Milan – Page 745 – a sibilant intake of breath

On fundamental physics

Watching this video about the Large Hadron Collider (a particle accelerator under construction at CERN), I was reminded of something I was wondering about a few weeks ago. People talk about the universe being the size of a grain of sand, or the size of a marble, in the moments immediately following the big bang. That seems comprehensible enough, but there is a fundamental problem with the analogy. The marble sized thing isn’t just all the mass in the universe, expanding into space that existed prior to the ‘explosion.’ Instead, space and time were supposedly unfurling simultaneously.

The big question, then, is how it can be said that it was expanding at all? If there was nothing to expand into, how is this process of explosion something that is comprehensible, as such? To imagine it requires a perspective where the camera is outside our universe, an idea that invalidates the notion that the big bang was the origin of our universe. And, even if our universe is embedded in a higher dimensional space, the emergence of our lower-dimensional realm still requires some explanation. I wonder if it will ever become an object of knowledge for us: both as a species with a certain amount of information about how the universe works – verified through repeated experiments and predictive power – and as a collection of individuals who almost never know more than a tiny fraction of what all people know as a collective.

The video is a bit over-hyped, as well as a transparent attempt to defend spending a great deal of money on pure research, but perhaps it will interest some people regardless. Some of the prospects associated with the LHC – such as looking for evidence of supersymmetry or investigating the nature of gravity – are very exciting indeed, from the perspective of advancing our basic understanding about the nature of matter, and the kinds of interaction that take place in our universe.

Heading South

In a number of ways, Heading South is a film that reverses expectations and thereby leads you to question the ways in which an issue is understood. The film is essentially about sex tourism, though the clients are aging women rather than the middle-aged men who would probably be demonized in the standard documentary treatment of the subject. While such condemnation may well be deserved, it doesn’t attach itself so easily in this case. The tensions between the women, and the insecurities within them, provide the dramatic energy that drives this frequently provocative film. The most interesting scenes are a series of confessional sketches, in which different characters direct monologues at the camera. The decision to employ such a technique highlights the quasi-documentary quality of the film.

Primarily in French, with subtitles, the film may appeal to those who know some French and are concerned about having it slip away from them (this is the case for almost everyone I know who was in French immersion.) The portrayal of Haiti under the Duvalier regime of the 1970s is powerful but indirect, consisting largely of a few vignettes showing the lives of people subjected to arbitrary power.

Morally complex and artfully produced, Heading South is a film to see when you want something to think about.

Tea

One unexpected stop in London yesterday was The Tea House, near Covent Garden (15 Neal Street, WC2). Sarah and I were lured in because the shop was incredibly fragrant. The same can be said of the 150g of Chai which I purchased there, and which has markedly increased the pleasantness of the smell of my room, just by virtue of sitting there in its bag. Their licorice tea, which Sarah got and which we tried after dinner, was also quite good. The secret, I think, was keeping the level of tea flavour low enough that it complemented, rather than overwhelmed, the distinctive flavour of dried Camellia Sinsensis. There is also much to be said for a shop that unfailingly demonstrates a commitment to the fact that only drinks made with an infusion based on Camellia Sinsensis are deserving of the descriptor ‘tea.’ Rose hips and the like may taste good in boiled water, but they are not tea.

Frequently as I am accused of being a coffee addict, I confess to preferring the aesthetics of tea. Coffee is a working person’s drink – to be consumed out of big paper cups while walking purposefully down a sidewalk, or gulped down from a big mug during a coffee break. Tea is more versatile and, to my way of thinking, more relaxed. As such, a break focused on its consumption is more worthy of that title.

Such talk makes me think nostalgically back to the days of the Esteemed Afternoon Tea Society. For those unfamiliar with this most absurd and memorable of UBC clubs, see the Epic History and the Declaration of War (PDF), which formally began the life of the organization as a potent (and generally highly militant) force on campus.

Quick London summary

Happy Birthday Nora Harris

Today’s trip to London was very successful: I got to spend time with Sarah for the first time since her wedding, I saw a large number of new Kandinsky paintings at the Tate Modern exhibition (including the spectacular Composition VI), I saw the Haitian film Heading South at an arty theatre in Soho, and had a number of tasty meals. Meeting Sarah’s husband Peter for the third time, as well as her father again, was also excellent.

Sarah and I saw some of the artwork at Somerset House: another London institution that I had previously known nothing about that turns out to be well-stocked with Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso, and such. They even had a respectable collection of Kandinsky paintings – organized in an identical thematic fashion to the Tate Modern exhibition.

