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.

Linking routes in western Toronto

Yesterday’s route in green

After work yesterday, I took advantage of the Bloor bike lanes prior to their removal and connected some disconnected tracks in the west of the city. I rode all the way to where the bike lanes end at Kipling, then took Dundas West northeast to where it splits: with St. Clair Avenue north of the rail lines and Dundas south. I took St. Clair to Prospect Cemetery, and then the familiar route north up the cemetery and then east along the York Beltline and Kay Gardiner Beltline trails.

Bad weather projected for Thursday has the Neon Ride delayed until Friday, and I am also talking with friends about a daylong ride north up the Humber ravine to the arboretum.

Pandemic walks extentification project

My pandemic walks project has involved a lot of densification: trying to exhaustively make use of all possible routes within a geographic area, acting as a kind of human radioactive tracer running through the city’s circulatory system.

This has been interesting and has led to some nice still and animated art.

At the same time, the whole project was motivated in part by the desire to avoid visiting and re-visiting the same areas during the pandemic. That, combined with pleasant spring weather, has me thinking about reorienting from densification toward extentification, both undertaking new rides to expand the total area explored and working to add days with over 100 km of riding.

I made some maps to get a sense of how long it would take to get beyond the explored region. I added lines to show the distances to places on the outermost edges of the explored area and, in parentheses, added the Google Maps bicycle travel times there from Brentwood Towers:

(Sorry the travel times are glitched in the final map; I wanted to make all the lines the same colour and accidentally overwrote the manual Google Maps travel times labels.)

These maps show only analog / mechanical / acoustic bicycle trips, including my year on Bike Share Toronto, my Dutch bike, and the loaner I used while it was being serviced.

I need to go a long way in most directions to get beyond the network: 10–15 km in most directions. The most direct route to new kilometres is northeast, through the Bridle Path and into the areas east of the northwestern branches of the Don.

The 10,000 milli-amp-hour portable phone battery which I bought for the 2015 CUPE 3902 TA strike at U of T had started bulging, so I replaced it. I should be set for day-long extentification weekend excursions now.

P.S. I figured out how to do this in a more automated way using QGIS. First, here is the area of all the rides converted into convex hulls:

And here is a set of automatically-generated spokes radiating in all directions from the centre point of all my rides (which is predictably enough right between home and work):

The only buggy element is how it projects spokes out into the lake. Nonetheless, this provides a useful visual guide to how far I need to go to get beyond my total area explored so far by bike.

Not doing well

I don’t like the practice of answering people’s questions with the response I guess they most want to hear. Lately, with people who I know to a certain degree, if they ask, I have just been saying that I am not doing well, and if they follow up provide a brief explanation of how multilateralism and evidence-based policy are collapsing while the world commits itself to climate chaos.

I tend to get two fallacious responses.

The first is the inductive fallacy: bad things have happened before (Black Death, WWI, etc) and people and civilization have endured, therefore we will endure whatever climate change brings as well. In terms of logic, this is an obviously weak argument. If a man is playing Russian Roulette and manages to pull the trigger once without getting shot, that doesn’t prove that trigger-pulling is nothing to worry about. Furthermore, there are excellent reasons to think the world is more dangerous now than at the times of the Black Death or WWI. It wouldn’t take too many nuclear strikes against cities to produce a nuclear winter which would essentially kill us all.

The other is motivated reasoning: you need to have hope. This approach basically rejects the value of knowledge and thinking, or at least the idea that hypotheses should be tested against logic and evidence. Deciding how you want to feel in advance, and then seeking out beliefs that reinforce the feeling, is a recipe for ending up totally deluded about the world. Someone who decides what they think based on how they want to feel loses the connection which a skeptical mind maintains with the empirical world. Instead, they become like transcendentalist gurus who only care about how the world seems inside their own mind. They are no longer able to help anybody, except perhaps to become as disconnected and useless as they are.

I know people who ask how you are doing seldom want an honest answer. It’s a social cue to come back with a light and social answer. At the same time, I am utterly terrified about how the population normalizes and ignores the dismal signs of just how much trouble humanity is in. The mechanisms that let people cope and maintain a tolerable emotional bubble around themselves seem thoroughly interconnected with the mechanisms which are letting us destroy the future because we don’t want to think about scary things, or give any consideration to the interests of others when we choose what to do for ourselves.

I have been trying to make sense of why I feel so intensely unhappy now, especially when in numerous ways life was a lot worse while I was in the PhD program. The closest thing to answer is that before I felt like there were worthwhile things to try to achieve in the world, but I was just being blocked from taking part effectively in them by nearby obstacles and barriers. Now I feel like I have no idea whatsoever of what to do to try to dodge the planetary calamity ahead. With the climate change activist movement distracted and disempowered, I also feel uniquely alone.