climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Posts where I spout off on one topic or another
The way complex organizations assess technology and security is often very silly:
A: “Here is the signed document, as a PDF file that I scanned and emailed.”
B: “No good. We need a hard copy.”
A: “Well, I can mail one to you within about a week.”
B: “That’s far too long. Why don’t you just fax it?”
A boots laptop
A opens PDF file
A clicks ‘print,’ plugs laptop into telephone, sends the fax.
Result: a lower quality version of precisely the same thing is transferred, at greater expense.
You will need:
To prepare, generate such a rupture in such a bicycle. Ideally, this should occur while you are en route to somewhere about 1000m away, with just enough time left to finish cycling there. Lock said bike to a fence at point X, approximately 1000m from your home.
At some later point, attend a high table dinner in your college, wearing the suit and robe. While walking home, decide that it is time to bring back your bike, despite how it cannot be rolled. Do this despite being (a) highly improperly dressed for the activity and (b) already burdened with a sack full of books and binders.
Alternate between carrying the bike over one shoulder and rolling it forwards on the front wheel, holding the seat post at shoulder level. Make sure to do this at night, in a city with the highest rate of bicycle theft in England.
Surprisingly, two police cars rolled right past me while I was in the middle of performing this awkward, uncomfortable, and suspicious voyage. They didn’t even slow down – probably because they were smart enough to realize that anyone stealing a bicycle would not move it in such a stupid way.
The question now is whether I should put in the time to buy a new tube, remove the rear wheel, replace the tube, inflate it, and re-assemble the bike this weekend, or whether I should wait until after exams. Fixing it would waste more time. Leaving it alone would make it even more foolish to have carried it home.
Whatever is decided for tomorrow, it is back to revision for me now.
[Three people with lung or tracheal infections] + [Fourteen hours together in a minibus] → [Runny nose] + [Acutely sore throat] + [Nasty headache] + [Joint pain]
I hope my application of liquids, ibuprofen, ginger, and sleep will dispel the latter combination before exams come any closer.
For the Paris trip, Hilary kindly acted as courier for this small tripod, sold by Mountain Equipment Co-Op. While it is not without some good features, it is a disappointment overall. The main reason for this is bad design.
The first mistake has to do with the rubber pads at the base of the legs. They fall off very easily: particularly the one shaped like an L-joint. They should be tighter or glued on. The second problem is with the velcro strap. It has no convenient place to go when the tripod is unfolded, except wrapped around one leg. It should be positioned more intelligently for situations where you want to fold and unfold the tripod often, or it should be made removable. I have never used it once, but I am a bit hesitant to irreversibly cut it off.
Far and away the biggest problem has to do with the knob controlling the ballhead. Even if you twist the knob with as much torque as you can possibly muster, the tripod head remains somewhat loose. If you want to keep the tripod on the side of your camera with the legs folded up along one side, the friction between the ball and the plastic socket for it is not enough to keep it there. Even more annoyingly, when you have tightened the knob as much as you can, it often becomes badly stuck. You will find yourself frequently using your teeth to loosen it. I have had to resort to pliers on several occasions.
While light and promising in its form-factor, this little tripod does not live up to its potential. I am grateful to Hilary for bringing it, but my search for a small, always-on tripod for my A510 is not over.
PS. ThinkGeek sells the same device.
In less than a month, the members of my course will be writing our final exams. Everyone has one on history from 1900 to present and another on international relations theory. Then, each person has their two optional papers. Mine are international law and the developing world. For each exam, we will be presented with twelve questions. Of these, you need to answer three, each by means of an hour long essay. Twelve hour-long answers over the course of three days and the M.Phil is complete. Passing all four is necessary to pass the M.Phil.
On the basis of how questions are fairly consistent from year to year, the most popular strategy is to prepare on a number of `topics.` For each, you identify and seek to understand the key bits of the secondary literature. Then, you try to come up with a clever seeming argument and map out – in general terms – how you would approach the question. Several course instructors have encouraged us to use this kind of approach. According to the Notes of Guidance:
In the written examinations, answers which merely regurgitate facts or opinions will not suffice: answers must be well structured, relevant to the specific question asked on the examination paper, well written, and show mastery of the subject.
I take “mastery of the subject” to mean having read and understood the appropriate academic sources. For examples of consistency between questions year to year, have a look at some past history questions and past theory questions.
My initial plan was not to use the topic-based approach. For our qualifying test last year, my approach was simply to re-write all my notes, re-do some of the most important readings, and then write some practice tests. That has the virtue of comprehensive coverage, but it does not prepare you as well for a question that you have anticipated than the topics approach does. Working on selected topics allows for a depth of knowledge and an opportunity for organization that is likely to be advantageous for Oxford-style examinations.
The biggest challenge relating to the finals is the sheer breadth of material. For each of our 24 core seminars and 16 optional seminars, there were two or three questions for consideration. For each of those, about ten readings were listed, most of them books. Provided you read 3-5 sources per question per week, that is easily several hundred complex articles or books. Even going back over notes on nearly one hundred different discussion topics is daunting. On one level, the volume of work involved in preparing for finals is a good thing, as it demonstrates the breadth of the program. At another, it demonstrates one’s cognitive limitations quite effectively.
