Stanford

Overwhelmed is an oft-used word, but for me, a British public school kid going to what I now believe to be the unequivocally the best university in the world for myself, it is an appropriate one.

Welcoming Latino students to campus

I flew from Heathrow in the economy section of the upper deck of a Virgin Atlantic Boeing 747 over South Greenland, Hudson Bay and the Rockies, and landed on Sept 2nd, well in advance of Int’l Student Orientation (ISO) on the 11th. Over the course of the week, in between setting up bank accounts, getting a phone contract and buying a camera (Canon Rebel XS + 18-200mm lens – blog post about it later!) I took the opportunity to explore the bay area. Golden Gate at night from the Marin Headlands is spectacular. The road on which Steve Jobs lives is beautiful. The wildlife on the Monterey coast is diverse and exciting. The weather is unbelievable. I visited Mills Hospital where I was born, and caught a glimpse of the house of my babyhood on Diaz Lane in Foster City; coming from drizzly, noisy, bustling London (which I of course still love), I am convinced that this part of California is the best place in the world to live.

And of course, I visited the campus on which I am to spend the next four years of my life, and it is best described as … indescribable – one really has to see it for oneself to understand truly what all the fuss is about. At every turn, from every angle, at any time, the sheer quality of the facilities and the opulence of the college blows me away. Just to illustrate with what I know of the sports facilities: the Arrillaga Sports Facility has a pristine fitness centre with modern equipment including some I’ve never seen before, a rock climbing wall with 6 routes set every week and an enormous basketball court. On the other side of the lawn, the Ford Recreation Centre has a gymnastics gym larger than my secondary school’s sports hall. Behind the tennis courts are four outdoor swimming pools and an American Football stadium. South of the main university is a Stanford-owned area of gently rolling hills larger than Richmond Park in London known as ‘The Dish’, named for the large satellite dish placed at its centre. West of that area is SLAC, the longest linear particle accelerator in the world, a luxurious golf course and a stables. Ridiculous is a word that springs immediately to mind. Ridiculous awesomeness. Plus campus has hummingbirds and a bamboo plantation.

On the 11th, ISO started. Apart from the cheesy, artificial and often cringeworthy icebreaker activities, the fire alarm that woke up the whole dorm at 3am, the most tuneless anthem I’ve ever heard (‘Hail Stanford Hail’) and the beach trip which was overcast and windy (ergo cold), I now genuinely believe that I couldn’t have ended up anywhere better. On the second night we had the opportunity to eat dinner with a faculty member. He teaches energy options, and in the ensuing discussion, I discovered that I am in the company of a class of, for lack of a better word, amazing people. The sheer knowledge, intelligence, passion and lust for knowledge infused with exceptional self-confidence (but not arrogance), communication skills and life experiences of some of the people I’ve met makes me feel like I’m in the company of an unequivocally brilliant set of people and that I’m going simply to love the next four years of my life. There were two debaters who took part in that discussion and both had a truly ridiculous amount of knowledge and breadth. They had exceptional understanding of the argument from political, social, economic and scientific perspectives, and the arguments and ideas they came up with and articulated eloquently were simultaneously inspiring and overwhelming. I subsequently met someone has very similar academic ambitions as I (physics with a CS twist) and is actually doing the same IHUM (Intro to Humanities) course as me, for the same reason (interest in philosophy). An appreciable proportion of the people I’ve met do programming to a level that exceeds casual interest (a fellow Brit did got through to the British Informatics Olympiad finals … and also does rock climbing). The people here are a hand-picked bunch of ludicrously well-rounded students, and it really makes a difference; I have yet to meet someone who falls into a stereotype – we have athletic, artistic and eloquent techies and logical, philosophical and scientific fuzzies. At first I had some deep academic concerns about choosing Stanford over Cambridge for precisely this reason – I believed that well-roundedness necessarily precludes expertise in any particular area. As it turns out, I was completely wrong, and the opposite is abundantly true. At the convocation speech, the following joke was made: “what do you call someone who only speaks one language? American”. But from what I can tell, a very large proportion of my peers are bilingual (at least). And speaking of people, Reed Jobs is in the same class as me (Stanford 2014) and I saw his dad, the CEO of Apple, at convocation. Just putting that out there…

Steve Jobs at Convocation

Then New Student Orientation (NSO) began. All over campus, the freshmen, a.k.a. ‘frosh’ (if you’re in the UK, read: ‘freshers’) started to arrive and the entire campus had a festive atmosphere. Each new arrival was personally raucously and vociferously greeted by a bunch of ecstatic Residential Assistants (RAs – sophomores and upperclassmen who have volunteered to help with freshmen dorms), and I finally met my roommate! Having gone to a day school and still used to the single-room paradigm at universities, I was slightly nervous about this but it seems Stanford really did their research and have come up with a good match – I think this arrangement will work out very well indeed.

Roble RAs welcoming incoming freshmen

I can’t talk about everything I like / am impressed with / have noticed. I haven’t even mentioned how beautiful the campus is, or how I have yet to see a raindrop. But here is a selection of stuff I happen to be able to remember off the top of my head.

Dorm Themes + cheers

Every dorm has a theme – mine (Otero) is ‘Moterotown’, a mutation of Motown; Robles has ‘Pirates of the CarRoblean’; Burbank’s theme is my personal favourite: ‘The Burbank Theory’, based on the famous TV comedy show ‘The Big Bang Theory’. They even have a poster pointing to a place on the couch saying ‘Sheldon’s seat’!

