Blessed by the Potato

I just found out that there’s a movie version of the Time Traveler’s Wife in the makings. I don’t think I’m going to go see it. It’s not that it’s shaping up to be bad: I don’t see any mention of Joel or Uwe, and the casting looks pretty appropriate. It’s just that it was such a good book. Such a powerful read. I don’t think the movie could ever be that good, that emotionally gripping and wrenching, so it would ultimately be a disappointment.

And if it was that good, I especially wouldn’t want to see it. I’ll recommend that book to just about anyone who will listen, but I don’t want to go through that again. I can’t.

Well, I had a disappointing day: I found out that a large SPSS file I was working on was somehow corrupted or had a data entry error all along. Basically, in a file with something like 8 rows and 500 columns full of data, about 200 rows down the data got all mixed up across the columns. I don’t know yet if it’s gone wrong in a predictable way that can be undone, but even if it has I’m still going to have to manually comb through all of that to make sure it’s right now before I can finish analyzing it and getting a paper out.

It’s a real bitch to have that sort of thing happen, especially after massaging a data set for a while to try to plumb the depths of its secrets. It’s a lot of wasted work. Drawing a simple scatter plot for myself might have been enough to catch the error earlier. Of course, if it wasn’t for the fact that one data point went way above any value that column should have had (a 91 in a column that should only have numbers 1-60 in it), I probably would never have noticed the scrambling in the first place. If the data was a little less screwed up, it might very well have gone on to get published in that state. Then we’d be stuck trying to defend that dirty data (assuming anyone read the paper). It makes me a little afraid working in science knowing how many little unconscious mistakes can potentially go into an experiment to really change things around. The (external) replication step seems even more important now.

I spend my Saturday afternoon at a workshop for science PhD students who may have an interest in working in industry called “Does your science degree prepare you for industrial careers?“. The workshop was to focus on “transferable skills” — that is, when a newly minted science PhD goes to work in industry, they are rarely hired for the specialized knowledge they gained in the course of their thesis. Rather, they are hired on the basis of their transferable skills, which can be applied to other subjects. For example, a PhD student whose thesis was on the migration patterns of unladen european swallows will probably not find a job directly relating to the migration of swallows, but may be able to apply their ability to analyze data, observe group behaviour, or load/unload small birds to other subjects of a more useful nature.

This is all stuff that I pretty much knew already, and that was present in the workshop description. I already knew that if I didn’t go into academia, that I could go do research in industry. But I didn’t know what other options were out there in industry. This workshop was part of a day long conference on teaching, so I thought that it might be useful in pointing out opportunities within industry to apply teaching skills, or where those skills might be valued. Sadly, the workshop seemed to have been designed for morons who didn’t even know that industry existed, because there really wasn’t any information provided beyond what was already in the course description. It was a slow, painful process of saying things like “well, if you do computer simulations of plasma, then you know how to use and program a computer, and that’s a transferable skill. If you volunteered as a lifeguard, then you know first aid and emergency management, and that’s a transferable skill.” I would have to say the workshop seems like it was designed for high school students or undergrads (especially since the pre-printed worksheets had examples like what transferable skills could you say you had from volunteer work or working in a restaurant, or what transferable skills would be gained from classes such as PSY131). It wasn’t the least bit specific to science, to PhD students, or to industry, despite the title and description.

I should have known that nothing good comes from waking up early on a Saturday. Ok, there was one interesting tidbit: a slide about the impressions that business leaders have of people with science PhDs:

Strengths:

• Lateral thinkers
• Problem solvers
• Quick learners
• Communication skills

Weaknesses:

• Fear of risk
• Time is not valued
• Priorities not valued
• No “big picture” perspective
• Poor people skills
• Failure to move beyond personal curiosity
• Poor project management

This was quite interesting to see. They’re the perceptions of business leaders, so it gives PhD students an idea of the sort of biases they have to push through. So rather than being moronic like the facilitator was suggesting and saying things like “my experience in this field shows that I’m a quick learner” or “my thesis work gave me X particular laboratory skill” or “I got a 99% in a class presentation which proves that I’m good at communicating” [I cringed when she suggested to the ESL kids that they say stuff like that in interviews to prove things] — one could leave those things mostly alone unless one really need to sell oneself. There’s a good chance that the business person already thinks some of those things about a PhD student, and instead one must push to show that they have strengths (or do not have weaknesses) in the other areas.

