Category: Science

New discoveries, the scientific method, and all matters relating to the scientific study of the physical world

Thinking about the Copenhagen Consensus

The Copenhagen Consensus was a project organized by Denmark’s Environmental Assesment Institute, meant to identify areas where relatively modest sums could lead to large improvements in human welfare. Unsurprisingly, most of the initiatives most strongly endorsed involved things like improving basic health and nutrition, as well as the control of infectious diseases. Almost without a doubt, these are the things that can produce the biggest gains in human welfare for the lowest cost. They should all be funded, using any available mechanisms for doing so.

At the bottom of their cost-benefit ranking come schemes to tackle climate change. This is a methodology that I feel inclined to challenge on a couple of grounds. Firstly, it’s fallacious to say that we have a simple choice between providing clean water in impoverished areas and developing less carbon intensive forms of electrical generation. There isn’t a set lump of spending to be allocated to one activity or another. When a government spends money to deploy aid supplies and sandbags to a flooded area, it should do so by dipping into funds for long-term environmental management.

Secondly, it may well be that things exist that are both exceptionally expensive and still necessary. When it comes to climate change, we are talking about the long-term habitability and character of the planet. This isn’t something that can be reasonably thought about in standard cost terms, because the value of it does not discount as we look farther into the future.

What is necessary to complete the Copenhagen Consensus project is an awareness of politics. It’s wonderful to know which areas can profit most handsomely from modest investment, but we must be mindful of the decision making processes that go into the allocation of such funding. We must take the sensible and identify the plausible within it. On the issue of climate change, that probably means continued efforts to learn just what the changes will entail, in terms of human beings and the planet’s biological and climatological systems. It also means developing means for mitigating the problems that are already certain to arise: especially for those who lack extensive means of their own to either deal with the problem of climate change or its consequences.

Magic and Mathematics

A book of magic tricks that I owned in elementary school included a number of ‘tricks’ that worked because of the properties of the Mobius Strip. I realize now what an insult they were to geometry. Yes, it may seem amazing that you can draw a line all the way around or cut a Mobius strip along its centre and have it turn into a larger loop, but to attribute these things to ‘magic’ is absurdly anti-educational. You might as talk about how the angles in a triangle ‘magically’ add up to 180 degrees.

Nuclear Test Sites

As we were both experimenting with Google Earth tonight, Neal pointed out an area in Nevada to me. You can see the crater where an atomic bomb in the 100 kiloton range was tested:

Nuclear test site

Surrounding it are more test sites:

They sure felt the need to make sure these things would work:

Many test sites

It definitely makes you more certain that Eisenhower was on to something when he talked about a military-industrial complex in his farewell address:

Yet more

In the words of Ike: “Every gun that is made every warship that is launched every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed”

Final shot, the whole area

It really defies all belief, doesn’t it?

[Update: 5 November 2005] Here are some more of my posts on nuclear weapons.

Still not FoodSafe, but much better

Over the course of an hour and a half this afternoon, Nora and I executed the kitchen cleanup. With freshly purchased Sainsbury’s bleach, anti-bacterial spray, and various abrasive implements, I set about rendering the inside of the fridge, the counters, and all other surfaces relatively free of grime and microorganisms. After fifteen minutes trying to remove the molasses-thick, 2mm layer of pure grease (decorated with dead and dessicated insects) atop the hood on the cooker, I gave up the attempt in favour of some braver soul who will come after me. Nora helped with the kitchen shelves, all the abandoned dishes, and much else. Nobody else turned up, despite every member of Library Court having to pass at least two signs advertising this several times a day.

Almost all of the food in the fridge – from the dark brown mayonnaise to the sausages that were best before November 1998 – has been discarded, as well as much of the putrified matter on shelves and in cupboards. Walking out into the night, the sky was dancing with lines of luminescence – probably the result of 90 minutes in an enclosed, non-ventilated environment with high concentrations of sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide in the air.

Perhaps they will add a sparkle to the final version of my essay, before I march it over to Nuffield and return to finish up my Inuit presentation.

Amateur Oxford sociology

St. Antony's LibraryHappy birthday Iason Gabriel

After lectures this morning, I spent much of the day working on the Connolly and Barkawi books. The Connolly book is interesting, but includes a lot of fairly general language and not a lot of direct examples. General points about theory are more memorable, comprehensible, and valid when they can be affirmed through at least one concrete demonstration. You can talk about symbol construction all you want, but one good case study on the construction of ‘Palestine’ as a symbol in contemporary Middle Eastern politics strikes me as quite a bit more worthwhile and useful than a lot of generalization. It’s an anti-parsimonious ideal that may set me outside the ‘discipline’ of International Relations: out amongst the historians, journalists, and policy makers.