Further to this, there is a lot of class and dorm pride. Each dorm has several cheers, so at large events we can make our presence loudly felt (we also like shouting ‘FOURTEEEEEN!’ to demonstrate class pride), and after overcoming the initial self-consciousness it’s good fun and seems to contribute to a sense of family, spirit and bonding; I can’t think of a less clichéd / cheesy way of putting it but I’m absolutely genuine. According to the guy I bought my SLR from, his son went to Stanford and his freshman dorm was also Otero, and every year, for some reason or other, the people always bond really well and build longer lasting and deeper friendships with each other than at other dorms. I can see this being true of our dorm this year (our discussions are open and honest, and other people have commented on our spirit and energy when cheering) which leads me to suspect there’s some selection process going on, in which case I’m proud and delighted to have been chosen for Otero. Oh yeah – every dorm has a baby grand piano, a table tennis table and a flatscreen TV in its lounge.

There’s a football game tonight – Stanford v Wake Forest – at our stadium and since I’m irreversibly caught up in school pride, I will be attending and noisily supporting the two footballers who happen to be in my dorm (they’re *enormous*!). Relatedly, in events in which we’re going up against Cal-Berkeley, a popular cheer is ‘Beat Cal’.

Academics

Since classes haven’t actually started yet I can’t say much, but we did have a talk on an incredible CS project undertaken by Stanford students on AI. They developed a robot that could recognise images using what seemed to me as a particularly intelligent statistical approach to AI and image recognition and could (for example) walk to the office to get a stapler. There was also a demonstration of reinforcement machine learning in which a toy helocopter was doing ridiculous stunts all on its own. As it turns out, half the people involved in the entire project were undergrads. There are also incredible opportunities here. If all my near-future plans works out, I’ll be getting an inside-scoop tour of SLAC, meeting and possibly working with the quantum computing guys at IBM and meeting Prof. Leonard Susskind, a legendary string theorist. This is why I chose Stanford.

Speeches + discussions

These people really know how to do inspiring speeches. Dr Harry Elam is one of the strongest speakers I’ve ever heard, and at the end of every speech, regardless of the speaker (yeah there have been quite a few…), I’ve felt inspired and excited about being here. And I’m not normally impressed by this sort of thing.

There was also a ‘Faces of the Community’ event which consisted of some cultural dancing / music (e.g. Japanese drums, jazz dancing etc) but also talks from some really exceptional people (low-income, queer, ethnic minorities, disabled) talking about themselves. All their talks struck me as candid, honest, open, courageous – they must be truly great people to be able to accept their situation, and despite it make a real difference in their community, succeed and thrive in one of the world’s leading universities and above all stand up in front of 2000 strangers and open up. There was a subsequent discussion in the Otero lounge and many of my peers expressed similar sentiments to my own. Speaking of which, throughout NSO we’ve been having reasonably regular dorm discussions on multifarious topics, and again the openness and open-mindedness of our small community’s members is remarkable.

Unrelatedly, on another occasion there were some (pretty damn great) musicians in a band who had to do this cringeworthy music-camp style thing encouraging people to listen to each other. They got two volunteers to come up on stage and play the bass guitar, and they ended up giving away two guitars! I’m not sure what to make of that – it’s an incredible gesture, sponsored by some music company, and whether it reflects more the wealth of Stanford’s alumni or the university’s will to get people to try out new things is debatable. I’m not sure what point I’m trying to make (if at all), but something tells me that sort of thing wouldn’t have happened had I chosen Cambridge!

Geekiness

Despite what I said about well-roundedness, Stanford is undeniably geeky, but in a good way. I received an email whose first line read: “Dear awesome members of Group n, where 0<n<=24 && n∈N*". During our first dorm meeting, the Resident Fellow set out the dorm rules, beginning with 'Don't be stupid'. He continued to define stupidity as 'an act that significantly increases the probability of physical, psychological or financial harm occurring to you or someone else' (I personally think it should be 'an act that significantly increases the expectation of the sum of physical, psychological and financial harm occurring to you or someone else' but hey), and gave a load of examples of stupidity. Abstracting everyday concepts and working with them for sake of argument (and/or comedy) is the sort of thing I do on a regular basis; I think I'll fit in just great!

Health

I’ve managed to go on a jog every morning so far, including one 60-minute run which was a result of my getting lost… Californians are normally pretty health conscious but I am determined never to develop a shape whose parameters can be summarised by a radius (i.e. any sort of spheroid). Let’s see how long this is going to last… There was also a swing dancing class as part of NSO which was very reminiscent of Ceroc which I used to do (a bit) in London. It’s actually offered as a 1-unit class and therefore contributes towards a degree. It was also good exercise.

Miscellaneous

There’s a free bus service (‘the Marguerite’) around campus and nearby bits of Palo Alto, which apparently used to be horse-drawn (it’s now powered by hybrids, or something green like that). Stanford is also the most bike-friendly place I’ve ever been – I’ve seen more bike parks around campus than I have in the whole of London, and buses (including the Marguerite) have bike racks on the front.

The food is also pretty good. It’s not quite as luxurious as the specially-arranged food I got whenever I was at Cambridge for events (this includes Trinity, Corpus and St Cats) but it’s very decent, and much better than what I’ve been eating at school for the last ten years.

One thing I’ve noticed is most stuff in America is cheesier than most Brits would expect. The Kennedy Space Centre had some of the cheesiest exhibits I’ve ever seen, and even here the icebreakers and cheering etc. just make me feel self-conscious and uneasy and serious points made in these situations just make me want to laugh!

So yeah. Beat Cal!

I apologise if this post is probably not massively helpful to anyone thinking of applying: it’s most certainly biased, contains only one point of view and it’s written by someone who’s only been here a week. It’s more of a stream of consciousness affair – a disorganised and ineloquent splashing of ideas onto a page, and I haven’t said everything I want to (if I had, I’d’ve written an extremely fat book). I just wanted to say I’m happy, and am sure I made the right decision after agonising for literally months over my choice of Stanford, Harvard and Cambridge. In almost every comparison I’ve subconsciously made of myself with my year group at Stanford, I’ve felt inadequate and overwhelmed. I used to think I was pretty clever, but I now know that’s really not the case. For the first time in my life I’m acutely aware that I’m in the company of people who will shape the future and create the world of tomorrow – I’ve finally found a group for which I believe it. I feel that this is where I belong but simultaneously massively outclassed in every aspect. It’s bizarre, and wonderful.

