Milan – Page 752 – a sibilant intake of breath

Two academic jobs

In the last week or so, I have found two short-term but remunerative pieces of academic work. Firstly, I will be giving a lecture on July 10th to a group of American undergraduates on Canada/US security and defence cooperation since September 11th. The lecture is part of a program being run by Regent University, in association with Hertford College, in which American undergrads are coming to Oxford to learn about strategic studies. Since the topic I have been assigned is almost exactly what the NASCA report was about, and I did a considerable amount of background research before we went to Colorado Springs, that should just be a matter of bringing things back together in a way that will fit into an hour and be accessible to people unfamiliar with the topic. My provisional outline will be to cover:

Afghanistan and Operation Enduring Freedom
The creation of USNORTHCOM and the Bi-National Planning Group
Canada’s decision regarding Iraq
NORAD and missile defence
And border security, including the Smart Border Declaration

Obviously, it cannot be covered comprehensively in an hour. Given that they probably won’t be at all familiar with Canada’s security role after September 11th, it is probably fine to just cover the basics well and then answer any specific questions afterwards.

The other teaching job is to read three papers and conduct three tutorials on the Camp David Accords. These will be with an American high school student who will be in Oxford for a few weeks as part of a program being run by St. Hugh’s. I should get the first paper by next Sunday, then discuss it on the Monday or Tuesday of that week. For the next two weeks, I am to suggest additional paper topics to be completed and discussed according to the same pattern.

To be honest, I am a bit nervous about both jobs. I’ve never actually done academic work that involves working with students in an official capacity. I have no concerns about the material for the first topic. The second, I have less expertise in. That said, the person with whom I will be working on it is in high school. By fortuitous chance, I am also writing a paper on the Arab-Israeli conflict for Dr. Hurrell. I think that if I pay special attention to material on Camp David, as well as reading a few journal articles specifically on the topic, I should be fine. Sarah P’s encouragement has also been helpful.

Actually doing work in areas that I’ve been studying for such a long time is definitely exciting, as well as slightly concerning, due to my unfamiliarity. The fact that each job pays more than anything else I have ever done is also a considerable inducement. The lecture pays as much as a day and a half at Staples, for an hour’s lecturing plus preparation time. The tutorial job pays as much as nearly five days’ work at my last summer job: enough to cover two weeks of my rent here. In addition to that, there is considerable satisfaction to be derived from doing ‘real’ work, rather than filler work intended to pay the bills.

Pringle-saturated satirical news

The Comedy Central website – once a much prized source of Daily Show and Colbert Report clips – has become unusable. Now, every single clip is preceded by a truly insipid 30-second Pringles commercial: the same ad for every clip. Given that both The Colbert Report and The Daily Show post about 6-7 one-minute clips on each day from Monday to Friday, watching them all would involve watching that Pringles video more than ten times in a half hour period: something I am not willing to put up with.

I can understand the need to pay for bandwidth, but this is just too annoying a way to pull it off.

PS. The Show and The Report are also under discussion here, at the moment.

Marston loop

Today, I came up with a nice ten mile ride primarily through eastern Oxford. Starting at the intersection of Banbury Road and Martson Ferry Road, you ride through a stretch of countryside to Old Marston. Then, carry on straight up the very obvious hill to where the John Radcliffe Hospital (not to be confused with the infirmary in Jericho) is located. Carry on straight from there until you see a turn-off to the right called Parklands Road. Past the end of that road, a path emerges. Following it provides a nice woodland downward track that varies from blacktop to dirt to really broken cement. This descent is the best part of the ride – at least, if you’re already well acquainted with the canal. At the bottom of that descent, you will find yourself outside the steel fence and razorwire-enclosed mosque that Roz and I found ourselves outside at the end of our trek through the fields east of the University Parks on Monday.

From there, take Marston Road (not to be confused with Marston Ferry Road) until you arrive at the corner of Oxford’s South Park. It has always been something of a landmark for me, as it is the first place in Oxford I ever visited, when I attended a Radiohead concert there in the summer of 2001. For good measure, I cycled once around it. On the western side, there is a nice leafy suburban area that winds up a hill and reminds me of Venebles Street, in Vancouver.

