Danny Fekete is studying education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, appropriately. 
May
28
Here’s more support for my solipsism: Martyn Poliakoff explains the chemistry of tea in celebration of the Chinese New Year, harmonizing my affections for both Camellia senensis and cotton-headed professors.
The weirdest thing is that I didn’t find it browsing the Periodic Table of Videos, but as a see-also link after viewing this disturbing commercial:
Baby-caterpillar has to be adopted.
May
26
I’m grateful to Gideon Weisman for a lot of things: I met him in high school and formed a very tight friendship with him in our OAC year, though both of us lived only tangentially within each other’s dominant social circles.[1] We fell in and out of contact through university, but as is the case with a few of my really good friends, we revert to our easy bonhomie almost immediately regardless of the time spent apart. I was privileged to attend his wedding to Marissa last summer, and my friendship with both of them has blossomed.
As I designed Philomathy.org and wrote my bio-blurb, it occurred to me that for many of the interests by which I define myself—my love of pens, tea, and audio equipment—I have Gideon to thank. The pattern seems to be that I will stumble upon one of the refinements with which he seamlessly surrounds himself, have a conversation with him about it, incubate the topic for six months to a year (or four, for my audiophilia), then suddenly be seized with an urge to learn everything I can about it, study it online for a few months, expend relatively immoderate funds on it, and then catch up with Gideon to report on my findings and share the interest with him intelligently, rather than as a gawking neophyte. Usually at that point Gideon brings my attention to something else amazing that I hadn’t noticed before, and the process repeats. The friendship is unspeakably rewarding.
One thing Gideon and Marissa shared with me that incubated very swiftly was an interest in actively learning about natural history (or, that province of biology that focuses on fuzzy, or leafy, or chitinogenous things and their interactions with each other—to wit, the stuff I’d been dying to learn about since I was four but was scared away from by (deeply important but much less approachable) organic chemistry diagrams and all the stuff that happens to ATP). At Carleton, Gideon took Natural History with Michael Runtz, a course also transmitted to distance students by mailed VHS and broadcast freely on iTunes as a podcast. It was at Gideon and Marissa’s direction that I sought these videos out and discovered the availability of nearly 72 hours with what amounts to the best possible synthesis of Charles Darwin and Robin Williams.
Dr. Runtz is a world-renowned wildlife photographer and naturalist who works primarily in Algonquin Park. He is excited by nature and “natural drama” in a way that reveals Discovery Channel offerings for the hyper-processed Sunny-D sludge of edutainment they are; he is Steve Irwin without sensationalism or self-conscious branding. In one lecture, he brings in a stuffed porcupine for demonstration and then pricks his fingers as he loses himself in a sudden (characteristic) digression, jolts painfully back to the present, forgets where he was, suddenly remembers something neat, and then pricks himself again. This goes on for at least five minutes. Like Poliakoff, he is impossible not to like; he shares the chemist’s warm, self-deprecating sense of humour, but has an infectious eagerness and wonder that makes for much better pedagogy. I’ve delighted myself (and kept sane) by consuming lectures and lessons outside my chosen fields of study, but only viewing these lectures have I felt genuine envy and regret not to have devoted myself thither. I will never get to be Michael Runtz, and I think I could have been.
Resources! The best thing you can do is watch the lectures and breathe deeply the heady Algonquin essence[2]—to do that, search for “Michael Runtz” in the iTunes Store and subscribe to his 1902 and 1903 podcasts.[3] However, if 350 megs per lecture is a bit steep for you to jump right into, a series of educational films he hosted called Wild by Nature are available for streaming in their entirety at FactualTV.com, and can give you a sense of the fellow. Please, please, please be aware that he’s nowhere as cool in these videos as he is in front of a room of students. Try this stuff, and see if you aren’t thankful for Gideon and Marissa too.
[1] Gid occasionally visited The Stairwell and it was only late in that last year that I started frequenting the Haig Radio Booth, where his precociously-seasoned taste in music broadcast itself throughout the halls of our Alma Mater in the wee hours before class.
[2] Scratch that: if you’re a student at Carleton, the best thing you can do is enrol in his classes.
May
25
This is all Stian’s fault.
Students of the University of Toronto are probably familiar with MyAccess, a sort of meta-webpage that pops up when they want to access normally restricted and proprietary resources (journal databases like JSTOR or Eric, for example) and allows them to log into those websites using their individual UofT passwords. Essentially, we need to prove that we’re associated with the university, and then, if the university has purchased a subscription to the resource, we get access.
Normally, the process involves finding the specific resource by going through our library website, into a directory of eResources, and then navigating to the one we want. This can be particularly tiresome if we’ve found a specific article that we’d like to read through an aggregate search engine like Google Scholar, because we can sit and sadly paw at the database displaying precisely the resource we’d like to access, but in order to convince it that we’re legitimate, we need to leave, log into the UofT Library page, and then find our way back again. This annoyed Stian and inspired him to put together a dandy little bookmarklet[1] which pulls up the MyAccess interface for a web-based resource regardless of whether you’ve navigated there through the UofT library system (and gives you a plain 404 not-found error if you try to use it on a resource that we don’t subscribe to). It’s very, very convenient for snapping up articles found during broad-sweeping Google Scholar searches, and can be a fun toy to try when you find yourself in a restricted space as a result of general browsing. Read more »
May
21
A quick, non-handwritten post for resource links and updates to previous articles will follow almost immediately.
May
18
Only by the innocent standards of laymen am I a connoisseur of pens. I know a few of the more salient companies—Parker, Pilot, Montblanc, Pelikan—though I’ve very little idea how they compare in the eyes of more worthy experts, and certainly to speak with confidence to the granular merits of particular makes would require deeper investigation than I’ve yet committed. I am beginning to experiment with coloured inks, though I still feel uncomfortable using anything other than my staple black Quink, a medium so unassuming that it’s stocked at every Business Depot I’ve been to. I know what capillary action is and why a key design component of ink is the management of its surface tension, but I’d want a few minutes to consult Wikipedia before I could describe the construction and mechanics of a typical fountain pen. I only own two pens. I am soft-core. Read more »