Stanford at night. It's damn pretty.

SPS, SPGS, LU, G&L Trip to Florida

I’m back from an exhausting, exhilarating and grossly exercise-deficient 9-day trip to Florida. This was originally meant as a school physics trip (much like the ‘physics trip’ to Thorpe Park…) to see the penultimate shuttle launch. Sadly the launch was delayed to November, and the rocket launch that was supposed to have replaced the shuttle launch also didn’t happen in the end. Fortunately, it is very difficult to go to FL and get bored, so we had a pretty packed schedule. For me it was one heck of a trip for several reasons, but mainly because there were about 100 other like-minded secondary school students on the trip, and also because it was the first time I’ve been to the US since I was born (I left CA, where I was born, when I was a toddler so everything was new to me) In brief, and in pictures (click any pic to embiggen, or click here to see them all):

Scary

Day 0 – Flight in

We had dinner at Ponderosa, a buffet where, as Matthew put it, we ate so much that we became sad afterwards. Presumably a combination of feeling ill and sleepy, or some sort of shock from having eaten so much oil.

Sunset combined with the East Coast clouds is beautiful. The photo, taken through a double-glazed window, really doesn't do it justice at all.

Day 1 – Baseball, Beach

We were taken to watch a baseball match in the morning. It was something like the national U16’s baseball final, and I didn’t find it hugely entertaining; compared to cricket, the batsman seems to miss most of the time and I seem to remember points (runs?) were scored extremely infrequently.

This is a freakily timed shot - I think the ball itself appears between the legs of the fielder (!)

We spent the afternoon at Cocoa Beach. There wasn’t a trace of any oil, presumably because some poor team of people is paid to somehow keep it at bay by trawling, scraping or shovelling the black mess someplace else, so we got the famous golden sand + glistening ocean experience. Which was pretty cool :)

Pelicans sometimes dive-bomb the water to get fish. They're awesome that way.

Day 2 – Universal Studios

Florida’s famous for its theme parks, so we spent the day at Universal Studios. I was surprised by the amount of care, effort and cash pumped into the actual theming of the rides. I found the Simpsons ride unreasonably effective; it was effectively a glorified ‘4D’ (I hate that name…) experience, but by adjusting the tilt and roll of the entire platform to provide a ‘g-force’ direction and having screen practically surrounding the riders (I’d say at least 2 pi steradians), some really incredible effects were achieved.

I can't remember this beast's name. But it was extremely fun, even though there were no inversions.

The universe revolves around me...

We dined at Hard Rock Cafe which was apparently really good, but some of us, me included, were still full at the time (burgers for lunch etc.) that we didn’t eat anything (dinner was ridiculously early; at 4:30)…

Day 3 – Kennedy Space Centre; Lunch with an Astronaut

We explored the KSC Visitor Centre in the morning and did the shuttle launch experience, which I thought was an impressively well-designed piece of kit; they even used the lumbar to give the impression of forward acceleration (relative to the rider’s frame of reference). We then had ‘lunch with an astronaut’ which actually just meant a really tasty lunch during which an astronaut appeared, gave a talk, took some questions and offered photo ops. I had the distinct impression he had been asked to dumb down his talk as much as possible – he answered almost all the questions as if reading from a simple.wikipedia.org page printed in Comic Sans. He did quote an equation which he claimed was related to Kepler but which we had never heard of before, and when we asked him about it he implied Kepler had derived it using linear regression on Tycho Brahe’s data, which could have described any of Kepler’s laws. I suspect it was derived from his laws and energy considerations but seeing as nobody could remember the equation afterwards I decided to drop the matter.

The VAB: the world's second largest building by volume, and it has its own weather...

Day 4 – KSC; Astronaut Training

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this day but I was actually pretty pleased with how it all panned out. There were some great displays and tours including old space equipment with accompanying stories (corned beef springs to mind), there were live demonstrations of the heat-proofing tiling material used on the orbiter and the hygroscopic powder used in the space toilets (sodium polyacrylate). We did a role-playing exercise of operating the shuttle on a mission, and of course we each had goes in the astronaut gyro things. The organisers were friendly and I thought it was a thoroughly worthwhile day.

Day 5 – Free day at KSC

The centre is actually really massive, including up-close coach tours to the launch sites and the legendary VAB (the Vehicle Assembly Building, which is allegedly so big that rainclouds form inside it). We were told about the ‘twang’ (the brief tipping forward of the entire shuttle before takeoff when the main engines are turned on), the difference between the orbiter (the plane-like thing) and the shuttle (the entire orbiter + external tank + boosters system), and the stages of shuttle launch (which I honestly can’t remember. SRBSep [Solid Rocket Booster Separation] and ETSep [External Tank Separation] happen in that order, I think…), and even had wildlife pointed out to us (including a truly enormous bald eagle nest that’s been around for almost 50 years). Apparently there are something like 320 species of bird on the complex.

Full-scale model of the Saturn V rocket. It's MASSIVE!

Day 6 – Island Adventure Theme Park

More theme parks! All I’ll say is that Harry Potter Land was unbelievably crowded (45 mins queue to get into a shop), butterbeer tastes like Dr Pepper with a 0.5cm thick layer of vanilla cream on top, and Duelling Dragons is probably the most impressively designed ride I’ve ever been on – the timing and closeness of the near-collisions are truly incredible, and the density of twists and turns made me lose track of the true direction of ‘up’, which has never happened to me on any other ride (and I’ve been on quite a few).

