums and not cardboard boxes. It took two days to record drums for eight songs, not including drum setup.

Part of our drummer's setup in the isolation room.

The reason one records all instruments separately is to preserve separation, prevent microphone bleed, and to ensure that everything is on separate tracks and can be mixed and edited separately. Edited you say? Yes, edited. I will return to this later.

Following drums, we took about a week to record guitars (putting us behind schedule). Each guitarist had to double track guitars (to make it sound thicker) meaning that each track had to be identically played. Following this, I recorded bass and have just recently completed vocals. I’ve always thought yelling into a microphone for four hours at a time was a good proposition – until one loses his voice.

Recording in parts like this means several things. One is having all the arrangements and tempos set out well in advance. In our case we had to program all the guitar arrangements by computer and create proper click tracks (tempo guide tracks) for the recording. It may sound trivial, but despite having so-called complete computer arrangements, it still took me nearly 20 hours of tweaking, testing, mixing and bouncing guide and click tracks for our drummer. That does not include the programming of the two keyboard parts nor the acquisition/arrangement of samples for the recording.

The benefit of recording to disk is myriad. Recording to HD allows for unlimited tracks (theoretically), high-bit digital recording (usually 24 bit), the use of digital effect plug-ins rather than the use of expensive outboard equipment, and the GUI allows for the visualization of waveforms for easy punch-ins (takes from the middle of song for example) and for editing¹. The disadvantage is that with old tube gear and analogue recording, there was always a bit of ‘give’ where everything didn’t have to be perfect. The finest mixing boards and vintage tube gear were forgiving. That said, nothing sucked more than having to redo take after take to get that perfect track on a given song. Digital recording picks up every little nuance, every little scratch and sound that one makes – even to the extent that one hears little things in playback that one would never catch on the original take. It’s this cold meticulous perfection and the fact that it’s relatively easy to edit songs visually that digital recording has run amok. Every recording that you have likely ever heard (with the exception of maybe most classical and some jazz) has been heavily edited and processed to the point where it’s just so clean and perfect that bands, just to keep up and to not sound like they recorded something in their basement also have to have everything digitally recorded, processed and then edited. One irony is that the Garage Rock bands (all the ‘The’ bands) have their sound tweaked digitally to make it sound like it was recorded on old crappy vintage gear after it’s been cleaned and polished to sound perfect.

In our case, following a number of guitar takes the engineer proceeded to edit some guitar tracks not because they were off time, but because they had to be ‘mechanically’ perfect and sound like they were played by a robot. The problem with modern pop-rock music is that there is increasingly less room for things to sound human and to have those little imperfections that make the music feel real. The question then is whether to go the human route or to have one’s recording perfect? An extreme case of this was a band that came through the studio recently. The producer insisted that the drums be recorded without cymbals (to prevent bleed) and then have the cymbals recorded later. Similarly each guitar chord was recorded separately and then composited together. Madness.

I’ll be glad to be out of the studio soon.

____________________________

1. Editing usually involves the ‘cleaning’ of certain tracks of noise, muddy fades, guitar string noise, and other extraneous sounds. Occasionally this involves actually digitally fixing mistakes made by musicians such as waveform nudges and in more extreme cases, pitch correction for singers. The caveat is, of course that if one really can’t play or sing, then the editing becomes obvious. Lindsey Lohan is a good example.

It should be noted that classical music rarely has any of this high tech trickery. One reason is the technical superiority of musicians trained for a decade and a half on a given instrument. The other reason is that the perfection of the arrangement of the modern orchestra and the amphitheaters in which they're situated has been ongoing for hundreds of years - possibly the longest studio mix in history. It is no coincidence that the instruments are situated where they are within the orchestra in order to sound their best.

Go Connie Go

2008-03-04T13:39:00.002-06:00

Shall we lament poor Lord Black. It appears that he got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, tried to deny it, hired the irascible Eddie Greenspan to erase our collective memories about said cookie pilfering but it seems to have failed. Now good ‘ol Connie has to spend 6 ½ years in the pen guarding his derriere not from clever assaults of wit, but rather clever assaults on is assets. Too bad that to placate his enormous ego, hauled behind him on a gilded gurney along with feisty Barbara Amiel and that dishy little daughter of his, he revoked his Canadian citizenship in lieu of assuming the Title Lord of Crossharbour, thereby forfeiting his right to spend his term in one of our cushy low security ‘hotels’. Nevertheless, months ago I don't think many of us actually thought he would go to jail. Looks like he did.

Good on him. Seems that stealing share-holder ca$h is prosecutable indeed. Too bad the share-holders stealing our ca$h to pad their eel-skin wallets isn’t a crime also.

To quote KA – Connie gets a kick in the nuts - macadamia of course, to suit his expensive taste.

To quote me, bollucks to you Black!

Kitty blogging

2008-02-15T08:46:00.010-06:00

I haven’t written about the cats in a while. While our first kitty Eris clings tenaciously to her position as the queen of the household, Freyja has infiltrated our hearts by her general cuteness and typical-pussness. Other than the early heat that she experienced shortly after the New Year (yikes!) ¹, she’s been a welcome addition to our household. So rather than yammer on, here are a few pix. You’ll notice the dearth of Eris pictures. That’s because she’s a grumpy-puss who doesn’t like her photo taken.

Stretchy kitty.

Scanner kitty.

Bass kitty.

Learned kitty.

VAC kitty #1.

VAC kitty #2.

Pants kitty.

__________________

1. She’s since been “fixed.”

Can someone give me a nursing degree?

2008-02-12T10:03:00.000-06:00

Most of you know the ordeal that the BH and I have been going through lately as a result of her collision with a dock. Thank the orthopods that although there have been numerous complications, things have been improving. The BH has even over the last several months been weight-bearing, and recently began walking without the assistance of crutches.

There has been one teeny problem. The wound on her foot, the result of a prophylactic fasciotomy, is not healing. Indeed, after being open for six months, it had abscessed and turned into a rather nasty cavernous wound. Before solstice, our orthopod went in with some xylocaine and none-too-pleasant looking apparatus to do some “cleaning”, aka, slice, slice, tear, tear.

Following some vac treatment and a few courses of antibiotics, things aren’t progressing as well as we’d like and it looks as though the orthopod will have to go in, clean out the foot, tidy-up some tendons and put the whole thing back together humpty-dumpty-like with some clever stitchery and a drain. The downside is that the BH would be immobilized for another 2-3 weeks post-op.

The more amusing part is the sort of care we’ve been receiving lately. Back in December the BH’s orthopod had re-requested that she get the vac following her hostel-stylez debridement. The cute part is that following a cost-benefit analysis, she was turned down by the CCAC ¹. Ordinarily, I think this is an appropriate approach. If the treatment has little benefit and is very costly, then a conventional cheaper treatment should be applied. Sadly however, conventional treatment had resulted in an abscess and furthermore, the physician, presumably an expert on the subject of orthopedics and wound healing, had ordered the vac precisely because conventional treatment had failed.

Waiting for the wound to close. We've been waiting six months.

Angry phone calls ensued. There was wailing and gnashing of teeth but we finally got our way – two weeks after the order had gone in. In the meanwhile the CCAC had excluded the only two non-profit organizations, St. Joe’s Health Care (SJHC) and the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON), servicing 85% of the home care patients in our area, from bidding on the new contracts coming up in the spring. I believe in publicly-funded healthcare, but do not in principle have any opposition to services being delivered through private firms and a competitive bidding process. Excluding two organizations outright doesn’t sound like a competitive process. What resulted could be easily predicted:

Rats.

Sinking ships.

You put it together.

How are 15% of the nurses supposed to take care of the 85% of home care clients (assuming proportional allocation of nurses to patients)? Even if nurses jump ship to the other healthcare providers, how long will it take for the all the chaos to work itself out? Who takes care of the patients during the interregnum? Nurses proceeded to look for new work or to retire, or to take that four weeks of unclaimed holiday time that they had accrued. Despite the CCAC’s assurances that services would not be interrupted, in the last week I have changed my BH’s dressings twice and four times altogether since solstice. Perhaps someone should refund me my tax dollars, or qualify me as a nurse because apparently as a lay person I have the skill set to apply a high-tech vac-dressing and obviously require little or no training ².

In the end, with extensive political pressure, the nurses managed to put an end to the bidding this year and an inquiry will be launched into why VON and SJHC were excluded from bidding on the tender. In the meantime however, our regular nurse has gone and the BH has seen a different person each day. Some of these nurses are retired casual workers, others are new or inexperienced and consequently some sloppily applied dressings resulted in improper drainage leading to further abscess formation and infection. And so now, it looks like our efforts to secure the vac have been in vain and the BH will have to go for surgery after all to the tune of many tens of thousands of dollars. It looks like a process designed to cut down costs has actually in the end lead to greater strain on the tax payer and increased personal grief.

Thanks a lot Mike the Knife.

Thanks a lot Dull-ton McSquinty.

Go f#ck yourselves with a rusty spoon.

_________________________________

1. Now we know how underinsured yanks feel.

2. Yes, I’m being just a little bit sarcastic.

Long time no blog.

2008-02-11T15:12:00.000-06:00

I haven’t written a post in a long time. Nearly two months as a matter of fact. Truth is, I just haven’t been feeling inclined to write. I’m not sure why I started this blog. I suspect that I wanted to catalogue some of my more random thoughts and musing and save them and comments made about them for posterity. I guess it’s kind of like scrap-booking. I never intended things to be too serious and had hoped to keep things light and informal. I had also decided to keep things (pseudo) anonymous to protect some of my privacy and at the same time protect me from internet trolling. After some of the recent things I’ve heard from some of my colleagues ranging from Google background checks to outright extortion, I’m glad I haven’t attached my name to anything here. Don’t get me wrong, one doesn’t have to be too clever to connect the dots to find out who’s writing this, but a simple name search shouldn’t pull up this blog.

Truth be told, I have had somewhat of a crisis in terms of figuring out what to do with this blog. Do I write serious, well-researched articles about various minutia and arcana or knock-off a few fun pieces for gits and shiggles? Initially I had hoped that I would post more writings about science – but my will to write about science after a day of doing science, or writing science evaporates. Indeed, it seems that in general my will to write has been sapped, particularly after getting into protracted intarweb arguments/debates that often degenerate into pure rhetoric. So I may just stick to writing about music in my regular metal melt-down posts. Who knows?

Anyway, for me, 2007 sucked donkey dong as far as I was concerned. In this past year I was scooped (lucky number three!), my father sold the family cottage, and my significant other sustained a serious crippling injury thanks to your truly. To add insult to injury, a paper recently published from my old lab, and based on my master’s research, did not acknowledge my contribution in the form of an authorship. Two-thousand and eight isn’t shaping up much better. It looks like the better-half will likely need to go in for another surgery. She’s also currently unable to work and our financial strain is slowly growing. On the science side of things, our collaborator seems to have lost interest in our paper and is being little help in contributing to its publication.

Well, so it goes. Life rarely hands one victory just like that. Unless we are very privileged, we all have to work for our success, and so, we trundle on.

Happy Solstice

2007-12-21T14:58:00.000-06:00

It’s a time for new beginnings. The darkest days are now and things will be getting brighter from now on. Out of the old comes the new and let’s all hope that the new will be better this year than last. So in keeping with the spirit of whatever you’re celebrating this year, all the best to you and your families and may all your dreams come true. May your bellies be full, may you have a roof overhead and may you prosper.

Cheers.

News Item: Holy (S)crap

2007-12-12T11:00:00.000-06:00

I’ve not written in a while. I’ve been busy. Get off my case.

Yesterday, on the radio, I heard about a rise in manhole cover theft in New York. I haven’t been able to find the original article, but this appears to be a fairly widespread problem, particularly in the developing world, and especially in China and India*. It seems that the increase of metal prices has lead would-be thieves to steal manhole covers and sell them for scrap. I’m not sure where I read this, it may have been in Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, but apparently, were civilization to collapse we’d never again make it out of the Stone Age. You see, all the accessible surface ores that could be mined and smelted by low tech have been remove across the world meaning that the remaining metals are deep, deep underground and inaccessible without advanced technology.

Image cred here, but beware the CHUDs.

Between sh!tting and dumping heavy metals in our water supply, pumping carcinogens into our foods and raping the land, I think Homo sapiens is the only animal capable of f#cking itself in its own arse without even knowing it.

PS. Always google manhole, NOT man hole…otherwise hilarity (and some grossness) ensues.

*For a few stories, click here, here, here and here.

For Brummell – More whimsical grunting

2007-11-29T14:11:00.000-06:00

Over the last little while I have been working on the previously mentioned ‘pig squeal’ vocals in anticipation of the band’s new recording in the spring. So far my success has been inconsistent at best. I decided to consult some expert instruction on both overtone singing and on the alleged squeals. So of course, I consulted YouTube. Thus far I have come to the conclusion that most squeal hobbyists actually perform them wrong, choosing to produce tones by inhaling rather than exhaling. Having witnessed/spoken to vocalists from bands such as Despised Icon, who perform this as a part of their music, I know this to be wrong and dangerous. But go ahead kung-fu-screamo-scene-kids, wreck your voices, it will only amuse me.

So, as a part of my research I have come across this exemplary piece of piq-squealery performed by the magnificently horrible underground unsigned death/grind band Waking the Cadaver. Although the song is called Chased Through the Woods by a Rapist, the band are in reality breakfast cereal enthusiasts, as can be sensed by the musical interpretation below. It would of course be very uncool to call your band Waking by Cuppa-Java – unless you were a weird mathcore/noise-grind hybrid. I detect a new side project….

Enjoy.

For Temporary Relief of Witchdoctors

2007-11-21T12:06:00.000-06:00

Looks like an interesting and useful product. I tend to be plagued more by fundies, other Abrahamists and the occasional Satanist at a metal show. Perhaps it’s our climate here in SoOn. I don’t usually get many pagans trying to sell me literature.

Definitely worth looking into though.

Metal Meltdown: An Unanticipated Night of Noisecore

2007-11-16T09:53:00.000-06:00

Over the weekend, and to my delight, I had found out from a band mate that one of my favourite death/grind bands, Despised Icon (DI), was coming to Hamilton. Quick as a turnip, I recruited my nefarious evilutionary colleague, C-lo the Malevolent to ‘come with’.

Despised Icon has recently emerged as a veritable force among the death/grind elite, what with the technical riffage, blistering drums and of course, the whimsical growling. I was not always a DI fan. The first I had really heard of them, was several years ago when we opened for them in Sudbury. At the time, I thought their EP was mediocre Montreal-style death metal. Things changed shortly before the show. As we were waiting for doors to open, the lads in DI went through their entire set acoustically. Gathered round a coffee table, with guitars unplugged, drums tapped out on a practice pad and vocals tapped out on the table¹, the lads rehearsed their whole set. Fast forward two years and two albums and these guys are one of the fastest up-and-comers to the genre.

