Bagpipe lung is coming for you: Morning File, Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Today’s Morning File is written by Lewis Rendell. I’m filling in for Tim this morning while he takes a much needed vacation.

News
Views
Noticed
Government
On campus
In the harbour
Footnotes

News

1. Hit-and-run seriously injures cyclist in St. Margaret’s Bay

On Monday morning a bike commuter was hit by a truck that left the scene. As Carly Stagg reports for the CBC, 44-year-old Tim Lane was pedalling near the head of St. Margaret’s Bay to the Tantallon Park & Ride when a black truck with a flat deck struck him off his bike, fracturing his face, skull and thigh and rupturing his spleen. Lane is expected to recover. If you have any information about the collision, consider calling Crime Stoppers instead of slashing tires. 

2. African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia calls for boycott of Sobeys

As Haley Ryan reports for Metro, until Sobeys apologizes to Andrella David for racially profiling her and begins racial sensitivity training for their staff, the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia (AUBA) is calling on members of its congregations and the wider community to boycott the grocery chain. David’s frustrating case began after she was accused of being a serial shoplifter by an assistant manager at the Hammonds Plains Road Sobeys. The company paid David the $21,000 they were ordered to, but have yet to make good on some of the other orders from the human rights board’s remedy decision.

3. Playing the bagpipes can kill you

In good news for people who hate fun and whimsy and bad news for just about everyone else, it turns out that playing the bagpipes can be fatal. In the right conditions, the chosen instrument for men in kilts everywhere can become squeezey death machines that harbour hypersensitivity pneumonitis-causing fungi. Other names for the condition include “bird fancier’s lung” and “hot tub lung.”  Was it Bukowski that said “find what you love and let it kill you?” No one is certain, but the sentiment resonates like “Danny Boy” through the highlands.

Views

1. Stephen Kimber on Dal’s $300,000 MIT field trip

Stephen Kimber takes on Dalhousie University’s controversial decision to spend $300,000 to send nine of Nova Scotia’s best, brightest and wealthiest people to MIT for a nearly poetically buzzword-y “entrepreneurship acceleration program.”

“Back in April, Dalhousie University’s Board of Governors approved a three per cent across-the-board tuition fee hike — even higher for students in engineering, pharmacy and agriculture — and squeezed faculty budgets to achieve its goal of a balanced budget.

At the same time, the university quietly agreed to pony up $300,000 US to cover the cost for nine of the province’s best and brightest (not to forget richest) to attend an “entrepreneurship acceleration program” at Boston’s Massachusetts Institute of Technology this fall.

The Dalhousie-funded participants include John Risley, Canada’s 39^th richest person (net worth $2.35 billion), Emera CEO Chris Huskilson ($4.3 million in salary and benefits last year) and, of course, Dalhousie president Richard Florizone (a piddling $390,052).”

No word on whether MIT plans to bunk the millionaires dorm-style and feed them ramen noodles.

2. ACORN’s municipal election guide for poor people

Anti-poverty group ACORN has released a list of demands for change in the upcoming municipal election, hoping to get out the poor vote. The group cites gentrification, the zoning of pay day loan sites and slum landlords as just some of the issues Haligonians living in poverty should be confronting candidates with as they ring doorbells in the districts.

3. Cranky letter of the day

No one seemed to be outraged enough to send in a cranky letter to their local paper over the weekend. I operate at a base level of cranky all the time, so here’s my own brief outrage: I almost got hit in a crosswalk by a man pulling newlyweds in a rickshaw the other night and I’m not happy about it.

Noticed

How grateful is Halifax? Chickity-check the feel-good video made by Gratitude at Work.

It’s heartwarming, sure, but can we maybe cut this out? Like can we, as a species, collectively agree that filming strangers doing extremely normal things and calling it a ‘social experiment’ is annoying? If I’m beelining it for the ferry it’s because I want to get to the last TIBS croissant, not because I want to be part of a social experiment. Gratitude is great. Halifax seems to be a reasonably grateful city. Do we need video evidence? And what about that one guy who didn’t say thank you? The whole city thinks you’re a real jerk, buddy. 

Government

No public meetings.

On campus

Dalhousie

Thesis Defence, Interdisciplinary Studies (9:30am, Room 1007, The Kenneth C. Rowe Management Building) — PhD candidate Jennifer Baechler will defend her thesis, “Operationalizing ‘Whole-of-Government’ as an Approach to State Fragility and Instability: Case Studies from Ottawa, Canada and London, United Kingdom.”

Thesis Defence, Oceanography (2pm, Room 3107, Mona Campbell Building) — PhD candidate Shiliang Shan will defend his thesis, “Eulerian and Lagrangian Studies of Circulation on the Scotian Shelf and Adjacent Deep Waters of the North Atlantic with Biological Implications.”

“Hyper-virtual Double Categories” (2:30pm, Seminar Room #227, Chase Building) —  Roald Koudenburg will present this @CAT Seminar. Abstract:

Hyper-virtual double categories are like virtual double categories but where there are multi-cells with empty codomain as well as the usual ones whose codomains are single arrows. The prototype involves (small) profunctors on large categories. In this way smallness conditions, of the sort needed for Yoneda structures, are coded into the double category structure.

In the harbour

Tuesday
5am: MSC Immacolata, car carrier, arrives at Autoport from Savona, Italy

Oceanex Sanderling. Photo: Halifax Examiner

6am: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, arrives at Pier 41 from St. John’s
10am: MSC Immacolata, car carrier, sails from Autoport for sea

11am: Porgy, car carrier, sails from Pier 31 for sea
11:30am: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, moves from Pier 41 to Autoport
3pm: Mary, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Cagliari, Italy
3pm: NYK Demeter, container ship, arrives at Fairview Cove from Rotterdam
5pm: Oceanex Sanderling, ro-ro container, sails from Autoport for St. John’s

Wednesday
6am: ZIM Vancouver, container ship, arrives at HalTerm from Valencia, Spain

Footnotes

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