The Hulk. Great ride, pulled some pretty big gs

Harry Potter Land - beautifully themed.

Day 7 – Airboating

Airboats are simply awesome vehicles. They are capable of going into (basically) a drift at top speed without the least bit of instability, and you stop by turning them 180° and turning up the fans while going backwards. We managed to snap a load of wildlife with some helpful pointers from the driver.

These go incredibly quickly and have scarily good stability. They're like hovercrafts, but *much* better.

You can just about see a bald eagle near the top right of the tree

I have no idea why this didn't blur or be focussed on the wrong thing (like my camera usually does)

We also visited the mall, which was almost entirely clothes, shoes, jewelry and food, as expected…

Miscellaneous Observations

Lots of the stuff I was told about the US and/or Florida actually turned out to be spectacularly true. The cars are, almost without exception, enormous. Most parking lots are easily 0.5m wider than in the UK. People are generally friendly, happy and Anglophilic (it was also the first time I’d come across a customs person who smiled at me). The food portions are ludicrous, leading to the unmitigated and undeniable crassulence of an alarming proportion of the people. And the skies are just beautiful.

A beautiful and bizarrely radiating-patterned sunset

For some reason there's something beautiful about the skies in Florida. Most of the time, every type of cloud, from cumulostratus to cumulonimbus to cirrus is represented.

P.S. Interestingly, I actually managed to lose 1 lb. Go figure.

Imperial Physics Interview / Religion Debate

Two relatively bloggable things happened yesterday so I’ll make some attempt to reconstruct them here in words.

Imperial Physics Interview

I think I’ll do what Farhan did last year in the spirit of open source (kinda) and say something about my interview.

I arrived at 12:30 in time for the tour after just about managing to find the mysterious room 306 (hidden in a sort of conference room). There was someone who had made it all the way from Poland for this and various people who had made arduous journeys from all over the country, so I almost felt guilty about having had such an easy trip – 20 minutes on the No 10 down HSK. We got given a general walk round and free lunch (always a good thing) and were even (jokingly) offered a pint by the tour guide before our interviews!

The 12 of us with interviews that day were split up into three groups of four – I was interviewed with the three others applying for the four-year ‘Physics with Theoretical Physics’ course. We were first all sat together and had the course run past us – it all sounds pretty awesome with ‘complex analysis’ and ‘mathematical analysis’ both being taught in the first year (GL said once the sign of a good maths course is mathematical analysis being taught in the first year). We all went off for a quick (free) tea session in the lunching area (I was hoping to catch some of the ion trapping people from my work experience but they had probably by then left) during which we discussed relativity and space-time diagrams and the concept of ‘now’ which was pretty interesting.

Then we were all sat outside the room and were called in individually for interview. I was the last (a consequence of alphabetical ordering) and the people who went before me seemed to find it OK – one said she had to sketch ‘some graph’ and explain ‘something physics-ey’ and everyone seemed to have got two questions – so I didn’t think it would be too bad.

So I went in and immediately saw a Newton’s cradle sitting on the desk in front of my interviewer. Her research interest was quantum gravity and was being shadowed by someone who was interested in explosions and generally breaking things Mythbusters style, which is cool. She didn’t mention my personal statement at all and just asked me why I wanted to do physics (as opposed to maths) and why I wanted to go to Imperial. I said I liked being able to see concepts happen in real life, to which she pointed out relativity isn’t exactly the average real life situation. I said something about being able to touch and feel and see stuff in action, and applying maths to stuff and seeing it work, which she seemed satisfied with – ‘I know exactly what you mean’.

She then gestured towards the pad of paper and asked me to differentiate 2^x. Following standard procedure I just rearranged it into e^xln2 and differentiated that, though I didn’t / forgot to turn (ln2)e^xln2 back into (ln2)2^x at the end. She seemed happy and said ‘yup that’s right’ then asked me whether I knew what the thing on the desk was. I successfully identified it as a Newton’s cradle and explained that each collision is elastic and that this results in the inboud ball stopping and the next one going forwards with the same velocity as the inbound one, etc, with some support from a fumbling demonstration.

She then asked me a question about a ping pong ball and a golf ball being dropped such that the former is directly over the latter from 1m, and she asked me how high the ping pong ball would bounce. I invoked the coefficient of restitution and said let the velocity at the bottom be v. Golf ball bounces, goes up with v. Ping pong ball bounces against this, goes up with 3v. Invoking conservation of energy twice the answer came out to be 9m – which was right, apparently. That’s quite high…

She then asked me how long it takes a photon to get from when the universe became transparent to now. I looked confused and for some reason tried to resist the temptation to ask ‘from whose frame of reference?’, though it turned out that’s what the question was asking. I drew a space-time diagram and made a pretty dreadful estimate of the age of the universe [my estimate turned out to be about the age of the earth; note to self: learn some of these numbers sometime…] and asked for clarification on the question. She said it was a trick question and said it’s about frames of reference, at which point I realised it was indeed a relativity question and said ‘zero’ with a slightly botched-up explanation using t = yt’ [note to self: try to remember which side y is on!]. I guess I should have drawn the thing with the axes changing angle on the space-time diagram but nvm…

At the end she said she can’t tell me whether I have an offer and if so it will be with an A* (I *think* I heard that correctly, and it’s possible ‘further maths’ was mentioned in the same sentence – so that was a bit of a surprise). Apparently the school wrote me a good reference, which is good.

EDIT: should probably also say offers/rejections in several weeks

It was all over by 5pm as promised so I had some time to kill before the religion debate at 6:45 (next part of this topically bimodal post).