My biggest problem, as far as these exams are concerned, is that I have never been particularly good at remembering who espoused what theory. Given the extent to which academic international relations is a name-game in which big egos dominate and every scrap of credit is fought over, this is a considerable defect for someone considering any further involvement with the academic world. I could imagine being familiar with all the big names in one’s particular sub-field of IR, but the thought of doing so for every major branch of the field, from the history of the interwar period to the economics of foreign aid, seems quite beyond my capability.
I have been annoyed recently by full-page ads in which RIM is advertising the navigational capabilities of their new BlackBerries. They suggest that people can throw away maps and compasses and wholeheartedly embrace the combination of GPS and electronic maps.
I know firsthand how useful GPS can be. As an altimeter or a way of locating yourself in a featureless landscape, it cannot be beaten. Likewise, it is very helpful for quickly figuring out where you are when you are out on the water in a canoe or kayak. All the same, I think there is a fundamental value in being able to read a map, locate yourself on it, and work out a course to where you want to be. It isn’t enough to take a course in these things and forget about it. As with any complex skill, practice is important.
Some common sense is also a necessity, no matter how you are navigating. If your GPS-based automobile navigation system tells you to drive along train tracks, you should be aware that machines are fallible, and highly stupid as well. They have no common sense by which to evaluate whether, for instance, a bridge has been washed out or whether a linear course between A and B includes a series of lethal cliffs. There is also the small matter that some dead batteries a splash of water or a dropped piece of gear could knock out both your map and compass equivalent, if you are relying on a GPS system.
Related posts:
The scene is Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, during the middle of an evening service. You see a person standing to one side of the alter, in the transept, looking across at one of the massive rose windows. The digital camera comes up, the window is magnified as much as possible, and then there is a sudden flash that distracts every one of the hundreds of the people in the cathedral but doesn’t provide nearly enough light for a proper exposure. On the camera’s screen, a very underexposed version of the window appears.
Normally, this is the end of things. Some people go on from here to deactivate their flash and take a second photo. This one is both hopelessly grainy (because the camera has automatically chosen the highest possible ISO setting) and completely blurred (because hand-holding a 1/2 second shot of a distant magnified object inside a darkened cathedral doesn’t work).
Obviously, I am someone who appreciates the practice of photography. As such, it pains me triply to see people taking photos in a distracting way, poorly, and in a space where such touristic incursions aren’t polite or appropriate.
Moral of the story: your flash cannot illuminate Notre Dame Cathedral. It cannot illuminate the Super Bowl or the moon either. If you are photographing these things, have the kindness, intelligence, and courtesy to turn it off. Then, make sure to at least brace against a wall, to help deal with the long exposure.
People may have noticed that the news today is saturated with stories about scientists ‘discovering Kryptonite:’ the fictional substance that causes Superman to lose his powers. The claim is based on how the chemical formula for the new mineral – discovered in Siberia – is the same as the one invented for Kryptonite in the film Superman Returns. Obviously, this is just a fluke that arose because of some words a scriptwriter or prop designer happened to string together. No insight arises from referring to the new mineral with reference to the film. To me, this seems like the same kind of cheap, low-brow science reporting as when all the coverage about ‘hobbits’ being discovered emerged in response to the discovery of H. floresiensis.
I can understand why a journalist might want to put out a fluff piece like these and then take the weekend off, but it really isn’t ‘science’ reporting in any meaningful sense. It is especially depressing when quality newspapers decide to print such rubbish, perhaps hoping to attract a few more readers. It is astonishing to me that they lack allure on their own, when discussing serious science. After all, the pace of ongoing discovery and technological development is staggering, and it has never been more important for ordinary citizens to understand the natural and man-made phenomena that influence the ways in which we live.
PS. Claire, Hilary, and I saw many goats today. Here are some goats eating plants.
My printing graph clearly applies to a great many circumstances. Having finished my thesis last night, I could not print it in Wadham because their printer was broken. I couldn’t print it in St. Antony’s because every scrap of paper had been used by other people scrambling to finish their own theses.
No problem, I thought, Temple Bookbinders says on their website that “photocopying service from disk or proof is also available.” As it turns out, the website is inaccurate in this regard. The nearest place that could print it was “around the corner,” by about a mile and a half. There, my thesis was printed at the rate of one page every 23 seconds (I timed it). For the 222 pages of black and white printing, they charged me £16 ($36 Canadian). The thesis will be bound and ready to be picked up at 11:00am tomorrow.
On the plus side, I did manage to see the Headington shark house.
[Update: 5:00pm] I have returned my thesis books to their various libraries of origin, re-filed the books I own into my normal non-fiction classification system, and put my box of thesis related articles out of sight.
Note: graphs are the purest and most compelling form of self-expression.
