Category: Rants

Posts where I spout off on one topic or another

Two more weeks

After the comparative aimlessness of the long summer, I am looking forward to September. I will be teaching tutorials for a first year Canadian politics course out at U of T Mississauga and persisting with my own PhD research.

I’m looking forward to the resumption of life and lunches at Massey College, meeting new junior fellows, and hopefully seeing an uptick in energy and accomplishment among climate change activists. I’m looking forward to sleeping without sweating, the return of kiting winds after the summer doldrums, and the return of a steady (if inadequate) income.

In a charitable interpretation, the degree to which I prefer term time to the summer ‘break’ is indicative that grad school is a good place to be, even if universities somewhat unnecessarily turn a third of the year into largely unproductive time.

Fix it with a fire tornado

Somehow, this article seems indicative of the low quality of a lot of our thinking about environmental issues: Mesmerizing ‘blue whirl’ from fire tornado could be cleaner solution for oil spills: Scientists discover clean-burning blue flame while simulating a fire tornado in the lab.

It seems a particularly questionable application of the idea that technology can correct environmental problems. Calling fire tornadoes used to burn up oil spills “remediation” stretches the bounds of both vocabulary and plausibility.

The AC dilemma

After many shorter spans which left us sweating in our third floor rooms, Toronto is now immersed in the longest and most intense heat wave of the summer so far.

This leaves me feeling awkward about actually owning an air conditioner, which I have never moved from its storage location in our living room. During my long search for accomodation, I saw many, many deeply unappealing, distant, and overly expensive rooms. When the chance to rent this one arose, I wanted to do everything possible to avoid somehow losing this one. So, when the previous inhabitant wanted to sell me his furniture (as well as most of the furniture in the common areas) I was willing to do so at the prices he initially suggested. That’s how I ended up with a $150 air conditioner which fits in my window but which I have never turned on.

My reluctance is entirely about the energy use and associated greenhouse gas emissions. Remarkably, in a city that goes below -20 ˚C in winter, Toronto’s highest energy demand is during hot summer days when everyone turns their air conditioning on. This isn’t so remarkable really, in part because cooling is fundamentally less efficient than heating. Turning electricity into heat is essentially a 100% efficient process. By contrast, refrigeration requires the inefficient compression of a coolant (producing heat as an unwanted by-product) which is then expanded in the area to be cooled and circulated elsewhere to be re-compressed and release the heat it has absorbed into the outside environment.

Perhaps worst of all is that when energy demand peaks, Ontario cannot produce enough electricity from low-carbon sources including large-scale hydroelectric and nuclear — instead turning on natural gas ‘peaker’ plants that would not otherwise run, like the Portlands Energy Centre.

Another oddity is that, for renters like us, electricity bills are paid by the landlord. Cooling would thus have no associated financial cost for me.

There are arguments in favour of me using AC. At the best of times, summers carry a danger of being inefficient doldrums. Without the structure asociated with teaching tutorials, regular meals at Massey, regular contact and communication with colleagues, and all the other motivating accompaniments of the school year, it can be easy to become unproductive. This is even more true when it is too hot to sleep, or even to sit in my room reading or doing research in a productive way.

I do have fairly easy access to cooled work areas at Massey College and Robarts Library, and that has been my chief means of escaping the heat.

This particular wave is meant to break over the next few days. I am greatly looking forward to the fall, which I think may be my favourite season in this part of the world. As in Ottawa, it provides an enjoyably span of pleasantly cooler and cooler days. Even the depth of winter is far preferable to mid-summer, in my eyes. I can always break out the wool long underwear, and wearing coats is often convenient for carrying things. By contrast, summer often leaves us with worsening the climate change plight of everyone in the future as our only means of avoiding the discomfort of heat and humidity right now.

As for the air conditioner, I can’t sell it because that would certainly lead to it being frequently used. Perhaps the best option is to find somewhere that can remove the coolant, since they are powerful greenhouse gases when they leak, and recycle as much of the rest of the device as possible.

Careerism in government

Quoted by Richard Rhodes, Daniel Ellsberg said of U.S. bureaucracy that it: “does not require true believers to run it. … The system consciously runs by men who — in order to stay in the game, to be close to the center of power, to have the hope that someday the moment may come when their own true values will be served — will go on for years serving values that are the opposite of what they privately believe”. (Arsenals of Folly, p. 56)

My civil service departure anniversary is coming up on Saturday, and I am still happy with having given up so much income and career advancement because the work I was required to do was unethical and insane.

