Milan – Page 94 – a sibilant intake of breath

A day of intellectual engagement

Happy Birthday Nick Sayeg

The most surprising thing about my three pound Tesco brand radio alarm clock is that came set to use one of the BBC talk channels as the wake-up noise. I’ve never changed it, and it has been influencing those precious dreams you get in snippets, punctuated by the smashing of the ‘snooze’ button. It is an odd thing indeed to be cajoled out of bed by the sounds of men with British accents discussing recent novels, developments in physics, or U.K. politics. I’ve never been someone who listens to the radio, except as a means of being jolted out of repose. It is too random, too filled with commercials, and too attention intensive in the wrong ways. It’s not something I can ever really enjoy, though it frequently annoys me.

Today’s ‘Advanced Study of IR’ lecture was delivered by Gavin Williams about the politics of development or, as he called it, the politics of most of the world. I particularly appreciated some of the methodological questions that were raised and then discussed among those present. Regrettably, only four of the twenty-eight members of the IR M.Phil were in attendance. After the lecture, I spoke with Dr. Williams for about forty minutes. We talked about British and Canadian politics, the tendency of sub-state political regions with newly-discovered oil reserves to contemplate succession, and the reasons for which institutions persist in making and perpetuating bad policies.

Aside: Thesis considerations

This evening was also the first chance in quite a while when I got to talk about my intended thesis topic . Dr. Williams’ enthusiasm has reaffirmed my hope that it will be a useful project, though I need to decide upon a way to pare it down to an M.Phil thesis sized question. The general project is to examine institutional and legal mechanisms for dealing with the advancement of environmental science. Environmental science involves quite a bit of uncertainly. By definition, complex dynamic systems (like ecosystems and the climatic system) are hard to understand. What we need are policies that are based on the best knowledge we have, aware of the extent to which those conclusions might be incorrect, and able to respond to new developments. Basically, the people doing the science and the people making the policy need to talk to one another, understand what is being said, and care about it.

The basic point is that there are separate intellectual communities: scientists, lawyers, policy makers, etc, who don’t manage to communicate effectively about environmental issues in many cases. That, or they fail to produce outcomes that make long-term environmental sense. Members of all these groups can also be co-opted by those who profit from the status quo. We need to consider interests and incentives, as well as modes of communicating and types of interpersonal connection. It’s not just who reads what journal, goes to which conference, or understands which piece of jargon; it’s who pays for the research, who pays attention to the policies, and who stands to lose or gain from all of this.

The question has many faces. You can look at the professional discourse of the different groups and try to understand where they understand one another, where they do not, and why. You can concentrate on the incentives presented to each group, particularly in terms to how they relate to one another. Are policy-makers rewarded for basing their strategies on sound science? Are rewards long-term or short-term? Perhaps the best way to tackle many of these issues would be to choose a case study. An obvious choice is climate change, due to the lack of scientific certainty and the level of political involvement, but I shy away from it. It’s too big, too politically charged, and it involves uncertainties that are too great. It’s not that climate change isn’t happening or that people aren’t causing it. What we don’t know is what the consequences of climate change they will be, who will bear the costs, and whether the cost of dealing with climate change exceeds the cost of stopping it. I don’t think we have the science to answer these questions right now, though it would definitely be good to have an effective and relatively de-politicized channel for turning increased certainty into more refined policy once we do.

I called Meghan briefly tonight, to say thank you for the Klein Bottle. Apparently, her graduation was yesterday and she gave the student address. I hope her family and friends were there to see it, and that enjoyment was had all around. My felicitations to Meghan Lynn Mathieson, B.A. Hons. (UBC). Best wishes in future endeavours.

Later, Nora prepared an excellent veggie casserole for Bilyana, Bryn, Kelly and me. It was thoroughly enjoyed by all and, furthermore, it was good to spend some time talking with other Wadham students. I’ve barely seen Bilyana since first week. As a mathematician, she was also particularly qualified to appreciate the Klein Bottle, which I felt near-obligated to show her.

Tomorrow evening, I have supervision with Dr. Hurrell: discussing the paper on the Chinese Civil War. Afterwards, I am supposed to watch Spirited Away with Margaret. For those who haven’t seen it, I thoroughly recommend it. It’s my favourite Studio Ghibli film: notably for creative combination and reinterpretation of elements of several different strains of folklore. Also, the artwork is quite stunning. Studio Ghibli also made Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Castle in the Sky. The studio is headed by the extremely talented Hayao Miyazaki, and I recommend their work without exception.

