Category: Daily updates

Happy Birthday Christina Porte

After a foggy day of reading, I have decided that I cannot efficiently carry out the tasks of graduate student life in the absence of caffeine. As such, I am lifting my personal prohibition, while being mindful of the three to four hour half-life (λ) of caffeine and my continuing efforts to develop a stable and efficient sleep pattern.

On an interesting side note, the half-life of caffeine (the time it takes for half of the concentration initially in the blood to be metabolized) varies enormously on the basis of certain factors:

λ for caffeine, normal adults: 3-4 hours
λ for caffeine, adult women taking oral contraceptives: 5-10 hours
λ for caffeine, pregnant women: 9-11 hours

For those with longer half-lives, the effect of the drug will be less marked, but will last for dramatically longer. [Update: This may be wrong. See this comment.] To quote Lisa Simpson:

As intelligence goes up, happiness goes down. See, I made a graph…”

*Despondent*

“…I make a lot of graphs.”

With an eleven hour half-life, you would still have about one quarter of the caffeine from the previous morning’s coffee in your blood as you sat down with the next morning’s brew. With a three hour half-life, less than half a percent of the caffeine from the previous day would still be present.

On a related note, Green’s Café is no longer being seriously considered as a thesis HQ, because it closes far too early. Instead, I am working in the Jericho Café. They are open until a rather more useful 9:30pm. They are also closer to my house, and have a wider collection of food available. Thankfully, I am on track to have my reading for this week’s developing world seminar done by then; that means that I will not have to worry about it when I go to London on Wednesday.

Four acquaintances of mine have become engaged during the span of the last three days. In the Oxford case, my speculation is that the recent cold snap is generating nesting-type behaviour in people: making them think about the safe, warm, and comfortable parts of life rather than the dashing about on sunny days parts.

As I’ve said before, this is the period where things in life start becoming truly optional. That applies to everything from education to where you live, which people you’ve known all your life you will continue to know, and how you spend your days, weeks, and months.

To some extent, it goes to show how people are generally better at making decisions within narrow frames than beyond them. To take a trivial example, people are better at playing video games than at deciding whether or not to play. People are better at passing exams and writing essays than at deciding which educational programs to enroll in. When things become really wide open, the limitations of our ability to collect and filter information become most apparent. The correct combination of heuristic approaches to decision making – what non-economists call ‘judgment’ – can certainly be a scarce commodity. I am personally quite concerned about whether I am seeing all the possible options, understanding each in a reasonably accurate way, and engaging in patterns of behaviour that make the most desirable options more likely to transpire.

As is often demonstrated in matters romantic, there is also an enormous element of chance that shapes the paths of human lives. Being adaptable enough to identify and seize the good chances is perhaps the most critical skill for living an extraordinary life, in contrast to one that is merely happy or successful.

My best wishes to all the newly-committed couples. I hope the marriages proceed as planned, and that they all reflect upon the decision in ten or twenty years’ time as one of the best choices they have made.

PS. Cycling home with a bag full of ripe grapes, tomatoes (I bought the gorgeous on-the-vine expensive ones), bananas, and apples, I noted with appreciation the incredible capacity of global markets. It is, after all, now getting dark around 4:00pm here, and it is below freezing at night. Of course, the thought of all those fertilizers, tractors, machines, trucks, and aircraft was also a reminder of how much goes into the operation of those markets, and how concealed huge expenditures of effort and resources can be.

After four successive weeks of high table dinners in Wadham College, I have become attuned to their patterns. Those who arrive early or have guests tend to congregate in the Senior Common Room (SCR), just below the MCR, in the main quad. From there, they head over to the hall, to meet those who proceeded there directly.

Dinner itself is bread, an appetizer (usually soup), a main, and dessert. Wine is served to accompany. Unlike the Red Room in New College, where there is Sherry beforehand and both a white and a red wine with dinner, at Wadham it is simply two glasses of the same sort of wine. In both cases, I generally find myself to be the only vegetarian at the table. For the past couple of weeks, I have been even more unusual, insofar as I have been declining the wine, in hopes of speeding my recuperation from this tenacious illness.

After dinner, if there is a senior member of the college who takes it upon themselves to organize it, people retire to either the Old Library – if there are many people coming along – or the Old Senior Common Room, if there are fewer. Tonight, five of us went to the latter, marking the first time I had even been inside. The reasonably small, green-paneled and candle-lit room definitely feels more intimate than the Old Library, which is probably half as large as the dining hall. I should like to return their once the cold has set in a bit further, and the fire is going. In either place, people converse and eat fruit and chocolates, while drinking sweet after-dinner drinks, like port and claret.

After that, people often head to the SCR for coffee from the famously expensive espresso machine. The conversation is usually about people’s areas of research, with interested individuals trying to learn more about fields in which they are non-expert. One of the fellows today actually worked as part of the team at NASA that operates the Hubble Space Telescope. When talk of research areas fail, people discuss the peculiarities of Oxford.

In attendance are usually between three and five graduates: either those being brought as guests by their college advisers or those who have privileges attached to offices or scholarships. In my case, the dinners are part of my Senior Scholarship. In addition to the graduates, there are usually about a dozen fellows of the college and their guests. Since there are usually three rotations of who you are sitting beside and across from, you actually get to meet a good number of people. This is reinforced through seeing some every couple of weeks.

The New College dinners – which I attend as a member of the Strategic Studies Group executive – tend to be more lavish, but the Wadham ones definitely feel more exclusive. This is particularly the case when people retire for port and fruit in one of the old rooms afterwards. Aside from a greater diversity of people present, the whole arrangement is probably not enormously different from when Christopher Wren and Isaac Newton apparently ate, drank, and conversed in these same places.

PS. I realize the photo is garbage, but the light was bad, I had nothing to brace against, and I was pressed for time. I will try for a better one next time.