Blessed by the Potato

There is a God or there isn’t, you can’t have it both ways.

I’ve heard this statement a few times recently. Something like it for the debate about Intelligent Design, which basically says that evolution did happen, but that it happened because a “Designer” was at work behind the scenes, and had nothing to do with mutations, heredity, or natural selection. This Designer, is of course, God for most (or aliens for some, or the Flying Sphagetti Monster and His Noodly Appendage for others). So they try to argue that their theories are science, but pretty much any theory that has at its core an appeal to faith and the Almighty is not really science. So, people immediately say “is it science, or is it god? You can’t have both…”

More recently, when watching Penn & Teller’s Bullshit episode on Alcoholics Anonymous, they said it in realtion to how that group is a religious one first, even though they try to put on secular airs at times. The show continued to blast them because of how businesses and courts forcing people to go there (rather than another type of alcohol treatment program) is equivalent to state-mandated religion.

I wonder though, does it have to be one or the other? What if God exists in a superposition of quantum states that aren’t collapsed until observed… at death.

An interesting idea, I think, though my quantum mechanics professor would probably lynch me for abusing the theory so much.

Of course, all that is just a fancy way of saying “there is no possible way to know until you can properly observe” and I’m postulating that such observation would occur at death. Maybe not such an interesting idea after all… or rather, maybe it’s interesting, but not much of a new idea.

I hate writing cover letters. Trying to sell yourself in three paragraphs, and professing your undying love for some job/scholarship/research project you’ve barely heard of is difficult at best, and that’s when it’s not ringing the “pants on fire” alarm bells in your head.

However, I think I’m getting fairly decent at it since I’ve had so much forced practice (writing not only my own, but also some for friends/coworkers). I find it easier to write them for other people, for a number of reasons. There’s less stress since I’m not personally involved (still plenty of stress, especially writing for someone where I really care whether or not they get the job, but not as paralyzing as when writing my own). It also involves more discussion back-and-forth by necessity, which can help hash out some of the details before putting fingers to keyboard. And finally, call it low self-esteem, protestant modesty, or whatever, but I have a lot more trouble promoting myself than I do a friend.

Some people definitely need help with their cover letters. For starters, you’ve got to realize that they are fairly important. Yes, some businesses don’t read them at all (and even say that ones sent will be thrown away, preferring stark forms alone), but most do read them, and pay rather close attention. Typos are caught, especially if they involve professional jargon, or words that were on the job posting. Depending on who you ask, formatting is least important, as long as the prose is professional and clear.

It seems ridiculous and perhaps wasteful at first, but you really do need to tailor your cover letter for each job that you’re applying to. If you’re a fresh graduate without many skills or life experience, it can be difficult to do this, since if you aim to sell about 3 points about yourself, you may only have a pool of 3 total. Nonetheless, your motivation statements can be modified for each new letter, even if your personal ones aren’t. A friend of Wayfare has been having trouble getting any interviews recently, despite being a very talented person who is a very hot commodity internally within the company. Turns out she’s been using the same fill-in-the-blanks cover letter for the last 4 years (not even updating it with a blurb about her current position!).

So, this has been a busy cover letter week for me, having hammered out two already, and another one to come tomorrow morning. Might as well make it a bit of a cover letter workshop then. I think it would be best to do so in the comments section, but if you’re not comfortable with that (or don’t want your copyrighted, guaranteed hire letter to get out into the ether) then feel free to email me. I know at least one of my friends needs help with hers, and given the number of people who seemed less than perfectly satisfied with their current jobs in previous comments, I suspect there may be a few of you out there updating your resumes and wondering what you should staple to the front of it.

The natural question to ask at this point is “why should the broke, technically jobless, and unemployable grad student be giving me advice about my cover letter?” to which I answer that first, even if I don’t apply for jobs with my cover letters, I do hammer out dozens of them every year for scholarships and grants. I also see a number from the other side, vetting potential undergrad lab monkeys assistants. Most impressive of all, I got my NSERC rejection letter today. I know what you’re thinking, getting rejected from NSERC doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. However, note that I got it today, today being late March. That means I made it to the final round (or the next-to-final round) — the writing of my application brought it to near the top of the dung heap, where it was only upon the very close examination of the final few applications that they realized I still haven’t finished my MSc and thus must suck and/or blow (or, perhaps more properly, don’t do enough of either; a third hypothesis holds that I’ve become too valuable to the daily functioning of the lab to risk graduating away, possessing numerous valuable and moreover, unique skills. Recent data has disproved this hypothesis, as weeks of severe illness went completely unnoticed by coworkers).

