I want to take a moment to discuss the sad state of affairs that is wizard engineering. Last week I took a vacation at Hogsmeade, and while there I also visited Hogwarts for an interdisciplinary conference, "Occlumency and Information Security". Frankly, I was appalled by the structural engineering and the ignorance the witches and wizards had of muggle engineering.

Trigger warning for discussion of suicide

As most of you probably know, the atheist and secular movements are having some…hiccups lately. There has been arguing and arguing about the status of women and minorities in the movement, about priorities, about harassment. Most recently, there was a lot of upset flung back and forth at the Women in Secularism conference. I see a lot of arguing about the details of who said what and this issue vs. that issue, but I think that at its root some of the differences is something a lot deeper. I think that in order to get at our differences we need to have a theoretical heart-to-heart about where our priorities lie. I’d like to propose that the divide is as follows: ideas vs. people.

Canada and science have had a rocky relationship over the past few years.  This relationship reached a point of turmoil when scientists gathered on Parliament Hill to “mourn the death of evidence”. 

It's getting to be that time of year again. You know. Gradamutation time. The time when you evolve from Undergrad to GRADUATE. It's exciting, I know. And now you get to go out into the big bag world and get a low-paying mind-numbing job and convince yourself that your degree was worth something. That bit is less exciting. Now I know all you STEM folks out there are patting yourselves on the back and feeling pretty smug about your life choices when you look at your humanities friends, but yours truly was a philosophy and religion major, and over the course of my time in school I got a little bit sick of skeptic and atheist scientists looking down their noses at me.