I admit that the main reason I wanted to see DI again (after having seen them three times) was to marvel at the wonder that is Alex Pelletier, who can only be described as a humming bird with drumsticks. The other reason of course, was to chuckle at the whimsical grunting².

When I arrived at the show, it turned out that half the band had either been replaced or was being filled in by other musicians. Most notably, the position of drummer was being filled in by fellow Montrealer Patrice Hamelin, who also happens to play for Montreal-based Martyr and a former band mate’s of mine band, Senate. It turned out that Alex sat this tour out because he was working (alas)³.

I was however, pleasantly surprised by the high caliber playing and were it not for the fact that I knew some members were replacements, I would never had know the difference by ear. Other than the crazy screamo windmill kids, the evening was quite enjoyable – until the noisecore that is.

DI doing what they do best.

When I obtained the tickets for DI, I really didn’t care about the other bands on the bill. It later turned out that the headliner was a notable (so I’m told) noisecore band called The Locust and the two openers were a band called Child Abuse and The Discord of a Forgotten Sketch, both also noisecore, which luckily I missed.

So what is noisecore? Noisecore (or occasionally called noise-grind) is the less musical cousin of the oft anti-musical grindcore. It is marked by abrupt stops and starts, incoherent political lyrics, strange tunings and instrumentations and all round weirdness.

Here is a hastily (and sh!ttily) drawn pseudo-phylogeny⁴ describing the relationship of noisecore to metal.

Figure taken from Mai-Ars et al, 2006.
Niche of a niche niche sub-sub-genre. Audience=2, SD +/- 4

Huh?

The easisest way to describe it would be to suggest that noisecore is the postmodernist metal. Still don’t get it? Neither do I. Have a listen to some of The Locust, in particular ‘Safety Second, Body Last’.

Feel better? Me neither. What’s perhaps weirder still is that the entire band (and even sound engineer) performs wearing green skin tight outfits with mesh eye-holes.

The Locust, boasting outfits that are stylish and practical. With song titles like Gluing Carpet Your Genitals, they must get loads of chix.

Although I was generally fascinated by the weirdness of the band along with the weirdness of the audience⁵, my stay became unbearable on account of the pure volume of the “music”. After my pants started vibrating uncomfortably from the bass frequencies, I decided to leave lest my testes rupture from the sonic onslaught. Therefore C-lo and I made our stealthy egress hoping to avoid sterility.

Oddly enough though, I’ve been craving a bit o’ The Locust lately. I think it might be time to have my brain checked.

NOTE: There have been a number of requests for me to post some of my band’s music. Although there are a number of sites hosting some of our recorded material, I’ve not pointed any of my posts to them for a few reasons. First, I’m trying to keep this blog somewhat anonymous on account of the fact that I have perhaps said (or will say) a few unflattering (but true) things about some persons, labs, etc. As a grad student, and one who found it very hard to find work after leaving a prestigious lab due to medical reasons, I’m mindful that what I say/write can work against me. Second, the most recent material from my current band is somewhat dated and I don’t feel adequately represents where we are now. Perhaps I will post some tunes, but we will have to wait and see.

____________________________________

1. Let’s face it, the vocals, being mostly atonal, are more of a rhythmic device than anything.

2. 'Officially' referred to as pig squeals in the metal/hardcore community, it’s really a simpler and stylized form of Mongolian throat singing, or overtone singing - without the singing. As an aside, who the h3ll are these officials? Is there some metal convention consortium? If so, I want to be on it.

3. There are no more r0ck st*rs. The truth of the matter for the last ten years or more is that most signed bands are in fact ‘working bands’, insofar that they work full time or seasonally to support themselves when not touring or recording. The reality is that most record contracts are merely loans or advances for recordings and distribution deals. The band always has to pay this money back, even if sales don't cover co$ts. There are of course exceptions such as U2, Metallica, most mainstream manufactured pop acts, etc.

4. Don’t even bother you prickish pedants – this mostly means you Brummel.

5. This requires further discussion. An uncomfortable number of male audience members were wearing colourful sweaters, white leather belts, painted-on pants (that can only be described as the new ‘hardcore cut’ by Tommy of whomever) and silly slicked down hair-cuts that defied physics, unless of course super glue were applied.

Knackered

2007-11-05T20:20:00.000-06:00

So its been some time since a post, and it hasn’t been entirely deliberate. The fact is that I’ve been rather busy and generally knackered of late and because of several ongoing things in my life right now I’ve sort of unplugged myself from the blogoverse.

First, I’ve been trying to get my wretched paper off the ground for the last several months. Now that I’m back in the lab more or less fulltime¹, I’ve been trying to focus on squeezing out the fetid turd that shall eventually become my paper. The problem is that most of the last month has been spent revising figures for the boss, over and over again. Normally this is part of the process, however, my boss’s schizophrenia means that figures are being revised shortly after being approved and then being approved, only to be again revised. The other problem is that he and only he, knows how this paper is to be written and hence the whole process is being micromanaged to the degree that I have very little (if any) incentive to actually write it. At this point I feel more like a contributor and less like an author.

Second, and as an added distraction, I have been recruited to assist in the writing of a book chapter about a certain tumour suppressor gene that is part of the research program of our lab. The book will focus mainly on clinical and medical genetic aspects of disease as a result of misregulation of said oncogene. As luck would have it, my supervisor has been asked to write about some evolutionary aspects of this tumour suppressor, presumably because of his experience with non-mammalian model systems such as fly and chicken used to study said gene. The only problem is that none of us are evolutionary biologists. I imagine however, that this will matter little to the editors, who being clinical scientists, have even less interest or knowledge of evolution than our lab.

Third, and perhaps most pleasantly (or least unpleasantly to be more accurate), I have been fairly involved in the pursuit of music of late. Things have been going well and indeed the band will be opening for a big-time signed act in December. We’ve also recently booked time in the studio for 2008 with the intent of recording a full length release. The drawback is the time this is taking out of my otherwise ‘spare’ time, also known as ‘sleep’. The fact that I’m no spring chicken means that it takes days for me to recover several hours of lost sleep. This last weekend the band played in Niagara Falls² which meant that I didn’t get back until 3am and due to my general geezerliness, I still haven’t recovered. The only redeeming aspect from Saturday was the prog-metal band What’s He Building In There?, with whom we got to play. Although a bit too Alice in Wonderland for my taste, these guys are tremendous musicians and a gracious bunch of lads who have expressed the strong interest for a gig-swap sometime in the New Year. Waterloo beware!

Taking notes from other metal core acts such as Between The Buried and Me, WHBIT deliver an eclectic prog-powered metal mix.

I hope to be posting more often, but we’ll have to see what sh!t-storm awaits. Hopefully things will be on the up and up soon.

_________________________________

1. Barring the occasional micro-crises such as the BH’s most recent foot infection scare – more about that later (possibly). Also, being in the lab fulltime means that annoying undergrads never leave one alone to actually get some work done.

2. Possibly the worst place in Southern Ontario – or at least on par with East Hamilton.

Rant: File formats

2007-10-18T13:59:00.000-05:00

I am not the most computer literate guy. When compared to the legions of tech savvies around me who code on a regular basis and have mastered the use of multiple operating systems including every flavour of Linux and SunOS, I am by comparison a mere peon. Over the years I have fraternized with many persons who were highly competent computer users, some of whom were amateur computers enthusiasts, others who were professional computer engineers and have probably learned a thing or two. Now, I’m not suggesting that we all need to learn how to program (although in the sciences today, programming, or at least scripting, is becoming more important day by day for all disciplines) but there has to be a minimum level of literacy to function properly in a professional setting. My primary beef regards file formats. After watching the last two lab meeting presentations fail because of non-compatible file formats and the grief I’m currently experiencing formatting figures for my impending paper, I just had to vent. As an example of said illiteracy, my boss recently expressed his confusion that I couldn’t edit his figures sent to me by email. Apparently it is his belief that files sent via email are somehow “standardized” so everyone can use/view them.

What the sh!t?

I’m guessing his belief is fuelled by persons such as me who always send files in a universally accessible format thereby deluding him into thinking that email is this magic babel-fish or Start Trek style universal file translator. But I digress.

Here are some suggestions when dealing with multiple file formats:

MS PowerPoint and Corel Presentations are NOT the same. Make sure you save both formats for that inevitable occasion when you have to use someone else’s computer and they only have PowerPoint (as is usually the case). Better yet, convert your presentation into a .pdf just in case.

Send documents to others in multiple formats. They may not all have the latest version of the software you’re using.

Scan all pictures/data in full colour at the highest resolution possible and save it as a universal non-compressed format (ie .TIFF). Do not use formats idiomatic to specific programs such as Adobe Illustrator, or to specific platforms (like Apple’s .pct). I recently watched someone convert his 150+ scanned images from Adobe Deluxe to .tiff format after he realized he couldn’t open those files on his home PC.

When sending compressed/scaled-down images use a universal compressed image format such as a .jpg or .png not a Mac .pct or a MS .emf.

Include file extensions in your filenames when sending files to other people. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to figure out what kind of file was sent to you – only to discover that you don’t have the relevant program at all.

Store all your images using the RGB colour scale that preserves all colour information. Remember, CMYK is for printing only.

When sending things like resumes electronically, be sure to send them as .pdfs so that the recipient can look at the file with the proper formatting.

Polish police end nun rebellion

2007-10-10T19:46:00.000-05:00

I always knew one couldn't trust those Polish penguins...

Back on the metal saddle again – Ow - I should have filed down the sharp bits.

2007-10-09T13:39:00.000-05:00

So my reunited band played our first show back last weekend. I was waiting if I could procure some photos of the event, but alas, despite the many snaps I saw being taken, I’ve yet to track down any pics. I of course was too nervous to bring my own camera, and the sole soul who I invited from my “real” non-heavy metal life, Carlo, was also sans-camera. This was probably a good thing given the smashy-smashy inherent to these things.

All in all, things went rather well. I was stunned by the number of people who came to the show wearing our old t-shirts and how many approached me to offer support for the reunion. Nevertheless, my stomach was still roiling because of my fear of things going horribly wrong. After all, we had disbanded because of the volatility of certain members of the band who couldn’t hold their sh!t together on gig nights on occasion, either losing their minds or getting hammer-smashed on whisky. Luckily, said member confined himself to his car with a bag of grass¹ and didn’t emerge until show time.

The show was headlined by the Montreal based groove-metal act Endast and was supported by Saskatoon-based Sparky, a fantastic metal cross-over act. We closed the show, expecting the worst following the main acts, but I was pleased to see about 150-200 people stick around for our set. Judging by the reaction they were well sauced and having a good time. The vigorous pit resulted in me being smashed in my face by my microphone about a good half-dozen times. There were two broken beer bottles on stage and during the last song, a completely naked man joined the fray in the pit hosing down the audience with beer (phew!).

But the night was young. After returning to the rehearsal space, the after party was just getting started. All the regulars were there: Hungry Bum, Gimpy, Nanook, Dirty Dave, Crustina, Dill-hole, along with a throng of other people I didn’t know. After showing C-lo around our derelict building, we made a graceful withdrawal just as things started to get a bit out of hand. A guy nearly picked a fight with me because he insisted that I autographed² his cigarette pack back at the show. After I carefully explained that I didn't, he became increasingly irritable and defiant that I had indeed signed his cigarette pack. It was time to go.

Overall, things went well. We’ve got another show booked for Niagara Falls in November and are currently booking for Toronto. Now as long as I don’t have to wake up with a sore face again, all will be OK.

________________________________________

1. The quantities of pot these guys consume are amazing. Moreover, I’m relatively certain that they couldn’t function normally without it.

2. It never ceases to amaze me that people want the band members of nobody-local-bands to sign random articles of junk. As a rule I refuse, but then one comes off a bit prickish without intending it.

Evolution of language: How she becomes he and he becomes it.

2007-09-30T18:08:00.000-05:00

I was talking to my stepmother recently and she referred to one of my cats as “he”. Now, both she and my dad know that our cats are female (or at least one still is). So is she senile, or did she forget? Neither. In Polish, even when referring to a female cat, one says ‘he’.

One of the interesting paradoxes in languages that have noun genders is that things that have actual genders (or sexes) can be referred to as having a gender other than their actual ones (grammatical vs. natural gender). In Polish, nouns can have one of three genders: masculine, feminine or neuter. The word ‘cat’ is masculine. So when referring to a cat, one would say ‘he’ regardless of the actual sex of the cat. This can have humorous consequences such as when referring to a cat that has had a litter one could say (in Polish), “He gave birth to the kittens yesterday.”

Polish is a highly inflected and morpheme-heavy language that is complicated by the fact that not only is there word gender, but also declensions as well as conjugations. Occasionally English speakers can feel a hoity-toity about their relatively simple, though irregular, grammar (but RIDICULOUS spelling) for avoiding such paradoxes. Nevertheless, although most words in English are a neutral ‘it’ gender, most of us use it wrong in the case of animals. When talking to my BH I usually refer to our cats as ‘she’. As one of my grammatically fascistic grade school teachers pointed out, only persons (and a rare handful of other nouns I can’t think of at this time) are referred to as 'he' or 'she', and animals are properly referred to as ‘it’. So to use my example above, one should say in English, “It gave birth to the kittens yesterday.”

And that’s how she becomes he and he becomes it.

My parents' cat Kacper (aka Kasper, aka Papa Kas) has the best of both worlds being referred to as ‘he’ in Polish – though I suppose he (I mean it?) is actually a eunuch. But don’t be fooled, under that furry exterior is a ruthless killing machine*.

___________________________________

*No joke.

RPGs are the Silly, but I still might have to get a new video card

2007-09-26T11:54:00.000-05:00

It’s no secret that I enjoy the occasional video game, and in particular I’ve been addicted to one Battlefield 2142 multiplayer first person shooter (FPS) for he past year or so. I am however, not a video game aficionado and have by and large stuck to FPS style games. For example, I am not into the much heralded role playing games (RPGs) I hear so much about. Most that I have played have failed to hold my attention probably because I have not had the patience to “get into them”, or they’ve been too silly to take seriously.

Enter The Witcher, an RPG made by the Polish video game developer CDPROJEKT. Now, I honestly don’t know if this game is any good, but the veteran Polish death metal band Vader¹ has released a video called The Sword of The Witcher promoting said game.

Now, I know what you’re thinking, this is not the brutal Vader thrashterpiece God is Dead, but given that I’m sure that the band is trying to appeal to the Squaresoft-playing Japanese-style RPG loving mama’s boys out there, they slowed it down a tad as to not scare them away.

I guess it’s time to buy a new video card.

^{^{_______________________________}}

^{^{1. Although Vader is the granddaddy of Polish death metal, I've never found them technical or diverse enough for my liking. There are a myraid of other fanatastic Polish metal bands including, among others, The Yattering, Decapitated and Behemoth.}}

Put on your ice skates, Ba’al-ze’bub’s wearing a toque!

