Rants – Page 60 – a sibilant intake of breath

Proposed handgun ban, more music industry nonsense

So, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin has said we would all be safer if handguns were banned. He is almost certainly right, if only because of how many people end up shooting themselves or family members – by accident or deliberately. Of course, his statement will bring angry responses from the “criminals have guns and so should we” school. In aggregate, this doesn’t strike me as a convincing argument. Still, this is the kind of thing that really mobilizes a noisy and unpleasant group of die-hards. Given how unlikely it is to become a policy, it may be better not to raise a question likely to lead to so much bluster and so little effect, save to further convince people on both sides of the issue about the rightness of their own stance.

Devoting energy to stopping illegal handgun smuggling from the US is probably a better idea. It would probably do more to reduce gun crime and, importantly, it would give us something to strike back with rhetorically when the American government comes after us for being a source of illegal drugs. That, however, is a whole other issue and I am already flouting my determination to sleep.

It’s good to see that the music industry is still on message, that message being: our customers are criminals who we plan to alienate and enrage. Frankly, these kind of tactics make me look forward to the day when the whole industry transforms or goes belly up.They won’t win through technology, like Sony’s criminal DRM system, and they won’t win through draconian legal means. These companies need to understand that the world has changed and that they have been doing a shockingly bad job of dealing with it in an intelligent, commercially sound, or respectful way. To quote: “Unauthorised use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing.” Alas. This Onion article barely seems like satire anymore: RIAA Bans Telling Friends About Songs.

Nutritional matters

Since I am being constantly criticized on all sides about my diet, I feel some response is in order. It’s not as though I enjoy eating little but bagels and beans and that there is some obvious and much healthier and more enjoyable solution that I am spurning due to masochistic urges. I am constrained in terms of time, access to equipment, access to foodstuffs, finances, and lack of knowledge.

Food here is a genuine conundrum. The nearest grocery store, Sainsbury’s, has a minimal selection of foods that are not pre-prepared. As Jonathan identified, there is a ‘take away culture’ in Britain, which would be fine with me if only the food being taken away was closer to being nutritionally balanced. The lack of raw materials doesn’t matter too much for me, in the end, as I have serious concerns about hygiene in the small and generally bitterly cold Library Court kitchen. Toasters, hot plates, or George Foreman style grills are strictly forbidden in college. I also have no pots or pans (though Margaret kindly got me some dishes), and relatively minimal amount of time that can be dedicated to cooking. The major alternative to eating bagels, cheese, beans, and a few pieces of fruit is to eat the college meals. Unfortunately, they are seriously awful – especially the vegetarian option. It is usually a wicked hot bowl of steaming animal fat, along with some limp noodles and bits of ground-up boiled vegetable.

Opting out of college meals gives me about three Pounds a day to spend on groceries. I’ve spent about £300 on groceries during the eleven weeks or so during which I have been here, so the £120 that I will get back for skipping a term’s worth of meals is not an amount to be snickered at. It would buy almost 60 cheese ploughman sandwiches, or almost 250 cans of Sainsbury’s baked beans: each of which, with a bit of mustard or hot sauce, would be more enjoyable than the few meals I ate in college.

The healthiest option would probably be to buy pots and pans, walk often to the Tesco on Cowley Road, buy vegetables, and brave the cold Library Court kitchen, with its dirty surfaces and strange smells, to cook them. This seems extremely unlikely to transpire. The next best option is to carry on mostly eating the pre-prepared foods at Sainsbury’s, but focus on the ones with a bit more nutritional value: paying the extra Pounds for their decent veggie soups and odd, individually packaged raw vegetables. All that can be bolstered, somewhat, through the acquisition of minerals from supplements: especially iron, since I eat virtually nothing that contains it in quantity. This, I am endeavoring to do. It would also be good to find some low cost eatery with high protein and vitamin content to its food. I shall continue seeking it. If I find one, I will make a point of eating there with something like bi-weekly regularity.

Milan: Creature of the night

One seeming property of the end of term is that I am becoming properly, vampirically nocturnal. My mean sleeping time is pushing onwards and onwards towards dawn, as my mean waking time descends past noon and into the afternoon. I hope the powers will follow the lifestyle, if not the thirst for blood. At some point, it’s a trend that will need to be beaten back. For now, it feels like a fairly appropriate extension of my personality and general state in the world.

