Larry Moran has made a very depressing post on all the creationists that are at my school. It’s sad how many there are, really. Check this:

 David K.Y. Chiu is Professor of Computing and Information Science and Professor of Biophysics Interdepartmental Group. He has a Ph.D. in Systems Design Engineering from the University of Waterloo (Canada).

Professor Chiu is head of the Pattern Learning Research Group. Most of his recent papers have to do with recognizing patterns in bioinformatics data.

Durston, K.K., D.K.Y. Chiu, D.L. Abel and J.T. Trevors (2007)doi:10.1186/1742-4682-4-47]

Measuring the functional sequence complexity of proteins”, Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling 4:47. [
Chiu, D.K.Y. and K. Zhang (2007) Biomolecular data analysis: a post-genomic reflection. Biomolecular Engineering, 24:319-320.

Chiu, D.K.Y. and Y. Wang (2006) Multipattern consensus regions in multiple aligned protein sequences and their segmentation. EURASIP Journal on Bioinformatics and Systems Biology, Vol.2006:1-8.

Ma, P.C.H., K.C.C. Chan, X. Yao and Chiu, D.K.Y. (2006) An evolutionary clustering algorithm for gene expression microarray data analysis. IEEE Trans. on Evolutionary Computation 10:296-314.

Hwang, C., Chiu, D.K.Y. and Sohn, I. (2005) Analysis of exon structure using PCA and ICA of short-time Fourier transform. L. Wang, K. Chen, and Y.S. Ong (Eds.): ICNC LNCS 3611, pp.306-315, 2005, Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.(also Second Intern. Conf. on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery, joint ICNC’05-FSKD’05, 27-29 Aug. 2005, Changsha, China.)

Durston, K. and Chiu, D.K.Y. (2005) A functional entropy model for biological sequences. in supplementary volume of the journal, Dynamics of Continuous, Discrete and Impulsive Systems, Series B, 2005 (also Proc. 4th Intern. Conf. on Engineering Applications and Computational Algorithms), pp.722-725.

Holy moly. I guess Duston is our “big one” and he’s actually the nicest person I’ve ever spoken to. I’m sure once we “got into it” he wouldn’t be so “nice”. But from what I can tell he’s a perfectly awesome guy (almost as awesome as Dr. Shallit… who I have to mention again… was the BEST speaker I’ve ever heard. Seriously.)

I ran into my favorite creationist today, Andrew Middleton - a main player in our “C4C group… I don’t think he likes me very much, and I think he got my university e-mail suspended. LAME. (I sent an e-mail out to his entire mailing list asking them to come out for the Larry Moran event… they didn’t look too highly upon that, apparently. Whoops.)

My worry is that with these creationists getting degrees that soon my school will become a joke in terms of academics - hopefully I graduate and get into a good grad school before then. *sigh*

I didn’t bring my camera - and Ang has yet to upload the photos - but Dr. Jeffrey Shallit spoke at Guelph last night about misinformation theory. I am much to tired to go into why this next statement is true, so you’ll just have to take my word for it:

Jeffrey Shallit is by far the best speaker I have ever seen as a skeptics event. Including all CFI events, UTSA, Guelph - all of them. He was by far - the best. He was interesting, entertaining, informative and hilarious. He brought prizes for the crowd, which was the cutest thing ever. (Even cuter was that they were really geeky prizes and we all thought they were so incredibly awesome.)

If you ever have a chance to go and see him - goooo! It was so good. I appreciated his talk a lot… I wish we could have pulled in more people for him to talk to (we had just over 60). Hopefully I’ll be able to post a picture of two eventually. I feel like a doofus - I totally forgot my voice recorder and it would have been a great lecture to have recorded because it was super entertaining.

Also - for all you 9/11 crazies (aka my brother) you should head over to his blog and check out all his posts on 9/11 conspiracy theories - they show a ton of great arguments that you should be reading.

Unfortunately Kirk Durston didn’t show up to put on a good debate for us - but he did agree to do a talk on information theory for us in the fall - so I look forward to hearing why the disgusting display of “math” is actually okay in his world.

This picture isn’t related in any way shape or form to what im going to ramble out, but the story that its from is all kinds of awesome. 

