Daily updates – Page 130 – a sibilant intake of breath

Menagerie of books in progress

On the mantlepiece in my room, there are presently two stacks of books. One is for thesis related books, sorted so as to be least likely to topple and crush me in my sleep. The other is for non-thesis books, sorted by the priority with which I mean to read them. I have read at least fifty pages of every book in each pile.

Thesis pile:

Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
Dobson, Andrew. Political Theory and the Ecological Challenge.
Popper, Karl. Conjectures and Refutations.
Popper, Karl. The Logic of Scientific Discovery.
Lomborg, Bjorn. The Skeptical Environmentalist. (Being selectively re-read)
Fenge, Terry. Northern Lights Against POPs.
Clapp, Jenniffer. Paths to a Green World. (Another purposeful re-reading)

Non-thesis pile:

Nabokov, Vladamir. Ada, or Ardor. (A much appreciated gift from Viki K.)
Atwood, Margaret. Moral Disorder. (From my mother)
Wilde, Oscar. De Profundis and other writings.
Hardy, Thomas. Far From the Madding Crowd.
Milton, John. Paradise Lost. (Re-reading aloud)
Cunningham, Michael. Specimen Days.

I have been reading these books for periods ranging from two days to many months. Sometimes, I wonder whether it would be more sensible to read books sequentially, one by one. I don’t really think so. This system lets me read in any of a half dozen distinctive genres or subject areas, and I don’t think I lose much comprehension on account of tracking so many strings at once. (Complex novels are an exception. I often need to force myself to start over and read through. This may be why I have never finished Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, despite at least four attempts.).

At the cusp of Hilary

Term starts tomorrow, so today was spent preparing: reducing the level of chaos in my room (discovering some very old, half-completed paperwork in the process), acquiring reading materials related to my international law course next term, and generally making ready for the eight weeks ahead.

Monday, I have a ‘collection’ with the Warden, in which I am to convince him that I am upholding academic standards and otherwise being a proper grad student. I have heard of other colleges holding these, but Wadham did not last year. At a whopping five minutes, I think I will be able to survive the onslaught.

At 9:00am on Tuesday, there is the first of the lectures on Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy; this, I shall make an effort to attend, if only to try and recalibrate my brain to termish schedules. In the evening, I have the Wadham Sustainability Forum, which I know very little about but was invited to by someone especially interesting. Then, we have the first OUSSG meeting (which I still need to publish additional details about on the website).

Wednesday morning, I have my first International Law seminar. The rest of the week will be filled out with lectures, law readings, and thesis work. Hopefully, the structured days that accompany term-time will create more definite spaces in which progress can be made.

PS. Recent revelations have made the iPhone (discussed before) not at all interesting. Apple is not allowing third party applications, and the thing doesn’t really run OS X. I saw it as more exciting as a platform for clever hacks than as a device in itself. While these restrictions will probably be circumvented, they show that Apple wants to issue a shiny toy that will make Cingular masses of money, rather than a genuinely revolutionary mobile communication device.

London: 13-Jan-2007

Black and white Turkey photos II

Here are a few more of the scanned black and white photos from Turkey. I have started posting the best ones on Photo.net, but the copies available here are larger.

Topkapi palace second courtyard.

One more shot of the Blue Mosque, what an elegant structure.

Ship on the Bosporus.

Suleymaniye Mosque.

Domes outside a mosque.

Web 2.0 wandering

A post on Metafilter led me to a long-winded essay about why blogging is a fundamentally cynical activity. Then, a comment on the MeFi post led me to a page that randomly generates text that sounds like a piece of postmodern criticism. It was amusing and memorable enough to add to del.icio.us. From the blog run by the person who wrote the script, I found the video to Pink Floyd‘s “High Hopes,” which looks like the recollections of someone who did far too many drugs while they were at Oxford. I recognize the type of places, but not the places themselves. It must be Cambridge.

The above is some kind of amazingly self-referential romp around some of the cleverer sites out there driven by user-submitted content. These people are the “You” that Time Magazine saluted. Collectively, the contemplation of all this technology and effort gives one a sense of trivial empowerment. It’s interesting, and it takes up time, but it doesn’t get us anywhere. At least, no more so than sitting around and listening to music. At least, in its curious way, it is a social activity.

Sandwich economics

The following is a factor price breakdown for the combination that comprises more than 80% of my lunches (n=28):

The cheese in question is either Cheshire or Wensleydale: certainly the two best foodstuffs that I have experienced for the first time while in England.

The surprising factor is clearly the cost of tofu. That said, I do use about 62.5g worth per sandwich. It still seems unfair that the least tasty part of the sandwich should cost the most. If I do end up going to London this weekend – as now seems highly likely – I can pick up some much lower cost tofu in the small Chinatown there.

MacWorld 2007 keynote

Sure Apple gets millions worth of free advertising by releasing its products in their glitzy, spectacular way. At the same time, it is hard for a geeky Mac fan not to comment.