Unfortunately, it seems that I won’t be seeing my mother in March, on her way to Iran. According to a message she sent me today, she was denied a visa on the grounds that she has American citizenship, worked for the American government, and is a feminist. I don’t know how the Iranian screening process would have identified the last item, or why they would be particularly concerned about it for a tourist, but it must be highly disappointing for her. I hope her appeal will be successful.

In an inspired piece of bureaucratic nonsense, I got yet another letter from NatWest today. This one says that, after receiving my fax, two sets of written instructions, and going to my home branch so they could record and verify my signature, they need to send banking details to my permanent address, in Canada. This is so that I can use their web banking and actually know how much I need to pay off for my credit card. They say they can only send the precious access code to a permanent address, for security purposes. Even though I won’t be there and it will surely be opened by someone else who will send it to me by email, this is obviously an intelligent security step. Their concern is that they think the code will expire before I am able to get it: perhaps because they are planning to send it by elite-trained homing pigeon. Given the fact that Britain is a major exporter of financial services, you would think they might have the slightest smattering of sense about such things.

Claire’s party tonight, at Wellington Square, was good fun. Somehow, the people present, the decor, and the overall character of the experience were all reminiscent of parties in Kits, such as the one where I met Meaghan Beattie, during my UBC years. In particular, the much-enjoyed and somewhat infamous ‘Dirty House’ parties. That’s not a pejorative description, in any sense, but a reflection of a kind of academic-bohemian fusion upon which good parties are often predicated. I ended up talking about Pink Floyd and biofuels with several individuals. I also got involved in a passionate and protracted argument about the plausibility of string theory, and the likelihood that evidence for it will be found at CERN. Ah, Oxford. My thanks to Claire for the invitation.

Now, I should get to sleep.

Nick has some very nice photos from India on his blog.
My brother Mica is looking for comments on his videos. If you leave them here or send them to me, I can pass them on. See if you can spot my brother Sasha in this one (it’s not hard).
Here are links to my Oxford Facebook photos, for non-members.
The third book of the five part trilogy called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fell out of an eddy in the space-time continuum and onto my hard drive. I have been enjoying it.

Further commentary from Mr. Bitters

Whatever compelled my fellow Wadham students to mark the end of term with an off-key, drunken sing-along lasting until well after 3:00am, I cannot understand. I can, however, be justifiably irked about it – particularly since it happened in the room with which I share a wall.

There aren’t even any quiet hour regulations or residence advisors to report them to here.

[Edited to add:] On an unrelated note, people should consider taking action against Sony for intentionally deploying malware against their own paying customers, lying about it, releasing patches that make it worse, and never showing any contrition or concern about illegally sabotaging people’s computers: Image hosted by Photobucket.com

Queer Bop Update 10:30pm

The Queer Bop is now in full swing and several aspects of it are quite shocking to me. Firstly, whoever bought guest tickets wasted their money. There is no access control whatsoever and anyone who would want to can wander right in. Secondly, there are no college staff present at all, except for three frantic men working the bar. Given the sub-zero temperatures, the scanty standard of dress, and the excessive consumption of alcohol, all this strikes me as quite irresponsible. Outside the JCR Bar, I saw three goosebump-covered young women vomiting on the ground beside one another. I don’t think you could get away with this sort of thing on North America’s litigious shores.

[Edited at 11:30] There are security people now and things are a bit calmer. Still far too cold and noisy for me – brand me a spoilsport.

Statistics ER: A play in one act

Dramatis Personae:

Dr. Von Spatz: Haggard and unshaven, Dr. Spatz carries a clipboard and coffee cup. Bleary eyed, he has the tendency to rave very slightly at times.

Nurse Wilhelm: Beautiful, but shrill, Nurse Wilhelm wears a freshly pressed, very white nurse’s uniform and fiddles with various medical instruments and sensors.

Intern

Patient: Convulsing and comatose, in alternating fashion.

NURSE WILHELM, clearly in a state of considerable agitation, stands beside a gurney in the crowded ER, frantically looking at a chart, then at the clock, and back to the chart again.

Through the double doors, SPATZ enters, cup of coffee in hand.

WILHELM: Thank God you’re here, doctor! He’s been heteroskedastic for the last twenty minutes!

