Alrighty then, let’s get the rest of this Montreal trip out of my system.
Monday, May 24th:
Here’s where I grin mockingly at those who disparage statistics. Most of the final week involved statistics in some form, much to the chagrin to Geoff. The material today addressed stochastic components of neural dynamics.
Accessing buildings today was an adventure, since it was Victoria Day. Unlike Waterloo, where most everything is open 24/7, McGill is pretty much shut down in the evenings and holidays. We had to present ID and sign-in to get into McIntyre in the morning and Burnside in the afternoon.
We had an extra lecture in the evening because we ran out of time the previous week. In fact, Michael Guevara’s talk on the development of the Hodgkin-Huxley equations and the giant axons of squid was probably one of the best of the entire program.
Security freaked out when they found us in the building that evening. Guevara had to pause a few times in order to speak with this stern looking campus police officer and get things straightened out. After getting special permission from some high-up administrator, she let us off the hook.
This was our first day of crummy weather. I introduced a few more people to Tim Horton’s for dinner. No one really had much energy to do anything that night.
My ankle was feeling pretty sore, particularly when putting weight on it. Did I walk around too much on the weekend?
Tuesday, May 25th:
More stochastic stuff today, this time in gene expression; more generally in considering chemical reactions as probabilistic systems. The talk was given by Peter Swain, the guy organizing the conference for the Centre. He’s pretty young and totally laid back, but you can tell he’s super smart. He reminds me of a C&O prof I had Waterloo: Jim Geelen.
In the evening, we took in an Expos game. Wow, put this team out of its misery. Some of the American baseball fans commented how this was more like going to a minor league game. It was fun being back in Olympic Stadium after many years, but it was a pretty sad sight. The Expos actually won the game, their only win in a ten game stretch or so. Highlights included explaining the rules to newcomers to the game, and the antics of Youppi. I tried getting a picture, but the blurry shot below is the best I could get of the excitable .. what the hell is he supposed to be, anyway?
[Daniel & Richard with a very elusive Youppi]
The city shows no love to their baseball team. I searched high and low for a black Expos hoodie for my brother Brad, but no luck. I was counting on Olympic Stadium to have a decent selection of merchandise, but that wasn’t the case.
There’s definitely something up with my ankle by this point. The ache is pretty constant and I need to walk gingerly.
Wednesday, May 26th:
I find that I’m really interested in microarray analysis of gene expression. Basically, on one small cartridge, you can test the relative expression of tens of thousands of genes at once. The details of this is really neat, but it presents a host of statistical problems (not really addressed at this conference, but more will be learned at the SSC meetings the following week). I’m thinking this topic will be worth exploring for the talk I’ll have to give later this term, and perhaps also for my Master’s Research Paper. My only reservation is that it’s such an emerging, hyped and $$-attracting topic with a lot of BS surrounding it.
I found myself with some free time after finishing the lab early (a benefit of having worked extensively with R over the past couple of years) before the student presentations that evening. The crummy weather was continuing and my ratio of pants:shorts wasn’t working out. I needed some new jeans anyway, so I headed out for some shopping downtown.
Shopping without knowing exactly what I want and where to get it is extremely frustrating. From annoying salespeople to daft consumers clogging up aisles, it’s not long before I run out of patience. It seems like too many stores are going the way of The Gap, with obscene prices. Who in their right mind wants to pay $80 (and that’s the low end at too many places!) for a pair jeans? Get real.
I ended up finding what I wanted at The Bay on St. Catherine. Now *this* was an old school department store setup. Soaring ceilings, bloated inventories, an insanely huge cosmetics department upon walking in … arrgh, the assault on the senses! At least I could find something suitable and get the hell out of there.
My determination to find that hoodie for my brother continued. I swear I went into every sports store in the Underground, along St. Catherine, Rene Levesque and a good chunk of St. Denis … or any other store that looked like they might have what I was looking for. Bah, no luck.
All the walking certainly did nothing for my ankle. By this point, I’m convinced that I’ve done something to it besides just being sore from a lot of walking. I can barely put weight on it, and I’m limping pretty badly. Unlike Brad, I’m not one who’s experienced a lot of injuries, so I’m not sure what to do. I figure if it’s not better in a few days I’ll get it checked out, ‘cause this pain can’t be normal and I’m not usually one to complain about soreness.
