Category: Daily updates

Generally musings of the day, usually accompanied by a photograph

2020-08-31

At 2am on the 31st, we have reached the end of “the summer” and I have loosely defined it academically for many years now (school starts early in September, but never in August in my experience — I moved in at my Oxford college on September 23rd) and I feel better than OK about how the summer devoted to advancing the dissertation went. I had adopted for myself the rough metric that I wanted to have a draft of every chapter ready for Professor Vipond by the end of August. As it stands, he has the first four chapters, I have hand-edited the fifth and am preparing to review the relevant interview reports, and then I need to do the same for chapter 6 and finally do a language edit of the conclusion. The existing draft is already solid. Nobody would know to miss some of the specific empirical details I am pulling back in from the interviews in these drafts, and Professor Vipond already thinks the review of the literature is more than adequate in scope and depth. What I’m mostly doing in this round of edits is spotting everything which would singe the eye of a highly experienced reviewer, as it saves a lot of time across the whole project to anticipate and avoid a correction rather than be informed of the need for one and comply.

Feline friend and falling fluid

After two fruitless hours of trying to sleep between 3 and 5 am, I decided to dress and go for a minimalist walk around the neighbourhood with just my keys, no wallet, phone, masks, or any of the other gear that routinely accompanies me when leaving the house. I got as far as the corridor on the second floor when I encountered a familiar neighbourhood cat. It readily followed me to the front door, and then I realized through my earplugs how intensely it was raining. The cat had no interest in leaving our small covered front porch and enormous enthusiasm for rubbing its head and body against me, the bench, the walls, and anything nearby. After about fifteen minutes of waiting to see if this would be one of the cats which unpredictably sets off mad allergies for me, I left it looking plaintively up at me with green eyes through the front door window and returned to my room to be bombarded with ill-informed tweets about nuclear energy (this time from under-researched pro-nuclear partisans disclaiming that power stations are in any way related to weapons).

Best case scenario, I’ll be able to get another two or three hours sleep, infuse myself with a large volume of instant coffee, and make Sunday into a productive day of incorporating thesis sources and editing the four central chapters into a form suitable for scrutiny from my supervisor.

“Buy once, cry once”

The protagonist of a YouTube channel about blacksmithing which I have been watching used the aphorism “Buy once, cry once” as a rhetorical justification for buying high-quality tools. If you buy the right thing the first time, you cry once at the expense. By contrast, if you buy an inferior alternative you will cry the first time not getting what you want, cry every time you use the inferior item, and then cry when you cave and buy what you should have initially.

It seems like a reasonable mark of distinction to apply to products which truly serve their function admirably and seem capable of indefinite high-utility use.

I use mechanical pencils a lot, and have in one sense or another since around elementary school. Occasionally the ability to erase is a large part of the appeal, but it’s mostly the particular quality of writing on paper with graphite. I find it ideal for taking marginal notes in books and making my own index on their opening pages, as well as for annotating academic journal articles and dissertations. I also find a pencil ideal for the final close edit of a hard copy which I do with important pieces of writing, and among the better tools for use in a paper daily calendar.

I’ve tried a few higher quality mechanical pencils over the last few years. A couple of years ago I bought an $8 Uni Mechanical Pencil Kurutoga Pipe Slide Model 0.5mm, Blue Body (M54521P.33) which I highly commend for build quality and writing experience. The retractable tip has been completely reliable, and it provides an easy way to store the pencil in a soft case without worrying about it breaking the tip or poking a hole in the bag. I also got the $16 Rotring 300 Mechanical Pencil, Black, 0.7mm. Again, I have enjoyed the experience of using it, finding that it sits most naturally for ready use on a desktop since there is no way short of a protective sleeve to carry it in a way that won’t risk being pointy. I can’t figure out if the rotating lead firmness indicator has any effect on the pencil’s function, but the mechanism overall is solid, reliable, and pleasant to operate.

I have also tried out ex-Mythbuster Adam Savage’s recommended (36 for $12) Paper Mate Sharpwriter 0.7 mm mechanical pencils. They’re not designed to be refilled or have the eraser replaced, and come with something around three leads inside each. They each include a shock absorber to reduce lead breakage, and I would say they actually work 90% as well as any of the far more expensive options on this list. They are a great tool to give away or scatter around in every possible place you may want to jot a note.

The Buy Once, Cry Once choice, however, is the $50 Rotring 800 Retractable Mechanical Pencil, 0.5 mm, Black (1854232). The metal body is solid like no pencil I’ve ever held and the retraction mechanism is impressively smooth and satisfying to use. A mechanical pencil becomes a reliable and easy-to-carry tool when you can keep it with the lead in ready-to-use state while it is clipped comfortably into a pocket. The Rotring 800 also totally pulls off the task of being much heavier than the everyday cheap versions of an object, but more usable as a result. I find the solidity and mass of it helpful for writing with a good balance of speed and legibility.

First thorough manuscript review

I am deviating somewhat from the planned timeline here, moving forward the first soft edit of the whole manuscript for coherence and structure to before finishing the literature review and incorporation of material from interviews.

In part, that’s just an effort to break out of a low productivity pattern of toiling at the same very long tasks over and over. More substantively, it seemed unanswerable that somebody ought to have read the whole manuscript by now and that doing so will improve the flow and comprehensibility of the final product while letting me complete the incorporation of extant literature and empirical observations more intelligibly.

So far, I have been pretty happy with the draft. I think it does a reasonable job in justifying the research question and approach, which will be among the main requirements enforced by the examination committee.