Intelligence Squared Debate: Religion

More specifically the motion was “The Catholic Church is a force for good in the world”. Matthew, Theo and I, the proud founders of the SPS Sceptic Society, were once again reunited to watch Christopher Hitchens (Writer, broadcaster and polemicist, author of the bestselling book “God is not Great”) and Stephen Fry (Actor, author, comedian and television presenter) debate against Archbishop John Onaiyekan (Roman Catholic Archbishop of Abuja, Nigeria) and Rt Hon Ann Widdecombe (Conservative MP and Catholic convert) (descriptions taken from the I² page). As always I tried to write some notes – here they are in pretty condensed form. {curly brackets} indicate words external to what the speaker said, e.g. comments. I’ve also abbreviated names slightly, and nothing is word-for-word

1st speaker: Archbishop – For

• General stuff about his father and him and all his family being Catholic {Matthew suggested this sounded like the start of a sermon}
• Questioned what sort of ‘force’ the debate was about. He thinks the ‘force’ is a spiritual message, spread around the world, and the force is what this message teaches etc.
• Comments about the sheer size of the ‘force’
• Said that if you ask anyone in Nigeria they’ll tell you the Catholic church is a force for good {according to WJB if you ask 80% of people in Europe they’ll tell you that only GM food has DNA…}
• Quotes statistics about what {I would describe as satisfied customers}
• {Actually I have to say, it did sound like a sermon}

2nd speaker: Hitchens {to much applause!} – Against

• Started with some witty banter
• Said the opposition should have started with a list of apologies {to much applause}
• Started listing crimes against humanity the Catholic Church has committed {a couple were incorrect I think, and also the debate is the present – lots of his examples were from centuries ago. Still valid though, as we will see later}
• Child abuse – the church tried to excuse itself for it instead of apologising
• Said something about antisemitism {lots of audience tuts}
• Religion goes against the method of free thinking and scepticism
• Quote’s Stephen Fry’s situation {Fry turned out to be a really strong speaker because of this later}
• Talked about the ‘sale’ of remuneration – paying for people to pray for you
• {I thought Hitchens would be stronger – he was, of course, as always pretty harsh and blunt, but he wasn’t as fired up as he was in some of his previous debates}

3rd speaker: MP – For

• Claims Hitchens misrepresented the Catholic Church {sarcastic applause from Hitchens!}
• Picked up on Hitchens talking about the past, not present
• Picked up on antisemitism thing
• Quotes WWII – helping Jews
• Quotes christians having to renounce faith to join SS {considering Nazism was pretty anti-christian anyways I don’t think this is a particularly valid point}
• Torture – last time’s standards were different so everyone was guilty, not just the church {Fry and the audience tear this apart later}
• Talks about child abuse – church ‘powerless’ to do anything, magistrates etc. also at fault
• Charity – $Bns given to charity {I wonder how much this is in comparison with the church’s wealth…}
• Hope argument – church gives hope to people
• she said ‘I knew condoms would come up’ – tried to make a joke of it {general audience tuts, someone shouted “how dare you laugh at that!”}

4th speaker: Fry – Against

• Started completely differently from Hitchens – said he’s fine with people believing and seeking enlightenment etc. – shows no hostility towards them
• Attacked MP’s point about past vs present – MP basically said ‘history is not important, so let’s forget about it’
• Talked about purgatory, people paying to bypass purgatory / go to heaven; referenced South Park’s version of purgatory (!)
• Quotes ‘outside the church, there is no salvation’ being used to excuse horrific deeds
• Church commands people to be ignorant, prevents them thinking for themselves
• Catholic Church deems itself the only owner of the truth and bullies people into believing
• Current Pope on child abuse: “We do not have the power of a nation” <- yes you do
• Commented on women’s equality
• Apparently the pope wrote a letter / made an announcement to child-abusing priests: [paraphrasing] “do not talk to the police, keep it secret, talk to me instead”. Pope claimed solution is to stop “homosexuals from entering the church”
• {either Hitchens or Fry made this following point} The church ‘sentenced’ one child-abusing priest to ‘a lifetime of prayer’ instead of several months / years in prison
• Church doesn’t need to exacerbate existing gay stigma
• Stephen Fry said: “I find it ridiculous that I am being called a perv by such extraordinarily sexually dysfunctional people” {*huge* applause + laugh, proposition looking really pissed off}
• Pope spread false lie that condoms makes AIDS spreading worse – instead of making useful suggestions
• church obsessed with sex. Comparison with food – church equivalent of anorexic and obese {more huge audience support}
• Proposed solution: pope gives back all of Vatican’s wealth to those from whom the church has stolen {even more audience cheer}

Before the debate the audience had pre-voted thus:
FOR: 678
AGAINST: 1102
ABS: 346

Questions

• Catholic Church broke 5 UN conventions on child abuse – should not be allowed to get away with this
• To Archbishop: Q “which Catholic policy are you most ashamed of?” A “I am ashamed of none of them”
• To proposition: “do you need the Vatican’s wealth?”
• To proposition on torture: “even though the standards of the time are xyz, isn’t the truth of the Church doctrine ‘eternal’?”. Church had changed mind on slavery for example. Seems like church in constant state of limbo. MP says “limbo = ‘second light'” – {only huge audience groan in entire debate}

Conclusions

Stephen Fry

• MP groaning: “I knew condoms etc would be brought up” – a bit like a burglar groaning in court “I knew my burglary would be brought up” {audience cheer}
• Constantly wasted opportunity for Catholic church to do something by giving away lots of its wealth – until then, not force for good

MP

• Reason for people having children in Nigeria is they need someone to look after them when they are old {relevance?}
• Says no statistical evidence for condoms preventing AIDS {so pope justified in spreading lies?? Theo and I agree she’s crazy}

Hitchens

• Thoughtcrime argument – catholic church essentially enforcing regime of thoughtcrime

Archbishop

• Basically said history doesn’t matter again {even though point previously successfully rebutted by Fry}
• Said he cares about his own relatives and he is happy for them to be Catholic etc. {urgh. There were two parents who fed their baby a litre of salt to punish it. I’m sure they cared about their kid, they just didn’t know giving it salt would be a bad idea. This point isn’t really valid.}

After the debate the results were thus:

FOR: 268
AGAINST: 1862
ABS: 334 {I think – it might have been 34. Can’t check by adding up since audience size was changing throughout debate}

Stephen Fry was a ridiculously strong speaker in this – even stronger than Hitchens, and despite my weak preconception that the Catholic church wasn’t doing much good, after this debate I am now quite convinced that it’s, if anything, a force for evil. Fry shouted twice (or even thrice) in that – he really is passionate about this topic.