SPATZ: (wearily) What’s your confidence level, nurse? Don’t think that your frantic and increasingly standard deviations from close medical practice are going unnoticed.

WILHELM: The p-value is .08 and rising, doctor! He’s regressing!

SPATZ: (more alarmed) Multivariate? Have you checked the concavity?

WILHELM: His r-squared has been falling ever since we took the log of the dependent variable.

SPATZ: Adjusted r-squared?

WILHELM: Also falling! Now at 0.13!

SPATZ: (whistles softly) Houston, we have an endogeneity problem.

WILHELM: Shall I induce multicollinearity, doctor? The data are increasingly dyadic.

SPATZ: Nurse, drop the outliers and set his IQR to red. STATA!

WILHELM: It’s no good, doctor, I can’t reject the null hypothesis! His t-test scores are neither unimodal nor symmetric.

INTERN enters and begins watching with a shocked expression. Noticing him, SPATZ turns to address him.

SPATZ: There’s not much we can do when we get them in this late, I’m afraid. It’s a standard error of people to wait until the variance is far too large, before bringing it to our attention.

Looks down into his coffee cup.

SPATZ: Some nights, it breaks my heart. Makes me think life’s nothing more than one big scatter plot for us to try and put a best-fit line through. Every time you think you’ve minimized the square of the residuals, some new outlier crops up to throw the whole thing off again. Sometimes… I wonder why I even bother.

INTERN: Because you’re a doctor, dammit, Spatz! Or have you forgotten your own causation? I remember when you used to run DFBETA tests all the time; now, you just throw away the outliers like yesterday’s newspaper.

SPATZ: Maybe you’re right… Maybe you’re right… Nurse, I am straightening up my game. Our relationship has been spurious all along, it’s only your close correlation with Nurse Whimpleton that has made it seem significant.

WILHELM: (gasps)

SPATZ: As for this poor fellow, make sure to check the interaction terms earlier next time.

Stats update and adventures in New College

Today’s statistics lab was a big improvement over the previous ones. Mark Pickup was absent, due to illness, but Robert Trager began the class by responding directly to our letter. He was understanding and sympathetic and both this week’s lab and this week’s assignment reflect a welcome change in methods and focus. We spent only half the lab working on STATA, with the rest devoted to discussing the statistical methodology behind an actual paper published in a major political science journal. For next week, we have been given another, as well as some responses to it, to look over and analyze. This feels far more relevant, and it is also an affirmation of the willingness of those running the program to change tack in response to our concerns. Professor Sir Adam Roberts, Director of Graduate Studies in International Relations , also issued an official statement today. Aside from all else, it is nice to be listened to.

After the lab, I went to G and D’s with Claire Leigh. She is taking a photography course, so we talked shop for a while before walking through the Christ Church meadows and then back up into Oxford. Like Roham and Emily, Claire formerly worked in banking. To be honest, words like ‘banking’ and ‘consulting’ have almost no substantive content for me. I understand what it means to clean an apartment building, or feed sloughs, or sell computers, but I don’t really understand what these positions involve, or if I could ever do them. That said, a few more pounds in the new NatWest account would do much to reduce my anxiety about paying for next year.

The dinner at New College tonight was very nice. I sat with Madjdy, Roham, and two more of Madjdy’s friends. The conversation, at times, was quite impassioned, but it was wonderful to pass a few hours of the evening engaged in heated debate with interesting people. After dinner, I had a bit of a wander around the New College cloisters with an employee of the Oxford career services, who also claims that she can get me a good summer job. Happily, she provided the two pounds by which unlimited drinks would be furnished to me in the New College MCR. I haven’t really the energy to get into details of tonight here and now. Indeed, there is a lot of night remaining.

Milan (Prazak) Ilnyckyj: definitive guide to pronunciation

Part I: Ilnyckyj

While it looks fearsome, this part of the name is quite easy. It is pronounced: ill-knit-ski, as in sick-crochet-snowboard.

Part II: Milan

For starters, how do you know if you are pronouncing it wrong?

If you pronounce the first syllable ‘mah’, as in “Mah name is Slim, what’s y’urs?” you are pronouncing it wrong. If you pronounce it ‘my’, as in “My blasted quadruped has scampered,” you are also pronouncing it wrong.