Lauren sent me some Nina Simone songs, and I like them a lot. Especially good is the song “Feeling Good.”
Here’s another Oxford blog, with a unique premise.
I now have 24 hour access to the Manor Road Building and the Department of Politics and International Relations. Don’t you envy the fact that I could be in there, drinking in the greenish light and pouring over readings or stats assignments every Saturday night, all night long?
Penn Jillette on athiesm. From Jessica.
The L.A. Times has a distressing article about the treatment of pre-war intelligence. (Via BoingBoing)
I am quite curious about what has happened to Kerrie Thornhill. I knew she was going to Ghana, but not exactly when. Unusually, all five or so of her blogs are silent. If anyone knows what’s up, I’d appreciate being filled in.
Today’s big environmental politics story

Early birthday gift

As soon as I saw the box from Meghan in the porter’s lodge, I knew that there was a closed, non-orientable, boundary-free manifold in Wadham. Despite my birthday not being for another four days, not opening it at that point would have been pointless and superfluous. After all, it is better to have a Klein Bottle on display than a Klein bottle which you know to be in a box. I trust that Meghan will understand.

As you are like to find in the office of a particularly cool mathematician, it is a genuine Klein Bottle: such as you would get if you could glue the edges of two Mobius strips together. While that is not actually possible in three dimensional space, the Klein Bottle is a three-dimensional cross section of that higher dimensional object. Imagine, for a moment, a hair elastic twisted into a figure-eight shape. In three dimensions, you can do that without having it intersect itself. If you were to draw that figure-eight hair elastic, however, or take a photo, it would look as though it intersects itself. The same is true of a Klein Bottle embedded in three dimensional space. Note that even if our universe really does have ten spacial dimensions, or more, as postulated by string theory, there are still only three of them unfurled enough to put parts of a glass Klein Bottle in.

Invented by Felix Klein – a German professor of mathematics – in 1882, a Klein Bottle has only one side (no inside and outside like a balloon), yet also no rim or lip (like a bowl or an open wine bottle). It’s the only gift I’ve ever received that I printed off an encyclopedia article about, for use in explaining to guests. You can also tell people it’s a work of modern art.

Many thanks Meghan, for furnishing me with what may be the geekiest thing I have ever owned. Like surviving through a battle in which your friends died, getting a Klein Bottle creates a commitment to live the rest of your life in a certain spirit. It’s also dramatically quieter than my rock tumbler used to be.

Afternoon with itinerant friends

Happy Birthday Darren Thompson, Kristina Meakin, and Spencer Keys

Seeing Nick and Ellen today was good fun. I had my first opportunity to serve as an Oxford tour guide, and I tried to cover some of the lesser known places. We ducked through a half dozen colleges, the Codrington, and very briefly into the natural history museum. We also had dinner at the noodle place on the northwest side of Gloucester Green: my first real dinner out in Oxford. Following with my veggies in black bean sauce, I got a fortune cookie with an inspiring message inside: “You are the guiding star of his existence.” How nice.

Later, having some drinks at the Turf with Nora, Margaret, Nick, and Ellen allowed for some engaging penta-national discussion. We talked about travel, India, the dangers of nitrogen narcosis, and the strange connections that we keep finding with the nationals of other countries. For instance, the Rhodes Scholar friend of Nick’s who we met in Starbucks today – with whom he studied economics in Brisbane – is now in the Economics M.Phil with Margaret, the friend of someone (me) who studied law and economics with Nick in Vancouver. It’s also interesting to think that, among us all, only Ellen comes from a nation never colonized by Britain.

Nick is an Australian lawyer who served as a fellow member of the ‘box seats’ for Robert Gateman’s law and economics class at UBC during my final year there. We ended up arguing on the same side for the moot carried out as part of that class, about the non-therapeutic sterilization of mentally handicapped people, as well as living rather close together in Fairview. In a few days, he is leaving for India, where he will be spending about a month. He bought his anti-malarial medication at the Boots on Cornmarket Street tonight: a kind of final reminder of the imminence of departure, I suppose. I look forward to seeing whatever photos he ends up posting on his blog.