2007-09-20T19:57:00.000-05:00

So the Canadian dollar reached parity with the US greenback today. Woo-hoo! Actually, I’m not sure so sure about why I’m happy. Perhaps it’s the psychology of it all. After all the grief and arrogance I received from most Yanks over the years concerning their mighty greenback, I feel like walking into a Denny’s in Buffalo and paying for whatever shit-sandwich they sell with loonies.

I’m sure they’d think I just came off the short bus¹ or lost my straight-jacket on the way in.

On the more serious side, I’m not sure if this a reflection of our strong economy here in Canada, or rather how Dubya has crashed his own economy into the ground. Either way, it is disconcerting because what happens down there, tends to affect us up here owing to the billions of dollars worth of trade between our two countries. Although listening to an economist on the tube today, he said that our economy is more disentangled from the US’s than ever, due to increasing overseas trade. As he put it, “It used to be that when the US got the sniffles, we got pneumonia. Now when the US gets pneumonia, we get the sniffles.”

Who knows if this is true. In the meantime though, I’ll be looking for consumer electronics south of the border.

_____________________________________

1. I incidentally used to ride to school on a short bus.

Revising democracy

2007-09-18T15:00:00.000-05:00

I wanted to write on this topic some time ago, however, due to other interests competing for my head space, I am getting around to this rather late. Better late than never I suppose.

We are fortunate to live in a democratic country where the will of the people is generally reflected by the sort of government we elect. I’ve generally been happy with our system that, despite the peculiarities inherent to a parliamentary democracy, protects the rights of minorities while assuring the will of the people is done. Nevertheless, there are shortcomings to our government, and one of them, in my eyes, has been the lack of proportionality to our voting system. When I received a flyer from the Ontario Citizen’s Assembly, I couldn’t believe it. There was going to be a referendum on the Ontario voting system. Now, I don’t have my ear to the ground for all things political, especially where the Province is concerned, but I found it perplexing that the first time I heard about the proposed revision to the voting system was via snail-mail. On later reflection though, it isn’t at all surprising. The Assembly’s proposed change would bring in a mixed-member proportional system that would see an end to the privileged status the main parties have enjoyed for so long – namely being elected to majority governments without the support of the majority of voters.

Under our current first past the post (FPTP) system, majority governments can be elected by holding the most seats in Parliament. To win a seat, one must simply get the most votes, not the majority of votes, for said electoral district. This is how the Federal Liberals won three consecutive majorities while never having more than 40% of the popular vote. The corollary to this is that, regional interests are over represented in the FPTP system. In the last Federal election, the Conservative Party won most of its seats in the bastion of conservatism in Western Canada, meaning that the interests of Canadians are being represented mostly by Western Canadians –likely favouring Western interests. More disturbingly, a secessionist party, the Bloc Quebecois, holds 17.5% of all the seats in Federal Parliament, but only 12.5% of the popular vote.

The proposed mixed-member proportional (MMP) system will better reflect the will of the voting public while maintaining local representation. The scheme would have Ontario residents voting for their local MPP and in addition, voting for a party ‘list member’. In the event that the number of seats does not reflect the proportion of votes cast in favour of given parties, the list members are use to ‘top up’ the seats. There will be 90 MPPs representing electoral districts and an additional 39 list member seats.

Win-win right? Not so, apparently. Some of my more serious blogospheric colleagues have voiced concerns that the proposed system is bad. Langmann, has raised the issue that list members will be party-appointed hacks with no or little experience in politics making decisions for the rest of us. Perhaps, or perhaps not for the following reasons.

The lists have to be published and approved for transparency by Elections Canada before election.

List members will likely be selected by the party membership, not by local riding associations - at least in the case of so-called ‘grass roots’ based parties like the former Reform Party or Green Party.

If you don’t like the list members and don’t want to vote for a certain list member – don’t.

Another criticism is that list members have no accountability. Perhaps not directly to their constituents but they have accountability to the party who is accountable to the public. If the party falls out of favour, it will get punished in the following election. Recall the Bob Rae government of the early 90’s. Nobody ‘elected’ it, but both the PCs and the Liberals got dinged for former governments and the NDP won by default.

Carlo has also commented that MMP could be destabilizing because it could lead to gridlock. Under our current multiparty system, governments, particularly minority governments, must make concessions to other parties in order to make the system run smoothly. Nevertheless, even a minority government can successfully orchestrate the parliamentary votes it wants by manipulating its opposition. I imagine the inclusion of a greater variety of opinion wouldn’t greatly change the way parliament is run now, other than perhaps moderate the legislative process and foster a greater spirit of cooperation.

There are of course advantages to MMP.

1. One can vote for his/her preferred candidate AND for his/her favoured party.

2 .The creation of list members may also open up the field to non-career politicians such as scientists, teachers, academics, physicians and economists who otherwise might not have the time or resources to run a proper campaign and jump through the hoops put up by the local riding association.

3. MMP would likely deter strategic voting. Too often we vote for parties that we know have the best chance of defeating the party we don’t want in power. Votes cast for smaller parties are wasted because they are never reflected in the final tally of seats. In my opinion, this is a really cynical form of democracy. MMP would allow every vote to count toward electing members that reflect the will of the citizenry. Moreover, how amusing would it be to have a member of the Communist Party of Ontario sitting next to a member of the Libertarian Party of Ontario?

Some bloggers have said that they’d like to see run-off voting systems, or the separation of legislative and executive powers. I for one would like to see the abolition of the Provincial level of government¹, but that’s not on the table. I would also like to see an elected senate and a directly elected government leader who doesn’t moonlight as the party leader. But again, that’s not on the table. What is on the table is MMP vs. FPTP.

Is MMP the best system for Ontario? Probably not. There is the instant run-off system used in Australia, or the related single-transferable vote system that was being bandied about in BC. There is also direct proportional representation where there is no direct representation of an electoral district. This however, is not the point. We are not voting for one of these systems, but in favour or against MMP - and since I believe MMP is more ‘democratic’ than FPTP, I will be voting in favour of MMP.

Regardless of your political stripes, exercise your right and go vote on October 10, 2007.

_______________________________________________________________

1. Just think of all the redundant bureaucracy. There are ten ministries of education, health, finance, transportation, etc. Why? This is one country, and we should all live by the same rule. Most Europeans visiting Canada are totally perplexed by our Provincial levels of government. The most bizarre example is Quebec’s adherence to a different rule of law, based on the Napoleonic code, vs. that of ‘English-speaking” Canada, based on English common law.

IBM vs. MS

2007-09-18T11:05:00.001-05:00

It's the man sticking it to uh...the man!

Mac vs. PC vs. Linux

2007-09-14T16:12:00.000-05:00

As per my previous rant, here is a topical Mac vs. PC spoof.

The Shining?

2007-09-12T19:01:00.000-05:00

I don't remeber it being like this...must of been all the drugs I did as a teenager.

Rant Double Feature: W!ndows Sh!tsta is Teh Broken and why Tux Sux (with a short disscussion on why Apple is crapple)

2007-09-12T18:34:00.000-05:00

I recently bought a new laptop. Some might think that because I already have a two-year old laptop, my purchase was frivolous. The reason I bought a new laptop was several fold. First, I needed a new more powerful portable computer with a larger HD to run the applications I wanted for research and to install a dual boot Windows/Linux system. Second, I wanted a large 17 inch widescreen so I’d strain my eyes less and have a number pad. Third, I could wipe the other laptop and give it to my BH for her work needs and fourth, they were damn cheap with all the going-back to school sales.

So I did a bit of research and picked up an HP dv9000 series laptop from one of the larger electronic retailers because hey, the deal was good. The only issue was that it came preloaded with the much maligned Windows Vista. I heard a lot of bad things about Vista, and I tried not to let it affect my judgment. I had Vista for about two days and then I wiped my hard drive.

Why? Because Vista should be called Shitsta. Now, before anyone gets their knickers in a twist, this is just MY experience. The laptop I had bought was allegedly designed to run on Vista – so presumably it was optimized for that purpose. At first I thought maybe I just needed some time to get my head around the interface and relearn some of the new features. But no, the main issues were performance. Vista performance simply seemed S… L… O… W… E… R. Why for example can I load XP on my old laptop¹ and shut it down twice in the time it takes to start up Vista once on my new computer? Why is it that even when I turn off the fancy over-animated Aero interface my windows still trail across the screen? Why is it that when sitting idle, not even doing anything, task manager shows that I’m using ~750Mb of RAM?

The useless but cool looking Vista 3D tiling window feature.

But it doesn’t stop there. There is of course the incessant asking of permission to do stuff, “Are you sure you want to open this window? This software may be malicious. I’ll ask you again in five minutes”. Some of my colleagues have reported that some third party software just doesn’t work, or works slowly. Networking is also a drag. Purportedly, the idea was to make networking easier by making it more stream-lined – but no go. Even after I turned off my security features on the router Vista still couldn’t find it. After much finagling a window popped up to ask me if I wanted Vista to “fix” my connexion. I hesitantly pressed OK. Nothing happened. I tried desperately to find the network settings (I never found them…I’m not sure where they’re buried) and the window popped up again. This time when I pressed OK, the problem was magically fixed. How? What changed²?

OK, fine. Networking works – on to the next issue One of the selling points of my computer was the larger 17 inch monitor running 1440 x 900 resolution. The idea is that I can fit more windows on the screen and have more columns available for Excel. I assumed by the giant icons on my screen and by the way the menu and button bars in Word and Excel crowded my workspace down to a tiny window that my resolution wasn’t cranked to the max. After five minutes of trying to figure out how to change my resolution, which in the end wasn’t done though Vista but through the proprietary nVidia control panel, I came to the conclusion that it was at the max 1440 X 900. What the hell is the point to this? Why have a 1440 X 900 resolution if you can’t use it? My 1280 X 768 rez on my other laptop has more workable screen room than on this monstrosity. So I tried to change the font size, the icon size, and nothing helped. They were already at the smallest setting. I read on some forums that there was a hack, but by now I was sufficiently pissed off that I was ready to kill Bill and of course Vista…

And kill it I did. Before I did though, I burned the necessary system restore DVDs (it takes two!) and checked the forums to see what I needed to do to “upgrade” to XP. The long and the short is that HP has made it difficult to do (presumably with collusion from Microsoft). Drivers exist, but not for everything and they don’t always work. Specifically, my webcam apparently only works with Vista. Naturally, none of the third party software that was preinstalled on my computer is available for download for your XP system and loading them from the restore discs is impossible without reloading Vista to factory settings. It took me another day to get XP to work normally and the resource use is down to a respectable ~150-200 Mb of RAM when idle and everything seems to work (except my webcam).

The next step was installing Kubuntu. For well over a year, I’ve wanted to start learning Linux so I could use certain scientific software and learn a bit of scripting. I also like the open source nature of Linux and with my increasing dissatisfaction over the years with Macs and MS, I felt like sticking it to the man. However, I’ve been thwarted by my boss’s lack of vision (not giving me time/resources), and my fear of accidentally wiping my hard drives on my desktop and laptop in order to try Linux. But now, my new computer is tabula rasa! I can do anything with impunity! After some discussion with colleagues it seemed that Kubuntu was the way to go because of the Windows-like KDE interface and the alleged ease of operation. I had used Linux before on a small scale and thought, OK, let’s do this. I visited some forums before I bought my laptop and it looked like I should be able to get Linux to work on the dv9000 easily. My computer engineering friends are all great aficionados of Linux and don’t run anything else at home and swear that most, if not all, hardware issues can be resolved easily.

Aha, not so! The woe started even before I installed Kubuntu. At first I couldn’t figure out why my latest version of Kubuntu (Feisty Fawn) would not install on my computer. After spending several frustrating hours trying to install, it turned out that my CD was corrupted. In fact after I checked md5sums on the first three Kubuntu distros (all different ones) I downloaded, it turned out all three were corrupted. OK, sorted that out with distros from a new ftp site and STILL could not load. Apparently, there were some device conflicts and I had to run the command line installation of Kubuntu to get it running. I finally got Kubuntu to install after close to twelve hours. Of course, none of my hardware worked. It was 4:30am. I went to bed.

Linux mascot Tux urinating on MS Windows. Image cred.

The next day I tried to get my video card to work. My screen was all squished up and distorted and it was hard to read the text. Luckily my ethernet connection was working but I had to go out and buy a new cable. I tried to use the get-apt command to get the nVidia drivers but no go. Of course, my command line skills suck and I have a lack of knowledge about certain things like ‘root’, ‘sudo’ and general Linux directory structures, so I’m not entirely surprised things didn’t work. Moreover, advice on Linux forums like “Install software X” is less than helpful. Then I discovered the Adept package manager, and life started to get good.

I got my video card to work and slowly things were looking brighter. Then I hit the wall – my wireless card. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get it to work. Adept manager could not install the ndiswrapper utility for converting windows drivers and get-apt did not work and I was losing my mind. I had to call in the big guns. If I could not get Linux to work properly on the laptop, I would have to return it, and my time was running out. I called Kcarlo³. Kcarlo however was on a tight schedule and couldn’t spend too much time helping me out. On Monday he came by my place after work and hammered at my problem for two hours or so and finally got most of my hardware working. Just as he finished the computer froze. It would now not boot up in Linux. Linux was teh-broken just like Vista, but different.

I eventually got Linux to boot and it seems to be working without freezing if I shut my ethernet off. After some investigation by Kcarlo and me, it turns out that there are several possibilities why Linux hates my computer.

The nVidia network drivers conflict with the Broadcom wireless drivers in Linux.
There is a conflict between USB devices and the wireless upon boot-up.
There is a conflict between network devices in general.
Tux Sux

Now all I have to do is get a better handle on the command line. It took me something like twenty minutes to copy three files from my desktop into a sub-directory in one of my lib folders. Gahhh! Would the drag and drop function really be that bad?

I have heard the songs of praise for Linux in the halls of academia, the server rooms of business and the basements of nerds for years. No doubt that Linux has its uses and that it is a very powerful and versatile operating system. But for noobs, Linux can be daunting and even the user friendly varieties like Ubuntu and Kubuntu can be very frustrating. It seems like OS makers have us over a barrel. One really has no choice, or rather a few choices that don’t satisfy all one’s needs:

MS Windows: Currently installed on about 85% (or more) home computers world wide. MS also occupies a huge chunk of business market share. Just about every piece of commercial software runs on Windows and if you want to do desktop gaming, Windows is the only way to go. If you want to buy a computer you will have to buy a Windows OS with it even if you don’t want it unless you’re building your own computer, or unless you’re buying a Mac. Now with Microsoft’s awesome Vista only scheme, new pieces of software will run only on Vista forcing consumers to “upgrade”. Even if I just want to buy a laptop to run a free open source OS like Linux – with all its inherent limitations, I still have to pay Micrososft for a shitty operating system I don’t even want! Is this really what free market capitalism is about?