The first syllable is ‘mill’ as in: “Let’s head down to the Old Mill, where I hear John Stewart Mill has cooked up his famous cider.”

If you pronounce the second syllable ‘lawn’, you are pronouncing it wrong. This is especially bad if you used ‘mah’ as the first syllable, because then the two together sound like you’re saying: “Mah lawn needs watering.” Lynn, as in Lynn Creek or Linseed Oil, is also incorrect for the last syllable.

The right way to pronounce it is ‘lhun’, as in London.

The hardest part of all is properly timing and stressing those two syllables: mill-lhun. The l-sound should be pronounced twice, with a brief pause between them and the first l-sound lasting quite a bit longer than the second. This part takes practice, but frankly I would be rather pleased just to see the errors described above diminish somewhat in their frequent usage among my friends.

Part III: Prazak

My middle name is pronounced prah-Jacques and not pray-zack or prah-zack.

So, there you have it: Milan Ilnyckyj = mill-lhun ill-knit-ski. Perhaps it will help you remember that ILL-KNIT-SKI is like SICK-CROCHET-SNOWBOARD.

Just drifting

After a month in Oxford, you begin to realize the extent to which this is nothing like a unified institution. I don’t have the foggiest idea about who coordinates the departments and the colleges, if anyone. I’ve never had to deal with them. The closest I’ve come is some vague contact with pan-university organizations, such as inter-college mail or the university computer services. Ultimately, this place is a million academic niches; a weird underwater ecosystem where it is equally possible to thrive and be eaten by a barracuda.

This morning, I headed over to the Manor Road Building to work on statistics. I ended up banging off a strongly worded letter to the people at the department responsible for course organization. The extent to which stats is interfering with everything else I am trying to do, while not conferring anything of value upon me, is just not tolerable anymore. I finished the second assignment but, after getting 58% on the first one for failure to use the right sort of graphs and label them as desired, I am not confident. I feel rather better about the paper for Dr. Hurrell, which has now been delivered to a Nuffield pigeon hole.

I finally met my college advisor today. I dropped by the tutorial office to say hello to Joanna – my favourite Wadham employee – and discovered that Dr. Paul Martin was in the room at the time. We’ve now exchanged a few emails. It seems that he will be organizing some kind of tea with his various neglected charges in the days ahead.

Soon, I hope, I will have the chance to head down to London. Getting out of the three kilometre circle that is defining and enclosing my life might be empowering. I don’t particularly have anything to do in London, or any money to do it with, but I am definitely open to suggestion.

On a completely different note, I’ve decided to try taking photographic requests. You post something from Oxford that you want to see, whether specific or more theoretical, and I will see what I can do to capture it on a digital sensor.¹ Please keep in mind that this blog is meant to be the kind of thing that bright young eleven year olds who dream of going to Oxford one day can read. Well, almost.

[1] This idea has nothing at all to do with how boring photos of computers and libraries can be.

Public service announcement

Windows users should be aware that several companies are now making music CDs that actively sabotage your computer: both by preventing it from being able to make mp3s and by installing trojan horse software that monitors and manipulates what you can do. Sony Music is among those companies. Luckily, you can get around most of it by disabling the autorun feature in Windows XP.

During the next few years, in all kinds of areas, we need to deal with the issue of intellectual property. We need to decide when countries can violate the patents of drug firms, either due to short term emergencies like an avian flu or long term ones like AIDS, We need to decide what fair use means, with regards to copyrighted materials, in an age where copying and distribution has become so much easier. We need to decide what to do about patents, which have the serious potential to be exploited and hamper both innovation and the public welfare, while confering underserved monopolies on those who hold them.

Whatever the answers to these questions are, and some of them are really very tricky, I don’t think they can legitimately involve the kind of backhanded dealing described in the first paragraph here. I don’t buy music from the iTunes music store, for the simple reason that I have no reason to believe I will still be able to use that music five years from now, or on a different computer or device. The nature of ownership, when it comes to things like software and music, is becoming ephemeral and uncertain – except for those people who have illegal copies that evade these feeble protections anyhow. I remember how, with my legitimately bought copy of Half Life 2, I needed to muck around for hours with registration, web updates, and a little Steam applet that seriously restricts how and when you can use the software which you bought. My friends who downloaded it from one or another peer-to-peer service just played.