Ellen is Norwegian, and was also studying as an exchange student at UBC. Both she and Nick have spent the past while in Scandinavia, and will be moving to Australia around Christmas time. As part of my ambition to see a good part of a major country on each inhabited continent by 2013 (when I shall be 30), I hope to visit them there soon.

While waiting for Nick and Ellen this afternoon (a bit of a coincidental combination of names, since I have a high school friend named Nick Ellan), I read some of Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won: the book that I withdrew from the Wadham Library in order to lend to Alex Stummvoll. I quite like the style in which it is written. Despite the fact that next week’s seminar topic is: “Can we explain the post-war economic order by using the theory of hegemonic stability?” I may carry on with reading this book, alongside those more pertinent to the subject under discussion.

PS. Many thanks to Gleider Hernandez, of the MCR executive, for lending me the new Tori Amos CD. I shall document my impressions of it at a later time. It takes me at least a few days to form an opinion about music, and it can take months to develop a stable one.

PPS. This is the 101st post on the new blog.

PPPS. With the start of December comes the start of the next batch of scholarship applications. I need to get on top of that. Last year, I ended up in the top half of the waiting list for the Chevening Scholarship. Now that I am here and they would only need to fund me for one year, I am hoping they will see fit to ease some of my financial worries.

Day of Consolidation

Happy Birthday Sheena Chestnut

Now over the hump, I can look back on the past few days with satisfaction. I was able to complete reasonably good papers without going mad or completely neglecting all else. Over the break, I shall make a determined effort to read at least a half-dozen key books on international relations theory, in order to get a jump on the next core seminar. Hopefully, Dr. Hurrell will be so good as to point me in the direction of the right ones – during our supervision on Friday evening, perhaps.

Another nice thing about today was having the chance to see Emily again, following her jet-setting foray back to New York. Both the core seminar and the statistics lecture were enlivened by her presence. It is pleasantly surprising to think that we have only one statistics lecture left, one assignment, and two labs. Of course, there is the test in 0th week of next term to consider.

Upcoming events:

Nick Sayeg and his significant other Ellen will be in Oxford tomorrow. An Australian lawyer, I met him through the law in economics class that we took with the unique Professor Gateman of the UBC Economics Department. He dubbed us “Mr. M” and “Mr. N,” respectively. It will be the first time I’ve seen him since he departed on the Scandinavian leg of his world voyage. He is now on his way to India and it will be good to see him before he leaves the European area. One day, I hope to visit him in Queensland. With luck, I will also have the chance to have coffee or a walk with Claire tomorrow.

Some exciting things are happening in the next few days. Emily invited me to the Canadian High Commissioner’s Annual Student Reception, which is also a recruitment drive for the Canadian foreign services. While I am not looking for a job in the moment (save for one over the summer), it is nice to know that they are in fact possible to get. It seems likely to me that Chris Yung, with whom I graduated from the IR program at UBC, will be present. He is doing an M.Sc at the LSE at the moment, supervised by Peter Wilson. The event is taking place in London and may well represent my first expedition back there since my brief stop-over en route to Oxford.

Also well worth looking forward to is the graduate student Christmas party: taking place on November 29th in the Manor Road Building. Divided, as we are, between two core seminar groups, we IR M.Phils see less of some of our colleagues than would be ideal. It will also be nice to have the chance to meet some graduate students in related disciplines and even some more of these fabled students who have actually survived the first year of the M.Phil and progressed to the second.

The slightly longer-term period will include the Estonian trip, Christmas in London with Sarah Pemberton, and much excitement besides.

My internet connection has been oddly sketchy in the later parts of tonight. Sorry to those with whom I’ve had interrupted conversations.
Bruce Schneier has an interesting entry about new policing powers and their use in domestic surveillance. This is the kind of thing discussed in the oversight section of the NASCA report. A representative quotation from Schneier’s piece:

“This isn’t about our ability to combat terrorism; it’s about police power. Traditional law already gives police enormous power to peer into the personal lives of people, to use new crime-fighting technologies, and to correlate that information. But unfettered police power quickly resembles a police state, and checks on that power make us all safer.”
If Venice is sinking, then I’m going under. (As well as a reference to a BBC article, this is a reference to a song by Spirit of the West: possibly the greatest band to ever come out of North Vancouver. For those who’ve never heard their music, I particularly recommend it.