Everyone expected Apple to announce the iPhone at Macworld, though there does seem to be more to this device than most people expected. Everyone expected it to be an iPod and a phone, in this case it has 8GB of storage, and most expected it to be widescreen. The two megapixel camera is probably pretty poor – as telephone cameras universally are – but it could be useful regardless. The biggest surprise is that the thing runs OS X, rather than the proprietary and limited systems generally associated with smartphone and Blackberry type devices. Combined with the embedded sensors (proximity, ambient light, and an accelerometer), I imagine people are going to come up with some pretty amazing hacks for these devices.

The iPhone is a quad-band GSM + EDGE phone with WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0. A lot of people probably expected it to be 3G, but this is a better move for Apple. 3G has pretty much been a disaster for everyone who bet on it. The fact that it seems capable of talking to WiFi networks is also a big plus, especially if it can be used to do VoIP in an elegant way. The fact that it does not is unsurprising, but also a letdown. I am personally looking forward to the days when mobile phones automatically form mesh networks to pass traffic between themselves. That would circumvent the need for network infrastructure for calls within densely populated places and really change the business circumstances in which cellular service providers found themselves.

The mundane issues are more what concerns me: it looks like the starting price is US$499 for a 4GB model and US$599 for the 8GB and they will start shipping in June. Those prices are based on signing up for a two year phone contract, also. There’s no way it makes sense to buy the release version, as there are usually a couple of serious flaws that get sorted out in the next version. (Not that I will be spending $600 on such a device any time in the foreseeable future.) The battery life is supposedly sufficient for five hours of talk time and sixteen hours of audio listening. If true, that is better than my iPod Shuffle, and enormously better than my old 20GB 4th generation iPod.

Like a lot of people, I am curious about whether this device will stand up to everyday abrasion better than the iPod Nanos do. There’s also no way I would even consider buying this platform before Skype or something similar can be run on it.

Interesting lectures in Hilary Term

A few that I plan to attend are below. I will link the notes on my wiki to these listings, once they are written.

Dr. Kean (I have no idea who he is) on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. 9:00am on Tuesdays, weeks 1-4. (St. Cross Building)
Philip Pullman on “Poco a poco: The Fundamental Particles of Narrative.” 5:00pm on Friday of 4th week (Gulbenkian Lecture Theatre, St. Cross Buildings)
Henry Shue on “Normative Theory and the Use of Force.” 2:00pm on Thursdays, weeks 1-4 and 5-6. (Examination Schools)
Oxford University Strategic Studies Group speakers – termcard forthcoming. 8:00pm every Tuesday. (Old Library, All Souls College)
Oxford University Centre for the Environment Linacre Lectures. 5:30pm Thursdays (Dyson Perrins Building, South Parks Road)

Are there any other interesting ones that people know about? I would be particularly keen to find something on climate change, environmental policy, etc.

Comedy news renewal

After a long holiday break, The Daily Show and Colbert Report have returned. You can watch the highlights of each episode for free from the websites, though they are now interspersed with advertising. Hello comedic news… goodbye productivity.

the fussy, blond, larcenous heroine of an English children’s story

For the vast majority of the four billion year history of the Earth, it would have been a very inhospitable place for human beings indeed. An atmosphere with oxygen in it, the existence of essential ecosystems (most of them composed of microorganisms), the presence of an ultraviolet-blocking ozone layer: all of these are essential to human life, and all are temporary and largely the product of random events. So too, a huge number of other considerations, from the ambient temperature to the level of volcanic activity. Of course, if the situation were different, beings would have evolved in a different way. There are, no doubt, other forms of metabolism; likewise, it is possible to endure all kinds of environments and ecological surroundings. This is where the anthropic principle and the Goldilocks fallacy collide.

The Goldilocks fallacy is to observe that if the conditions of the Earth were different, human beings as they are could not live here. The faulty conclusion drawn is that these ‘perfect’ conditions could not, or have not, arisen by accident. This is akin to seeing a large number of black moths sitting on black trees in England during the 19th century and stressing how perfectly matched they were. Of course they were, because soot from factories had blackened the trees, allowing black moths to hide from predators more effectively than their lighter brethren, who duly saw their numbers reduced. The situation establishes which beings will do well, and ensures that those who do not will disappear. This was Darwin’s great insight.

A broader version of the Goldilocks fallacy stresses how unlikely the development of life in the first place was, then uses that as evidence for divine creation. The first response to that is to wonder how unlikely life really is. Life, at the lowest level, is something that can take what is in the environment, then make copies of itself using those materials. Prions (the replicating molecules that cause mad cow disease) are a bit like crystals: they reproduce themselves on the basis of coming into contact with the right materials. Given millions of billions of galaxies, hundreds of billions of stars per galaxy, and an unknown but massive number of planets, there is certainly a lot of chemistry going on. Given what chemists have cooked up using a few basic organic molecules and lightening in a closed environment, I would be personally astonished if at least single-celled life forms did not exist elsewhere in our galaxy, much less in the observable universe.

The last step in the logical chain is to consider the very real possibility that our universe is only one of an infinite number that could exist. It is also entirely possible that others do exist. Some universes will have life forms in them who can putter about and strangle each other and write blog entries. Others will not, but there is nobody reporting on them. As such, the puttering, strangling, blogging beings who marvel at their own existence may be rather missing the point.