Some of those biases may be inherent to doing a PhD: it’ s a pretty risk-averse and time-wasting path to take. If you had a big picture perspective and good long-term planning and thus knew you wanted to work in industry all along, you probably would have gotten an MSc and a job. So for me, I think that means that I’ve got to focus on building a record of good people skills (d’oh!), project management, and moving beyond personal curiosity to… err… well, what exactly is there beyond personal curiosity? :)

Way back in 2004 or so, my dad bought a new laptop for himself, but found out after getting it home that it was widescreen, and he didn’t like that, so he stuck to his old 4:3 for a while longer. I started using the new laptop, which he was keeping as a spare in case anything happened to his old one (he can’t afford to go a day without a computer). It was a pretty powerful model, a heavy desktop replacement with a P4 3 GHz processor, and a dedicated graphics card (a mobile radeon 9000, pretty crappy by the desktop standards of the time, but a revolution for laptops). That was good enough to play World of Warcraft on, which I did, and slowly the laptop went from something I borrowed from my dad while I was in town visiting to my laptop, which I brought to conferences, presentations, etc.

It’s always been a heavy, hot beast, and any little bit of blockage of the fans (even just a tablecloth on the table) will cause it to overheat and crash — if I’m going to use it for a long period of time, I prop the back up with something to improve airflow. That’s been kind of annoying, but it was something that could be manged. Then it started developing problems with the power supply not working properly. A loose connection of some sort that could be fixed by putting something under the power cord to keep it up at an angle and force a connection. Lately though, that’s been getting harder to accomplish, and it’s also been overheating and crashing more often. While at my parents’ house for the holidays it crashed over a dozen times (and I’m not even gaming on it much!).

I’ve tried to repair the bad power connection before, but after taking apart the case, I found some sort of plastic connection right there that I couldn’t remove, snap our, or unscrew, so I couldn’t even see the board the power connector attaches to, let alone find a way to solder it. For a while I’ve been thinking about just getting a new laptop: while this one is still reasonably powerful, responsive, and all the other things I need in a laptop, it’s just too damned annoying and unpredictable to use. Of course, a new laptop is really expensive (especially if I insist on getting a dedicated graphics card “just in case” I need to game on it), even with the boxing day sales (I’m still looking at about $1000!). That’s a waste of a lot of money, particularly since I only need one for visiting my parents and going to conferences. At my parents, I could set up a desktop somewhere to just check my email, or borrow one of my siblings’ computers. And I could borrow a laptop from Wayfare or even take one of the slow work ones when I have to go to a conference…

