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.

Timeline: the next 250 days

Tomorrow begins another busy week. I need to finish preparing my presentation on West African fisheries for the Wadham Research Forum tomorrow night. While I appreciate the chance to proselytize a bit on this important subject, I am somewhat nervous about being the only grad student presenting to a clutch of dons; hopefully, none will be international lawyers with precise questions about the interpretation of statutes.

The next order of business is reading for this week’s Developing World seminar. Tuesday brings CCW and OUSSG, then I have GEG on Friday (a life dominated by acronyms). Wednesday is the fourth OxBloggers’ gathering.

Next Tuesday – how very close at hand – are the American midterm elections. As with all North American elections experienced in UK time, they promise a night as late as last one was. The next day, I am going to London to see Sarah, attend a private viewing of the William Townsend exhibition, and buy a new iBook battery.

That weekend (Nov. 10-12), Gabe will be in Oxford for a debate tournament, possibly sleeping on my floor along with his debate partner, and certainly in need of getting one of my reasonably comprehensive Oxford tours. That said, there seems little chance of turning up my missing Codrington Library card before then.

Then, it is just three more weeks until the end of Michaelmas, the arrival of my father in the UK, and our December 4th departure for Turkey. We get back on December 16th: leaving me with the rest of the break, one more term, and one more break to finish the thesis (17 more weeks).

After that, there are eight weeks of studying for our final examinations, the completion of the same, and the beginning of my not-so-phased withdrawal from the UK. Beyond that, the future is truly uncertain. There is certainly some temptation to stow my remaining possessions with an accommodating friend and make one more interesting foray to the continent, before my return to North America. I have no reason to think finances will allow the mooted Kilimanjaro climb to go forward. Unless my student loan appeal succeeds, tricky questions will remain about funding the rest of this year.

Heat and light as services

Yesterday, I read about a rather clever idea. Right now, individual homeowners (or renters) make the decisions about what kind of heating, lighting, and insulation to use. Utility firms simply sell them electricity, oil, and gas in order to meet their demands. As such, the firms have no incentive to help people conserve and, despite possible financial incentives to be more efficient, few homeowners will do so. The latter problem is clearly more acute with renters.

The alternative presented is for utility firms to sell a package of lighting and heating services instead. Then, they would have an incentive to cut power consumption and upgrade to more efficient infrastructure. They would also benefit from being able to do so at a much larger scale than individual consumers. Apparently, firms are already doing this in Woking and London.

Given how incredibly wasteful homes are when it comes to energy usage, especially in the UK, this seems like a smart way to changing incentives. Households in the UK use 25% of the total electricity generated, and produce an equivalent amount of CO2. 60% of that energy is used for heating, often in houses that are poorly insulated and were never designed to be kept at today’s room temperatures throughout.

Experts: scientists and economists

Here’s a little bit of irony:

According to BBC business correspondent Hugh Pym, the report will carry weight because Sir Nicholas, a former World Bank economist, is seen as a neutral figure.

Unlike earlier reports, his conclusions are likely to be seen as objective and based on cold, hard economic fact, our correspondent said.

The idea that economists are more objective than scientists is a very difficult one for me to swallow. While scientific theories are pretty much all testable on the basis of observations, economic theories are much more abstract. Indeed, when people have actually gone and empirically examined economic theories, they have often been found to be lacking.

Part of the problem may be the insistence of media sources in finding the 0.5% of scientists who hold the opposite view from the other 99.5%. While balance is certainly important in reporting, ignoring relative weights of opinion is misleading. In a study published in Science, Naomi Oreskes from the University of California, San Diego examined 10% of all peer-reviewed scientific articles on climate change from the previous ten years (n=928).¹ In that set, three quarters discussed the causes of climate change. Among those, all of them agreed that human-induced CO2 emissions are the prime culprit. 53% of 636 articles in the mainstream press, from the same period, expressed doubts about the antropogenic nature of climate change.