Other highlights include us spotting Derren Brown in the audience and a priest in the audience standing up and totally siding with Stephen Fry.

EDIT: whenever I mention the ‘church’ I mean the Catholic church, just to avoid any confusion. As Fry pointed out, he has nothing against Quakers, for example.

Copyright Infringement

This is in fact my Economics essay for the Barnett Prize. The person who marked it thought it was a terrible essay (fair enough), but I still think it’s interesting to discuss. So here it is, however horrific an essay, after being cut down to exactly 1500 words, and with a less bellicose attitude towards the RIAA than normal (for the sake of being PC). It’s entitled “Steal this Essay”. This is also an experiment to see how well WordPress’ ‘import from Word’ feature works. I have to say, I’m impressed by how it deals with footnotes and citations/bibliographies.

Using a specific microeconomic case study from either the UK or abroad, assess how governments can deal with market failure.

Copyright infringement is a growing concern in the music and film industry. Despite the best efforts of governments, private firms, law-enforcement agencies and cyber-police, the amount of music and film in illegal circulation over the internet has grown at an exponential rate since the conception of Napster, the first peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing service to hit the internet. According to Ars Technica (1), usage of Bittorrent, a popular tool used by file sharers, grew 24% in five months, and Bittorrent is apparently responsible for 80% of the world’s traffic. Global music sales dropped from $38bn in 1999 to $32bn in 2003 and American studios reported $2.3bn in losses to film piracy in 2005 alone (2). Free market forces are failing: talent starved of adequate funding will fail to flourish and music, entertainment and culture may be eroded as a result. Without consumers willing to pay for goods produced by talented artists, such artists will be unable to invest profits in creating more music (they may opt to record fewer CDs), and supply of the product decreases, increasing its cost which in this case further exacerbates losses leading to a vicious cycle. With revenue from their music falling, artists may choose to switch careers, discontinuing their contributions to music: the labour supply decreases, as does the pool of musical talent. Culturally, the negative externalities of this are highly significant, resulting in a shallower music culture.

In my opinion, the primary reason for file sharing is simply convenience. The internet allows even very large amounts of data to be transferred at zero cost and supersonic speeds; the temptation to cheat the system becomes irresistible: the opportunity cost of buying a CD from a local store, which involves both monetary as well as time sacrifices, is far greater than the single mouse click it takes to download the entire album. Pirated media can be seen as a substitute good for which consumers pay with risk of getting caught rather than with conventional currency; industry is losing out to this illegal competition.

Existent government measures have proven ineffectual at best. For a while law enforcement worked: the RIAA[1] and MPAA[2] succeeded in intimidating file sharers into accepting monetary settlements out of court, thereby recouping losses and deterring potential copyright criminals. However when exonerated file sharers began to sue the RIAA back (3), subsequent copyright lawsuits became somewhat anathematised and digital rights organisations procured an increasingly unpopular and disrespected reputation for aggressive methods (as illustrated). One of the primary difficulties is the issue of evidence: piracy is exceedingly difficult to detect with ever-advancing encryption technology. Taking the current trial of The Pirate Bay[3] as an example of ineffectuality, on the second day of the trial half the charges have already been dropped (4) (at the time of writing this). To make things worse, the music industry’s attempts to cover itself from piracy only punish the law-abiding: employment of digital rights management on music by online retailers such as Apple renders the files unusable with anything but iTunes and iPods, causing frustration, heavily discouraging the buying of music.

The government has attempted to enforce the law through Internet Service Providers (ISPs): since they provide the means to perform illegal activities, perhaps it should be their responsibility to police their networks. In 2008, the UK’s largest six[4] ISPs[5] agreed (5) to a code laid out by the government: if an ISP has reasonable evidence upon which to suspect a customer of illegally downloading music, it will throttle his download speeds significantly. This appears promising: a large proportion of the country is now under surveillance by ISPs and users have an incentive to stop file sharing; Virgin Media even sent out warning letters to several hundred of its file sharing customers. However the government is pitting itself directly against the free market forces: as pointed out by the Wired article (5), it is far more probable that they were merely taking measures against losing customers: firms appreciate the revenue from them. In addition, ISPs abiding by this code are likely to lose business owing to a pervasive sense of intrusion from being constantly monitored. Besides, imposing regulations on businesses raises supply costs (employing a monitoring team for example), shifting the supply curve leftwards, resulting in a more expensive, and less abundant, good or service:

[Insert bog standard Economics AS/AD diagram]

One suggestion was for the government to accept the fact that internet users will share files, and rather than fight this unwinnable war, to tax broadband usage and return tax revenue to industry, thus compensating for the market failure. Unsurprisingly this has been met with much fury: not only does this demonstrate great cynicism and mistrust on the government’s part, but it may actually exacerbate the problem: consumers might decide that since they have paid for their illegal downloads they are entitled to download copyrighted material.