Dinner with Alex, Claire, and Iason tonight was an affirmation – once again – of how fun people in my program are. I was meant to meet Emily afterwards, but things once again didn’t manage to work out. It’s interesting to observe the sociology of the M.Phil group: who spends time with whom, what kind of inside jokes develop, and how people conceive of themselves in the program. Personally and intellectually, I feel like I am undergoing a second adolescence here. I am very actively defining my beliefs and personality in a way I can never recall doing before. I think it’s the combination of a new place and having finally reached a level of self-affirmation where I can brush off most criticism. It’s an empowering mix.

Hopefully, it will empower me to get a decent draft of my paper for Dr. Hurrell done tonight – after a brief foray to the King’s Arms with Alex, Claire, and some of Claire’s St. Cross friends. I could write much more, but I really should get some reading done now if I am going out again later.

PS. Tristan has a new batch of photos online, including a really odd one of Meaghan Beattie and I. Tristan frequently seems to post more photos of people in a day than I do in several months. Partly, that’s because there have been problems in the past with posting photos of people on the blog. Even so, I will try to show a less de-populated Oxford during the next while.

On travel, a new project, and thesis planning

Spikes near Christ Church Meadows

Speaking with my parents over Skype today, I was reminded of how difficult it can be to communicate through a speech-only medium. It’s especially frustrating when you are making the attempt with someone who you really do want to speak with, but you are having difficulty doing so with any clarity or skill. The extra fraction of a second of Skype-to-phone lag definitely contributes to the difficulty. So plainly, in fact, that when I use SkypeOut to call people, they frequently suggest going on Skype themselves so as to increase the quality of the connection.

Partly for these reasons, I am especially looking forward to seeing my mother in about a month’s time. It’s still not certain whether we will go to Malta, Portugal, or Greece – though the middle option is increasingly looking the most likely. The kind of trip that is being proposed is a package-deal type hiking trip, with 4-10km walks every day and arranged hotels. While quite different from the kind of travel I have generally done, I find the idea to be an interesting one, and one that is likely to be enjoyable. I found travelling with Meghan Mathieson et al to be especially interesting, precisely because it involved traveling in a group and according to a set itinerary that I didn’t control. Hopefully, this expedition will mimic the best attributes of that one.

Oxford life

At the end of this year, I think I should condense the mass of experience I’ve had here into a trio of short guides: one for people considering coming to Oxford, one for people considering Wadham, and one for people thinking of doing the M.Phil in IR. It would offer me a chance to be both balanced and concise, while offering a perspective that people may find valuable. While the information that would be included is already embedded in blog posts, I don’t think anyone is likely to go through the whole collection of hundreds of entries just to gain insights that might be better expressed in three to five pages on each topic.

Thesis planning

I have been investigating the Oxford Environmental Change Institute and it seems like a resource that could conceivably be extremely helpful for my research topic. Their website quotes Dr. Anna Lawrence, of the Human Ecology Program, as saying: “Researchers must find ways to incorporate the experiences and values of other stakeholders in their research.” This is exactly the kind of thing I want to do: look at the means by which such cooperation and outreach is taking place. If I can find some way to get involved with this organization, it might contribute a great deal to my ability to say something new and important on the subject. While it can be difficult to deal with segregation between different areas of academia, the very lack of connections makes it a really exciting place to do work. There is much to be discovered there.

An orrery of errors

Shadow on brick wall

One of the trickiest questions of environmental politics is always whether we are actually managing to deal with problems, or whether we are just shifting them elsewhere – either spatially or temporally. This is true on many fronts: with regards to pollution, with regards to resources, and with regards to the overall intensity with which we are exploiting the earth. Our experiences of environmental conditions in the rich world are certainly not reflective of the overall global story, nor of the ultimate consequences.

Looking first at pollution: during the early periods of their industrialization, the countries that are now the world’s cleanest were polluted to the point of seriously impinging upon the health of those who lived within them, particularly in the cities. London’s notorious fogs were more the product of particulate matter from burning coal than the product of the natural humidity of the place. Some Japanese cities were so saturated with heavy metals from industrial sources that they became notorious for the illnesses and birth defects that resulted. Evidently, the bulk of these problems have now been overcome in the developed world. Zoning laws, environmental regulations, new technologies, and the rest have all come together to make our air and water broadly safer than they have been since the industrial revolution.