I suppose this says something about the relative levels of trust assigned to different expert groups. Economists study money, so they naturally must know what they are talking about.

[Update: 25 February 2007] I recently saw Nicholas Stern speak about his report. My entry about it contains a link to detailed notes on the wiki.

[1] Oreskes, Naomi. “Beyond the Ivory Tower: The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Science 3 December 2004: Vol. 306. no. 5702, p. 1686. (Oxford full text / Google Scholar)

CAYS Party tonight

A final reminder: the first ever “Come as Your Supervisor” Party in the known history of Oxford will be taking place tonight. Those who present the most accurate and the most amusing portrayals of our common academic superiors will doubtless earn the respect of their peers, as well as the intrepidity required to gain fame and fortune in the world. Those who attend simply for the food, drink, and conversation will not be penalized.

Those with any questions should contact me by the means of their choice. While I have yet to recover fully from various health complaints, I am bound by honour and practicalities to attend this party in more or less its entirety. As such, I need to finish my fish presentation before it begins… To Powerpoint!

Utterly unrelated: there are a depressing number of anti-vegetarian groups on Facebook. Are people just instinctively hostile to those with other views? Seeing so many certainly makes me want to go do something militantly vegetarian.

Lithium-ion battery preservation

After seeing that the capacity of my iBook battery has fallen by 10% over the course of four complete cycles of discharging and charging, I went and read up on lithium-ion batteries. My previous conceptions about them turn out to be almost entirely wrong. Since almost all cellular phones, laptops, and music players with rechargeable batteries run on this sort, it is worth knowing how to keep them going for as long as possible.

1. Discharging completely, then charging completely, is not the ideal approach

Unlike other kinds of batteries, there is no ‘memory effect’ with Li-ion systems. Batteries that suffer from memory effects ‘forget’ how much charge they can hold if they are not completely drained and then completely recharged. As such, the strategy to keep them alive for the longest time is to always follow that pattern.

With Lithium-Ion batteries, full discharging is not only non-ideal, it is actually harmful. This is because it strains the weakest cell. Since a battery is composed of several cells, the failure of any one will mean the failure of the whole system. All lithium-ion rechargeable batteries have systems to prevent cell voltage from dropping too low (a microcontroller cuts it off before it reaches that point), but draining them to the point of cutoff is still harmful.

2. Temperature matters most

The biggest factor in battery life, especially for laptops, is the temperature at which the battery is kept. Judging by the figures from iStat Pro, mine is consistently at more than 40°C when the computer is running. Between reading, writing, listening to music, and just hanging around on Skype, that is probably more than twelve hours a day.

Just keeping the battery at 40°C will result in capacity loss of more than 15% over the course of one year, compared with a 2% temperature based loss if the battery is kept at 0°C and a 4% loss if it is kept at room temperature (about 25°C).

The most practical upshot of this is that it is intelligent to keep your battery outside of your computer when you are using it plugged into the wall. The most important reason for this is that it will thus be living at a much lower temperature, and thus for much longer. Since a laptop with no battery will shutdown instantly (and incorrectly) with any interruption in the external power supply, the best bet is probably to use a battery on its last legs (but still good enough for a few minutes) when plugged in, and a better one when working off battery power.

3. Storage or using at 100% charge is harmful

For reasons too complex for me to understand, a charge of about 40% is best for the long-term storage of Li-ion batteries. A Li-ion battery kept at 100% charge and 40°C will lose about 35% of its capacity in a year.

4. Li-ion batteries fail over time, regardless of anything else

According to Wikipedia: “At a 100% charge level, a typical Li-ion laptop battery that is full most of the time at 25 degrees Celsius or 77 degrees Fahrenheit, will irreversibly lose approximately 20% capacity per year.” This loss is because of oxidation (over and above heat damage, as I understand it), which causes cell resistance to rise to the point where – despite holding a charge – the battery cannot provide power to an external circuit.