Alternatively, similarly to using disturbing television advertisements about lacking TV licences, the government could attempt to threaten the population into submission. There is good evidence that advertising works with anti-smoking campaigns, so there appears to be a high probability of success with this measure. Again the government is no longer working against the free market: it is rather injecting information into the market and allowing consumers to make a better-informed decision. Unlike regulation, such measures preserve human rights and can be highly effective in combination with other measures. Unfortunately, unlike the case of smoking and even TV licences, a savvy file sharer knows he can hide his activities indefinitely: threatening advertisements do not work for such people (who also tend to be the heaviest sharers). Education may eventually curb the problem through generations of law-abiding citizens, but such slow-acting measures may not be sufficiently effective in the short run to avert cultural erosion.

In September 2007, it was discovered that a large (needless to say illegal) cyber-offensive was being planned (6) against The Pirate Bay by MediaDefender[6] in an attempt to halt file sharing activity. Although it was discovered and averted, perhaps such measures are the only ones that will work: aggressive attacks on the central hive of activity; this is after all what governments are accustomed to doing when dealing with terrorists and criminals. However, despite a worldwide offensive on terrorism, ever since September 2001, little, if not negative, progress has been made against it; what guarantees the success of an offensive against a worldwide network of highly intelligent anonymous criminals?

Perhaps to understand fully the nature of this market failure, one should reconsider the extent and type of damage done by file sharing, and also take into account its positive aspects. According to US District Judge James P. Jones (7), ‘17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales’. If a customer wants some music but is not prepared to pay the price quoted on Amazon (indicating he is not willing and able to pay for it), he would not be in the market in the first place, so the music industry should be indifferent to whether he downloads that music illegally in the end. Of course this line of reasoning cannot be extended too far, but the point is that not every illegal download harms industry. In fact there was a study (8) (English synopsis (9)) commissioned by the Dutch government which concluded that in fact file sharing contributes €100m per year to the Dutch economy. Apparently much downloaded content becomes treated as sample content to be bought later, and downloaders tend to buy more games than non-downloaders (possibly an effect of exposure to online marketing). In addition, the positive externalities of file sharing include broader cultural wealth. By annihilating file sharing, the government would lose out on positive externalities as well as negative ones. The report concludes that most losses can be attributed to things other than piracy, including competition with other forms of entertainment. Notably in The Netherlands, downloading media for personal use is legal. Perhaps an unconventional solution to the market failure is to legalise file sharing, thus maximising the social benefits and accepting the (minimal) social costs. Besides, surveys show that 80% of British people would be in favour of this measure (10).

In conclusion, business has taken a radical new direction since the concept of ‘free goods’ first appeared. Google provides millions with enormously powerful search facilities for free and receives its revenue largely from advertising. According to Wikinomics (11), ‘free and collaborative’ (complete with externalities) is the future, whether we like it or not. I believe governments should embrace this future and work with the market, rather than fight it. Whatever the solution to the problem of copyright infringement eventually turns out to be, I suspect, and hope, that the RIAA and MPAA will not be closely involved, that free market tools will be capitalised upon, and that the positive externalities of change will be fully appreciated.

Bibliography

1. Bangeman, Eric. BitTorrent use soars as MPAA fights on against P2P sites. ars technica. [Online] 17 04 2008. http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/04/bittorrent-use-soars-as-mpaa-fights-on-against-p2p-sites.ars.

2. File sharing. Wikipedia. [Online] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_sharing.

3. Oregon RIAA Victim Fights Back. Recording Industry vs The People. [Online] http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2005/10/oregon-riaa-victim-fights-back-sues.html.

4. enigmax. 50% of Charges Against Pirate Bay Dropped. TorrentFreak. [Online] 17 02 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/50-of-charges-against-pirate-bay-dropped-090217/.

5. Buskirk, Eliot Van. British ISPs Agree To Curb File Sharers’ Internet Access. Wired. [Online] 23 07 2008. http://blog.wired.com/music/2008/07/uk-could-announ.html.

6. Leyden, John. Pirate Bay sues media giants for ‘sabotage’. The Register. [Online] 24 09 2007. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/09/24/pirate_bay_counterstrike/.

7. Cheng, Jacqui. Judge: 17,000 illegal downloads don’t equal 17,000 lost sales. ars technica. [Online] 19 01 2009. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/01/judge-17000-illegal-downloads-dont-equal-17000-lost-sales.ars.

8. Ups and downs – Economische en culturele gevolgen van file sharing voor muziek, film en games. TNO. [Online] 2009. http://tno.nl/content.cfm?context=markten&content=publicatie&laag1=182&laag2=1&item_id=473.

9. Ernesto. Economy Profits From File-Sharing, Report Concludes. TorrentFreak. [Online] 19 01 2009. http://torrentfreak.com/economy-profits-from-file-sharing-report-concludes-090119/.

10. Orlowski, Andrew. 80% want legal P2P – survey. The Register. [Online] 16 06 2008. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/16/bmr_music_survey/.

11. Tapscott, Don and Williams, Anthony D. Wikinomics. London : Atlantic Books, 2007. ISBN 978-1-84354-637-5.

12. P2P Survey Results. In HIIT. [Online] 2007. http://inhiit.blogspot.com/2007/09/p2p-survey-results.html.

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[1] Recording Industry Association of America

[2] Moving Pictures Association of America

[3] A large Bittorrent tracker and hub of illegal piracy

[4] Virgin Media, Sky, Carphone Warehouse, BT, Orange and Tiscali

[5] Internet Service Providers

[6] Anti-piracy company

A Sceptical Take on the Financial Crisis

By no means am I denying that the world is in some pretty deep financial you-know-what. But from where I’m seeing things – mostly from my computer in London – there appear to be several potential misconceptions about the entire crisis about how it began, how it will end, the people involved in it and how bad it is. I’ll admit that I don’t read the FT every day. However from the few financial RSS feeds I’m subscribed to and the occasional article I read in the Economist or Moneyweek, I keep feeling instinctively compelled to draw conclusions which I don’t think necessarily ring true and increasingly feel the need to stop and wonder whether the journalism I’m being fed really represents what is going on out there in the real business world. I’ve always been advised not to believe what I read, so here’s me questioning it.

