Chris Landreth's Ryan won the Academy Award for best short animated film last night. I had seen three of the five nominees, and of those three there was no contest. But whatever. It's a brilliant animation, and a much-deserved award on top of the many awards it has already received. I'm also happy to say that the NFB made it available in full from their website. I'm not sure how long the link will be good, but for now you can go here to watch it.

In other news, I discovered that one of my all time favourite animations is up on CBC's Zed website. Primiti Too Taa is an old experimental sound poem brought to life in an animation where every frame is a typewritten page. Watch it here.

I'm on the downward slope into a cold, so the discovery that I could watch both of these animations again made the evening a little more pleasant.

I'm currently proctoring the midterm for my course, which is a perfect time to update. Time is growing tight over the next four weeks or so, but I'll try to write when I find an opportunity (next: blogging during lectures!).

I finally bit the bullet, so to speak, and went for a dental check-up a few weeks ago, my first since returning to Canada. It's a bit surprising that I should have waited this long, since (a) I don't have much faith in the longevity of my teeth, which seem poised to crumble to dust and fall out of my head, and (b) there's a dentist's office on my block.

Amazingly, the dentist seemed quite happy with my teeth. Apparently they're mostly in good shape. He did investigate some problem areas, though:

• A chipped molar, almost certainly caused by grinding. The chip will be filled in and I will be given a new night guard to prevent me from wearing my teeth down to nubs.
• A funny looking area under the gum, above my top front teeth. He eventually decided that my teeth were simply oddly-shaped (they taper inwards at the gumline). But he spent a fair amount of time holding my gum up and scraping hard with a metal point, trying to figure out what was going on. Blood was spilt. The whole time, he asked, "do these teeth ever both you?" No, but they sure did for a while after the visit.
• And the piece de resistance: a cavernous hole in one of my top molars. This was one of those moments you never want to experience in the company of a medical professional. He looked at the X-ray and said, "Well, that's very interesting...". And take note: this comes from someone who's not merely a dentist, but who has taught dentistry for thirty years. He printed the X-ray, in order to take it to the university and show his colleagues. It could be a couple of different things, but one way or another it's a great big hole, and he can't tell what it's all about without drilling into it. Once he's in there, who knows what joys I might experience (hint: root canal).

All of these questions will be resolved in my three (!) follow-up appointments: cleaning, night guard, and drilling. Maybe it's time to seriously consider that all-soup diet.

Last week a student came to me asking if I could take a look at his final exam in the course he took from me last term. He wanted to see if there was an opportunity to reclaim a few lost marks. After looking over his exam, I decided to give him an extra 0.5 on it, because his answer to one question arguably deserved slightly more than the 0.5/2 he received.

Why would I bother making such a small change to a final exam? Well, the exam was out of 80 and counted for 40% of your final grade, so that 0.5 translated to a boost of 0.25% to his final grade.

How could that possibly matter? When we compute final grades, we get a fraction that is rounded to the nearest integer. Pre-adjustment, the student's final grade as 71.429%, which was rounded down to 71%. By giving him an extra 0.25%, he went up to 71.679%, which was rounded up to 72%. Ah, so that small change to the exam upped his final grade by a whole percent.

Still, why should I adjust a final grade by one percent? This student was pursuing a special joint program between geography and my faculty. In order to get the joint degree, he needed to graduate with a 60% average over the 16 courses he took with us, meaning he needed to accumulate a total of 960 marks across those courses. He added it all up and came up with... 959. A difference of one percent in any of those courses would change his degree entirely. And that difference came down to a difference of 0.071% in my course. At that scale, our evaluation of student performance is pure noise. I was therefore happy to oblige.

Ah, the proverbial butterfly flapping its proverbial wing.