In Toronto, my wife and daughter went to see Casa Loma today! It’s all “Decked Out” for the holiday season (see photo to the left).
I took Bobby to Poke Page for a Boba this afternoon, effectively Daddy/Son Chat #28 (see photo to the right). He chose the milk tea boba and I had the coconut. We got talking about the smartest person who ever lived? Was it Einstein? How about Leonardo di Vinci? I asked ChatGPT and it said Isaac Newton. Why? “Isaac Newton has the strongest claim to being the smartest person who ever lived because he didn’t just advance existing ideas—he created the frameworks that unified vast parts of reality. In his early twenties, working largely alone and without modern tools, he invented calculus, formulated the laws of motion, discovered universal gravitation, and built modern optics, showing that the same laws govern a falling apple and the motion of the planets. This unification of heaven and earth into a single mathematical system became the foundation of science and engineering for over 250 years and is still used today. Einstein refined Newton at the extremes, Galileo measured motion, and Leonardo imagined broadly, but Newton drew the map that made all of them coherent—compressing more of reality into one working system than any other human mind.“
I had Facetime with my wife and Katie this evening. Katie was saying how she didn’t feel at home in the high rises of Toronto, but liked the townhouses near Casa Loma. She said that she wasn’t even sure about going to the Metropolitan University of Toronto.
I did some research on the Metropolitan University of Toronto and found out why I had never heard of it. It was formerly Ryerson! Ryerson has been around for ages, but changed its name because its original namesake, Egerton Ryerson, was closely associated with the development of Canada’s residential school system, a system now widely recognized as having caused profound and lasting harm to Indigenous peoples.