I go to work to de-stress. That’s just not normal. The Larry Moran talk was hugely stressful - most of it fell onto Ang, for which I feel bad, but it’s getting pretty frustrating for all of us when it comes down to the day before an event and nothing is worked out and our posterer decides to skip town for a random interview.

So it was a relief to walk into work where the most stressful thing I had to deal with was deciding if a pant wall should remain a pant wall or get converted into a wall for the green and browns….and making our target for the night. (We left the wall and made target…)

I decided not to do anything today that pertained to any sort of project that is on the go…(except reminding the Good News Bears to register us a domain and sending out a couple e-mails to the skeptics executive…) and it turned into a pretty relaxing day. It was sort of weird to be lying around doing nothing, but I soaked it up.

At this point I just can’t stop thinking about September, I’m really excited to go full time at school again and get all this degree shit behind me so I can start doing interesting stuff. I was sort of wishy washy on what to do next year (just work, go to India, go to school…) but then I was talking to a hair dresser and amidst her mindless rambling she said something (i dont know what, honestly) that sort of made me think “wow…she’s right…” …It was something about there never being enough money - but since when didn’t students have loans and why does that need to put your life on hold and blah blah blah - I figured if she could just accept that, then surely I can too.

So… that was it, next year is full fledged school time - yet again. I’ll have a geography degree… but I want a biology degree. However I was talking to my favorite prof from first year and he made it very clear to me that starting over and wasting money on more undergraduate would be a really stupid idea - and instead I should work REALLY hard at getting phenomenal grades and doing biology shit “on the side” so I can do my masters in bio. That works.

The fountain; downtown Guelph

The smell of bubbles in the downtown fountain, the shilling screams of first years finding out what south residence really looks like and jail bait in every single bar; it’s “O week”. (More commonly known as frosh week.) It was harshly brought to my attention yesterday that as a senior student, I’m not really allowed to join in on all the festivities of “O week”, but the fact of the matter is I never really participated in my first year - so why not now? I haven’t actually done anything, I didn’t even take advantage of $0.75 beers last night at Trappers.. (instead we went to the most south end of Guelph possible to the very dead Shoeless Joes, the only bar in town with less than 10 people inside.) Still, I would like to join in on something… It’ll make me feel old if I don’t.

Anyway, I had yesterday off, the perfect opportunity to get involved with a thing or two, so I hiked down to campus (no longer do I just live a 3 minute walk from the center of campus, but instead a 40 minute bus ride…) but instead of partaking in events I thought I should just get some things done. So I got my government CPP form filled out, and requested a letter to get into my RESP. I bought all my text books and picked up my course material for distance ed… all the while looking at all the first years, and missing my own first year. I don’t think I partied enough.

My courses are as follows:

History of the environment:

An introduction to the field of environmental history - its nature and uses. This course provides a historical perspective to environmental issues. It examines the causes and impact of human-induced modification of the natural world in selected areas of the globe, the evolution of attitudes and ideas about the natural world over time and the growth of conservation/environmental issues and movements.

Environment and resources:

This course examines the interrelationships between people and biophysical processes. The main themes are: 1) characteristics of natural resources and processes through which they are developed and used and 2) human response to environmental conditions, including natural hazards and global change. Contemporary Canadian case studies will be presented at the regional and national scales.

Environment and tourism:

An integrative perspective on tourism, addressing diverse interactions between people and tourist resources. Emphasis is on experiences derived from the use of resources, the environmental, economic and cultural impacts of tourism, and approaches to managing these impacts.

Pop culture and punishment:

The course will survey the social, political and intellectual influences upon the leisure activities of Europeans and Americans in the period with special reference to institutions such as the prison, the asylum, the reformatory and the regulation of popular culture and leisure activities. Witchcraft and the witch-hunt will be discussed.

One of these things is not like the other… one of these things just isn’t the same.

Yesterday I had thought the punishment course would be on that I’d drop… but now that I re-read the description it might actually be good, certainly a nice break from all the environment stuff. Anyway, classes start in a week and I’m super excited.

People make hilarious fuck ups that end up looking like politically incorrect parking lot porno…

People “tag” John Newcomb’s name all over campus…

But some spell it wrong…

And we’re so environmentally friendly that we have bunnies instead of lawn mowers.