The extent to which we can cheer this is, however, mitigated somewhat in the knowledge that much of the health and safety we enjoy is the product of misery elsewhere. Consider the conditions in the industrializing regions of India or China. Consider the conditions in the various resource sectors that provide the raw materials of affluence: from coal and diamond mines to hazardous timber industries run by corrupt national armies and organized crime syndicates in the Asia Pacific.

Indeed, resources are probably the area where this outsourcing can be most obviously seen. What forests remain in much of the developed world are fairly rigorously protected. Even Canada’s vast timber industry has requirements for conservation, replanting, and the protection of streams. I am certainly not claiming that this industry is perfect, nor entirely sustainable in its present form, but it is clear that these kind of standards certainly do not exist worldwide. Where once the big area of concern among environmentalists was the Amazon rainforest in Brazil (certainly still in danger from a growing human population and the desire for land), the real, widespread damage being done today is in Asia: where the smoke from massive land-clearing forest fires occasionally rains down on cities and where Japan uses more tropical hardwood than any other nation in the world. The primary use: shaping concrete.

The most difficult to assess area in which such phenomena are occurring is in terms of just how much stress vital ecological and climatological systems can endure before they are degraded in the long term. I needn’t remind any long-term readers about the example of fisheries, but is also bears considering just how much toxic and radioactive sludge we can continue dumping into the sea before the problem comes back to bite us. Consider the dozens of Soviet nuclear warships and submarines that have been scuttled off obscure portions of the Russian coastline: both well-stuffed with spent fuel and other radioactive waste and, in most cases, themselves rendered dangerously radioactive. Like the concrete tomb in which the Chernobyl reactor has been encased, it is only a matter of time before these containers are broken down by time and corrosion.

A similar story of large scale pollution can be told about the atmosphere – and I am not talking about greenhouse gasses and climate change. A broad collection of chemicals including the products of burning garbage, as Japan does widely, industrial chemicals, like the PCBs leaking from the old RADAR stations along Canada’s Distant Early Warning Line, and pesticides have such chemical compositions that they break down only extremely slowly in the biosphere. They do, however, concentrate in fatty tissues and in ever-greater concentrations as they progress up the food chain. The long-term ramifications of these persistent organic pollutants are, naturally, far from entirely known.

As for climate change, this is the macro-level elephant in the room. While we don’t know exactly what it will involve, what magnitude it will be, and what it will cost to deal with, the reality of climate change demonstrates how human activity can impact the entire planet. It also underscores the extent to which our present prosperity may be banking colossal problems for future generations.

The point of this is not to be overly alarmist, nor to endorse specific policies for dealing with the above problems. The point is related to how problems need to reach a certain level of severity before action against them comes together. Look at the present political circuses about health care and pensions in all the demographically-shifting rich states. Sometimes, action taken at the point where danger is apprehended is effective. Look at the Montreal Protocol on chlorofluorocarbons: the major class of chemicals that was eroding the ozone layer. Within a couple of decades of the identification of the problem, a fairly effective international regime was in place to begin dealing with it. The ozone is recovering.

Looking through the literature, you will see the ozone example a lot. That’s not just because it is a fairly good example of international cooperation on a clear environmental problem: it’s because it is one of a few success stories among myriad failures. Hopefully, in the next few decades, we will gain tools to better understand the future consequences of present choices and actions. Likewise, I am hopeful that we will develop the wisdom – individual and collective – to begin curbing contemporary demands and wasteful and destructive contemporary practices, both with an eye to global equity and another towards those who are to succeed us on this planet.

Know your audience

I am curious about who makes up the readership of this blog. Most days, about 100 people take a look. The better part of those people come directly to the page, suggesting they are returning to it, rather than finding it through Google or another search engine.

Some aggregate information that may interest people: Based on data from the past few months, about 60% of visits to the blog are from people who have been here before, while about 40% haven’t been – at least from that computer. 13.65% of people find the blog through Google, while 15.94% are still finding their way here from the link at the old address. The blog is overwhelmingly read by people in North America and Western Europe, with a smattering in Australia, Asia, and Africa. 42% of visitors come from the United Kingdom; 37% from Canada; 16% from the United States, with no other single country above 1%. My election day post and the Oxford blog listing are the most popular single pages, though more than half of people leave the site immediately after looking at either.

On the technical side, just over 50% of users use IE, with 38% on Firefox and others using a collection of (sometimes very obscure) browsers. 78% of people use Windows, 17% use Macs. Like Firefox usage, this is well above the world average. The vast majority of viewers have screen resolutions of either 1024×768 or 1280×1024. 82% of you use some kind of broadband, lucky folks that you are. Eight of the ten most common phrases that people search for in Google and subsequently find their way to my site through the results of are people’s names. None of them are my name. Only two have anything to do with the title of the blog.