Before getting into the workshop, I will sing some high praises for your thesaurus. There are many beautiful, long, and confusing words in the English language, and it’s great fun to bandy them about with reckless abandon. Often, there are a number of near-synonyms that can be used with increasing degrees of exactness, and proper selection of these can get you places, cleverly stretching the truth in cases without necessarily fabricating statements from whole cloth. As much fun as big or obscure words are, it’s important not to indulge your logophilia too much; it’s important that your letter sound at least vaguely like yourself and more importantly, that the slope-skulled middle-management type who’ll be hiring you not feel like they’re being talked down to. For example, the humour on my site is biting, sarcastic, sardonic, hostile, cynical, and full of non sequiturs. These aren’t quite synonyms, but they’re related and all seem to describe the same thing (or a few related things). We’d probably want to pick just one word when describing it, and depending on who we were pitching the idea to we might pick a different one. If trying to sell some of it to a TV network that airs a lot of terrible reality TV, we might pick hostile and biting, perhaps throwing edgy in as well, since it’s a buzz-word amongst those types. A magazine editor might be more receptive to non sequiturs and sardonic, while an “alternative” web portal looking for cheap content might prefer sarcastic and cynical.

To take a real-world example, Wayfare says “I have also been responsible for a number of broader marketing initiatives, including designing an advertising layout, presentations, and in-store signage…” for a cover letter aimed at getting a job that involved getting information out to the public from time to time. This sentence makes it clear that she has experience making signs and giving presentations, and should have the required (rudimentary) layout skills. If she were instead to try to get a marketing job, she would probably blow this sentence up, naming programs used for creating those presentations and signs (powerpoint and photoshop, say), as well as possibly dropping the names of stores or magazines where these promotions ran. Likewise with web experience, if the job doesn’t require it simply stating “created and maintained a website…” can be enough to let them know you’ve done it, which often means you have enough knowledge for that position. Adding more, such as “created a website involving PHP, SQL, and Flash” makes it sound like you’re volunteering to redo the company website in your spare time if the job is for a non-web position. Likewise, you’ll need to specify those types of things if a job is largely focused on creating and managing web content (throwing something together in HTML and putting it on Geocrappies doesn’t quite cut it these days).

Anyway, leave some comments or send me an email, and let’s get a cover letter workshop week going!

I’m really sick of just about every site on the internet requiring free registration to do anything. Newspapers, podcasts, forums… what’s the point? They often say they won’t sell the information you give them, and that their “newsletters” are strictly opt-in (even if the checkbox does default to on). If that’s true, why bother? If you’re not selling the information, why not just let people surf the site without the annoying “register now!” requests, and just let those few who are actually interested in your newsletter sign up for it on their own? So knowing that they’re selling our information to spammers, we sign up with free throw-away addresses. Knowing that the addresses are useless, why bother with the forced registration?

Today was pretty bad. I decided to turn on the Penn Jilette Radio Show because I’ve heard some good things about it. And before it would let me listen to the broadcast, I had to fill out my name, email address, zip code, whether I had any hiring priviledges at my company, and how many people worked there. So I tried to put as little info in there as possible, and every time it would spit it back to me asking for more, and delete what I already had, so I had to do it all over… so annoying.

So for anyone that doesn’t already know about it, I’m going to plug BugMeNot. It’s great particularly for newspaper sites that require you to register before they let you read the articles. That can get really annoying, especially if it’s the kind where you have to wait for the email activation code to come, and by the time it does you forgot what story it was you wanted to read about.

And finally, since I can’t think of enough to pad this out to a full post (well, I can, but no one needs to know about my unnatural proclivity for staying in bed as long as humanly possible), here are some unusual alarm clocks.

Rogue waves are something of a nautical legend: recent recordings and sattelite imaging have shown that though rare, they do exist. For a long time, their existence was not quite as assured, although their possibility remained a very serious threat to ships. They could form at random, a towering wall of water slamming into a ship on an otherwise calm day. If the ship avoided sinking entirely, then there was still a good possibility that unprepared sailors on deck would have been washed overboard.

There are a number of theories as to how they might form, including focusing effects of various shorelines and underwater ridges, as well as simple non-linear interactions between waves, leading to occasional “spikes” — a summation of the energy of a number of adjacent waves into one large one before separating again. While large in magnitude, they are rare and tend to be very short-lived (which is why few of them manage to break on the shore where most observers are most of the time).