Once you’ve gone around the park (this may be a bit more than ten miles, really), head up Saint Clements Street to the Cowley Road roundabout and then across the Magdalen Bridge. Then, head up the high street as far as the County Library, turn right onto Magdalen Street, then left onto George Street. Carry on to the entrance to the path up the Oxford Canal that begins on Park End Street and then follow that path up the canal until you reach the bridge back to Jericho at Walton Well Road. Then, just head up Saint Bernard’s Road to Woodstock, and take Bevington Road back to the Banbury Road.

All told, the ride has a couple of nice hills, as well as a lot of attractive leafy bits. You’re also never terribly far out of Oxford, so the kind of bike troubles I had out near Yarnton are less of a concern – though I always carry spanners, patches, and a pump now. I am taking my bike for the free three-month tune-up from Beeline Cycles tomorrow. The pedals and handlebars haven’t come loose since they were tightened at the one month tune-up. The only concerning thing is how the pedals tend to creak and flex noticeably when striving to push uphill.

Oxford internal mail

Within a university that often seems like a bewildering assortment of disconnected parts, those elements that work really well are especially appreciated. Perhaps most notable among these is the inter-college mail. You can put a paper into an envelope, drop it at the porter’s lodge, and have it delivered unto your supervisor within about a day’s time. The system is efficient, free, and practically invisible.

Finding anything out about the system is reasonably difficult. They are not included in Wikipedia’s list of Oxford institutions and Google yields no information either. The vast Oxford website also seems to be silent on the matter. They seem to have no web presence whatsoever, and manifest themselves to most people only in the form of envelopes showing up in pigeon holes or being handed to college porters. Doubtless, one of Bodley’s books contains information on them, but I can’t conceive of how to begin finding it, short of trawling through general books about the university.

The system must be a reasonably complex one: dealing with thousands of items per day, at least, moving between 39 different colleges and a large number of other university offices and buildings. I am glad that it works, though I am curious to know how.

Google Idol victoriously concluded

Our estimation of when the day ticked over on the Google Idol server was wrong. Rather than doing so at 3:00pm GMT, as expected, it did so at some time before 10:30am.

That said, it doesn’t really matter: “Voting is closed! Mica Prazak has won! New competition beginning shortly.” Anyone wishing to comment on this can do so on Mica’s blog.

Many thanks to all those who helped. It’s a relief to have the contest over. Now, I can put something else up at the top of my blog.

Contest final round

The time has come: Mica’s “Walk Idiot Walk” video is in the final round for the Google Idol video competition and he really needs support if he is going to win. Those who can are encouraged to vote every day. Likewise, please pass along the message to similarly interested others.

I didn’t even know there was prize money, however:

If I were to win this competition, I have decided to donate the prize charity money to the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation. A close family friend of ours was recently diagnosed with breast cancer, and I think it would be fitting to help her cause, and the many more that suffer from it.

His post about this is here.

This round ends on June 24th. As always, his videos can be discussed on his blog.

[Update: 18 June 2006] With six days left in the contest, Mica is winning by 36 votes: 53% to 47%.

[Update: 19 June 2006] Mica is down by 15 votes: losing 49% to 51%. Please keep voting and publicizing his video.

[Update: 20 June 2006] Mica is up by 53 votes: 52% to 48%. The lead has switched back and forth a number of times in the past 24 hours.

[Update: 22 June 2006] Mica’s up by just 5 votes, with more than 3000 cast. I have created a chart that shows the amount by which Mica has been winning or losing at various times when I have checked on it. As you can see, he has been winning in the majority of instances, though by decreasing margins as time goes by. If I had to bet on a winner at this point, based on the data I have collected, I would choose Mica. That doesn’t mean you can stop voting!