This is all information that gets automatically passed to servers by your web browser, if you’re interested in knowing where I got all these data from.

I would guess that the readership is dominated by members of the following groups:

  1. Friends of mine, particularly those in Canada and at other far-flung schools and jobs
  2. Family members
  3. Former teachers and professors
  4. People in the I.R. M.Phil
  5. People in Wadham College, especially the MCR
  6. People considering coming to Oxford
  7. People considering taking the Oxford M.Phil in IR

Clearly, some people may fall into more than one group. I am curious to know what the relative shares are. Knowing would let me do a better job of writing things that people find interesting. I would be especially interested in knowing if there are people who are in none of these groups, but still read the blog regularly. If that is the case, what attracts you? In general, what would people like to see?

Contemplating the future

Shadows of me and Emily Paddon

The Stardust Mission

One piece of exciting news today is the safe return of the NASA Stardust capsule, after a seven-year mission intended to collect dust from the tail of a comet. If the aerogel-filled compartments are, as expected, saturated with this material, it will be the first time such a thing has ever been collected and it may contribute important information to understanding the early solar system.

This is also the first mission since 1976 to return solid material from an extraterrestrial body: a measure both of diminished interest in the moon and the exceptionally longer distances involved in reaching other planets and asteroids.

Whereas there is a great deal of controversy about the usefulness and safety of manned space travel – especially the Shuttle Program – there are few people who contest the scientific usefulness of robotic exploratory missions. Indeed, there is a very satisfying record in the past few years of improved understanding of cosmic phenomena, both within and outside our solar system.

The really exciting prospect is the possibility of seeing new developments in particle and theoretical physics start to match up better with improved cosmological models. The biggest questions in physics today are probably the questions related to dark matter and energy, the explanation behind the profusion of subatomic particles that have been discovered, and the generation of a theory that is able to deal with the contradictions between quantum mechanics and relativity. While this mission doesn’t necessarily speak directly to any of those goals, it’s part of a process of improved data collection that feeds the development and testing of explanations. It seems likely that interesting times are ahead.

The second term schedule

On Tuesday, the second core seminar begins: Contemporary Debates in International Relations Theory. While the subject matter is inherently somewhat less interesting than the historical analysis of the first and third term, I am excited about the course. Partly, that is because of the instructors: David Williams and Jennifer Welsh. Partly, that is because of my fellow seminar members. If I recall correctly, I am in the same group as Roham, Sheena, Andy Kim, Bryony, Claire, Robert Moore, Emily, Matt Pennycook, Shohei, Alex, and Robert Wood. Collectively, I think this will make for interesting discussions.

Just like last term, I have a one in seven chance of being called upon to give a fifteen minute presentation on one of the week’s two topics. This week, mine would be:

‘For classical realists conflict stems from human nature, while for neo-realists conflict stems from the nature of the international system’. Is this an accurate assessment of the differences between classical and neo-realists?

Thankfully, I have some recollection of Robert Crawford’s IR Theory course at UBC to fall back upon. The sensible approach seems to be to quickly summarize and contrast some of the biggest names in realist theory: E.H. Carr, Hans Morgenthau, and Kenneth Waltz, in particular. Tomorrow, I will be in the SSL formulating some speaking notes.

Aside from the core seminar and qualitative methods, I am not entirely certain what we are meant to be attending this term. I’m not sure if the ‘Advanced Study of IR’ course is persisting into the second term; nor am I certain about whether the ‘Philosophy of the Social Sciences’ course that was delayed in Michaelmas will be happening now. Then there are things like the undergrad IR lecture and the ‘Professional Training in the Social Sciences’ course that were poorly attended and never discussed last term. I am sure it will all become clear in the first week or so, and I can ask Dr. Hurrell about it in our first supervision.

One thing I am scrambling over is the ORS application. For some reason, I thought it was due months from now. As such, I am having a real struggle coming up with two letters of reference before the due date on the 20th. That is particularly true since Dr. Hurrell is not supposed to provide one, since the department will be making the selection of which ORS applicants in the program get passed along to the university. It’s frustrating to have to do all of this for a scholarship we’ve told we have almost no chance of actually receiving. I am personally more hopeful about the Chevening, for which all applications were due in Ottawa today, and a few others that are coming up in the next few months. Suffice it to say that having some funding for next year would be exceedingly welcome.