Just in time for Christmas

Some recent comments reminded me of one of my greatest inventions ever, and an excellent Christmas gift: the ever-popular Wombat Kits. They contain everything required to make a wombat: primarily sedges, grasses, and roots. The logic behind them runs as follows:

Pregnant wombats eat grass.
Pregnant wombats make baby wombats.
Therefore, baby wombats can be made from grass.
Baby wombats eat grass.
Baby wombats become adult wombats.
Therefore, baby wombats can be made into adult wombats, using grass.
Ergo, adult wombats can be made from grass. Q.E.D.

The logic is unassailable, and the kits also contain detailed anatomical diagrams of wombats: for ease of assembly. Once you’ve made a male and a female, you can make additional wombats from additional grass with considerably increased efficiency.

For those who have grown tired of the lesser challenges of building model ships or stable two-state solutions in the Middle East, wombat kits promise hours of enjoyment.

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6,000+ academic words scrutinized, edited, printed

After a productive meeting with Bryony this morning, I lay down for what was to be a judicious twenty minute nap. Instead, it became two hours of the strangest dreams I can remember: as strange as the infamous pony dream, but involving Herman Melville. The BBC was there, and Japanese imperialism – personified. Even so, the paper for Dr. Hurrell was dispatched by three and I my reticle was firmly centred on interwar American foreign policy soon afterwards. By midnight, I had a solid and comprehensible seeming draft of that paper done as well. Kudos all around. I definitely feel some affinity with the various Oxford bloggers churning out words for National Novel Writing Month (NatNoWriMo).

The incredible thing about completing these two papers is that, with the exception of reading and one more stats assignment, this marks the completion of the workload for my first term at Oxford. Of course, the inter-term break will be well-loaded with work of its own, but it is still gratifying to see one phase come to a reasonably successful conclusion.

Aside: Pondering Meghan’s Riddle

As per her requests, I have been pondering what gift Meghan has inserted into the international mail system for my birthday and Christmas, both. I know that it’s something for which I once expressed very strong approval, that it “isn’t at all practical,” and that it isn’t from ThinkGeek.com. A large, laminated world map struck me as a possibility, but it would be both quite awkward to mail and quite practical for my course of study. Another possibility I’ve considered is rare earth magnets. I’ve always found magnets fascinating: they seem to defy all of our expectations about how matter should behave. They remind me of something Homer Simpson once said: “The Lord gave us the atoms, and it’s up to use to make them dance.”

One major possibility is some kind of gadgetry. Anything photographic would fall under ‘useful,’ and there aren’t really many photo gadgets that can be used with a point and shoot digital camera. I’ve always been a fan of folding type metal gadgets: like my large and small multi-tool. Again, however, they are eminently useful. The same goes for virtually all books, so I am at something of a loss for ideas. A complex three-dimensional toy of the Science World variety (separate the rings, open the box, etc) seems possible. The lack of certainty makes it rather more exciting, anyhow.

After a collection of days as sleepless as the last few have been, it’s of vital importance to get back on my standard sleep schedule: going to sleep between 1:00am and 2:00am and waking up at 9:00am. Getting back into the regimented order is the only way of wearing down the sleep debt without destabilizing my sleep pattern for a long time, sleeping for a whole day, or both.

A blog about the Festivus Pole: symbol of a superior holiday.
I had an interesting conversation with Lauren tonight, and received some engaging correspondence from Astrid.

Chilly day: reading and typing

As I sit in my room writing this, I am wearing a MEC microfibre shirt, a wool sweater, my woolen hoodie (hood on), and a fleece over top of all of it. Central heating here is more nominal than real and I prefer bundling up to breaking out energy inefficient space heaters. Besides, the cold helps me concentrate.

Today featured a sustained effort to finish the two papers due on Tuesday. Being able to celebrate the end of this crush period with Nick is most welcome, but I need to defer all contemplation of such things until the two hurdles have been o’erleapt. I finished the Jonathan Spence book tonight and I think it will form the chronological basis for the China paper. Tomorrow I will mount a Northern Expedition to the SSL to access confined books vital to the American foreign policy paper.