I had seen Kandinsky’s work first-hand before: in New York in 2003, both at the Guggenheim and at the Museum of Modern Art. Of course, their new location had not yet opened at that point, so they were only showing a limited assortment out in Queens. By comparison, the Tate Modern exhibition was a much more comprehensive look into the progression of his work. Of all the paintings there, the massive canvas of Composition VI was most interesting and compelling. I urge people not to search for it online, because on the basis of my previous viewings of it as some little JPEG file, I can assure you that it cannot be understood in that format. You need to see the wall-sized painting to have any comprehension of it at all.

While the trip really deserves more ample description, it is 2:00am. I will do so soon.

Fish paper publication upcoming

I may be delerious because it’s 6:30am, but this seems pretty unambiguous:

I really enjoyed the piece you wrote on EU policies regarding fishery sustainability off the coast of West Africa. I’d like to work with you to prepare your piece for publication in [the MIT Internatinal Review].

You mentioned on your cover letter that you would be willing to “re-focus it in the most appropriate direction and summarize other sections.” This will probably comprise the bulk of our work together, as your piece was very well written to begin with.

An excellent bit of news by which to start the day. I am off to London.

Official daily post

This has been a weekend full of surprises: mostly good, a few bad, and one simply baffling. Much as I am inclined to respond publicly to a certain recent provocation, I know it will be wiser to simply submerge it, and allow the author to float back to sanity of their own volition, or simply remain out of sight. Not to let that dominate the paragraph, it should be strongly affirmed that life is proving satisfying and interesting at the moment – if also quite tiring. Given my 6:30am projected wake-up time tomorrow, the plan is to be asleep by midnight, at the latest. Hopefully, my neighbour with the passion for early-morning chain-sawing (seriously) won’t be to to their wood-destroying ways tomorrow.

Writingandmacgeekery

For the first time, I found a reason to consider upgrading the operating system on my iBook from 10.3.9 to some version of Tiger (10.4). Namely, a program called WriteRoom that consists quite simply of a completely black screen, onto which you type basic green text. No fonts, no spell checking, no instant messenger windows popping up. Ironic as it might be to upgrade my operating system so as to use a program with fewer features than any text editor I have ever used, there is still a certain appeal. I already use TextEdit almost exclusively for writing on the Mac; Word uses too much RAM and does idiotic things like automatically trying to insert the last names of anyone in my Entourage contact list whenever I type their first names. I type: “He drew… a blank” and it ‘helpfully’ suggests “He Drew Sexmith a blank.” Much as I like to be reminded about friends from high school, this feature is much more trouble than it could possibly be worth.

That said, a new version of OS X is meant to be coming out sometime in the next few months (Leopard). As such, I think I will probably wait until it is possible to move forward by two bounds instead of just one. Of course, doing so will probably require that I get the extra 1GB of RAM that I have been considering. Initially, I was annoyed that I would need to remove the 256MB RAM upgrade that Apple overcharged me for when I bought this computer, but it seems that the mobo of the 1.3GHz 14″ iBook can handle a maximum of 1256MB of RAM anyhow.

Thesis development

Talking with Dr. Hurrell about the thesis this evening was rather illuminating. By grappling with the longer set of comments made on my research design essay, we were able to isolate a number of interwoven questions, within the territory staked out for the project. All relate to science and global environmental policy-making, but they approach the topic from different directions and would involve different specific approaches and styles and standards of proof.

Thesis idea chart

The first set deal with the role of ‘science’ as a collection of practices and ideals. If you imagine society as a big oval, science is a little circle embedded inside it. Society as a whole has a certain understanding of science (A). That might include aspects like objectivity, or engaging in certain kinds of behaviour. These understandings establish some of what science and scientists are able to do. Within the discipline itself, there is discussion about the nature of science (B), what makes particular scientific work good or bad, etc. This establishes the bounds of science, as seen from the inside, and establishes standards of practice and rules of inclusion and exclusion. Then, there is the understanding of society by scientists (C). That understanding exists at the same time as awareness about the nature of the material world, but also includes an understanding of politics, economics, and power in general. The outward-looking scientific perspective involves questions like if and how scientists should engage in advocacy, what kind of information they choose to present to society,

The next set of relationships exist between scientists and policy-makers. From the perspective of policy-makers, scientists can:

Raise new issues
Provide information on little-known issues
Develop comprehensive understandings about things in the world
Evaluate the impact policies will have
Provide support for particular decisions
Act in a way that challenges decisions

For a policy-maker, a scientist can be empowering in a number of ways. They can provide paths into and through tricky stretches of expert knowledge. They can offer predictions with various degrees of certainty, ranging from (say) “if you put this block of sodium in your pool, you will get a dramatic explosion” to “if we cut down X hectares of rainforest, Y amount of carbon dioxide will be introduced into the atmosphere.”