Housing for next year and a job for the summer

Both at the back of my mind for the whole break, neither of these problems has found a solution yet. I am increasingly inclined to staying in Oxford: partly because of the availability of research materials for my thesis and partly due to the lower cost of living and the correspondingly increased probability that I will be able to find a job that will at least cover them. I would be happiest with a job doing academic research or working as a writer or editor in an academic, journalistic, or publishing context. Anyone with ideas is very much encouraged to contact me.

I have preferences but no possibilities regarding housing as well. I’d like to have a room in a house shared among some of my friends (ideally, at least a few of them members of the M.Phil in IR program). The Jericho and the Cowley Road areas seem to be the desirable ones for students. Jericho is closer to university stuff, but is less of a low-cost residential environment. The existence of the Tesco on Cowley Road could single-handedly account for a somewhat lower cost of living there. As for the building itself, my critical requirements are:

  1. High speed internet access.
  2. Decent security – I really can’t afford to have my laptop stolen
  3. A clean and effective kitchen
  4. Tolerable proximity to classes and services
  5. Affordability

Of course, a big part of the quality of any living arrangement has to do with the people with whom you are living. My thuggish former roommates from my first year in Fairview may be the ultimate example of how bad roommates can ruin a residence experience. While I don’t think I could possibly do that badly again, I’d really like for my first experience in private accommodation to be with people whose company I enjoy. This will be the first time I’ve ever rented a private room. At UBC, at L’Universite de Montreal, and at Oxford, so far, I have always lived in university housing.

I may well apply for a space in Merifield, just so that the option of living there remains open.

The Animal Lab Protest

Police at Broad Street and Cornmarket

When I walked across central Oxford to return The Life Aquatic, I found the city suffused with a very heavy police presence, on account of the protest that was held today against the Oxford animal lab. Presumably, that was also the reason for the 10m tall, metal-covered and razorwire-topped fence around the lab construction site itself that I saw yesterday. While it’s always a bit unsettling to see hundreds of police officers, this group was much less intimidating than most I have seen. Firstly, they were all in reflective yellow. While I am sure there were other officers dressed in civilian clothes, it is still much more reassuring to see patrols of twenty yellow-jacketed officers with faces uncovered than the black riot gear clad police forces that I’ve seen in Seattle, Washington D.C., Prague, and elsewhere. Secondly, while in North America they would have been bristling with automatic weapons, here they were visibly armed with nothing more than pepper spray and low-profile batons.

With regards to the cause of the protest itself, I’ve said before that I think it’s a misguided campaign: and not only because of some of the objectionable tactics that have been employed by protesters.

While animals do have some level of moral considerability, that does not automatically preclude the moral legitimacy of animal testing for medical purposes. Obviously, it’s not a thing that should be done lightly or capriciously and efforts should be made to minimize both how much such testing takes place and the level of suffering inflicted in the course of it. For the foreseable future, however, animal testing will be a necessary part of medical research and development. There is a balance that must be struck between the development of things like new medicines and surgical techniques, their thorough testing, and the decent treatment of animals. Already, Britain has in place rigorous protection for laboratory animals. British animal labs are inspected more than ten times a year, usually at unannounced times: much more often than in most countries. 85% of medical experimentation in Britain is conducted on rats and only 2% of all procedures cause “severe pain or distress.”

The Oxford animal lab is also a particularly poor target for public anger, given that it is meant to consolidate existing Oxford labs rather than provide new capacity for animal experimentation. Partly, the move to consolidate has been motivated by the property destruction that has become an unwelcome feature of the protest campaign.

Indeed, that protection extends far, far beyond that extended to the millions of food animals that are slaughtered here annually, as well as elsewhere in the world, to provide for the tables of British consumers. Like other developed countries, Britain has an industrial meat industry that I am certain would shock and appall most consumers if they had a good sense of how it operates. The fact that 75% of American poultry inspectors refuse to eat chicken should be indicative of something. Those concerned with animal welfare should pay greater attention to what they buy and eat, before moving to condemn practices that are necessary for the advancement of important humanitarian goals.

  • As Spencer pointed out on his blog, The Globe and Mail – bastion newspaper of the centre-left in Canada – has given its endorsement to the Tories. It is looking more and more like we’re headed for a Harper government. This is a prospect I find very worrisome.
  • Lots of IR people are apparently going to the James Bond bop at St. Antony’s tonight. (Roham is on the poster.) For my part, I feel more like reading, especially after the enormous eight egg veggie omelet I cooked and ate with Nora.
  • Neal is leaving China tomorrow. I wish him a safe journey back to Vancouver.
  • Going to http://photo.sindark.com/ automatically forwards you to my Photo.net page: where I post my more successful attempts at photography.
  • This FAQ for Canon EOS cameras has some really good information in it, presented in an accessible manner.