Fortunately, I’ve found instructions for repairing this apparently systematic problem with the Toshiba A70’s. I finally got around to doing the repair today, thanks especially to diassembly instructions I found. It took me about 3 hours to do total, with disassembly about 2 hours of that (largely because I was nervous and had never stripped a laptop down that far before). I have to say that having a half dozen Tim Horton’s cups in my office to collect screws was quite handy, since there are at least 4 different kinds of screws in there. The disassembly didn’t go perfectly smoothly: a large number of parts are held together by snap-together plastic, and it’s really held together well. At one point I snapped off a tiny plastic tab trying to free the upper case cover, but I don’t think I could have been any more gentle with it since a lot of pressure seemed to be needed to free pretty much every part, and I scratched up the case a fair bit using a tiny screw driver to pry those parts off. After that, I got really nervous about the part where I have to take the motherboard out of the case to get at the “top” side of the power supply connector. Looking from the exposed/”bottom” part where the solder is, the power supply terminal had been visibly burned out and looked like a poor connection. It tested fine with a multimeter, though I think resistivity was not a problem, but rather intermittent complete contact breaks. Not having much experience with solder I got someone from work to do it, which took him all of 30 seconds. I haven’t had much of a chance to test it, but the power lights did light up immediately after I plugged it in upon reassembly. No jiggling or holding it at weird angles required! Since I didn’t take it out to really clean off the power connector like the instructions above recommend, there’s a good chance this problem will recur. However, I figure I bought myself another year or so, and now that I have experience at it, this process shouldn’t be too bad to repeat in that amount of time. One more round (for a total of 2 extra years) and this beast will be thoroughly obsolete and ready for replacement.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have my camera anywhere handy to document the process. I did learn a bit more about the weight distribution of the computer. I figured it was something like 1/3 battery, 1/3 system case, 1/3 screen, but it’s 8.5 pounds are actually mostly concentrated in the battery and screen. Despite the intense amount of heatsinks and how seemingly strong the case is, the keyboard/motherboard part of the computer is actually fairly light. While I’m not impressed with the crappy power supply connection problem with this laptop, I have to say that I’m glad Toshiba stamped most of the plastic bits beside screw holes indicating what size screw goes where. Very helpful for putting the right screw in the right place when reassembling.

Never try to catch a falling knife.
Never shoot a running horse.

These are two simple sayings that investors use to remind them of how to manage getting into and out of a stock. They essentially boil down to one word: patience. Fortunately dear readers, you have me here to act as a giant stock market nooblar to reinforce the point for you. I’ve made two recent mis-steps in this volatile market.

Never try to catch a falling knife.

My falling knife was Russel Metals (TSE:RUS). As I mentioned earlier, I had accumulated a bit of cash over the last two years or so and didn’t put it to very good work. It was at least in a high interest savings account, but I felt that a good portion of that money could serve me better in the stock market. So I spent a weekend with my dad looking for stocks to buy (and then discovered the magic of low-MER index funds). There were a few that I liked, but except for TD (which I’ll get to), I thought they were all a little too expensive for me. Russel metals in particular was one that both my dad and I liked. It’s a steel company, and they make a variety of steel parts, particularly tubular steel for oil sands projects. Their expertise in rolled steel and proximity to the oil sands lead me to think that they would have a pretty steady business as long as the oil sands kept pumping. They also paid a decent dividend. However, I just didn’t like them at the price they were at (around $26 at the time), and figured (via a valuation calculation that, given my inexperience, might as well have been composed of a dart and price target) that under $24 seemed right to me, so I put in an order at $23.75 and just kept renewing it every few weeks.

I got it at that price not too long ago, in the middle of a steep fall to it’s current price around $20. If I had waited for it to settle in to its current price, I probably would have been a lot happier. Of course, I can’t be too upset: as long as they keep up their dividend, I should make 7% on that money. And I think it’s a good long-term hold, and the day before I got it, it looked like it would take quite a downward spike to hit my bid. Though there are all kinds of ways to feel stupid when a stock you just bought falls over 16% in just a few days. If I had more money to invest, I probably would have bought it in a few separate lots as it was falling.

Never shoot a running horse

TD Bank is perhaps my favourite bank stock. They may not have as much of a dividend as some of the others, but they have such a great retail bank business that always seems to get at least decent word of mouth, combined with the longer hours inherited from Canada Trust. They have a great discount brokerage service, and have been prudent with their US acquisitions; overall it’s a company I feel proud to own a part of (new call centre excepted). Moreover, they managed to sidestep most of the subprime fiasco (I say most because while they may have avoided investing in ABCP, the reasoning goes that there’s a good chance a mortgage given by TD to a perfectly low-risk client could be under a sub-prime second mortgage, and if that client goes into arrears, it’ll hurt TD just as much as if TD made the sub-prime loan in the first place). That, in my mind, makes them a shining beacon of conservative, intelligent management in this sea of financial sector disaster. At $65/share back in November, I thought they were a good bargain and bought some up. It shot up to $75 within two weeks. However, I was in it for the long term, and didn’t end up taking any profit there. I got to watch that high slowly erode as TD was dragged down with the rest of the financial sector, all the way back down to where I bought it. It’s been unusually volatile these last few weeks, and to be honest, I got spooked, particularly when it fell below my supposed more-than-fair buy price. My dad phoned me up and told me to sell it and cut my losses — while TD may be a great bank, possibly the very greatest these days, the market sentiment (or the “macro picture”) just wasn’t behind banks, and TD was going to get killed with the rest.