Academic journals and conferences have given me the belief that to anybody well briefed on a subject beforehand almost all scholarly work comes across as a consolidation of the known and obvious rather than a set of blazing and unfamiliar new ideas. One of the books I read on thesis writing stressed repeatedly how a PhD thesis is a basic demonstration of competence in research at a professional level. It’s not meant to be a grand opus. Even Einstein’s doctoral thesis was about comparatively mundane matters of how things dissolve in fluids, rather than grand ideas about the ordering of the universe.

As I discussed with my brother Sasha the other day, I think writing long documents needs to be a process of successive approximation. It’s impossible to simultaneously work all elements into their final form, and it’s impossible to give an unlimited amount of uninterrupted time to any task. The writing process must be designed so that every part can be set aside and returned to, and each set of alterations should bring the whole closer to the final state. That’s how I have dealt with long documents before, and I am hopeful that the approach will take me to the end here.

Alone in a time of coronavirus

Looking back through my calendar, I think the last time I deliberately met anyone was March 7th. I foolishly skipped a couple of Massey College social events in the next couple of days and helped my ex-flatmate Silas move out, but by the time another friend was visiting town on the 14th, she cancelled her social plans and left Toronto shortly after arriving. My dentist’s office closed on the 16th, during the same timespan as I was trying to cancel my appointment because of a sore throat.

Since then, all my social gatherings have been cancelled. So was the Mark Jaccard talk at U of T on the 23rd, Massey Grand Rounds on the 25th (which I had been strongly suggesting to medically-minded friends), and my mother’s intended birthday visit on her way back from helping her mother in North Carolina, along with the U of T Festival of Dance which we planned to attend. The big Queen’s Park climate rally planned for April 3rd by Fridays for the Future was ‘shifted online’, producing no effects which I observed (in fairness, that’s true of in-person climate rallies too). The UBC alumni lunch I was invited to on the 9th was cancelled.

There’s a reasonable chance this is the longest I have gone without a deliberate meeting since I first had any control over my life, say in elementary school, when agreeing to meet a friend after school was already normal. Running into my supervisor or member of the provincial parliament on the sidewalks is certainly welcome and a change from solitude, but it doesn’t diminish the oddity of having nothing scheduled except forgettable group videoconferences (I pity those whose schooling will increasingly take that tedious and unengaging form).

Particularly as I am working through an audiobook on Stoicism I am mindful about the pointlessness and perhaps inappropriateness of complaining, which isn’t precisely what I intend to do with this post. It’s more to share life experience and preserve a contemporaneous account than to advance any claim that what’s happening is intolerable or undeserved. Indeed, I am exceedingly fortunate in that my most important work is largely unimpeded by all this. My data collection and research for the PhD are done. Now it’s just a matter of incorporating the literature into my manuscript and editing it to the point where I can send it to the committee. I can do all that alone, as odd as a solitary life continues to feel.

The appeal and wisdom of Stoicism

CBC’s Ideas with Nahlah Ayed ran a good segment on Stoicism during the coronavirus pandemic. It covers a lot of what I find appealing about philosophy and the contrast with the “power of positive thinking” notion which I dispute both factually and ethically. We can’t make things happen by wanting them or “thinking positive”, and indeed our total control over what happens in the world at large is extremely minimal. As with mortality, those are the conditions which we must live with and it’s counter-productive or delusional to choose to believe otherwise.

The piece closes with a reference to Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life“, which is probably productive reading even during these times when people feel subjected to an undeserved burden of social isolation or illness. It also reminded me of Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s excellent audiobooks, which I am loading back on to my phone to accompany further solitary walks across the city.

Oil and stock price shocks

The always-slightly-overenthusiastic Slate.com reports:

The financial world resumed melting into goo on Monday thanks to the global coronavirus outbreak, with stocks falling so hard and fast in the morning that it triggered a rare 15-minute timeout on trading. By day’s end the S&P 500 collapsed by 7.6 percent—its worst showing since the financial crisis. The sell-off followed after Saudi Arabia’s leaders decided that now would be a good time to purposely crash the price of oil, a shocking and risky move likely to further destabilize a world economy that’s already wobbly thanks to the incipient pandemic.

…

The events that sparked Monday’s panic were the result of a clash between Saudi Arabia and Russia over what to do about oil prices, which have been tumbling ever since the number of coronavirus cases began to surge in China around January. Initially, the Saudis argued that its fellow OPEC members and their allies, including Russia, should respond by cutting production to prop up prices in the face of falling demand. But Moscow officially rejected that proposal on Friday.

So Saudi Arabia resorted to its Plan B. Over the weekend, the kingdom embarked on a surprise price war designed to cut into Russia’s sales, while promising to further flood the market by increasing its own production. It’s a move we’ve seen before from the country, which waged a brutal price war in 2014 and 2015 that eventually forced Russia to start coordinating its production with OPEC. But as of now, the Russians have responded by vowing to pump more of their own oil. We appear to be entering a standoff.

Of course this has been dominating the news for weeks, as people discuss the overlapping consequences of decreased oil demand due to coronivirus-induced reductions in travel and energy use; changing energy production policies from OPEC, Russia, and other jurisdictions; and whatever else is panicking global markets and making people willing to buy 30-year Treasury bonds with less than 1% interest.

Feel free to discuss scenarios. Will the coronavirus recession be the straw that brings down Trump? How will high-cost oil jurisdictions respond to these economic conditions? Will non-fossil fuel energy be hurt by cheap fossil fuel prices, or encouraged by concern about fossil fuel price volatility and political instability?