While not anywhere near as large as those seen on the ocean, we did run into a rogue wave once on the lake by the cottage. On a reasonably calm afternoon, the lake rocking by maybe 20 cm, we were out in our old boat, a ~14′, 4-person jetboat. All of a sudden, we hit a wave that was more like 2 m (6 ‘) high. Fortunately, nobody was thrown overboard, but it did kill the engine and had us really shaken for a while. We believe that one was caused by the wake of a lake freighter that had passed some time ago; it’s hard to say how long those wakes propagate.

On another occasion, while on the scuba trip to Jamaica in high school, we were on the boat returning from our night dive. Suddenly, we hit something and the boat tilted 45° or more, and came almost instantly to a stop. We didn’t lose any students (who managed to hold on to their seats), but one of the crewmembers who was standing got thrown overboard, as did most of the creatures we had collected to study (which were residing in buckets in the centre of the deck). We never quite figured out exactly what caused the mishap, but it was immortalized on the shirts we had printed afterwards. My theory is that the pilot missed the channel back into the lagoon and we hit the reef at full speed; many others hold that it was a rogue wave.

Today, as things are finally starting to settle back to some semblance of normalacy in my life (though to be honest, I doubt I’d recognize normal if I saw it now), I was hit with a rogue wave. After months of delays, I have finally completed my thesis (though it still isn’t perfected, the last few change requests have been more about formatting than content), and the graduate office is busy contacting examiners to find an exam date for me. I took some time to get some other much-procrastinated work done (my OGSST application, plus some software installation for the new imaging analysis box), when out of no where the other member of my committee walks in and says we have to meet tomorrow: there are major problems with my thesis that we need to talk about.

Someone throw me a line, I think I’m drowning.

Well, looks like the brief bout of spring weather yesterday was too good to be true, and the snow has come back today. Pity, I liked romping about in a T-shirt.

I got a flier in my mail today for Cousin Vinny’s pizza. On the back, there’s an ad for a $6 large pizza for students (pick-up only). That’s a pretty good deal anywhere, and Cousin Vinny’s pizza is pretty edible here (nice, thick crust, but they’re usually too light on cheese). However, I got virtually the same flier last month and when I went in to take advantage of the deal, they said it was a mistake, and the deal was for a $6 medium pizza. We negotiated on an $8 large, which still isn’t a bad price. Getting the same ad is probably just a result of having them print several months’ worth at once, but it still irks me a bit: it seems a lot like bait & switch. Last time I was there, they didn’t even have a notice in the window or anything about the error, and in fact there were copies of the flier by the cash.

I haven’t brushed up on the law, but I’m pretty sure bait & switch is illegal, as are several other forms of misleading advertising. In practice, I don’t really care all that much, as it’s a pain to file a complaint with the government and all that jazz. Plus, typos do happen, and it’s not reasonable to expect a company to honour a misprint in an ad just to go bankrupt in the process. To my mind, it’s not really all that different than having Cineplex sell you 2-for-1 movie passes that can only be used on mondays, wednesdays, and thursdays (but not for matinees) and only for movies that have been out for 4 weeks or more (if there are any movies left these days that have legs like that). They both lure you in with the idea of a deal that you’ll never reasonably get. But they’ve got to make some steps towards not looking like they’re purposefully trying to deceive. A notice in the window, or a sticker with the proper price on the next round of fliers would be a start. The movie passes at least do have the fine print (oh, how I loathe the fine print).

As long as I’m thinking of pizza places not giving me advertised deals, I’m getting really fed up with just about every pizza place I know not giving walk-in specials to phoned-in orders. It’s really convenient to be able to call in your order as you’re leaving work, having it come out of the oven just as you get there, and then going home to eat. But depending on the current specials, you might pay as much as $5 more for the priviledge of phoning in vs. ordering in person and waiting. I know some of the places like Pizza Pizza have ginormous centralized ordering facilities (seeing as how they have to ask what city you’re in, they presumably serve several). Despite that however, they seem to have the same walk-in specials at every one from Toronto to London anyway, so that potential excuse doesn’t hold much water. Even if the pricing was different from store to store, you’d think their new computer terminals could manage it (even if they can’t always figure out how to get you a plain cheese pizza — more than once they’ve just plugged in a pepperoni pizza for me, then scratched off pepperoni on the printout).