So I put in a sell order with an ask price of $67/share two days ago, hoping to catch another inexplicable spike back up, and get out with a modest profit to watch from the sidelines. That happened today. I can’t really complain: I made 2% after commissions in just over two months. However, if I had the time to watch it today, I might not have sold so soon into its huge rally at the end of the day — it closed up over $68. By selling while it was in the midst of its upswing (shooting the running horse), I gave up a fairly decent amount of potential profits. Who knows what tomorrow might bring?

Again, it was a bit of a noobish thing to do, but I’m trying not to beat myself up over it too much. While I still like TD for the long-haul, this volatility makes me think I can get it for a better price than I had. So, I take a bit of a profit today, and sit back with my cash and wait for a better buying opportunity.

Speaking of buying opportunities, I bought some more Priszm income fund (TSE:QSR.UN) today. Priszm is an income trust that manages several fast food restaurants, mostly KFC and Pizza Hut locations. They’ve had some financial troubles of late (and I can understand why — when I drive by KFC it’s always empty!), and had to cut their distribution for a few months while they got the company back in order. They had been paying out at about 6% during this time. Now they’ve just announced that the distribution is going back up to $1.20/year. At the current share price of $6, that’s a 20% return! There are some concerns: the TD analyst who did the report felt that $1.20/year might be unsustainable for Priszm, and I can totally see where they’re coming from. However, the distribution the analyst suggests, and that my dad also thinks they’ll settle to in a few more months would still represent about a 15% return. It might be a bit of a troubled company, but I’ll take a gamble on getting 20% on my money, with a decent shot at 15%, and what looks to be a fairly solid floor of 6%. Of course, since it does appear to be higher-risk, I only put about half the money I got back from my TD sale into Priszm. The rest will wait for this volatile market to bring me another buying opportunity.

I don’t know why I’d need a disclaimer about not following my advice in the very post where I talk about the nooblar mistakes I made, but just in case it’s needed: I am not a financial advisor. This is not financial advice. Don’t buy or sell based on my recommendation, and if you do, don’t come whining to me afterward.

It’s been a rough new year, and I haven’t been able to shake a vague feeling of being “loser-ish”.

First up has been paper rewrites. This one has been particularly grating since I’m a good writer, damnit. I was supposed to have finished this while at my parents house over the break, but didn’t even look at it there. In the process of writing the paper the first time, I had to keep it very succinct so a lot of stuff from the first draft was cut out. After being rejected from the first journal, I should now stretch it out to about double the length so it’s an appropriate length for our second and third choice journals. However, it’s not a simple as just going back to the first draft and cut & pasting some of that information back in. For the most part, I was convinced that what was cut should have been cut, and I don’t like that text any more. I also need to tailor the text to the audience of our target journal, which means I largely need to pad out the introduction and include some topical references, and that’s the part of scientific writing that I’m the worst at. Particularly since I don’t have the references I want to cite handy, so I’m doing literature searches at the same time. All this is complicated by my peculiar “publication performance anxiety”. I don’t seem to have any problem giving presentations of my data to large groups or leading classes, but as soon as it comes to submitting my stuff to a peer-reviewed publication I get all panicky. I worry and obsess over the fact that my work is now going to be part of the body of scientific knowledge in a very indelible way, and fret constantly over my data and arguments, because any mistake is going to be out there for years, misleading scientists who follow in my footsteps, and dangling in front of my detractors as proof of my fallibility. It’s worse with rewrites of course, because I hate rewrites. I’ve always been a one-pass writer. Often, I don’t even read what I write here, just trusting that it came out of the keyboard making some kind of sense, and hoping that no errors creeped in. So wordsmithing a paper to get that exact subtle meaning, to include exactly what we want to convey and waste no words on anything extra can be quite painful for me.

