Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

The Great Dying

Elephant statue, National Gallery of Canada

251.4 million years ago, the earth experienced the most severe extinction event ever recorded. The Permian-Triassic (P-Tr) extinction event (informally referred to as the Great Dying) involved the loss of 90% of all extant species. This included about 96% of all marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrate species.

There are a number of theories about what caused the event:

  1. A comet or meteor impact
  2. Massive volcanic activity
  3. Continental evolution
  4. A supernova destroying the ozone layer
  5. Methane clathrate release

Some combination of such factors may well be responsible. Regardless of the initial cause, one of the defining elements of the P-Tr event was a high degree of global warming. Mean global temperatures increased by about 6°C, with much higher increases at the poles. This period also involved the large-scale failure of ocean circulation, leaving nutrients concentrated at the ocean bottom and an acute lack of oxygen in the sea. The latter was the product both of decreased circulation and the large-scale die off of the kind of phytoplankton species that now produce about 90% of the planet’s oxygen.

The study of such historical occurrences is useful, largely because it helps to improve our appreciation for how climatic and biological systems respond to extreme shifts. Just as the re-emergence of life after a forest fire and a clearcut may have some common properties, perhaps the patterns of decline and reformation after the P-Tr event can offer us some insight into macro level processes of ecological succession after traumatic climatic events.

Aurigid meteor shower

For those who missed the annual Perseid meteor shower, there is another chance to see some debris vaporizing in our atmosphere this week. The Aurigids are a much rarer shower, generated by comet Kiess (C/1911 N1) passing near the sun around 4 C.E. Gravity from the Earth and other planets sometimes creates dust trails that intersect with the Earth, as it moves through its orbit. The night of August 31st will be one such occasion.

Regrettably, there will not be much to see from eastern Canada. Even in the countryside, the incidence of meteors will peak at less than ten an hour. In Vancouver, however, those in the countryside can expect to see a sharp peak of activity between 4:00am and 5:00am, during which more than 200 meteors per hour should be visible. If you are looking for an excuse to escape all that city light pollution, this is an excellent one.

Aspiring amateur astronomers will find this page very informative. It includes tips on viewing, as well as a neat applet that lets you calculate the incidence of meteor activity in your location.

The ugliness of war

Artillery monument, Ottawa

Today’s Ottawa Citizen has an article about how the Canadian War Museum is being pressured to change some of the text in its Bomber Command exhibit. Veterans had complained that it makes them out to be war criminals. The text reads:

“The value and morality of the strategic bomber offensive against Germany remains bitterly contested. Bomber Command’s aim was to crush civilian morale and force Germany to surrender by destroying its cities and industrial installations. Although Bomber Command and American attacks left 600,000 Germans dead and more than five million homeless, the raids resulted in only small reductions of German war production until late in the war.”

The museum consulted four contemporary historians, after complaints from the National Council of Veteran Associations, and they each affirmed the accuracy of the text. Two of them, however, lodged some complaint about the tone employed.

All this strikes at one of the tough moral questions that arises when you treat war as the subject of law. If the London Blitz was a crime, surely the bombing of Berlin, Tokyo, and Nagasaki were crimes as well. The targeting of civilians was a crime committed by those who chose where the planes should drop their deadly cargo. The dropping of the bombs was a crime committed by those who followed the illegal orders. (See: this related post) Alternatively, one can adopt the view that none of these undertakings were criminal. I suspect that neither perspective is a very comfortable one for those who were involved, but it seems difficult to come up with something both different and defensible.

In the end, it seems wrong to give anyone the comfort of thinking they were on the ‘right’ side and this somehow excused what they did. Their actions are equally valid objects of moral scrutiny to those of their opponents, though they are much less likely in practice to be thus evaluated.

None of this is to say that all the combatant states in the Second World War had equally good reason to get involved, nor that there is moral equivalence between the governmental types in the different states. What is hard to accomplish, however, is the translation of such high level concerns into cogent explanations for why former Canadian strategic bombers should be honoured while Germans launching V2’s into London should not be. The generally unacceptable character of the intentional bombing of civilians is firmly entrenched in international law; as such, the sensibilities of current veterans do not warrant changing the text.

[Update: 30 August 2007] Randall Hansen, an associate professor at the University of Toronto, has written a well-argued editorial in the Ottawa Citizen attacking the museum’s decision to change the wording.

Facebook ecosystem

Milan’s Facebook ecosystem

It is nearly always interesting to see complex data presented in a new way – particularly as a visualization. The way this one arose was actually very mathematical, based on equations for modeling the strength of electromagnetic fields.

The dense cluster on the left is a tangle of high school and undergrad. The much smaller grouping on the right is Wadham College, Oxford. All around the edges and bottom are relatively or entirely isolated people – evidence of how many people I meet and random and at a sufficient level to warrant a Facebook linkage.