Apple Mac: Currently have about 10% of the market, mostly in special purpose applications such as publishing or recording. Macs run fast and their software is optimized for their operating system and computer architecture. The drawback is that there is less software available for Macs and the availability of hardware is limited. As a pet peeve for me, most recording/audio-editing software companies have switched to Mac-only applications forcing recording studios to adopt Mac-only recording facilities. What Macs make up in style and ease of operation, they seem to lose in efficiency. Working on Excel on a Mac is like putting a saddle on a cow. The lack of the right mouse button and certain quick keys makes input operations a bitch as you have to go back and forth to the window menu repeatedly. Apple also regularly infantalizes its consumers by those damn Mac vs. PC ads. The message I get from those ads is not that Macs are superior, but that Mac users are too dumb to use a PC – which I’m sure is not true.

Typical Mac app. Where the hell are the OPTIONS???

Unix/Linux: Unix derived operating systems comprise less than 5% of the market share. Arguably the “best” OS varieties out there, they are difficult to learn as a newcomer to computers, or even the operating system. Although new flavours of Linux are increasingly like Windows or Macs, learning the command line is essential and intimidating. There are also a number of hardware issues that are works of progress and have to be addressed on a continuous basis. Although much software is Linux/Unix only, there are important pieces of commercial software unavailable for Linux.

So what have a learned so far?

If I want to play games I need a PC. If I want to be stylish or record music I need to run a Mac. If I actually want to do research, I need Linux. Everybody wins!

_________________________________

1. 1.3 GHz AMD Turion with 1.18 Gb RAM and a 60Gb 4200 RPM HD (running XP) vs. 1.7GHz Dual core AMD Turion with 2Gb RAM and a 160Gb 5400 PM HD (Running Vista).

2. This is why I don’t like Macs. They may work well and crash seldom, but when something goes wrong, good luck. The Mac philosophy seems to be “make it as easy as possible with as few features or options as possible”. Generally things go well, but when there is a problem it’s impossible to fix.

3. One of the annoying things about Kubuntu is that they prefix practically anything with “K”. Just try to find the right software when everything is called K(whatever).

New blogroll links

2007-09-09T15:26:00.000-05:00

I've updated my blogroll with an eclectic collection of new links. I've added the vociferous and occasionally irascible Langmann, the highly anonymous (and humorous) King Aardvark, the piscine pusher Brummell and the delectably delicious Dagmar.

Back in the saddle again (?)

2007-09-03T15:56:00.000-05:00

Before all this nonsense with my BH’s injury, the old band had decided to give it another go and see if we could make it work again.

Well we’ve been back for a few rehearsals and it’s going OK. There is something eerily strange and familiar about the whole process again but I’m enjoying rehearsals so far. It’s been over a year and half since I’ve played with this band and about eight months since I ceased playing with the last ‘filler’ band. It is however a jarring contrast to what I experience day to day. Upon entering the room on the third floor of the dilapidated building that houses our jam space, the noises and smells, and textures all come back. The sticky floors, the lingering smells of old pot, cigarillos, and stale beer; the walls and ceilings plastered with pornography and eclectic magazine cut-outs of bands and musical instruments all seem familiar and foreign at the same time. Let’s see how long it will last.

The drum kit, heart of a metal band.

Ahhh…the rock and/or roll dream. It smells like beer and piss and doesn’t really look much better.

The very long road to recovery: Inky black essence of death

2007-09-03T15:28:00.000-05:00

We knew that the road to recovery would be long. After my Better Half (BH) got home following the accident we thought that the worst was over. That turned out not to be quite true. When my BH arrived back home after three weeks in hospital up North, she was put back on antibiotics preventatively to avoid infection of a nasty wound that had opened up over one of the original stapled incisions from her first orthopaedic surgeries.

Cefalexin, the drug, had a nasty GI side-effect for the first week and so we had it switched to clindamycin¹ for the remaining last week of treatment. It did the trick. My BH didn’t get an infection and her guts were OK.

Fast forward eleven days and my BH had the first signs of a mild diarrhea. We had initially thought that this, accompanied with chills and parasthesia, were symptoms of withdrawal. The same weekend her symptoms started she decided to go cold-turkey from the opiates she was taking to manage pain. A few days later, the vomiting began. Still she didn’t have a fever and we weren’t sure if this was an infection or something else. When the diarrhea increased in frequency and vomiting occurred even after the ingestion of water, I decided to take my BH into the hospital. My primary concern was dehydration.

It was a good thing we went when we did. My BH’s pulse was 150 and pressure was ~90/50. In the next two hours they pumped her with six litres of saline. Yes, that’s correct. Six litres – one and a half of those four litre milk bags, or one and a half of those plastic milk jugs. My BH didn’t even have to urinate after the saline was pumped into her. The physicians were amazed that she wasn’t comatose, let along talking coherently and moving under her own power to the toilet.

The physician on duty suspected C. difficile and immediately put her on a drip of Flagyl. We got a room in emerge, were put into isolation and spent the night in there where I got to be intimately acquainted with C. diff. It was a busy night and the nurses were running around with the chaos unfolding in the ER (a couple of traumas just came in as well a severe alcohol poisoning) and it was my job to empty my BH’s commode. Human fecal matter is not a pleasant thing to deal with at the best of times, but the C. diff. sh!t is something else – an inky black essence of death. And it smells that way too, sort of like putrefying flesh and feces.

My BH spent five days in hospital. By the time it was over, she hadn’t eaten for seven days and had lost another several pounds. A few days into her stay in hospital she developed a sensitivity to stemetil ², a strong anti-nausea drug. The sensitivity manifested itself as uncontrolled tremors in her limbs, and dystonia in her face. At first they thought it was an electrolyte imbalance. My BH called me at home and I rushed to the hospital thinking they had put her KCl drip on too high knowing full well that KCl can depolarize cellular membranes and kill a person. After the blood tests came back they ascertained that it must be the stemetil and put her on benedryl to counteract the allergic response.

So she returned back home a few days ago and she’s doing better. Unfortunately I had to cancel my committee meeting and will have to do it sometime in the future weeks. At this time, we both just want our lives to return to normal.

_______________________________

1. It turns out that both cephalosporins (to which cefalexin belongs) and clindamycin are notorious for inducing C. diff. Moreover, because my BH is both female and had C. diff. up north, she was at an even greater risk of getting it again. I think someone should have thought that one through a little better.

2. Resident humour: At one point, one of the residents was baffled by why my BH was experiencing so much nausea. The conversation between my BH and the resident went something like this:

Resident: “Do you think you might be pregnant?”

BH: “Umm…No.”

Resident: “Perhaps we should do a test just in case.”

BH: “Um, I spent three weeks in hospital and another four weeks at home during which I’ve had no sexual relations. I’ve also had two periods during that time.”

Resident: “Well maybe we’ll do one just in case.”

BH: “???”

It would have been funnier if the situation wasn’t so serious at the time.

I am a slacker

2007-08-21T13:25:00.000-05:00

You ever get the feeling that you’re a slacker, but you don’t know it? The shear number of my recent posts probably tells you that I’m procrastinating. Well, I am. I’m supposed to be working on my committee report and on a paper and, well, neither seem to be going very well right now. But overall I thought I was doing OK with my life. As a kid I was always ranked well in school. I was involved in sports, arts, and music. By sixteen I had already held a few regional titles in swimming and track and field and I even went to OFSAA. Before eighteen I was already gigging regularly in bars and clubs and had two recordings under my belt. I now hold three degrees and I’m working on a PhD. I also play in a semi-professional band. I have a loving life partner (read: wife) with a successful career and things are on the up and up.

So why does this guy have to go and ruin my little bubble? His name is Adam Fulara and he’s a 30 year-old Polish computer engineer who also happens to be, I don’t know, the world’s sickest¹ guitarist² ever!

No, you couldn’t be some weirdo who lurks in his basement all day trying to bang out Bach on a sh!tty electric while eating small rodents and insects. No, you have to have a decent education, career and probably a girlfriend to boot. Thanks a heap Adam.

__________________

1. I am of course exaggerating. I don’t know who the sickest guitarist is, but this guy is amazing.

2. He plays guitar using the two-hand tapping technique to play polyphonic or rhythm and lead compositions. In this regard he is more of a “stick” player than guitarist. This was already being done on guitar in the 70’s. However, because the difficulty of “tripping up” by accidentally playing two notes n one string, most practitioners of this art have switched to either double-neck guitars or an instrument designed for the expressed purpose of tapping, the Chapman stick. There are a few videos of Adam playing a double neck (see here for example) but I find these less impressive because you don't have to worry about string interference.

Monday Metal Meltdown: Is it something in the water?

2007-08-20T20:56:00.000-05:00

Before my BH’s unfortunate accident I had intended on posting a few technical articles about alternate guitar tunings and the use of non-standard instrumentation in metal. However, sometimes you just have to immerse yourself in the music and ignore the minutiae. I realized this when I recently stumbled across a band called UneXpect. I had read on the metal news website, Blabbermouth, that Mike Portnoy, a highly regarded prog, rock and jazz drummer, had highly recommended UneXpect. So I thought it was worth checking out.

All I can say is that this is pure heavy metal ear candy - but not in the standard sense. UneXpect is a cross between Dillinger Escape Plan, Emperor and Cirque du Soleil with a bit of Primus and Gypsy Kings thrown in. It’s totally unconventional. It’s huge, it’s dramatic and it’s technical without sounding like it’s being technical for the sake of being technical¹.

One of the unique features of the band is the unusual instrumentation. While the core of the band is standard metal ensemble of two guitars, bass and drums, there is an additional female vocalist, a violinist and a keyboard player. Both guitarists contribute ‘dirty’ and ‘clean’ vocals to compliment the lead female vocalist’s operatic style. Compositions include the standard frantic riffery of more ‘extreme’² metal bands and include the unusual addition of jazz and classical style piano along with jazz/funk pop-slap-tap bass lines executed on a nine string electric bass³. However, rather than trying to deconstruct the sound for you, have a listen to a few of their tunes on their myspace site. In particular, listen to the tracks Desert Urbania and Megalomaniac Trees.

Although his band is great on its own merits, the broader question is this. Why do all these amazing bands seem to come from Montreal? Montreal is known as one of the world’s metal Meccas and has produced world renown extreme metal acts such as Cryptopsy, Kataklysm, Despised Icon, Ion Dissonance, Neuraxis, Martyr, Quo Vadis and classic metal acts like Voivod and Obliveon. Does it have to do with Montreal’s vibrant artistic community? If so, why does Montreal have such a well-known musical nd theatrical establishment? Is it something in the water?

______________

1. Some of the Dream Theater artists, notably guitarist John Petrucci and drummer Michael Portnoy released some pretty wanky musical-masturbatory projects like the Liquid Tension Experiment. Although musically magnificent, it’s nearly unlistenable in my opinion. It’s like auditory pornography, completely gratuitous and tasteless but without comedy.

2. The unfortunate terminology ‘extreme metal’ usually refers to acts that are faster, or more dissonant, or more discordant or generally louder and more difficult to listen to. Extreme metal bands usually (but not always) have a higher level of musical technicality than more mainstream metal acts.

3. Standard electric basses have four strings tuned in ascending intervals of fourths. Five string basses with the addition of a lower-tuned string have become increasingly popular since the eighties for all types of music. There are however numerous multi-stringed variants of the electric bass such as the six string bass, and the difficult to master Chapman stick.

Evolution of a foodie?

2007-08-19T22:46:00.000-05:00

I was just having some left-over low-grade Chinese food from the BH’s parents’ visit and while rummaging around in the fridge I found a derelict piece of truffle Brie from before my BH’s accident, and I had a flashback to a very eclectic snack I had just before summer.

It was a weekend and I had a few drinks in me and I got a hankering for some nibbles. So I slunk away to the fridge to have a poke around and see what could be scavenged. I returned with (to my BH’s eyes) a plate of horror. On it I had placed several different items for my consumption consisting of a few portions of brine-pickled herring¹, a small slab of unpasteurized Roquefort², a generous portion of Brie de Meaux³, some kimchi⁴and a handful of Moroccan olives⁵. All this yumminess was washed down with a dry gin Martini⁶ garnished with, of course, a green olive.

Mmm...pickled herring, just like mom used to make. Image cred here.

My question is two fold. First, am I becoming a foodie or just someone with a perverse taste for eclectic and strong tasting food?

Second, why is it that it’s always food that’s kind of gone off, that tastes the best? I mean milk is good right? But let’s let some bacteria rot it out and then mold get at it and call it cheese! Barley is good too, but what about barley and fungus and we can call it beer! Cabbage? Too plain, let’s ferment it! Olives? How about we leave them out in the sun for a few days?

So what gives? Any one of these foods might give some people a heart attack, but all of them, together?

Has this happened to you? Has my gut run amok? What’s the most eclectic snack you’ve eaten?

____________

1. Pickled herring is a Northern European delicacy eaten in Baltic regions including Germany, Denmark, Poland, the former Soviet Baltic States and Scandinavia. Pickled herring is raw herring prepared variously using vinegar, brine (my fave) or even by fermentation. It’s usually eaten accompanied by a strong liquor such as schnapps (Germany) or vodka (Poland, Scandinavia). I just stumbled across this site with not one, but three different types of pickled herring!

2. Roquefort cheese, or the ‘king of cheese’ (Stilton and Brie are also known by this name) is the prototypical blue cheese. Imported unpasteurized Roquefort is the sh!t. From my experience, all so-called commercially available blue cheeses pale by comparison. As an aside, I do enjoy other regional blues such as Stilton (England), Valdeon (Spain) and others.

3. Contrary to what most people seem to think of Brie, it is not the mild buttery cheese most people think it is. Real certified unpasteurized Brie is rather strong, and very complex in flavour. However, the initial fragrance is quite off-putting. The first time I had real Brie I can only describe the experience as "eating in colour". All other Brie's until then were "black and white". Don’t forget, the rind is meant to be eaten!

4. Being Polish what could be better than sauerkraut? How about, spicy Asian sauerkraut! Kimchi is a spicy Korean version of fermented cabbage.

5. I don’t know if the olives were actually from Morocco. Likely they were from Spain, being the largest olive exporter in the world. These were black olives prepared in Moroccan style by being sun dried and then packed in olive oil.

6. I hadn’t any Vermouth (which would have arguably made my snack even more ‘gross’) and so I settled for pointing my glass in the general direction of Europe.

Incoherent rant: pseudo-quasi uber-picky vegetarians

2007-08-17T16:35:00.000-05:00

I’ve decided to add another category called ‘incoherent rant’. This will take a similar form to a normal rant, but will not be as well thought out and argued (or perhaps should be phrased, not thought out and more-badly argued). So, on to the IR.

How many times have you had this happen? You invite over some folks for dinner knowing full well that they’re vegetarian. So you prepare a myriad of vegetarian dishes and you face an exchange like this:

Necator: “Bon appetite.”

Guest: “Oh, um, I don’t eat chick peas.”

Necator: “Oh, are you allergic?”

Guest: “No, I just don’t like them, and oh, what’s that?”

Necator: “This? It’s couscous.”

Guest: “Um, yeah, I don’t think I like that.”