I’ve got two other drafts to work on as well, though neither one is really even at the “outline” stage yet. Plus some short story ideas I could work on. Usually having a number of things to flip between works well for the scatterbrain spazzy writer inside of me, but this week it just seems to be paralyzing me. I don’t want to write any of them, so I stare at my word document, like a deer in the headlights, then decide to let that one go and open up another one, just to also draw a blank.

The weather hasn’t helped much. To stave off winter, the hospital keeps the heat on. Really, really on. Most days in the office I’m so hot even in just a T-shirt that I can barely think straight. Oddly enough though, I don’t sweat through it like I do in the summer. At home though, I’ve been getting cold, which is very unusual for me. Usually Wayfare gets so cold so quickly that the thermostat creeps up enough that I’m quite comfortable in a T-shirt at home, as long as I have nice thick socks on. The last few days, I’ve been layering up in sweaters and blankets in front of the computer, which doesn’t help fight the desire to put my head on my desk and take just a little nap.

That loser-ish feeling hasn’t been at all helped by the other things in my life, either. I’ve been really sucking at curling in the new year (though admittedly, one night I was so tired I could barely stand, let alone curl). This is particularly disturbing since it was not too long ago that I was starting to think of myself as really hot shit out on the sheets, even thinking I was good enough to try out for competitive curling. I thought I made a decent showing at the varsity try-outs, and while I didn’t make the team, I figured with a bit of practice I could have a real good run in a few spiels. This week though, I can’t even hit the house, let alone the button. To think, they used to let me teach new curlers the sport!

At work, we had a very important grant rejected. I don’t know how much I’m allowed to say, but suffice it to say we were not impressed with the tragically mis-informed reviews we got back on the proposal.

And of course, the stock market has been an absolute nightmare in the new year, yesterday in particular. I feel pretty stupid for buying on the way down and not listening to conventional wisdom about catching falling knives. There were a few stocks that looked like they were priced at more than fair valuations last week (TSE:RUS and TSE:YLO.UN in particular) that I snapped up, only to watch them fall much further just a few days later. I spent some time researching the financial sector and came away really liking TD, especially at the $65 price point it was at over a month ago… after buying it I was proven right by a decent rally, only to find all that and more wiped out yesterday. My dad says that I picked the right company for all the right reasons, but the “macro environment” is just hammering financials, and the good ones are going down with the bad. And the pain is not over yet, with indications that today is going to be just as bad. I’m trying not to panic, to stay the course, and to remember, as Wayfare tells me a few times a day, that it’s just a paper loss. As long as the Accord doesn’t die on me I won’t need the money for at least a few years, and by then the market should have rallied. However, that doesn’t make it hurt any less when I look at the sheer magnitude of that “paper loss”, or when I look at my portfolio update and see nothing but red numbers all the way down the column… nor does it make me feel any less stupid for seeing that my most recent buy, at what I thought was a great value, is one of the worst stinkers in the lot.

Buying opportunities should be ahead, and for those who aren’t in the market with some cash, and a long investment timeline (i.e.: the young people who actually read my rants) this might be a very exciting time. I’ve decided to pace myself much more than I have been. I’ve cancelled most of my “bargain basement low-ball” standing bids which turned out to be a little too optimistic about the bottom of the market. I put a sticky note on my monitor with the word “patience” on it. I was in a “stock picker” mentality last week when things were looking pretty bad but figured I could find the gems with real value in there, the stocks that may have been unfairly oversold. After yesterday’s crash across pretty much the entire board, those TD e-series index mutual funds are looking a lot more attractive again. While they make up a small part of my portfolio, I’ve been steadily buying them up every 4 weeks here (with my 3rd round of buying due in ~2 weeks), $100-$150 into each of the Canadian, US, and International indexes. For the long haul, I think those are pretty good bets, and the small, steady buy-ins save me from some of the pain of the markets going down and at making any effort to call the bottom.

