I feel like every other entry on this blog begins with a variation of “I’ve been very busy lately” but this one ends the sentence differently: “I’ve been very busy lately with stuff I couldn’t talk about.” Around the middle of May, the chips fell and it became clear that I was to be the …
Author Archives: Jonathan Sterne
A Few Words on Taxes in Quebec
(note: I’ve got a Saskatchewan report coming, but Carrie’s got the camera in Vancouver, so it’ll be delayed) For those of you who don’t follow Canadian politics, the new Quebec minority government almost fell last week. The liberal party, who has a plurality, introduced a budget with a massive income tax cut for the middle …
Saskatoon-ho!
Tomorrow morning, Carrie and I head off to Saskatoon for the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences. But mainly, I’m going because I want to see Saskatoon. It’s all part of my Canadianization project. I’ll be back on the weekend.
Deep Purple in Space
Full disclosure: the last post came courtesy of Music Thing. This one comes courtesy of Emily Thompson. I rarely find this stuff on my own. If you scroll down through this article on the sonic characteristics of different atmospheres, you can hear a Deep Purple riff run through filters that model the atmospheres of Earth, …
File Under: “Coolest Thing Ever”
Want to know what a Helmholtz siren sounds like? Now you can. and here’s some information about them.
Gadget Report
I promised one and I’m delivering. I’ve made three big gadget purchases recently, though I’ve only really explored one to its fullest. The two I won’t say much about are 1) the Edirol R-09 voice recorder, which is amazingly light and easy-to-use. I bought it and promptly lent it to Erin, a doctoral student of …
Conference Report
I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced anything like the last week. Our department has (nominally) 14 faculty members, so it’s not a particularly big place. And yet there were three conferences in a single week, all based in our department and all exquisitely executed. I couldn’t have managed full attendance at every event given other …