A few years ago I took a course at the Royal Military College in Kingston, Ontario. Every week I would walk across Le Salle Causeway from town and through campus to the classroom. I passed by cadets running for fitness or marching in formation with rifles and backpacks. But one of the most interesting things I remembered is a patch of grass that was clear of snow and steaming all winter long. I joked to my civilian friends that they must have some secret project under the ground that was producing a bunch of heat.

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I’ve been reading a lot about nuclear power lately (more posts to follow?) and I discovered that my joke was half right: RMC has a nuclear reactor located in the Sawyer building immediately to the east of that patch of grass. It’s a SLOWPOKE light-water reactor, that produces only 20 kWh of electricity (10 house-units of power). It runs so cold that it has no active cooling system: the core sits in a tub of water that circulates by convection.

RMC did a bunch of research into retrofitting our old Oberon class submarines with those reactors. Who knows what classified things they’re doing with it now?

The universities of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Montreal still have operating SLOWPOKE reactors. They used to have SLOWPOKEs at Dalhousie and Toronto, and there were two kicking around in Ottawa. McMaster has a real, live pressurized heavy-water reactor with active cooling, the same type as thesimilar to CANDU-brand reactors. So that’s where I’d go if you want to become a nuclear engineer.

I have a master’s degree in programming language theory. You don’t care what that is, trust me. The process of getting the master’s caused me to stop caring about it too.

There is a community for people interested in programming language theory called Lambda the Ultimate. I used to read it when I was working on my thesis, so I could pretend that someone else in the world cared about what I was doing. Every few months I go and check it out just to see what’s up these days.

One of the big issues in programming language theory is that industry completely ignores this field of academia. For example, it was just announced that the next version of C#, Microsoft’s flagship programming language, will include a feature that was considered state of the art in 1958. (Yes, I am the only computer science grad student I knew who referenced papers so old that they weren’t available online.)

A frequent topic of discussion on Lambda the Ultimate is this dismissal by industry and the related issue of teaching programming language theory in university. Such a discussion recently yielded this insightful comment:

If I take a PhD in chemistry which knows everything about coating, then I can build a company around him. If I take a PhD in physics who knows everything about nanoscale optics, then I can build a company around him.

Now I look at PhDs from fundamental computer science (CS). How many can I use to build a company around him/her? The problem is not that CS doesn’t produce programmers, the problem is that CS doesn’t produce enough new ideas which industry can use. If CS PhDs were such that you could use them to start companies, industry would stop complaining immediately.

And this follow-up math pun:

Q: What company would you build around a fresh PhD in (fundamental) mathematics [who] knows lots of things about algebraic topology?
A: There are manifold possibilities.

I’m sitting on the bus listening to politics grad students make fun of a researcher who compared Marx and Foucault using a scientific methodology. It’s called ideology: deconstruction is no better a source of truth than science in the eyes of postmodernism.

I often wonder if I’d be better off in school rather than trying to teach myself postmodern theory. These students have allayed my fears. Like all modernist institutions, academia is chiefly concerned with the accumulation and practice of power, not the pursuit of “truth”.