Remember: even if I may spout advice, it is generally useless. This is particularly true for financial advice: while I’m learning fast, I’m terrible at this. Don’t listen to me, just go off and do your own research or consult a proper advisor. For those curious, the “lowball” bids I haven’t cancelled are NAL.UN at $12.50, which I might very well get today, GE at $27.20, which I doubt I’ll get. Feel free to laugh at me for being foolish, either right now or in the coming months.

Some time ago I discovered that Quiznos did have very good sandwiches. I had put off trying them for years because I didn’t see the appeal of toasting a veggie sandwich, and figured it was mostly just a place for meat-eaters. Once I did try it and like it, I still didn’t go there very often because a sandwich there is $2 more than at Subway, so I usually only went when I had a coupon or really felt like going upscale. Then I think Quiznos started to try to cut costs or something, because the coupons stopped coming (even the crappier online coupons!) and the quality really took a nose-dive. In particular, it seemed like the bread just wasn’t as tasty any more, and a big reason for going was lost when they cancelled Wayfare’s favourite sandwich, the Tzatziki chicken. I have no idea why they discontinued that sandwich, it always seemed really popular, sometimes they’d even run out of tzatziki sauce. So, I stopped going entirely for pretty much all of the end of summer and the fall.

We just got another batch of coupons in the mail and decided to give them another try, plus Wayfare wanted to try their new “Sammie” mini pita thingies. It’s still not as good as I remember when I first got hooked on it, but the quality has come a huge way from where it was a few months ago. I noticed that my sandwich was toasted a lot better today, and wonder if that might have been part of the issue; the few subs I’d had before had been barely warmed by the heat, and it seems like their bread is just not very good cold. Wayfare liked her Sammie, which is just a tiny little thing, maybe 3 bites to it.

I was puzzled by their pricing scheme though, since it seemed to defy all usual retail sense. First off was the sammie pricing: $2 per sammie, or 2 for $3.99! Wow, I could save a whole penny? That’s pretty retarded. I know the sad thing is that it might convince some people to buy two just from putting the thought into their mind, but if I was going to buy a sammie, I’d probably just buy one, and then go up and reorder if I wanted a second, just to spite their stupid non-discount. They couldn’t have even made it 2 for $3.75 or something? It’s just so sad.

For their sub sandwiches, which form most of their business, the pricing is also really weird. Usually, there’s a lower incremental cost for an upgrade to try to entice a consumer into buying more, to upsell. The customer perceives a benefit of buying more, since the last bit of upgrade cost them less than the first bit, and the company makes more profit since it costs them less still to offer a bit more. This is something that’s generally true for companies selling food, including movie theatres, as well as other types of sales, such as long distance minutes. Not so for Quiznos, however. There, there isn’t much incentive to go beyond a 9″. A 6″ sandwich costs $5. A 9″ one costs $6, so the extra 3″ upgrade from the 6″ costs you a dollar. But a 12″ costs $7.50, so the 3″ to go from the 9″ to the 12″ costs $1.50, which goes against the usual upselling price points as well as the economies of scale. I wonder how many people just order a 12″ without considering that — I know I did, being in the habit of just ordering that size without really checking the price of the smaller ones. However, now that I know, it bugs me that they do that, possibly trying to wring that last 50 cents out of me, trying to just sneak it in, so I order a 9″ instead. Which is good, since a 9″ sub is just about the perfect lunch sized portion for me: 6″ is too small for my appetite, but with a 12″ it’s sometimes a struggle to stuff in that last bite or two. While the incremental cost to upsize to a 12″ out of whack, the total cost per inch of sandwich is still marginally less for the 12″. A 6″ sub is $0.83/inch, the 9″ is $0.66/inch, and the 12″ is $0.63/inch. It would make more sense to me to see that cost per inch go down more for the 12″, but at least it is lower so I don’t feel too bad when I do order a 12″, and it does leave some (very minor) justification for trying to upsell.