Let down by Gibson’s The Peripheral

The main storytelling device in William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral is after-the-fact exposition (ATFE), which gives it the feeling of a mystery more than conventional science fiction. Rather than tell you in advance how a world or a technology works, Gibson shows you the results without context and provides the explanation later. This does well for avoiding the tedium which is sometimes mocked in speculative fiction, where books or chapters open with the author describing the parameters of the fiction with a boring lack of tension or mystery. For me, at least, it falls down in the case of this book when the central mysteries are never resolved. In increasing order of importance:

  1. Why is Lower Manhattan underwater due to climate change in the far future (p. 435), but London is apparently untroubled?
  2. What was the point of the “party time” test of character (p. 382)? The woman tested never seems to face an important moral choice later.
  3. Is Aelita actually murdered? If so, why? What do the antagonists who are revealed at the end have to gain from it?
  4. What’s the story with the Chinese server that connects the mid-future with the far-future (p. 189)? What did the people who built it use it for?
  5. What’s the metaphysics of this book? It says that the middle-future in communication with the far-future (p. 185-6) has its timeline changed as a consequence (p. 422). Is this a case of infinitely branching universes where communication pathways can be established between any two? Every time someone far the far-future communicates with the past, do they create a new future timeline starting from there?
  6. Why do people in the far future care what happens in this particular mid-future? A major plot point is one character from the far-future trying to avoid a catastrophe in the mid-future (p. 320-1), but what’s the point if (from the far-future perspective) this is just one branch in a vast number of pasts? Why care so much about this one?
  7. Why is having people from the mid-future drive robots in the far-future useful? They never do anything that remote operators in the far-future couldn’t do without all this time travel communication.

I was also frustrated by how a large part of the book is devoted to people training to pilot these future robots (as well as acquiring specialized weapons), which only end up getting used in a rather disappointing way. In particular, a supposedly evil red cube from a custom universe focused on weapon development never ends up doing anything interesting.

Sometimes the ATFE approach is quite frustrating: especially the habit of opening chapters using only pronouns to describe the person involved, pointlessly leaving the reader unclear about what is being described. When people are murdered, the motive and immediate consequences are often unclear.

Summer TA work at U of T

In each year of my PhD, I have applied for all the summer teaching assistant (TA) positions offered in the Department of Political Science (and, after second year, in the School of the Environment too). I never heard anything back as the result of my applications, including for frequently-advertised ’emergency’ positions and jobs in statistics courses which I expected to be less popular.

Today I had a brief conversation with a prof who I worked for in a fall and winter term and learned that virtually all summer TA jobs go to people who are beyond the 5-6 year span where U of T provides funding. Apparently, summer TA jobs all go to people who are in their 8th or 9th year, or otherwise well beyond the “funded cohort” and seniority is the overwhelming criterion used to select them.

It’s reflective of how U of T generally under-funds its graduate students, as well as how the quality of teaching provided to undergrads is clearly not a university priority.

Explaining Trump

The often disturbing spectacle of the rise of Donald Trump as a leading Republican contendor in the presidential race prompts many emotional and analytical responses: about the long decline of America as a superpower since 1945, about the dysfunctional features of party politics and American politics in particular, and about the chasm between quality information on one side and public policy and (especially) public opinion on the other.

Many interpret the Trump phenomenon in terms of disaffected voters, as this passage from The Economist describes:

The reason evangelicals vote for Mr Trump has little to do with faith or specifics of policy. It is more a question of attitude. A study by the RAND Corporation, a think-tank, has found that the most reliable way to tell whether a Republican voter was going to support Mr Trump was whether he agreed with the statement: “People like me don’t have any say about what government does.” Trump voters feel voiceless, and whatever attributes Mr Trump lacks, he has a voice. He lends it to them, to express their grievances and their aspirations for greatness, and they love it.

All this at a time when people are prosperous and governments are making easy choices, at least compared with what is likely in coming decades because of our criminal unwillingness to stop burning fossil fuels.

We had better hope that worsening global conditions eventually have a rallying effect, rather than prompting a scramble of every state, region, and ideology for itself.

Metrics of activist success

The fossil fuel divestment campaign at the University of Toronto is still dealing with the disappointment of President Gertler announcing such an uninspiring response to the social injury and financial risk associated with fossil fuel investments.

One early response from the campaign was to hold a creative direct action outside Simcoe Hall, home to the Office of the President and the Governing Council.