The big question, then, is which of these dynamics to study. Again and again, I find the matter of how scientists understand their legitimate policy role to be among the most interesting. This becomes especially true in areas of high uncertainty. The link from “I know what will happen if that buffoon jumps into the pool strapped to that block of sodium” to trying to stop the action is more clear than the one between understanding the atmospheric effects of deforestation and lobbying to curb the latter. Using Stockholm as a ‘strong case’ and Kyoto as a ‘weak case’ of science leading to policy, the general idea would be to examine how scientists engaged with both policy processes, how they saw their role, and what standards of legitimacy they held it to. This approach focuses very much on the scientists, but nonetheless has political saliency. Whether it could be a valid research project is a slightly different matter.

The first big question, then, is whether to go policy-maker centric or scientist centric. I suspect my work would be more distinctive if I took the latter route. I suspect part of the reason why the examiners didn’t like my RDE was because they expected it to take the former route, then were confronted with a bunch of seemingly irrelevant information pertaining to the latter.

I will have a better idea about all of this once I have read another half-dozen books: particularly Haas on epistemic communities. Above all, I can sense from the energy of my discussions with Dr. Hurrell that there are important questions lurking in this terrain, and that it will be possible to tackle a few of them in an interesting and original way.

Boots and letters

This morning, I got an impressive array of mail. I got postcards from Alex and Bryony (who are still off hiking), as well as from Tristan in New York. Meghan sent me a letter, and my mother sent me a package that can only be my hiking boots. With the second supervision I am teaching in an hour and a meeting with Dr. Hurrell shortly after, I haven’t the time to go through all this right now, but many thanks to all those who sent things.

I am glad to know that nothing now remains in the way of the Scotland trip. My unrelated trip to London tomorrow promises to extend my pattern of minimal sleep. This looks to be another 7:00am or earlier style departure. I should be back in time to catch the tail-end of Nora’s birthday barbecue.

Already July?

I hit a rich vein of thesis materials today: a thesis on a related topic that is a veritable gold mine of sources. So often am I likely to be making reference over the next year, I had the thing printed and it now resides in one of the curious two-ring binders that are the UKs equivalent of our three-ring sort. Once I finish it tomorrow morning, and perhaps print off a few of the key cited journal articles, I will be in better shape to discuss the thesis plan with Dr. Hurrell tomorrow afternoon.

Tomorrow will also bring the second tutorial that I am teaching for the St. Hugh’s summer school. I got the essay tonight, so it has become another element of the clutch of reading material that I need to get through in the next fifteen hours or so. Little time remains for Sweetness in the Belly – a novel my mother sent me – or “Barn Burning” – a short story that I told Linnea I would read months ago. I also picked up a used copy of Far From the Madding Crowd. For some reason, I absolutely love the sound of that title. Somehow, the sounds and syllables combine magically in a way that has nothing to do with its meaning, which has never been very clear to me anyhow.

For the rest of the summer, I’ve decided to feel guilty about not traveling whenever I am doing thesis work, guilty about not doing thesis work whenever I am not traveling, and absurdly guilty at times when I am doing neither. That way, I will hopefully manage to accomplish the two major goals of the summer in the time that remains before Michaelmas 2006 begins. To anyone who worries that such guilt will keep me from enjoying things in general, they need not be concerned.

PS. Life is full of unbloggable surprises (though I don’t have time to relate them at the moment, anyhow).

Product endorsement: Foosh mints

I feel the time has come to formally register my appreciation for Foosh Power Mints. The reasons for which I like them are numerous:

They don’t dance around the fact that they are caffeinated mints. There are no euphemisms (ie. guarana), and the dosage is clear and comprehensible – 100mg of caffeine per mint.
They actually taste quite good, particularly for a sugar free mint and especially for one so effectively saturated with stimulant.
They cost less than coffee, per unit wakefulness, and do not require boiling water. They can be had in the UK for 2 Pounds per pack of 12 mints.
They can be consumed quickly and easily, without pausing from what you are already doing: whether it be reading, trying to sort out a train timetable, debugging a PHP script, or scaling a frozen waterfall.
Unlike coffee – which tends to make me ravenously hungry – they do not substantially increase my food bill.
Along with caffeine and mint flavour, they also contain some unknown (probably negligible) amount of ginseng and – more usefully – taurine and B vitamins.

For those struggling to slog through reading material, or develop some basic level of awareness in the early morning (for work, travel, or other reasons), Foosh mints are worth a try.