On The Fork is a high-end restaurant on the Forks of the Thames inside Museum London. I was thrown by this when trying to find it, I wasn’t expecting it to be inside the museum, way in the back. Museum admission is free, so this actually gave me an excuse to run quickly through a floor or two of it while waiting for the rest of our party to arrive. The view out the back is quite good, overlooking the forks of the Thames (hence the name) out behind the museum.

The waiter warned us right away that the portion sizes were quite small, and that there weren’t separate appetizers and entrees: instead, we were expected to order two (or three) items off the menu, and whichever was faster/easier/lighter would be brought out first. Everything is roughly “appetizer” sized, with a focus on presentation and style over portion size, though even after two plates and a dessert, some of our group was still hungry. This plan does allow for some variety (in fact, it’s a favourite of ours at Kelsey’s, where we can just order 3 appetizers to share instead of a main course) but also can make a meal get really unexpectedly expensive. Each dish ranged from $7 to $16, which is about what an entree costs at a more casual restaurant, so plan on a night at the Forks being about 2-3 times as much (which is not out of line with other upscale restaurants).

There were only 4 vegetarian options: a “warm salad” with goat’s cheese that didn’t sound, smell, or look very appealing to me; the gnocchi and tomato sauce; a very heavy creamy soup; and a squash ravioli which I figured would either be quite nice or be really grody. I played it safe and stuck with the gnocchi, and ordered it again for my second course, much to the disparagement of the waiter, who was quite a character (and really pushed a second course on me, even though I wasn’t very hungry). He was also very pushy when dessert time came around, really trying to sell everyone on a dessert, even though he didn’t really know what each option comprised (it was the first day with the new dessert menu).

On the Fork is definitely out of my usual price and haughtiness range, so I wouldn’t ordinarily recommend it. I also don’t think I would recommend it for dinner: for a larger meal, you’d be looking at most likely 3 dishes to satisfy, and that would just be ridiculously pricey. Plus, at night, the view of the forks wouldn’t be as good (AFAIK, there are no lights on the river) so half the attraction of the restaurant would be gone. If you do go there and are driving, be sure to check out the municipal lot directly in front of the museum doors first: we saw that it was pretty full and just went across the street to the ImPark lot, which ended up costing us $7.50 — while the municipal lot was quite full, there were about 3 spaces left as we walked through, and it would have only been $2.50 for the same time period!

Canada has been at the forefront of nuclear research right from the very beginning. We also had some of the world’s first nuclear accidents at Chalk River in 1952 and 1958, and those early mis-steps lead to an incredible culture of safety in our nuclear power industry. No matter the cost over-runs, the delays in a project, or the engineering required, safety was always the highest priority, and our nuclear watchdog the CNSC was there to make sure that safety stayed priority number one. The CANDU, our series of Canadian-designed nuclear reactors were designed from the ground up to be as safe as possible: using natural uranium means the core can’t naturally go critical (and has non-proliferation bonuses), and heavy water as a moderator can be easily drained/evapourated in an emergency to shut the core down, etc. This reactor has also been sold with some success around the world (granted, we engaged in some fancy lending practices to sell it, and the design may owe as much to a concern about safety as it does to our position as a major producer of heavy water).

I’ve been a proponent of nuclear power for a while: sure, waste is an issue (though again, less so with the CANDU design) for the long term, but for the medium-term (10-50 years) nuclear power is really going to be our only cheap, GHG-free source of electricity, and I think we’re going to have to rely on it until other renewables can get off the ground. (I also think it’s better to plan to build one over the span of ten years and start now than to realize 8 years from now that oh shit, we need another nuclear power plant, like, now!).