Necator: “Have you had it before?”

Guest: “No it just kind of looks gross.”

Necator: “Um, okay, how about the bean salad?”

Guest: “Yeah, I find the white ones kind of icky.”

Necator: “How about the eggplant?”

Guest: “Too mushy.”

Necator: “Well, what would you like?”

Guest: “Do you have fish?”

Pause for incredulity.

Necator: “I thought that you were a strict vegetarian?”

Guest: “Well, yeah, sort of, I mean, fish is kind of a vegetable right, fruit of the sea?”

Necator: “Um, yeah, a fruit with a spine. Anyway, we didn’t plan on making fish, maybe something I might have in the fridge?”

Guest: “How about bread, I like bread!”

Necator: “Okay, let me get some.”

Guest: “Oh…do you have white bread?”

I mean, what the f#ck? Why is it that nine times out of ten when eating with a vegetarian, I have a broader palate and tolerance for vegetarian dishes than these people? Sure, I’m a bit of a foodie, and like lots of different foods. I don’t shun vegetarians and make an effort to eat more vegetarian meals each week, but come on! Perhaps if you ate more than just pasta and white bread, you wouldn’t have the skin tone of a cave fish and wouldn’t get sick all the time.

Argghhh.

End rant.

Trials and tribulations of a tib-fib

2007-08-15T13:42:00.000-05:00

This post marks my less-than triumphant return to the blogosphere. For my 1.73 readers, feel free to rejoice. For over a month I have voluntarily unplugged myself from my blog because there were too many more important things with which I had to deal and still do.

On Monday July 2^nd, 2007, my better half (BH) had an accident. While riding a water tube during one of our final days at the family cottage she struck a dock and sustained an open fracture to her lower left leg. Immediately following the collision, I retrieved her from the water and swam her to shore where my father and I physically stabilized her so I could call EMS. Given our location in the middle of nowhere, EMS arrived after a harrowing twenty-thirty minutes (I wasn’t really counting) whereupon we and some of our neighbours assisted EMS in getting my BH across to the mainland where she could be taken to a helipad to be airlifted to North Bay. Tension was high but things were looking good. My BH was lucid, chatting with EMS and she hadn’t even put up too much of a fuss during the time following the accident – not a tear! It looked as though her tibia was broken and penetrated the skin but she wasn’t bleeding profusely and we were pretty optimistic.

Upon arriving at North Bay several hours following my BH’s arrival, I found out that she had broken both her tibia and fibula (apparently known as a tib-fib) and that she was going to have surgery to align and stabilize the break by inserting a metal needle through her tibia - an hour and a half long surgery I was told. I kissed my BH bye and left to get a room for the night and make some phone calls.

I had arrived back at the hospital later than I wanted and was worried that my BH was out of surgery and I had missed my chance to talk to the orthopaedic surgeon, Dr. K. I was grossly mistaken. The surgery took five hours. Apparently the tibia was also fractured longitudinally and due to bone fragmentation, both bones had to be aligned using plates and screws. Moreover, skin running down her shin had been caught in the longitudinal fracture preventing adequate circulation from reaching it resulting in some superficial necrosis that had to be excised. As a result her staples (ventral incision) were tighter than normal. Her leg was elevated and we settled in for a long night of watching her leg for compartment syndrome. Briefly described, compartment syndrome arises from excessive edema to an extremity causing an accumulation of pressure in said extremity that can lead to ischemia and nerve damage. This can happen from trauma or highly invasive surgeries. Left untreated, compartment syndrome will kill the limb by depriving it of oxygen. The solution to preventing compartment syndrome is a surgical procedure called a fasciotomy. Naturally, compartment syndrome is to be avoided not only for the potential consequences of the syndrome itself but also because the fasciotomies take very long to heal and are susceptible to infection. Essentially these are open wounds, often to the bone, that heal by a process called secondary intention and can take months to heal¹. At three AM I retired to my room, in a strange motel cum boarding house cum-tavern².

I returned to the hospital at 7 AM the same day to catch the surgeon on rounds. Nothing had changed but by the afternoon there had been a disturbing development. My BH’s toes and foot were increasingly cold and cyanosed. By the evening, the quest for compartment syndrome had begun in earnest. Dr. K came by and said to my BH, “this is going to hurt.” What he said was not, “this may hurt”, nor “you may experience some discomfort”, but “this is going to hurt.” Knowing physicians’ typical underestimation for other persons’ pain, my BH was suitably worried. Dr. K. began bending my BH’s toes in different directions. I thought my BH’s eyes were going to pop out of her head. I thought I was going to kill Dr. K., so I had to leave the room before my thoughts manifested themselves materially. However, after the ordeal, Dr. K was not satisfied by the level of pain my BH was experiencing, believing that if she had compartment syndrome, it should hurt more and in different places from where she was feeling the pain ³. Dr. K ordered an art line test for my BH to measure the pressure in her leg.

In this case, the arterial line (art line) test involves the strategic insertion of a large (~ two-inch long 18 gauge in this case) needle into the four compartments of my BH’s lower leg. No go – her internal compartment pressure was normal and her foot was still blue and cold. The only other possibility was vascular damage. At approximately midnight, Dr. K. called the CT techs out of bed ordered a CT angiogram. He got the radiologist on the blower, emailed him the pictures, and pulled the vascular surgeon in too. The CT scan was too muddled given interference from the hardware in my BH’s leg. The diagnosis was unclear. Exploratory surgery followed by vascular surgery appeared to be the only options. Dr. K and the North Bay vascular surgeon deferred their expertise and prepped my BH for a transfer to a vascular unit. Around 2 AM we found out that Sudbury would take her. The nurses let me use their computers to MapQuest the directions and I headed out to the motel at 3 AM to try and get some rest.

The call came at 3:48 AM. I showered and got dressed, stopped at the gas station for gas and some wake-ups, got on the road hoping I had the mental acuity to avoid any moose or deer that might be loitering on the Trans-Canada along the ~150km drive to Sudbury. As dawn approached, the boreal parted and the landscape transformed into the eerie lunar landscape that is a hallmark of the city. As I got to the hospital, my BH was being prepped for surgery and I took the opportunity to talk to the vascualar surgeon, Dr. F. Simply put, he wasn’t very optimistic. Oxygen deprivation in an extremity for as long as my BH had experienced meant that there was a very real possibility that she could lose her leg. Even if circulation was restored, the leg and especially the foot could already be dead.

It was always in the back of our heads, but now the worst was becoming a reality and it was my fault. You see, the reason my BH broke her leg was because of me. I was steering the boat. I had done this dozens of times each season for tubers and skiers and had never had even a close call, except this time. I had misjudged the boat’s trajectory and the distance to shore. We were at the end of the run and I was pulling into to shore to stop so that the tube passenger, my BH, didn’t have to swim too far into shore. I had however, come in too tight and too close. When my BH collided with the dock, the boat was already at rest. Had I stopped two meters sooner, she would never have collided. Had I stopped half a meter further, she would have hit her head with enough force, I can only imagine, to have killed her. I can only be thankful that this did not happen with a previous passenger, a thirteen year old girl and daughter of a friend of the family.

The surgery took over four hours. Dr. F. had identified the problem and performed a vein patch angioplasty and thrombectomy in the tibial artery. As a preventative measure he also performed two fasciotomies to prevent any possible complications with compartment syndrome. The good news was that the muscle was still red and appeared to be healthy, but the next 72 hours were still critical. We were in it for the long haul. My BH’s parents were arriving from an Alaskan cruise that night and I would have to break the news to them, that their daughter may not have a leg by the time they got up to Sudbury.

By the evening, it was apparent that her foot was still ischemic. Doppler sonar only detected weak pedal pulses. Dr. R. came in to do a quick assessment on behalf of another orthopdod in surgery. My BH was scheduled for orthopaedic surgery the next day. Dr. C. came in and explained that she was going to have another two to three fasciotomies on her foot to relieve pressure from the edema in order to allow the blood to get to her whole foot. My BH’s parents came just before the surgery.

The next 72 hours were indeed tense. It had been one of the longest weeks of my life. It seemed that all progress was thwarted by some new exigency. I had gone through every emotion in my repertoire, from despair, anger, and guilt. I am shamed by some of the thoughts and emotions I felt during that time. I wish that I could have been stronger for the sake of my BH. After the death of my mother from cancer, watching her turn into a skeleton before my own eyes and watching her die in my living room, I thought I had my emotions under control. All through that first week, it was my BH who was the rock. She never cried. She was calm and collected and accepted her fate stoically. Most of all, she forgave me.

The surgeons saved her leg, and her foot. The day after her surgery I saw her wounds during a dressing change and can only say that it looked like something out of a gore film⁴. The two fasciotomies on her leg were each over a foot long down to the bone. Along with the two stapled incisions from the ortho surgery and the three fasciotomies on her foot, her leg looked more like the result of a boat propeller accident than a ‘simple’ break.

These are pictures of my BH's wounds taken aabout two days following the third surgery. the left picture shows the lateral fasciotomy on the leg and both stapled incisions from the ortho surgery. The picture on the right shows the medial fasciotomy and one of the foot fasciotomies.

But that is not the end of the story. It’s been a long ride. My BH spent twenty two days in hospital. During that time, she lost twelve pounds, caught C. difficile, became anaemic and found out she had another two undiagnosed breaks in her foot (second and third metatarsals). During that time I had to return to Southern Ontario to sort out some things here and had to return to the cottage twice to pack things to take home now that it was sold. It took about a week, but after twenty-two days we got my BH transferred to Hamilton. She’s now been home for about three weeks. For two of those she had her intestines turned inside out from the broad spectrum antibiotics she was taking. She’s finally eating normally again and her bones and fasciotomies are healing well (two on her foot are healed). She’s also been placed on a vac-dressing to aid in healing.

As long as the ride has been, there is an even longer way to go. My BH will not be weight bearing for another four weeks and her larger fasciotomies will not be healed for up to several months. It’s almost certain that she’s sustained permanent muscle and nerve damage in her leg and foot and will have to re-learn how to walk once she’s able to stand on two feet. She’s also incurred some necrosis in her toes from those few days of sustained ischemia, but we have no way of knowing how superficial or severe the damage is at this time. It could take more than a year for her to walk again normally. We’ll have to wait and see, but things are looking good.

Thank you Dr. K, Dr. F, Dr. W., Dr. C. and Dr. P. Thanks to all the nurses at North Bay Civic and Sudbury Memorial and the Hamilton General fracture clinic. And thanks to everyone else who’s helped along the way.

Before I left for the Canada Day weekend, I wrote a post about the sale of the cottage. In it, I poured out my heart about what the cottage meant to me. Well, in some ways, it’s all bollocks. I’ve gotten to know myself better than I’ve wanted to over the last month. I’ve also learned and relearned a few things. This is the most important:

You can replace property, but you cannot replace the ones you love.

To my BH, I love you SPY.

1 .Indeed, these wounds may take over a year to heal in the elderly, diabetics or even smokers.

2. North Bay is a strange place at the best of times, peopled by numerous transient workers boarding for seasonal labour, timber and mining. Further adding to the peculiar feel to the town is the idiomatic speech habits of the locals. North Bay is very close to the Quebec border and is, I was once told by former North Bay native, the ‘most bilingual city in Canada’. I’m not even sure how you can quantify that, but over the next two days I started to pick up on what that person meant. It’s not that everyone can speak French and English. They can, and fluently. It’s that they’re speaking French and English at the same time. They casually shift back and forth between the two languages not only mid-sentence but also construct these odd hybrid sentences of French peppered with English or vice-versa – and tourists like me aren’t immune to this kind of dialogue. As a curious aside, the city is also invaded annually by a plague of shad flies that have been known to cover buildings and roads so thick that they all look white. It’s also been rumoured that the roads become slick with dead flies to the point where they’re a traffic hazard. I had just got the tail end of this invasion.

3. In retrospect, the strange locations of her pain were probably explained by the fact that the fractures in my BH’s second and third metatarsals had as yet been undiagnosed.

4. We’ve been photo-documenting her healing since just after her second set of fasciotomies and I will likely post my BH’s healing progress in the following weeks and months.

Bye-bye Baiji

2007-08-09T21:11:00.000-05:00

Despite the turmoil in my life right now, and my blogospheric hiatus, I couldn't let this go. Lipotes vexillifer, also known as the Yantzee river dolphin or baiji has been declared extinct more or less as a direct result of human activity. I read this before in late 2006, but it seems to be confirmed. I'm not reacting to this just because this is a 'cute' aquatic mammal (it's actually quite ugly), but because it's one of those indicator species, high on the food pyramid.

F#ck Mao.
F#ck unbridled capitalism.
F#ck the monstrosity that modern China has become.
F#ck North American complacency and insatiable materialism.
F#ck me.
F#ck humanity.

We deserve everything we've got coming.

Indefinate Hiatus

2007-07-06T10:38:00.000-05:00

Due to some recent personal events, this blog will be on hiatus for the next little while.

Happy F#ck!ng B!rthday

2007-06-26T19:30:00.000-05:00

I am the son of immigrants. In fact, I myself am an immigrant. I was very young when I came to Canada, but I was born east of the Iron Curtain. My parents sacrificed a lot when they came here. My father was a chief engineer and patent agent at a metallurgical firm in Poland and my mother was a principal dancer in the Warsaw Ballet and Polish National Opera. In Poland in the late seventies, they were at the top of their game, two young thirty-somethings mingling with aristocracy, diplomats, business tycoons, artists and musicians – but my dad’s past was beginning to haunt him. As a student he was nearly arrested at various anti-communist demonstrations and some of his childhood chums had been ‘disappeared’. It was time to move.

They came here with $200, two suitcases and me. When they arrived, they started at the bottom. My dad was a delivery boy before getting a job as a junior draftsman and my mother was never able to break into the insular Canadian ballet scene. After several years she gave up and never looked back on dance. It was then that she sheared her waist length hair marking a symbolic and literal severing of artistic ties. The first ten years of my life were happy but marked by poverty. I always had enough to eat but things were tough. When my sister was born and when I got into my tweens, things started to look up. My parents bought a house, we got two cars, and I was finally able to accrue ‘stuff’.

As a kid I didn’t have a lot of the things other kids had. To make matters worse for me at the time, my parents always sent me to “better” schools in the richer areas of Toronto and I became acutely aware of what other kids had. But as my parents became more affluent, life became easier. Eventually, my parents owned a decent house in Glen Abbey West and six years ago my dad bought a cottage.

Today, on my birthday (I shan’t reveal my age for fear of being labelled senile) my dad accepted an offer on the family cottage. You see, my mother has since died, my dad has remarried and things are becoming bleak again. My father is getting ill, he has little pension from the government and none from his company and so he and his wife intend on retiring in Poland, back to build on ancestral land that my father owns. Unfortunately, they cannot afford to keep both properties, and so the cottage must be sacrificed.