[Update: 23 June 2006] With less than 24 hours left, Mica is down by 50 votes: 1,874 to 1,924. This is the most I’ve seen him down by since the contest began, so please make an extra effort to vote today, before the contest ends. It finished on the 24th: at 7:00am Vancouver time, noon in Toronto or New York, 3:00pm in London, and at appropriately matching other times around the world. Thanks again for your support.

Note: I am going to keep this entry at the top of the blog until the contest ends in three days’ time. The race is extremely close, so a big final push would be much appreciated.

Media idiocy

One of the BBC top stories right now: “Mobile phone risk during storms.” I am not going to link it, because they don’t deserve traffic for publishing something so asinine. The crux of the article is that people who get struck by lightning while using a metal mobile phone are more likely to be injured than people just standing there. The article doesn’t indicate that your chances of getting struck by lightning while talking on the phone are any higher. Indeed, I would posit that you would be less likely to be standing around outside in a thunderstorm if you had your expensive and almost certainly non-waterproof mobile phone pressed against your ear. And whose mobile phone is made of metal anyhow?

According to scientist Paul Taylor: “I would treat a mobile phone as yet another piece of metal that people tend to carry on their persons like coins and rings.” Do they advise not wearing rings or carrying change during thunderstorms? Of course not. That would be absurd.

Sometimes, the enthusiasm of the media to scare people on the basis of incredibly improbable events is so frustrating I don’t know what to do. They would have you believe that strangers will poison your child’s Halloween candy (all known cases of poisoning by this route were committed by the parents of the child). Everything from shark attacks to terrorist incidents gets presented as far more common than they really are, in a world of six billion with a media likely to report every incident of each. A really brilliant essay by Jack Gordon on this kind of fear-mongering can be found here. The best paragraph reads:

It is fashionable to remark that America “lost its innocence” on September 11th. This is balderdash. Our innocence is too deep and intractable for that. The thing we’ve really lost doesn’t even deserve the name of bravery. We’ve lost the ability to come to grips with the simple fact that life is not a safe proposition—that life will kill us all by and by, regardless. And as a society, we’ve just about lost the sense that until life does kill us, there are values aside from brute longevity that can shape the way we choose to live.

This essay won a contest by Shell and The Economist on the topic “How much liberty should we trade for security.” It is well worth a look; it’s enormously more deserving, I would say, than the BBC article of comparable length. The basic point: we need to acknowledge the existence of risk and deal with it intelligently. We can never be perfectly safe, and we shouldn’t try to be. We can never do otherwise than balance risks against benefits.

Living alone, thinking about trips

I finally feel as though I am getting a bit of traction on various projects. I’ve finished one of the three papers that have been hanging over me. By the time I meet Andrew Hurrell on Monday afternoon, I am resolved to have the paper on the Arab-Israeli conflict done, also. Thankfully, it is fairly similar to a paper I wrote in Michaelmas term about the interwar period in the Middle East and the causes of subsequent instability. In addition to academic work, I have printed some resumes and begun dropping them off at another batch of places. While I rather like the idea of a book shop, the tempting agencies that have been suggested to me by many people are becoming a possibility that I am distinctly considering. That, plus a few smatterings of academic work, might be able to constitute a reasonable employment path for the summer.

With regard to the planned European trips, it seems increasingly clear that finding other people who want to come along and are free to do so will be very hard. This I find particularly regrettable, as living in this empty house is providing a constant reminder of how much better I generally operate and enjoy myself when surrounded by friends. Regardless of that, I should probably go ahead and book at least one trip while the ticket prices are not as high as they will surely become. I need to find out whether my cousin Jiri in Prague is going to be around there this summer. If I can stay for free with him, I could fairly easily justify spending a couple of weeks there. While it wouldn’t be somewhere new to me – like Dublin or Istanbul would be – it would nonetheless be somewhere that I know to be interesting and enjoyable.

My parents are keen on me visiting Vancouver at some point towards the end of the summer. Naturally, I would be very keen to do so; spending two entire years without seeing my brothers or my friends in Vancouver is not something that I ever wanted to do. At the same time, I am anxious about spending so much on airfare prior to a year for which I have managed to secure no funding. The weight of all those failed scholarship applications is something I feel quite acutely at the moment.