The action made me think about different ways in which acts undertaken to provoke social or political change can be evaluated. At least two possibilities come to mind: evaluation in terms of the subjective experience of participants, and evaluation in terms of the effect on the thinking or behaviour of the mass public or elite decision-makers.

Subjective experiences (AKA “feelings”) are not trivial. I think the biggest challenge activist groups face is maintaining the health and motivation of their members and key organizers. Indeed, when it comes to big marches like the People’s Climate March and March for Jobs, Justice, and the Climate I have reached the conclusion that they are more important in terms of energizing participants than in terms of changing public opinion. Not least, this is because the media tends to wildly under-report them.

That being said, I think activism by definition is an effort to change how the world works and that doing that requires changing the thinking and behaviour of the mass public and decision-makers. To be effective in that, we need to think hard about why people believe what they believe and make the choices they make, and what kinds of interventions can change those things. As activists resolutely focused on achieving positive change, we need to focus on producing good outcomes which would not have happened without us.

From the second perspective, I am less confident about how productive the action outside Simcoe Hall was. For the random student wandering by – or the random administrator listening through their window – did it improve the odds of them supporting fossil fuel divestment? The more militant members of the campaign often talk about “building power”, but we ultimately cannot force the administration to do anything. We need to convince them, which takes us back to serious strategic thinking about how to change the beliefs and behaviours of non-activists.

iPhones, batteries, and Fido frustration

I got my 16 GB iPhone 4 back in February 2011 and it has mostly worked well. Now, much like my 160 GB iPod Classic, the battery life is badly depleted. I am lucky if it lasts through a 30 minute phone call, or more than an hour or so of poking around with email or web access. It also has a tendency to shut down when used even briefly in Toronto’s cold weather and then need to be plugged into the wall to be re-started.

I called Fido and was told that I could stay on my current plan and get a free 32GB iPhone 5S, provided I sign a new two year contract. Getting an iPhone 6 would cost about $350 with the same contract. The 6S is only available with a more expensive premium monthly plan. The Fido telephone support people sent me to a Fido store where the staff said that they had black and white 32 GB iPhone 5S models in stock, but they couldn’t do the upgrade because they were closing in half an hour.

When I walked back today, the same shop told me that they had been out of the 5S for months because it is discontinued. They sent me to the nearby Apple store, which did have a 5S but which could not keep me on my current phone plan. When the employee there called Fido, they concluded that they could only give me the ‘free’ phone by increasing the cost of my plan from $55 plus tax to $75 plus tax for two years.

$480 for a ‘free’ phone was not very appealing. Instead, I am going to try paying $80 plus tax to have the iPhone battery replaced at the Apple store on Wednesday. I am also going to see whether it would be possible to fix or exchange my iPod. Apple has inexplicably stopped making the excellent 160 GB iPod, without now offering anything with remotely comparable battery life. Only the most absurdly expensive iPhones come close on storage, offering 128 GB for $700+.

I am sometimes tempted to get out of the smartphone system entirely and get a simple model capable of calls and texts only, and with much better battery life. Having constant access to email has both benefits and frustrations, and it’s sometimes nice to be able to tether my laptop through my phone’s internet connection.

Structurelessness

Princeton established the Institute for Advanced Study in 1930 as a place where some of the world’s greatest minds could pursue their research without distractions like teaching and administrative tasks. Richard Feynman famously criticized the idea, saying:

When I was at Princeton in the 1940s I could see what happened to those great minds at the Institute for Advanced Study, who had been specially selected for their tremendous brains and were now given this opportunity to sit in this lovely house by the woods there, with no classes to teach, with no obligations whatsoever. These poor bastards could now sit and think clearly all by themselves, OK? So they don’t get any ideas for a while: They have every opportunity to do something, and they’re not getting any ideas. I believe that in a situation like this a kind of guilt or depression worms inside of you, and you begin to worry about not getting any ideas. And nothing happens. Still no ideas come. Nothing happens because there’s not enough real activity and challenge: You’re not in contact with the experimental guys. You don’t have to think how to answer questions from the students. Nothing!

Something a bit similar happens to me during the summers, especially when I don’t have a regular job. Whole days are open in the calendar – and there is always endless work to do on my PhD and on climate change – but it can be extremely hard to become and remain motivated. The framework of classes, teaching, and Massey College events during the year helps make the blocks of open time seem valuable, and helps force you to get specific things done in them.

PhD work needs to be pretty much wholly self-motivated, so I am definitely going to need to develop habits and a mindset to support that over the next three years.