Since my childhood I’ve been used to not having stuff, but when I got stuff, I never let it go. I remember the Millennium Falcon I got from a visiting English uncle when I was six. It was about the sole Star Wars toy I had. I almost never played with it. I wanted it to be there forever. It sat on my bookshelf, unused for years. Likewise, I wanted the cottage to be there forever. The cottage for me was the ultimate Canadian dream for my dad and me – to own a little piece of Canadian wilderness. I remember hearing all the kids growing up talking about their cottages in Muskoka or Haliburton or the Kawarthas and how they’d go water skiing and tubing and fishing and cliff jumping. I always wanted to be invited but never got to go. Years later, after my formative ‘cottage experience’ years were behind me, I got to go water skiing and tubing and fishing and cliff jumping, but with a difference – I invited as many friends as I could. I could finally share with others what I never had a as kid.

The cottage, or Campo Phantastico as I called it, will now leave our possession. Sure it was a pain to get to (it took four hours on a good day) and had a leaky roof and we almost got killed by falling trees during the Ontario wind storm and the foundations are buckling and the dock is unsteady, but it was MINE. It was my little piece of paradise. Few things were more magical than getting up at dawn and watching the sun rise while drinking a cup of coffee, watching the risers of the fish and hearing the lamentive cry of the common loon.

So now there will be no more listening to Quirks and Quarks or Ideas on CBC radio; no more playing cards until 3AM and then going for an early morning swim; no more watching meteor showers on the dock; no more cooking sausage over a camp fire; no more drinking on the dock at 11AM while fishing; no more candlelight suppers when the power goes off; no more water sports; no more weather reports for Sudbury/North Bay, Timmins, 'The Kap', Moosonee, Attawapiskat and Hearst; and no more bears on our porch or moose in our yard.

It’s gone. I’ll miss you Campo Phantastico.

Happy fucking birthday.

Mathematics

2007-06-22T11:44:00.001-05:00

I'm normally not a fan of forwards, but my better half, a math teacher, sent me this one and I thinks it's great. We've all worked at one time or another in some uber-@rsehole corporate environment where everyone is trying to put in "110%" and "actuate their potential" by "realizing the end-goal of the workflow by visualizing the process while not reinventing the wheel."

Here's to those c0cksuckers:

From a strictly mathematical viewpoint it goes like this:
What Makes 100%? What does it mean to give MORE than 100%? Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%? We have all been to those meetings where someone wants you to give over 100%. How about achieving 103%? What makes up 100% in life?

Here's a little mathematical formula that might help you answer these questions:

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26.

Then:

H-A-R-D-W-O-R- K
8+1+18+4+23+15+18+11 = 98%

and

K-N-O-W-L-E-D-G-E
11+14+15+23+12+5+4+7+5 = 96%

But,

A-T-T-I-T-U-D-E
1+20+20+9+20+21+4+5 = 100%

And,

B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T
2+21+12+12+19+8+9+20 = 103%

AND, look how far ass kissing will take you.

A-S-S-K-I-S-S-I-N-G
1+19+19+11+9+19+19+9+14+7 = 118%

So, one can conclude with mathematical certainty that, while Hard work and Knowledge will get you close, and Attitude will get you there, it's the Bullshit and Ass kissing that will put you over the top.

Metal Meltdown: Getting back together with the old band

2007-06-22T11:14:00.000-05:00

I know what all of you are wondering, “Oh, mighty Necator, how is it that you are such a font of heavy metal knowledge?”

I have been playing guitar for over sixteen years, and for most of these years I have been involved in one band or another. Though I’ve played in many bands over the years (including top 40, jazz, blues and of course heavy metal bands), there have been three major bands with whom I’ve played. These will be called My First Band (MFB), My Last Band (MLB) and The Last Band (TLB) of which I was merely a performing member but not really part of the band. There was also my OAC funded solo project that I won’t really discuss here because it was never a ‘band’. A little bit of history is in order.

MFB was a three-piece ( we started out as a four-piece) 90’s style thrash band in which I played for eight years. I cut my teeth in the biz and we enjoyed a modicum of success recording a few tracks (two demos and two LPs) and opening for legendary metal acts like Anvil and Overdose. It was however the 90’s and metal was a dirty word. The band failed in the early 2000’s after a disagreement over a potential record/distribution deal.

Having unsuccessfully tried to find bands looking for a guitar player, I settled on the role of bassist/backing vocalist in a young upstart grind/death metal outfit with some black metal influences. After a few line-up changes and a few years and recordings later, I became principle song-writer and main vocalist/bassist. This was my most successful band, opening for the likes of Strapping Young Lad, Cryptopsy, Kataklysm, Misery Index, Despised Icon, Threat Signal and The End. Unfortunately, it was not to be. Following a series of unfortunate events (broken wedding engagements, substance abuse, suicide of a person close to the band, attempted suicide of a band member, car accidents, unemployment, gangrene and hernia surgery) centring mostly on the drummer, the band dissolved about 18 moths ago at the height of its game. To keep from going crazy, I joined TLB as a guitarist. Initially enjoying the transition back to guitar (yes, I got to play solos!!!), I got bored after six months when I got frustrated with the rigid song-writing process and the general dysfunction of the band. Despite having an incredible and professional drummer, I left, and the band dissolved shortly after (oops).

The night before last, MLB got back together for a rehearsal to assess the plausibility of a reunion. All said, things went well. Interestingly, after being away from the band for a year and a half, I forgot how hard some of the songs were to play. I reviewed the six songs we were going to rehearse the day before the practice and I can only say that I’m glad we wrote the songs down (we use Guitar Pro to write and annotate tunes) because I totally forgot how to play them and how hard they are to play! The immediate thing that struck me as I was reading the song notation was, “what was I on?” None of the bass lines made sense, and in addition to that I apparently had a knack for overcomplicating guitar lines by using counterintuitive back and forth harmonies and partial chords that only made ‘sense’ when played by all the instruments. After not having played bass for over aa year, I woke up today with both wrists and forearms sore and stiff, from the… um, heavy metal workout (insert jokes here).

We’ll have to see how things progress. We have a few more rehearsals scheduled. It would be great to be back on stage again screaming my brains out!

Happy Belated Summer Solstice everyone!

2007-06-22T10:15:00.000-05:00

Image credit here.

I hope everyone remembered to fill their dads’ boots with coleslaw! Oh wait, I think that’s Yak Shaving Day…

Well, I hope everyone had a good frolic in the starkers with all the other wood nymphs! I should be up at the cottage this weekend to ‘commune’ with the divine^*.

*Dear fellow atheists, do not read too much into this. I do not believe in gods, goddesses, nymphs, horned or otherwise. I take this opportunity to reflect on our role as part of the biosphere…and have a few drinks.

When Ninjas Attack!

2007-06-12T16:12:00.000-05:00

This one's for you Carlo. When Ninjas attack!

Book Minireview: The Female Brain

2007-06-12T13:38:00.001-05:00

Good science books for lay-persons are notoriously hard to find. Often they are quite technical and really intended for an audience that has a good grasp of the field in discussion. Other times, they’re fluff/woo pseudo-science being pushed by the likes of archetypal scientific illiterates like Oprah. Rarely does one read a book that finds a happy medium of a truly well-researched book written by an expert that does not patronize his/her readership nor write for only the scientific elite.

Enter The Female Brain (TFB) by Louann Brizendine (ISBN: 0767920090). I had first heard about this book from my BH after she attended a PD session at her school and they were discussing brain and learning differences in female student. I admit my first reaction was, “Here we go, some new age woo woo pseudoscience being sold by an American physician with little grasp of basic science.” I was however, pleasantly surprised. The book is well referenced and marries various scientific and clinical fields including molecular biology, neurology, medicine, psychology, psychiatry and (wait for it) evolutionary biology. Unlike Jared Diamond’s Why Sex is Fun (0465031269) which I found heavy handed, repetitive and ponderously boring¹, Brizendine’s exploration of female sexuality was fun, easy to read and peppered with anecdotes and case studies supporting hard scientific data. Interestingly, despite the title of the book, the female brain included a lot of information about sex differences between men and women and hence not only did one learn about the female brain specifically but also about the male brain.

The format of the book follows the life cycle of a human female from conception to death. It discusses physiological, endocrinological and anatomical changes in females and the consequent psychology of the female brain. Although not a book about evolution per se, Brizendine’s examples using comparative biological and even genetic studies enforced certain hypotheses regarding human fidelity, hidden estrus, menopause² and other subjects. Unlike Diamond who seemed to draw from mostly bird studies, Brizendine spends a good deal of time discussing comparative studies using various mammalian species including of course primates, along with other model organisms such as rats and prairie dogs.

In all, the book was informative and pleasant to read despite the occasional ‘chicky’ language and Brizendine’s penchant for referring to the brain as being “marinated” in hormones. The BH and I borrowed this one from the library (along with Why Sex is Fun). Having read it, I would consider buying a copy for my shelf.

1 Diamond’s book should have been called Why Sex is Fun, but I won’t bother telling you, instead I’ll talk about birds.

2 Diamond argues that menopause is an adaptive trait that evolved to allow elderly females to increase their fitness by caring for their grand-offspring. Although not outside the realm of possibility, his case in Why Sex is Fun is unconvincing. Though Brizendine does not argue one way or another, she does cite data that early 20^th C women had a life expectancy of 48 years whereas the median age of menopause is 51.5 years suggesting that menopause was more a consequence of aging in our hunter gatherer ancestors.

Fluff post: Kitty Chaos

2007-06-12T12:51:00.000-05:00

So it’s been over two weeks since we acquired our bastard kitten ¹ Freyja. Our main concern when Freyja arrived was whether our other grumpy-puss Eris would accept her. For the most part, things have been quiet, up to about a one meter distance between the felines. Lately though, Freyja has asserted herself and started harassing Eris. This has manifested itself in numerous ways including Freyja’s new found joy of jumping on Eris’ head.

Freyja harassing Eris on the cat stand.

Now that Eris has snapped and started batting Freyja perhaps Freyja will learn her place. We’ll see.

1 I mean this literally.

Hardly a surpise....

2007-06-06T23:46:00.000-05:00

You Are A Martini

You are the kind of drinker who appreciates a nice hard drink.

And for you, only quality alcohol. You don't waste your time on the cheap stuff.

Obviously, you're usually found with a martini in your hand. But sometimes you mix it up with a gin and tonic.

And you'd never, ever consider one of those flavored martinis. They're hardly a drink!

What Alcoholic Drink Are You?

Although...the golden shower superhero guy kind of disturbs me.

You Are a Classic Martini

You area sophisticated drinker, who knows that simple quality is over-rated.

You're a knowledgeable drunk, but sometimes you're a know-it-all when you're blasted.

You should never: Drink and gossip. You tend to forget who's standing right behind you!

Your ideal party: Has a real bartender. But no one mixes a better drink than you.

Your drinking soulmates: those with a Chocolate Martini personality

Your drinking rivals: those with a Margarita Martini personality

What Flavor Martini Are You?

Once again, no surprise...

Declining morale

2007-06-04T14:12:00.000-05:00

A while ago I wrote how my work got scooped. Since then, we’ve been trying to push a paper out as fast as possible. Of course, the problems have been compounded because despite having pretty good data and a small but neatly self-contained story, it is the will of my boss to make the story more complicated and convoluted by adding all sorts of other data that will likely confuse the fairly clean story that we have.

To make this exercise a little less vague, I will describe very generally what the content of the paper is. The paper is essentially a microarray paper aimed at demonstrating some general trends in gene expression that arise as a consequence of a certain series of genetic perturbations that are known to cause cancers in humans and other vertebrates. The uniqueness of the paper arises from the fact that we’re using a well characterized viral model of cancer that until recently has not been amenable to array analysis. However, in contrast to pure bioinformatics¹ papers, this paper will also contain a smattering of biological experiments in support of the array data.

The usual mode of investigation for these sorts of papers is as follows:

Pilot array experiments to assess the feasibility of large scale experiments
Plan out necessary array experiments with cost benefit analysis (more isn’t always better, sometimes the simplest experiments are the best and easiest to interpret)
Full scale array experiments using necessary replicates and controls
Data analysis using the most appropriate and unbiased methods
Biological validation and follow-up experiments to underscore trends in the array data

Sadly, this is not the way that my investigations are being done. They started out that way, but with my boss’s ill-conceived collaboration, samples and experiments got tacked on after the fact. The addition of new array experiments and samples appear to be disagreeing with some of our previous observations. In one set of experiments the addition of two new replicate arrays disagrees with the first three arrays calling to question some of the in silico data that have been generated. In an attempt to resolve this problem I have tried the usual methods such as identifying outlier arrays (arrays deviating from the norm with respect to invariant probes) and using the presence/absence of known biological markers to eliminate potential problem samples. Unfortunately, these methods have not discerned which among the samples are in fact true outlier arrays. Grouping arrays into two parsimonious groups (with respect to gene expression patterns) yields two very different results – one of which disagrees with some of our experimental observations, suggesting that these samples in fact deviate from the norm. However, the statistical properties of these arrays are much nicer creating a bit of an issue with respect to which data should be presented.

To compound things further, microarray data, particularly array data for oligonucleotide arrays, can be analysed in various ways that are consistent with common accepted practice (but not neccessarily consistant between different analytical methods). Depending on normalization techniques, the use of presence/absence calls, utilization of mismatch probes vs. sole use of perfect-match probes, the availability of numerous ‘canned’ programs (both proprietary and open source), and the implementation of certain cut-off values, one can get a staggering diversity of analysis results. As a consequence the temptation to employ analytical methods that will be most consistent with one‘s observed data become great.

Discussion of these issues with the boss has reassured me somewhat insofar that he believes that the data are the data and any variation between samples should be explained in the context of differences in cell culture, sample preparation, etc. In this sense I’m greatly relieved that he doesn’t want to ‘massage’ the data into supporting what we want to see. Nevertheless, my faith (I use that term loosely) in empirical integrity is occasionally called into question, and I sometimes have to wonder if my data and by extension my science is not pure sh!t. And so, my morale has been suffering tremendously of late. Coupled with my worsening sleep patterns, my poor coping mechanisms (gin martinis) and the fact that I likely won't be able to take a holiday this summer, I'm turning into a wreck.

1 Despite my (mostly amateur) interest in bioinformatics and despite what my boss thinks, I am not a bioinformatician – I never have been and given the lack of support I have in pursuing bioinformatics on my own within the context of my lab, I will likely never be one.

New Addition: Freyja

2007-06-01T08:38:00.000-05:00

Last week, the better half (BH) and I adopted a barn kitten. We’ve kept quiet about it because we weren’t sure how our current grumpy-puss, Eris, was going to respond to a new intrusion on her turf. As it is, despite a few close calls the new kitty and Eris are not killing each other and much to our relief we won’t have to give up the new kitty to my sister. Though the cats have been mostly ignoring each other, I had forgotten how demanding and crafty a 7-week (now 8-week) kitten can be. When we first brought her home, she was skittish and could not scale anything taller than herself. Within two days she managed to foil all my improvised and store-bought barriers aimed at preventing her and Eris from getting too close. Oh well, who needs sleep.