The student presentations that night were much better than the first round. Of note, Delphine and Peiying were among the presenters that evening. Although she was really nervous about it, Peiying’s was particularly interesting and her (unintentional) humor really won over the crowd.
Thursday, May 27th:
Today’s lectures were given by representatives from Gene Network Sciences, who specialize in modeling biochemical pathways. The founder is a former McGill student. I appreciated the talk, because it’s nice to have a perspective of actually getting a job out of this field of research. Some of the other students were less enthused, especially when given demos of the company’s proprietary, in-house software used for the modeling. Oh well … for someone like me who won’t exactly be sticking around in grad school for an extended period of time, this was right up my alley.
Mmmm, more Frisbee.
Besides our afternoon lab, we also had a tour of the Montreal Genome Centre. Some areas were more interesting than others … the actual grunt work of dealing with microarrays is hardly exciting. But seeing some of the equipment at work was interesting; I was reminded about the cool assembly lines at the RIM manufacturing plant.
The second of our big dinners hosted by one of the professors took place at Leon Glass’ place. The weather cooperated and we had a great dinner outside. A bunch of banquet tables were strung together along the length of the driveway, and for supper we enjoyed samosas, lasagna and more. Oh, and the “and more” included some awesome pecan pie (thanks to Dean for introducing that to me only a few weeks before!).
After the dinner, we again ended up heading home with the UBC folks (Daniel, Richard, Alexandra) and Winnie (from McMaster).
[dinner in the Glass’ driveway; antics at a statue on McGill College Ave., around the corner from the Metro stop: David, Geoff, Abby, Winnie, Daniel, Alexandra, Richard … where did Peiying disappear to??]
Ankle feeling better, less limping.
Friday, May 28th:
Some great lectures on dynamic models and building them from time series data (ha, more stats!) from Ted Perkins. Ted was one of the better speakers, although he’s not far removed from his grad school days.
For our last dinner outing, we hit up a restaurant in Chinatown on the recommendation of some of Peiying’s Chinese friends. The food was excellent!
[David, Peiying’s friends whose names I didn’t quite get, Geoff; Peiying, Huguette, Abby, Daniel; Tim (a doctor from Florida), Florian (German and fellow movie buff), Delphine … and how about that, a picture that I’m actually in!]
Geoff and I gave Abby, Peiying, David, Huguette, and Delphine a preview of a CD we were putting together for them of the pictures we had taken during the conference. Since they were with us for so many events, it seemed like a good idea.
After dinner, I convinced a number of people to go see Shrek 2. Oh man, what a hilarious movie! So many great moments and little jokes that repeat viewings are definitely necessary (mission accomplished within a week). Everyone enjoyed it, despite some of the pacing being too quick for the non-English-as-primary-tongue people.
Ankle seems to be fine; not sure what the deal was, but it seems to have healed just as quickly as it became painful.
Saturday, May 29th:
A whole bunch of us went out for a nice big breakfast, which doubled as a goodbye since most people were going their separate ways that afternoon. So sad. What a shitty aspect of such conferences: you make some good friends, and then just like that you’ll probably never see them again.
[departing for our last group outing]
Many e-mail addresses were exchanged. But as you can probably guess in my efforts to keep this blog up to date, my correspondence skills are somewhat lacking. Even at this point, I owe a number of people emails.
That afternoon, Geoff and I headed to Old Montreal. I’ve always loved the old buildings and narrow streets here, and it was great to spend an afternoon just wandering around. For the artsy crowd, there are lots of boutiques and galleries in the area. I checked out one shop that I tracked down as selling Gama-Go merchandise: Jen, Billie and I are big fans of some of their stuff (ninja kitty!). Unfortunately the place didn’t have much of a selection, and it was really expensive.
We took in the sights, checked out some buskers and street merchants, walked along the piers, and scoured the area for a reasonably priced restaurant for dinner.
[some views of Old Montreal]
[lots of activity; a street performer does some tricky bike maneuvers]
[some artwork I couldn’t resist buying from a street merchant]
Well, that pretty much does it for the McGill System Biology Summer School portion of my time in Montreal. I’ll have a few more things to say about my final days in the city for the Statistical Society of Canada meetings, and my stopover in Ottawa before returning home. Thanks for sticking with me for all this!
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