Now, the Harper neocons have forced me to possibly reconsider that. First, they interfered with and politicized the issue of the NRU shutdown, and ordered it back up with a bill in parliament (yes, the other parties supported it, but they were also in a bit of a hard place with that). That move I thought was possibly the right thing for the moment: there was a big backlog of nuclear medicine tests because of the lack of isotopes. In the greater scheme of things, that might have been a time to forgo absolute nuclear safety, let the reactor run as it had been for a while, stockpile some more moly-99, and then shut it down again for the upgrades in another month or so. Beyond the moment though, it was a very dangerous move for the government to take. Once that step is taken of a government stepping in and overruling the nuclear watchdog, how hard is it to do again, for increasingly trivial reasons? Sure, this time the greater good may have been served by letting a downright ancient reactor run in a somewhat risky state (and note that this is one of the very few reactors in Canada with a design that will allow it to meltdown in a failure mode) to help thousands of patients. But what about next time? Will they overrule the CNSC again just to cut corners and get a steam-generating nuclear station set up for oil sands extraction? Maybe a bill to let another nuclear project run without safeties just because it’s too gosh-darn expensive to install them? (After all, they’ve got some taxes to cut!)

Out of the blue today, they fired Linda Keen, the president of the CNSC. This has gone way too far now. She was just doing her job as far as I can tell. No matter what Lunn might have to say about it, her job is to make sure that nuclear energy and isotopes in Canada are handled safely, and to regulate that. That’s it. Her job is not to balance safety with health concerns and isotope availability. If the ancient NRU somehow became the only source for Moly-99 on the continent, and hospitals all over are facing shortages, well, that’s above her pay grade, and the short-sightedness of people who should plan that sort of thing is not her fault. The reactor is not safe, so it doesn’t come back up. Even under pressure from the government, she kept her chin up. The government can (and did) do an end run around her in the case of a health crisis/isotope shortage, and that’s fine. It was a special set of circumstances beyond the scope of her agency. But there’s no reason I can see for firing her. In fact, reading her letter it looks like the CNSC was trying to work with AECL to get a modified license to bring the reactor up without the backup equipment, but the ball was dropped by AECL (whose chief resigned already).

There are a few choice quotes from the Globe & Mail’s article about Lunn defending his decision:

Bloc Québécois MP Claude DeBellefeuille accused the Minister of undermining public confidence in the CNSC.

“You have shaken the confidence that people should have in this independent watchdog for nuclear safety. You have sown doubt about this body,” she said.

The article doesn’t have an answer to that one from Lunn, and that is an exceptionally valid point. The parliamentary override, as controversial and short-sighted as it was, could have been done with a lot less name-calling and finger-pointing. Most importantly, it could have been done with a lot less politicizing, which might have given people some reassurance that this trouncing of the nuclear watchdog, just doing its job, was a one-off affair, and not a recurring madness in our government. Either way, this episode is going to strengthen the arguments from those opposed to nuclear power.

Asked by the NDP’s Catherine Bell if he would resign if censured by parliamentarians, Mr. Lunn replied, “No, I serve at the pleasure of the Prime Minister and I have his confidence.”

I predict that in a few days, Lunn is going to find out just how fleeting the “confidence” of the PM is. He’ll tear up a key campaign plank and break a promise, like taxing income trusts, and sow havoc in the markets about random, unjustified government intervention in the marketplace, on a complete whim. When he’s got as much political pressure as there is now to axe Lunn, and when Lunn has been as embarrassing to the PM as he has been, well… loyalty and confidence count for very little in the neocon party of Canada.

Here’s a neat idea from London Hydro and the London Public Library: you can borrow a Kill-a-Watt energy meter from the library using your library card, and find out how much energy things around your house use (with the idea being that it would help you find ways to conserve). I think it’s a pretty neat idea to share equipment like that through the library.