So please welcome our new Felis catus, Freyja.

Figure 1 shows Freyja reclining peacefully after an intense half-hour of ribbon chasing. Note the resemblence of said cat to the 'Oh, Shit ' kitty from the famous poster adorning dormatory walls across North America.

Figure 2 shows Freyja (bottom) and the grumpy-puss Eris (top) atop a formidable cat tree designed by the author's BH's father. Also note the utter crapitude of the photo quality due in various part to poor photographic skill by the author and a substandard Sony digicam.

Metal Meltdown: Guitar Virtuosi

2007-05-30T15:21:00.000-05:00

Until I was in my early teens I didn’t really get into popular music. Up until then I had listened to my parent’s modest collection of vinyl LPs consisting mostly of classical ¹ and assorted 70’s and 80’s pop (Abba, Boney M, Diana Ross). It wasn’t until I heard Metallica’s Master of Puppets in the late 80’s with its complex rhythms, structured harmonies, and unconventional song structures that I got into popular music².

When I had finally got into guitar at around 14, I started playing because I had fallen in love with the chunky, bassy, percussive guitar sound employed in modern heavy metal. Over the years I had developed my skill in rhythm and lead techniques, which for the most part fell on deaf ears given that I was playing during the 90’s, a period of atrocious anti-musical pop populated by bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

Before I digress too far, I wanted to discuss some of the virtues, and virtuosity of heavy metal guitar. Metal was, and is, in many respects about excess. Metal musicians frequently push music and technique to the limits. As a consequence the metal genre has become a repository of fantastic mostly self-taught musicians. Now before I get ahead of myself, I need to discuss some of the differences between metal guitar and other styles such as classical, jazz and other pop styles.

A logical starting point for discussing guitar would be classical. Although contemporary guitar came into classical music fairly late in the game, guitar under classical has developed significantly. Classical guitar is very formalized and regimented. As anyone who has played nay classical instrument can tell you, everything is codified; from back posture to the angle of the fingers to the fret board, to which fingers are ‘allowed’ to pick which string and even things like foot position. Classical employs a finger picked system (using nails, often reinforced with various resins) using a nylon-stringed classical acoustic guitar ³. Classical playing varies from most popular forms of guitar playing by virtue of the fact that most pieces are composed for playing a melody line in accompaniment with a rhythm line. Usually the guitarist plays the lead lines on higher strings (termed upper strings even though they’re physically oriented near the ‘bottom’ of the neck) whilst playing the bass notes on the bottom two or three strings (lower strings on the ‘top’). Jazz is less formalized and can use numerous guitar variations including classicals, acoustics, electrics, and hybrid electrics. Although there are notable jazz virtuosi such as Al DiMeola, John MacLaughlin, Paco DeLucia, among others, most jazz playing focuses on phrasing and note choice and less on technique and thereby speed – what the metal guitarists crave.

One of the main differences by which metal and rock differ from all acoustic guitar playing and most jazz is the use of distortion. Distortion compresses the overtones and changes the dynamics of an electric guitar tone and creates a ‘hot’ overdriven or ‘fuzzy’ sound. Guitar distortion in the 60’s was initially a by-product of cheap tube amplifiers being pushed past their limits but later evolved as a deliberate effect used in the vast majority of rock and metal music.

Distortion has a number of side effects that affect the way an electric guitar is played. These include longer note sustain, signal compression and feedback. These characteristics make the electric guitar much different from an acoustic insofar as playing goes. It allows the guitarist to use lighter gauge strings, to hit notes lighter (and therefore faster), to sound notes by tapping (creating an audible note using the fretting hand alone) and to create chunky, percussive tones through the use of ‘palming’. But not all is roses in the land of the electric. The use of distortion often creates undesired noise and/or feedback, so much so that the guitar player must constantly mute undesired notes using either the left or right hand. It also prevents the metal guitarist from playing two separate lines simultaneously on the guitar without them sounding like mud.

These interesting acoustic properties of distorted electric guitar⁴ lead to the development (or at least the popularization) of a number of techniques that otherwise are not possible in classical and jazz. The first is the use of palming (or palm muting) to create chunky and bass heavy tones in rhythm playing. This was the sound with which I fell in love.

Here is Frederik Thorendal playing rhythm guitar from his solo album Sol Niger Within.

Another popular technique is sweep picking. This is a technique popularized by Swedish guitarist Yngwie Malmsteen who borrowed it from classical rake technique. It is mostly used for playing arpeggios (chords divided into single notes) by picking one note on each successive string (either ascending or descending). When played ‘at speed’ it looks as tough the guitarist is sweeping the strings using his right (picking) hand. On an electric this technique is hard to execute because each string must be muted immediately after it is sounded. However, played fast this technique sounds deadly.

This is Jeff Loomis from Nevermore playing an example of a sweep for Guitar World magazine’s “betcha can’t play this” lesson series. An extended example can be found here.

Another killer technique is the use of the tap (occasionally called the hammer-on from nowhere). Tapping uses the force of hitting a fret to sound the note of that fret without actually picking it. Eddie Van Halen popularized (he says invented, though it’s being used very sparingly in classical for hundreds of years) two hand tapping in the early 80’s. The idea is that in addition to using the fretting hand, one can use the picking hand in concert to tap notes in succession on the fret board. The extreme form of this, eight-finger tapping, uses all eight fingers from both hands to tap out melodic lines.

This is an example of Chris Broderick of Jag Panzer/Nevermore playing an eight-finger tapped line for Guitar World magazine’s “betcha can’t play this” lesson series. An example of a jazz style two hand rhythm/lead tapping piece by Mozart also by Broderick can be seen here.

As with anything though, these things can get out of control. Here is a bit of runaway selection if you will for guitar playing. The guitarist featured in the clip is ambidextrous dual-guitar playing cock-rocker Michael Angelo Batio who is so ridiculous that he’s just plain fun to watch!

1 Our common understanding of classical encompasses a number of stylistic periods of ‘high culture’ music of which classical is one. Others include baroque, renaissance, romantic, modern classical, etc.

2 I refer to popular music or sometimes simply pop as a music apart from classical, jazz and folk traditions –music mainly form popular consumption. In this regard Britney Spears (shudder) and Cannibal Corpse fall into the same category.

3 It should be noted that classical varies significantly from flamenco playing. The two are not interchangeable either musically or with regard to technique.

4 Electrics can be played without distortion and in this regard sound very much like acoustics but have the benefits of lighter string gauges, etc.

Political Axes - Filler Post!

2007-05-29T11:16:00.000-05:00

I’m still pretty busy, so I figured I’d do a filler post! Here it is:

I’ve often found the polarization of politics based on certain key issues interesting and misleading. In these highly volatile times one finds that if he/she shares certain repertoire of values then he/she is either left, right or in some cases in the centre. I find this particularly true in the US media. By their conventions being pro-choice, believing in socialized medicine, and environmentalism makes someone ‘left’ and favouring deregulated economies, social conservatism and privatized healthcare makes one ‘right’. As we all know, our political landscape is rarely that simple. We have four major parties in Canada, all varying in their social and economic views, but it rarely seems that they’re all along the same continuum.

Often the term liberal and conservative is thrown around to confuse the issue more. So which is which? Are the hard-line old-school communists in Russia conservatives? Are those in support of unregulated, liberalized economies liberals? By our experience, these two examples might be counterintuitive and wrong.

Enter Political Compass. This site categorizes your views along two axes according to social and economic criteria. So far I’ve taken this quiz about four times over the last two years or so and I’ve ended up in every quadrant (except the bottom right I believe), though usually close to the centre of both axes in all cases. I suppose the variability is due to how I’m feeling about a certain question that day. So give it a shot and see where you compare to some of the more famous/notorious characters in history and modern politics!

CW Jeffries update

2007-05-24T14:54:00.000-05:00

It turns out that the mother of Jordan Manners, the deceased in the CW Jeffries shooting, is my better half’s (BH) former colleague. This is a great tragedy for this single parent mom who is a teacher and who has been described as a leader in the community. My heart goes out to her.

Interestingly though, her older son, who was recently arrested for (understandably) assaulting a camera operator outside of Sunnybrook hospital where Jordan Manners died, was caught red handed following a break and enter about three-four years ago. At the time, the perpetrator had stolen goods from a house and was fleeing the scene by rooftop when a local Sun newspaper photographer living in the area snapped him rushing across his roof. The picture made the front page of the Sun and the kid was arrested.

Jordan Manners has been described as nice kid who always kept his nose clean . That may be true, but how much of a chance did this kid have living in a neighbourhood with gangs, poverty, and delinquents in his own family?

Corregium

My BH has informed me that Louisa Manners, the aunt of deceased Jordan Manners - not the mother, is her former colleague. It was also Louisa Manners' son who was arrested for the B&E, not Jordan's brother.

Sorry.

Duo-rant: CW Jeffries murder

2007-05-23T23:33:00.000-05:00

To all three of you, sorry for the lack of posts, but I’m still bogged down with mostly meaningless lab work (i.e. perpetual motion machine), and so rather than writing posts, I’ve been mostly thinking about the best way to tackle my current lab woes (see post). So for the most part, my posts will be sparse over the next few weeks.

Today I’d like to write about a couple of things that I’ve been thinking about since the shooting at CW Jeffries High School in Toronto yesterday. This will be mostly in the form of a rant, since I really don’t know the solutions to any of the problems I will mention below.

First, I’m distraught by the sensationalist media coverage that has been provided by an otherwise reasonably good media outlet, CTV. Over the years I’ve watched CTV Newsnet and CBC Newsworld for what I believe to be reasonably balanced broadcasting. Sadly, today CTV broke that rule. In the vein of Fox and CNN, which broadcast live car chases, CTV did the same. To my chagrin when I tuned in to Mike Duffy’s politics report at 5pm, I found live coverage of the outside of CW Jeffries high school. Despite no witnesses, no police reports or anything of interest, CTV regurgitated the same three facts (14 year old dead, school in lock down and no one knowing who the murderer was) for three hours…live. At least CBC had the decency to continue its normal programming with occasional interspersed updates as new information emerged. So much for the free market improving the quality of our news.

But I want to discuss something more serious. What do we really expect given the conditions under which teachers must educate and students learn? My better half (BH) taught at a school about 2km from CW Jeffries, and I carried out one of my practica for teacher’s college at said school. The area is tough. Indeed the year before my BH joined the school there was a non-fatal shooting at her school. The kids are very needy and there are many problems that they face including gangsterism, drug abuse, teenage pregnancy, and above all, a severe lack of parental involvement. Everyone in the GTA is aware of the notoriety of the Jane and Finch ‘corridor’ and sadly, despite what we’d like to think about Canada being a safe place to live, that part of North York/Rexdale, is not. In the years that my BH worked at her school there were numerous lock downs, weapon seizures, drug seizures and arrests of students for an array of charges including assault using dogs, assault with a deadly weapon (non-canine), extortion, drug possession/dealing, etc. Most of these incidents were kept on ‘the down-low’ and out of the media, because our schools are supposed to be safe. Then why were all the doors locked to classrooms, offices and the even to the outside? The staff didn’t feel safe and when a fatality finally occurred, no one could sweep that under the rug.

The problem seems to be reasonably easy to solve, or so one would think. Identify non-resident students, provide a positive social framework for kids, provide a safe environment for learning, get the parents involved, and above all, educate - but how? One of the major problems was the lack of parental care. My BH never had a full evening’s appointments on parent teacher night. Moreover, contacting parents when a student was at risk – academic or otherwise – was nearly impossible. The parents just weren’t there. Gang fraternity transcended most other bonds except on occasion ethnic. Students in her school represented at least three gangs, two of which were ‘chapters’ of the infamous west coast Crips and Bloods gangs. Though gang colours were banned and the school doors (other than the front door) were shut to the outside, gang violence was still prevalent. New Canadians were tragically vulnerable. Many of them didn’t understand the interplay of these forces in their neighbourhoods and affiliated themselves with one gang or another based on fear. Some others were coerced into local expatriate ethnic extortion rings such as the Tamil extortion rings funding terrorism in Sri Lanka. One kid showed me his tiger claw on a chain around his neck, beaming that he was a real Tamil Tiger. To compound things, the school board had put in placed a policy called ‘safe schools program’ that allowed expelled students from one school to attend another in the area. Presumably, the logic was to get the kids off the street where they’d cause more trouble than in school. One must keep in mind that getting expelled is not easy. It usually requires a very serious offence, often combined with an arrest. The result was a swap of delinquents from one school to another of the two schools in the immediate area and vice versa. Rather than solving the problem, it displaced it to other local schools and in some cases provided networking opportunities for gang members.

So is there any surprise at the recent death? Between the ethnic conflict, the gangs, the poverty, and lack of parental involvement, I’m not surprised. Is there solution? Surely, not a simple one, and if I knew, I’d be the king of the world.

The Fall of Falwell

2007-05-16T10:29:00.000-05:00

I can only hope that the death of another fundageleical does not lead to his martyrdom.

Rather than air my own views on the matter, I'll leave youu with a suitably heretical rant from Christopher Hitchens posted earlier today on Pharyngula.

Monday Metal Meltdown: Rationalist metal - Napalm Death

2007-05-14T17:36:00.000-05:00

I once read in a metal ‘zine that metal lyrics can usually be categorized as either banal or pretentious, and like in many forms of popular music, this is partly true. Not all metal is, ‘kill your mother, kill your father,’ but some content can be quite silly. Lyrical topics range from fantasy (dragons, Tolkien), to morbid fantasy (vampires, haunted woods, lycanthropy), to gore (explicit descriptions of human mutilation) to more inspired, introspective and, dare we say, rationalist lyrics. Though far from being Lord Byron, the band Napalm Death falls into this last category.

Napalm Death was born out of the ashes of the post-hardcore movement that came as a response to the treacly, insipid sounds of new wave. Originating in Birmingham (along with other metal pioneers Judas Priest and Black Sabbath), early Napalm Death incorporated the fast iconoclastic elements of hardcore punk with the more classic elements of 80’s heavy metal. Their seminal 1990 album Harmony Corruption solidified their style and provided a prototype for the grindcore brand of metal. Aside from pioneering grindcore, Napalm Death has also been credited with popularizing (some say perfecting) the blast beat¹ as a mainstay of the ‘extreme metal’ subgenre. Over the course of Napalm Death’s 23 year career, many former members have gone off to spawn equally important British metal acts such as the doom/stoner metal band Cathedral, industrial metal pioneers Godflesh and the archetypal gore-grind band Carcass². In this sense, Napalm Death can be seen as one of the great icons of heavy metal, perhaps more important than Maiden and Priest.

Napalm Death has always had a special place in my shriveled, blackened heart since they were the first ‘extreme metal’ band I listened to (Carcass was the second). In my mid teens I found that the lyrics resonated well with my dystopian and atheistic outlook on life. Though recent Napalm Death albums have shifted musically to a less agressive style that does not move me as much as their earlier material, I still find their lyrics poignant.