PS. Does anybody know about interesting groups in Oxford that meet regularly over the weekend? With classes over, roommates gone, and friends departing, I am feeling a lack of scheduled activities where it is possible to meet people. Book clubs, photographic societies, walking or hiking clubs, and the like are all appealing possibilities.

Strategy time – time strategies

I have been trying to learn what I can learn during these last few days of the Google Idol contest, in hopes of being able to maximize Mica’s chances. The first potentially relevant fact is that the website hosting the contest is registered in Brisbane, Australia. I had often found it difficult to guess what time the server would be ticking over into the next voting day, allowing all the IP addresses that had already voted to do so again.

This round ends on June 24th, but nowhere does the website specify at what time. As such, the earliest it could possibly end (00:01 Brisbane time) would be 2:01pm Oxford time on the 23rd. The latest it could possibly end (23:59 Brisbane time) would be 1:59pm on the 24th. If someone has figured out at what time of day their server ticks over, it would be very useful information.

Why?

Because the lead has been cyclical:

Chart based on data between 22:00GMT on the 18th and 22:00GMT on the 20th.

As you can see, the distance between the number of the votes for each video rises and falls according to an orderly pattern. I would guess that with ‘Twan, Sjoerd, Manuel en Iwin’ living in Western Europe and Mica coming from the West Coast of North America, there is about an eight hour lag between time equivalencies in the areas where most of their respective voters will be living. Those of Mica’s competitors rise eight hours earlier, vote, and go to sleep eight hours earlier.

The fact that the slope of Mica’s line is more constant may be the product of how I have been cajoling people on the east coast of Canada and the United States – as well as in the UK and elsewhere – to vote for him as much as possible. Alternatively, I may have nothing to do with it and people voting for him just vote at times more distributed across the day for some other reason or collection of reasons.

As such, it would be helpful to work out what time it will be in each place when the contest ends. Ideally, we would probably want it to end around midnight Vancouver time, when it will be about 8:00am in Europe. I think that would be about 6:00pm in Brisbane.

[Update: 22 June 2006] I have created a chart that shows the amount by which Mica has been winning or losing at various times when I have checked on it.

Theorems and conjectures

As strongly evidenced by how I finished it in a few sessions within a single 24-hour period, Simon Singh’s Fermat’s Last Theorem is an exciting book. When you are kept up for a good part of the night, reading a book about mathematics, you can generally tell that some very good writing has taken place. Alongside quick biographies of some of history’s greatest mathematicians – very odd characters, almost to a one – it includes a great deal of the kind of interesting historical and mathematical information that one might relate to an interested friend during a long walk.

xⁿ + yⁿ = zⁿ

The idea that the above equation has no whole number solutions (ie. 1, 2, 3, 4, …) for x, y, and z when n is greater than two is the conjecture that Fermat’s Last Theorem supposedly proved. Of course, since Fermat didn’t actually include his reasoning in the brief marginal comment that made the ‘theorem’ famous, it could only be considered a conjecture until it was proven across the span of 100 pages by American mathematician Andrew Wiles in 1995.

While the above conjecture may not seem incredibly interesting or important on its own, it ties into whole branches of mathematics in ways that Singh describes in terms that even those lacking mathematical experience can appreciate. Even the more technical appendices should be accessible to anyone who has completed high school mathematics, not including calculus or any advanced statistics. A crucial point quite unknown to me before is that a proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is also automatically a proof of the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture (now called a theorem, also). Since mathematicians had been assuming the latter to be true for decades, Wiles’ proof of both was a really important contribution to the further development of number theory and mathematics in general.

Despite Singh’s ability to convey the importance of math, one overriding lesson of the book is not to become a mathematician: if you manage to live beyond the age of thirty, which seems to be surprisingly rare among the great ones, you will probably do no important work beyond that point. Mathematics, it seems, is a discipline where experience counts for less than the kind of energy and insight that are the territory of the young.

A better idea, for the mathematically interested, might be to read this book.