Greenhouse gas flowchart

Terry Fox statue

The World Resources Institute has produced an excellent flowchart showing the activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions and the magnitude of those flows in terms of CO2 equivalence.

The data is from 2000, but I would expect the relative magnitudes to be reasonably similar now. This graphic provides a powerful and intuitive view into where the problem lies, and suggests areas where the greatest improvements could be made.

Afghan opium

The Senlis Council, an international policy think tank, has developed an alternative plan for dealing with Afghanistan’s record crop of opium poppies. Their Poppy for Medicine Project aims to address the global shortage in medicinal opiates (such as morphine) while also providing a sustainable basis for the Afghan economy. Providing poppies for legal medicinal purposes will offer an income alternative that does not fuel the illicit drugs trade. Romesh Bhattacharji, India’s former narcotics commissioner, has offered his support for the plan, citing the high incidence of cancer in the developing world and the lack of access to pain killers.

This year, Afghan opium exports were worth about $60 billion at street prices in purchasing countries; that is 6.6 times the total gross domestic product of Afghanistan. No wonder coalition forces have been having such a hopeless time trying to eradicate this production. Within Afghanistan, the trade is worth about $3.1 billion, though less than a quarter of that accrues to farmers. Village level schemes of the kind Senlis is proposing could increase that proportion, while decreasing the share that goes to organized crime, smugglers, and insurgent groups.

The idea that NATO troops can win hearts and minds in Afghanistan while simultaneously destroying the opium crop that is the basis for much of the economy has always been foolish. While I was in Oxford, the reality of this situation was privately acknowledged by a number of British military officers. If Afghanistan is to be in any way prosperous or secure by the time western forces eventually withdraw, a bit more intelligent engagement and a bit less dogmatism would be in order.

[Update: 28 August 2007] Here is a similar argument.

Lucrative video contest

Readers of this blog have been appreciating my brother Mica’s videos for a long time, and have helped him win a number of video competitions in the past. Now, he is in a contest where the objective is to produce a promotional video for Molson Canadian. While I hope readers of this blog have less mediocre hops and barley beverages in their own fridges, voting for his video might help him win $5000, which he will spend on school.

In order to vote, you must be on Facebook (though that seems to include almost everyone under 30 now). You need to join a group called ‘Molson Canadian Nation.’ If you want an invitation, send me or Mica a message and we will send you one. Voting begins on September 1st, and members of the group can vote once per day.

More details will follow. This will be an excellent way to show your appreciation for Mica’s videos, as well as help reduce the size of his student loans for next year.

[Update: 5:40pm] It seems that only those in Canada can join this group. To those elsewhere: “Thank you for your help in previous campaigns. The advertising imperative in this case does not favour you.”

Encrypting personal communication

Statue outside the National Archives

Personal use of encrypted communication is yet another example of so-called ‘network effects.’ (These have been mentioned previously: 1, 2, 3.) The basic idea is that the more widespread certain technologies become, the more useful they are to everyone using them. The most commonly cited examples are telephones and fax machines; back when only a few people had them, they had limited utility. You would need alternative channels of communication and you would waste time deciding which one to use and exchanging instructions about that with other parties. Once telephones became ubiquitous, each one was a lot more powerful and convenient. The same can be said for email addresses.

Good free software exists that allows the encryption of emails at a level where it would challenge major organizations to read them. While this may not protect an individual message that falls under scrutiny, it changes the dynamic of the whole system. It is no longer possible to filter every email passing along a fibre-optic cable for certain keywords, for instance. You would need to crack every one of them first.

Making the transition to the routine use of encryption, however, requires more effort than the adoption of telephones or email. While those technologies were more convenient than their predecessors, encryption adds a layer of difficulty to communication. You need to have the required software, key pairs generated, and passphrases. It is possible to make mistakes and encrypt things such that you can never access them again.

As such, there is a double barrier to the adoption of widespread communication encryption: people must deal with the added difficulties involved in communicating in this way and with the problem that hardly anyone uses such systems now. If there is nobody out there with whom you can exchange PGP encrypted messages, you aren’t too likely to bother with acquiring and using the software. It is entirely possible that those two constraints will prevent widespread adoption for the foreseeable future.

One nice exception to this rule is Skype. Users may not know it, but calls made over Skype are transmitted in encryption form, very considerably increasing the difficulty of intercepting them. The fact that users do not know this is happening greatly increases the level of usage (you cannot avoid using it). While such systems may well not be as secure as explicit encryption efforts undertaken by senders and recipients, they may be a useful way to increase overall adoption of privacy technology. Such ‘invisible encryption’ could also be usefully incorporated into stores of personal data, such as the contents of GMail accounts.

PS. For anyone who decides to give PGP a try, my public key is available here.