For more information see Wikipedia and this page. The especially bold can learn how to rebuild depleted Li-ion batteries. Anyone with background in electrochemistry is strongly encouraged to comment on the accuracy of the above information.

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Taxes and card games

Tristan and I had an interesting discussion earlier about tax law. I present the following possibility: tax law is like a complex card game being played by taxpayers and the government. There are thousands of rules, and everyone is playing as best they can, given their level of knowledge and ability. As such, anything that does not contradict the rules of the game (whether clever uses of trusts, putting property in a family member’s name, etc) is not ‘cheating’ in a moral sense. This derives from a shared understanding of the nature of the game: specifically, a common view of tax law as a purely black letter, rule-based phenomenon.

In this view, if people in Queensland realize they can get tax breaks by registering their mortgages in the names of infant children, it is akin to developing a clever new defence in chess. Lawmakers and tax collectors, also players in the game, then get to respond.

The obvious critique is to say that there is a spirit or intention behind the law, which there may well be. That said, if lawmakers understand the tax game in the same way as taxpayers, their intention must be interpreted through that viewpoint.

What do others think?

‘Brains’ -to be said in zombie tone

I am feeling very ill now. Much more than before. I will be back, but not very soon.

[Update: 2:45pm] Despite total lack of appetite, I am dosing myself with cheese and broccoli soup, sent for Thanksgiving by my mother, and chai purchased in London with Sarah. Sleep, soup, and thesis reading are the orders of the day, at least until I feel non-infectious.

[Update: 28 October 2006] Notes from the class I missed have been transcribed and posted to the wiki.

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Generally unwell

Happy Birthday Lana Rupp

Despite making a determined effort to sleep more, keep warm and dry, and consume mass quantities of fruit and vegetables, I have been oscillating sinusoidally between being slightly and fairly ill during the last week or so. It seems like a thing that cannot be isolated from the nasty weather that has been punctuated at times with a few hours of stunning fall crispness (the source of all the recent photos of foliage).

In the interests of getting work done, let us hope that the trend of illness reverses from today’s course. Somehow, Claire’s party on Friday and the one my roommates and I are throwing Saturday seem unlikely to help. By the time my fisheries presentation on Monday rolls around, it will pay to be clearheaded.

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Bloggers’ gathering reminder

The day has been busy and the hour is late, so I will not write much. Indeed, I will just quickly remind members of the Oxford blogging community – new and old – that the fourth Oxford Bloggers’ Gathering will be happening next Wednesday, November 1st, at 8:00pm, at Far From the Madding Crowd, near the small Sainsbury’s at Broad Street and Cornmarket.

In my experience, meeting other Oxford bloggers is good fun, so I hope to see plenty of people there. Established bloggers, please pass along the word.

PostScript on choosing a thesis font

Following hard upon questions of content and structure is another essential decision related to the thesis: what font to print it in. The obvious choice, based on past form, would be Garamond (the font used in the banner atop this page). It is definitely a more elegant font than the ubiquitous Times New Roman, but it is rather too common itself. Bembo is an older and rarer variant, which I believe was used to print the hardcover edition of The Line of Beauty. Cheltenham Book is an option I am considering.

For ease in reading, as well as general aesthetics, I strongly prefer a serif typeface. Indeed, if there were any apart from Times likely to be on any computer someone would use the blog from, I would use a serif typeface here. As it stands, it will use one of the following sans serif typefaces, in decreasing order of preference: Lucida Grande, Verdana, Arial (a bad ripoff of Helvetica, but very common), and whatever the system standard Sans-Serif is. Because of the font collections included in each OS, Mac users are likely to see Lucida Grande, while Windows users are likely to see Verdana.

Are there any other people out there who check the front pages for a blurb on the font before starting a book? If so, do you have any suggestions?

One final matter typographical: North American Mac users in Oxford, and there are a good many, will appreciate learning that you can make the Pound symbol (£) by hitting Option-3.