At about ten tonight, between spans of reading and writing, I spent a pleasant half hour having soup with Nora and Kelly. I lost track of them at the bop yesterday, though their nights seem to have concluded reasonably well. From their descriptions, I am glad I was wearing my headphones while working between 2:00am and 6:30am, when I went to sleep. Tonight looks set to be comparable but, soup fortified, I will surely be able to manage it. My editing session with Bryony has been pushed back to 9:30am tomorrow.

sardonic: Of laughter, a smile: Bitter, scornful, mocking. Hence of a person, personal attribute, etc. Characterized by or exhibiting bitterness, scorn or mockery.

Queer Bop Update 2:00am

My determined effort to go and read in the library led me instead to Leonora, and from thence to my second, far longer, and more enjoyable encounter with the Queer Bop phenomenon. The Wadham Library is being used as a kind of warming and refueling centre, a storage depot, and – in the darker corners – a venue for more adventuresome activities. We did not persist there long, but headed out boldly into this human wilderness.

As quite possibly the two most sober people in Wadham, Leonora and I wandered through the JCR Quad area, immersing ourselves several times in the tent that was the nexus of all light, sound, and activity in Wadham tonight. By the time we were there, some of the energy density had dissipated; it was more of a throng and less of a crush and consequently rather more enjoyable. Additionally, having at least a good portion of the attention of another person makes these sorts of experiences far more comprehensible and enjoyable for me. I even made a few awkward and pathetic attempts at dancing, as well as getting to serve as the base of one of the two-person amalgamations that swerve around to “Free Nelson Mandela” at the end of Wadham bops.

While all manner of interesting things took place tonight, this blog is not the venue for all stories. Moreover, if I am to have anything at all to edit with Bryony tomorrow night, the rest of tonight will have to be devoted to producing it. In any case, my thanks go to Leonora for helping me to perceive the bop in something much closer to its proper light. To have not done so would have been a betrayal of the basic imperative to experience and understand life.

Sorry about how grainy the above photo is. This is what happens when you set the ISO equivalent on the A510 to 400. Not such a bad effect, once in a while, but the ones in the 10:30 update are better. Once I have sorted the potentially publishable photos from those better confined to encrypted disk images, some more of them will appear online.

Queer Bop Update 10:30pm

The Queer Bop is now in full swing and several aspects of it are quite shocking to me. Firstly, whoever bought guest tickets wasted their money. There is no access control whatsoever and anyone who would want to can wander right in. Secondly, there are no college staff present at all, except for three frantic men working the bar. Given the sub-zero temperatures, the scanty standard of dress, and the excessive consumption of alcohol, all this strikes me as quite irresponsible. Outside the JCR Bar, I saw three goosebump-covered young women vomiting on the ground beside one another. I don’t think you could get away with this sort of thing on North America’s litigious shores.

[Edited at 11:30] There are security people now and things are a bit calmer. Still far too cold and noisy for me – brand me a spoilsport.

Academic reflections

The rigidity of the once-a-day entry system is not ideal. At the same time, people seem to like the consistency. My solution for the moment will be to release daily flagship entities, complete with the photo of the day, and supplementary entries on other topics. As always, it is up to those reading to decide what they want to do with this information.

Today was fairly productive, in terms of schoolwork. I embedded myself first in the Cornmarket Starbucks, reading, then the High Street Starbucks and finally in the upper reading room of the Radcliffe Camera. While it’s not a style of architecture for which I generally have a great love, the Palladian styling of that rotunda is really quite lovely. It doesn’t have the dolled-up, overdecorated feel that many domed, semi-Romanesque buildings have. Instead, there is something of the simple elegance that I so appreciate in gothic buildings. I particularly like some of the stone sculpture right below the lip of the dome. Right across from the Codrington Library, it’s a part of Oxford where I should spend more time. I am shamefully ineffective at reading in my room and the fluorescence of the DPIR at night is reminiscent of Staples.

I am anxiously awaiting the time when we will have more freedom to study what we are actually fascinated with. While all this history is important, I am anxious to arrive in the contemporary world. History, like gardening, is something that the young take up by necessity, the old with passion cultivated through patience.

The time when we get to direct our own studies will be the point at which I decide whether this whole graduate school this has ‘caught:’ whether it’s something I can commit myself to for another six to eight years, in order to complete a PhD. While I don’t feel like it would be either wise or possible to complete all of that at a stretch, it would be good to have some real certainty about it as a course of action. That’s one of the big motivations for doing the M.Phil: it will let me test the waters of academia before spending a few years working in government, for an NGO, or in some other non-academic role.