There were so many events in the last three months that I am not sure if I remember to list them all.
A question that often arises is whether funding academic research is worth the investment, since from the outside universities look like money burners. The investment sometimes pays off, as in the case of BumpTop, a company that started from the master’s thesis of Anand Agarawala here at U of T and has just been acquired by Google for around forty million dollars.
There were some bad news too. Professor Avner Magen was killed by a snow avalanche while climbing a mountain in Alaska.
Reminding Oded Schramm.
I had my first defense (U of T has two separated defenses). The whole phd process is worth an entire letter so I will skip it for now.
After the defense, I had a trip to San Francisco and Seattle. Unfortunately, my Canadian citizenship test was scheduled towards the end of the trip, so I had to cut it short. However, even if I couldn’t reschedule the trip, one thing I appreciate about the Canadian government is that if you call them three times and talk to three different people, you always get exactly the same answer.
In Seattle I stayed with Eli Shechtman, which some of you may remember from July04. I was lucky enough to be at the day of the solstice parade.
I didn’t take pictures, because it started with nude bikers, but other people did. In Seattle they call it freedom of expression.
After returning to Toronto I took the citizenship test. It is the kind of test the average Canadian will not pass without preparation. It is interesting to read how Canadians present themselves (at least the conservative government, that changed the previous book of the liberal government).
We also had the G20 summit in Toronto. In order not to make it too boring, these conventions attract protesters which are an integral part of the show for foreign TV. This happened under tight security measures which are unusual in Toronto. The university was shut down for four days.
This wasn’t the only thing the police was taking care of. If you remember September07, there were moving scams going on freely in Toronto. Apparently the scammers made a fatal mistake.
They stung a police officer.