Take the following lyrics to Puritanical Punishment Beating from the album Smear Campaign (2006),

Resounding words from God
And words are all they ever are
Astounding deeds from faith
That never quite astound…

And later,

Same sex, different habits - who gives a fucking shit
This won't make the species unfurl

Earlier works were perhaps more prophetic. From Harmony Corruption (1990), Unfit Earth,

Transforming aquatic inhabitance
Overcome by cocktails of sludge and chemicals
Interfering with life on which so many rely
Then dumping our shit to economise

Wanton destruction
Environment in regression
All reverse into decline
Kiss this unfit goodbye

And another gem, Suffer the Children,

At one with your god
your sole intent
Your treasured place assured
For a substantial rent

Global lunacy
Death threats for supposed blasphemy
No room for free thought
All non believers pushed to the floor

Aggressive tyrants
Supposed saints for the cause
Judgement through force
Faith a fuel for pointless wars

When all is done
Who shall benefit? Who is the one?
Not those who pass on
But those dictators divine waving their deceitful wands.

Finally, someone, something that shared my feelings on the world. As a teen I felt disenfranchised from society and helpless in the wake of economic progress and the corporatization of the world. Napalm Death provided hope knowing that there were others like me who cared and that I wasn’t alone.

1. Possibly the most frantic beat ever. Difficult to describe, it’s best seen/heard. Here is an example by Romain Goulon, a French extreme metal drummer. Watch this clip starting at about 0:45. He also provides an example of a gravity blast (single-handed roll adopted from jazz drummers) at about 2:25. An example of how this could be incorporated into song structure (beat wise) as shown by Derek Roddy of Hate Eternal can be seen here.

2. Carcass was one of the most imitated and influential metal bands of the 90’s. They pioneered an intelligent and technical form of gore-grind oft imitated but seldom reproduced.

Update

2007-05-14T14:31:00.000-05:00

Greetings all, posts over the next few days may be sparse. I have since received part of a data set that my boss wants analysed, and so I will be busy over the next while doing just that. The more astute of you may have noticed that I said ‘part’. Let me now indulge in some talking to myself craziness:

NECATOR: "Doesn’t that mean that I’ll have to re-analyse the data when the rest of the data come in?"

necator: "Yes."

NECATOR: "Might the conclusions change once I have more data analysed?"

necator: "Yes."

NECATOR: "Isn't this a waste of time?"

necator: "Yes."

NECATOR: "Haven’t I pointed this out to my boss?"

necator: "Yes. Apparently grad student labour is cheap and our sanity is unimportant."

Jeebus Friekes

2007-05-09T12:25:00.000-05:00

A while ago one of my lab mates began a journey of self-discovery that lead to madness. Said member has become a Jeebus Frieke (JF henceforth). Now, I know that this person comes from another culture and has had a hard time trying to fit in, but in this case I believe JF has been lead astray. JF has joined a fundamentalist Christian congregation through the coercion of JF’s cultural compatriots. Given JF’s cultural predisposition to superstition, I believe this was an easy victory.

Now, despite my own theological (or anti-theological) leanings as it may be, I still believe everyone has a right to a personal belief and self-discovery. Nevertheless, I have not encountered any convincing evidence to assure me that there is a god, deities of other sorts, a soul, afterlife, etc. We are here, we are mortal, let’s get used to it. However, I do believe that before one embarks on any philosophical journey, one should be aware of as many arguments for and against a given philosophy. My own journey toward atheism lasted several years and is subject to regular scrutiny periodically. I thus provided our JF with my copy of Dr. Bart Ehrman’s excellent book about the origins and textual criticisms of the Christian Bible called Misquoting Jesus as a counterpoint to the literal interpretation of the Bible. The book is a well referenced scholarly work for lay persons concerning the origins of the modern Bible, its textual variants and how copies have changed over the years. JF had the book for several days, and then returned it telling me that her indoctrinator had given her a better book. I inquired as to the author and title and JF told me that it was a book about the history of Israel.

Merf?

Are we talking the modern Israel from 1949 until present? Are we talking about historical Palestine? What does this have to do with Biblical scholarship? To me, this is as though I handed a fellow biologist (whom JF is) a paper entitled, “Interaction of novel protein factors interacting with the phosphotyrosine residues in the PDGF receptor lead to attenuated tomourigenesis in mouse models” and my colleague hands me another paper and says, “Oh, I have a better paper, it’s called ’The mating habits of suburban bandicoots in South Eastern Australia.’”¹

Both may be good papers, but they have nothing to do with each other.

I think JF has been lost.

1. Any similarity to the titles of actual papers is merely coincidental.

I Knew Disney Brainwashed Kids But...

2007-05-09T10:23:00.000-05:00

How quaint, the Islamist version of Mickey Mouse^TM is preaching death and destruction to kids in Palestine. In tickles the cockles of my heart to know that cartoon characters are being used to indoctrinate twelve year olds. I love how religion is all about peace love and mankind, it just gives me that warm fuzzy feeling.

A Blessing and A Curse

2007-05-09T09:59:00.000-05:00

We returned from the cottage late Sunday night. All in all, the trip was not bad. The weather was warm and the flies only started to pick up the day we were leaving. The evenings weren’t too cold and I got to spend some quality time with the better half (BH). The downside was that due to the so-so winter we just had, with the repeated freeze thaws, our three year old foundations have taken a rather serious shift.

In addition, our roof needs to be re-shingled, and the dock will likely have to be redone this year. After last year’s repairs where the BH and I leveled and resurfaced the dock, everything is essentially back as it was – frustrating to say the least.

In addition, for the first time in the short ownership of this property (about six years now), we had our first mouse infestation over the winter. The rambunctious rodents chewed up paper and linens to make nests, defecated everywhere and stashed neat little piles of seeds under mattresses and blankets.

In addition, we appear to have at least four separate hornet infestations that will have to be taken care of. We already exterminated one nest in one of the bedroom windows (I still feel guilty about this). The annoying part is that hornets to me are as snakes to Indiana Jones. We don’t get along. As a toddler I unknowingly stumbled into my grandfather’s apiary and developed a phobia of yellow and black striped hymenopterans ever since. At least I’m not allergic.

On the bright side, things were rather pleasant overall. The fish didn’t bite, but the scenery was nice, the people were sparse and we got to see some rare red trilliums (trillia???)!

Far and Away

2007-05-03T14:57:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow I am travelling north to open the family cottage. The timing is a little ill-conceived, however my better half has a day conference along the way there, and so several months ago we'd figured we’d get a head start on the season by going this weekend. My secret motivation was avoiding having my dad launch the boat. Inevitably something goes amiss when he does (crash/boom/splash).

Well, we’ll have to see how things go. From what I’ve heard, it’s still pretty frosty up there. I’ve also heard that it will be warm this weekend and the locals are forecasting the black fly hatch. Goody. I’ll let you all know how everything went next week. I’m sure it’ll be tales of freezing, broken pipes, shifted foundations, leaky roofs, and being eaten alive by insects.

The Month de Merde

2007-05-03T13:16:00.000-05:00

And so ends one of the worst months of my life. As a grad student, there are many hardships that one must endure and I’ve endured more than most. Repeatedly, I’ve suffered the insult of being denied scholarships, being scooped, and of course having experiments come out ‘tits up’.

This past April was no different. Of the two scholarships for which I applied, the OGS and the CIHR doctoral awards, I got hosed on both. Now, I know that in many respects I’ve made my own bed. Perhaps if I were more diligent and consistent in course work I would be more competitive, etc., but sometimes life throws one a curveball from which recovery is next to impossible. Take for example that I have a B+ on one graduate course from my master’s. As some might know, this grade in grad school is a borderline pass and does not make one particularly competitive for scholarships. Perhaps I could have studied harder and done better. This is true, but I suspect that the fact that my mother was dying from cancer on the living room couch as I was taking this course, did not help matters much. Indeed, she died five months later, essentially from starvation, high on morphine, abdomen distended with ascites fluid, her defatted skin pulled taught her body, clinging to her bones like the desiccated skin of a mummy. She died at home, in our living room. My dad lost his mind for the next year and my sister and I were left to take care of him. A B+ seemed pretty trivial right then.

Not too long after my master’s I decided to leave science and pursue something less ethereal, namely teaching. My spouse is a teacher and we thought this would work out nicely if she and I would share the same career. Teaching is a calling, and suffice it to say that I have not been called. So after a three year hiatus from science, my second authorship, earned during an ill-fated master’s degree, in scientific terms, was from a millennium ago. A second authorship from a millennium ago does not go very far in a scholarship application. What I needed, and still do need to further my career and get some scholarship squilla is a publication, and soon.

Another one of trials of grad school that I have endured is the ‘scoop’. Being scooped is when another research group publishes the same or very similar research to what one’s research group is researching. This is one of the scientists’ worst nightmares. It can set one back years. I have had the misfortune to be scooped twice in the past. This last month marked scoop number three. Over eighteen months of work went down the drain. Moreover, and what’s worse, is that the paper is terrible. To add insult to injury, we had better publishable data six months ago, but it was decided from upon high that we would try to go one further and form a collaboration to write an airtight paper.

In science, collaboration is encouraged. It is believed that by bridging the gap between different fields, systems, disciplines, expertises we can get closer to the truth. In reality it does not always work this way. The relationship can be mutually parasitic, and the net gain seems to be less than that of the total investment. Nevertheless collaboration is often conducted for political/strategic reasons and the old saying of keeping your enemies closer oft applies. In addition, collaboration, more often than not, results in a disproportionate amount of work being put in by the different parties; yet both parties often receive equal credit.

I think it is reasonable to say that our collaboration did not work as well as it should have. Our collaborators star grad student came to our lab to teach us a thing or two and to generate a few samples for us using our reagents/protocols/conditions to ensure consistency in comparing experimental data. Please do not misconstrue my opinion of our star. He was very bright and hard working; more so than I, but, predictably, things went awry right away. As anyone who has done wet lab work in molecular biology knows, simply moving to a new environment/lab is a guarantee that things will not work for the first three or so months at the new location. At the end of our star’s six month stay, he had accomplished the absolute bare minimum of providing us with samples we needed. All the validations and support experiments he was to do, never got done. It has since turned out that a few of the samples he managed to generate in the end may not be usable due to quality issues – and we don’t have any back-ups. After six months of contaminations, failed extractions, anomalous results and likely thousands of dollars of reagents and manpower, it may have been all for naught. My PhD may also have just gotten a couple of years longer.

So let me recapitulate my month de merde, this fecal fortnight (times two). First, I was denied my scholarships; second, I got scooped; third, the samples I require to finish experiments to publish a counter-paper to rebut the first paper are likely unusable.

To be a grad student, one requires madness or masochism. I’m not sure into which category I fall.

Monday Metal Meltdown (Belated)

2007-05-01T12:48:00.000-05:00

It has been my observation over the years that musical tastes somehow correlate with one’s socioeconomic class and education. In my case, despite the 10+ years of post-secondary education I now stow snugly beneath my belt, I am a heavy metal aficionado. Now, this brings me to my quasi-rant. Many people, especially those of middle-class upbringing do not ‘get’ metal. Metal is not mindless, it is not noise and is not all the same. Most importantly, most persons who are not avid listeners are unable to recognize metal or alternatively, believe certain types of music to be metal when they are in fact not. When discussing metal to the uninitiated, it may be most instructive to give examples of what metal is not metal. Bon Jovi, AC/DC, The Darkness, Tool, Motley Crue, and Korn are not metal. They may employ metal elements, but by and large they are not metal. A useful guide I have often described to others is this: if one hears a particular band on a mainstream radio station with some degree of regularity, it is likely not metal.

Now, this may sound perhaps a bit pretentious, but one of the characteristics of metal tends to be a certain degree of unlistenabililty (forgive the neologism). The reason this is, is because most, if not all, metal tends to be music for other musicians. Just as some freeform jazz may be unlistenable to lay people because of odd time signatures, playing outside the key and odd chord phrasings and harmonic structure, metal can be unlistenable for the same reasons. So why write music like this? The reason is to push musical boundaries of what can be played, and what can be listened to. Of all pop-music genres metal musicians are likely the most technical, and, I believe it could even be argued that as a whole, much metal is as technical as jazz and some classical. As someone who has played guitar and bass for over 15 years, the most challenging musical pieces to me are classical, jazz and metal. In some cases the overlap between classical and metal is so close that they may as well be interchangeable.

Nevertheless, metal is a wide and varied genre of music. Its myriad of subgenres sport such colourful names as death metal, black metal, gothic metal, doom, hardcore*, metalcore, mathcore, grindcore, power metal, thrash, Gothenburg, folk metal, cyber-metal, and progressive metal. Subgenres have even spawned sub-subgenres such as the various black metal descendants like “true” black metal **, symphonic black metal, epic black metal and American black metal. This fabulous diversity of metal is truly astounding and in my mind rivals the diversity that one hears between musical genres outside of metal. So, that being said, how does one even unify such diverse bands as Emperor, Cryptopsy, Strapping Young Lad, DragonForce and Ion Dissonance? The task is almost impossible, yet four common aspects stand out, those being musical aggression, the use of minor/dissonant keys, speed and technical virtuosity. Other aspects, such as lyrical content, image, and instrumentation range significantly from style to style and even between bands of the same style.

Over the course of this blog experiment, I shall try to bring some of my love for metal to you, the reader. Hopefully, metal Mondays will become a regular addition.

Until next post…

*Hardcore can refer both to subgenres in punk and metal. In metal, its origins are disuputed but hardcore likely arose from a merger of metal and punk styles. Despite its name, hardcore is not the 'hardest' style of metal, but refers to the hard style of punk to which it is (or at least was) most closely related musically.

**There is a population of black metal fans who insist that all "true" black metal must be of Scandanavian origin, must be poorly recorded, lacking diversity and melody, and Satanic/pagan themed. This usually limits the sub-subgenre to a handful of Norwegian bands from the early-mid '90's.

Post 1.1: The world does not need another blog

2007-04-26T16:23:00.000-05:00

Just as the world does not need another human, the world does not need another blog. So why pollute the blogosphere with more inane ramblings of yet another grad student? I don’t really know. Why do people choose to f*ck and bring more lives into this world than we can sustain? I don’t know either, though I suspect it’s because that is biology’s modus operandi.

As onanism is to sexual frustration, perhaps blogging is to sanity, (cleaning of the psychological pipes as it were) so I imagine this blog will become a vehicle for my incoherent ramblings, thoughts on life and commentary on things I find interesting. We shall see.

You may have also noticed that this blog is more or less anonymous. This is true, though I suspect that I will refer to many real people and actual places with sufficient frequency that it will become obvious who I am with time. It’s not a secret and you won’t have to be particularly clever to figure this out. Nevertheless, at least for now, I choose to hide my identity so that casual trolls will not be lured here for whatever reason.

Until next post….

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2007-04-26T11:34:00.001-05:00

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