Doom Prophets aren’t all geniuses

Newsnight (BBC), Squawk Box (CNBC) and various other financial and news programmes seem incredibly fond of bringing in various great geniuses who supposedly predicted this crisis for interviews. I have no doubt that there are people out there with a far superior understanding of the market than even the most experienced bankers, and that indeed some of them did predict this crisis. However with a new doom prophet appearing on CNBC practically every week I begin to wonder whether some of these people just got lucky. While it may seem ridiculous to suggest that someone who predicted such an apparently surprising turn of events did so purely out of luck, it is a fact that every economic system ever devised has had problems with it which would result in some amount of instability, be these problems due to imbalance of power or wealth, or some cyclic boom/bust sequence. If such a perfect system did exist which somehow balanced fairness with economic efficiency and stability and utilitarian (or otherwise) happiness (or utility, if you like), it would surely be in place somewhere, if not everywhere in the world. The so-called doomsayers therefore only have to pick one of these problems and hope to be proven correct. Since there is a limited number of obvious problems which can lead to a disaster, when that disaster happens, chances are that there will be a substantial handful of people who hadn’t a clue what they were doing yet still managed to predict it. I reiterate my previous disclaimer: I’m not saying every doom prophet was playing dice with his predictions; I’m merely pointing out that with such a large base of doomsayers, it’s statistically probable that when something happens someone will have got it right.

It’s not -that- bad

Reading the news and scrolling through the business section of the BBC website (or looking at the RSS feed), I can’t help but notice the frequency of articles containing painful details of firms laying of thousands more workers, or taking severe losses, or going into administration – the list goes on (almost) ad infinitum… There was an interesting post on Lifehacker a while back about information overload due to the financial crisis. As media become increasingly efficient at broadcasting the only type of news that customers love: bad news, the average citizen becomes increasingly over-alarmed at increasingly over-dramatised situations. My mum for example has an interesting impression of the world: she advised me not to respond to a snowball thrown at me for fear that if I throw a snowball back the original thrower in question would pull out a gun and shoot me. This I hope is an extreme example and I’m more than sure the crisis is dead serious. However the amount of dystopian news/journalism flooding into my brain through my eyes and ears every day does seem to suggest the picture isn’t quite as black and white as the BBC says it is.

Maths works!

I was actually quite outraged when I woke up one morning to hear Nick Ferrari denouncing Mathematics as the cause of the financial crisis and going on proudly to broadcast to London’s Biggest Conversation his ineptitude at all things numerical. Of course I had heard of how financial mathematical models had failed to take into account risk as they should have done. However from what I see of comments on financial articles, statisticians appear to have become even more unpopular than CEOs, and I cannot sit back and accept this. I believe it’s not the Maths that was at fault. The models that were created were perfect considering the assumptions made by the quantitative analysts and theorists who dreamt them up in the first place. If all the assumptions made were true, a perfectly-constructed mathematical model would have always provided the best answer possible. In fact, even the people who came up with the models, on the whole, aren’t to blame in my opinion. They were forced by the complexity of the problem to make certain assumptions. With the market so chaotic, what option did they have but to model it as a basically stochastic system? The people who really are at fault are the ones who chose, with incomplete knowledge of the Mathematics, to act upon the results of it. Michael Hintze, head of CQS, apparently once said something to the effect that ‘Maths is a great place to start but a terrible one to end’. I couldn’t agree more: Mathematics functions under the general rule: Garbage In, Garbage Out. It will work perfectly given perfect data. But owing to the incomplete nature of information in the market, it simply cannot be relied on as much as those who did rely on it thought it could. So rather than complaining about how Maths has failed the world, Nick should have been complaining about how it was abused to the point of disaster.

We won’t do this again, promise

There are occasional optimists who claim that the situation we’re all in at present is good for the world in the long run. The line of argument often quoted is something like ‘we will learn from this’ and so ‘the world will become a better place’. The idea is that market failure and economic disaster may be averted in future owing to great revelations during this slight blip. There was a person last year who came to talk at St Paul’s who pointed out that ‘better’ is a very subjective word when it comes to technology. He used the example of sending a man to the moon. Back in 1969 it took an 8-bit computer, some pretty good theory and some enthusiasm on the part of a NASA team to beat the Russians to send a man to the moon. According to the speaker (apologies as I have forgotten the name) the red tape that would need to be dealt with in order to send a man to the moon now would be impenetrable and it would be highly unlikely for NASA to fund a trip to the moon. There are also several advantages of CRT screens over LCD screens which have been lost such as wide viewing angles and low latency. Omnipresent surveillance is also a direct result of improved technology although some would argue the Labour government has more to do with that. The speaker’s argument was that rather than progressing linearly, some things get better and some worse as technology advances, and progress can be seen more as a rotation than a step forwards. I suspect the same happens with Economics. Bloomberg was a huge hit, yet it has made trading so much more complicated and made it so much harder to make money against a semi-automated market brimming with information. Whether that is a step forwards or backwards is up to you to decide. Returning to learning lessons, the government can’t be everywhere at once and watchdogs and regulators won’t be able to prevent the inevitable cycle of boom and bust which seems to be a feature built into Capitalism. After all, since when has man learnt lessons from his mistakes?

Will the world ever learn?

So to conclude, all I’m saying is that I think the truth is somewhat different to what most people interpret from what they read in the Financial Times LEX Column. As Moneyweek exaggerated, generally speaking there is no such thing as a ‘good investor’, merely a lucky one. Mathematicians cannot and should not be held responsible for misuse of their work, and the future will not necessarily be a better place because everyone has somehow learnt lessons. We will probably not learn enough from this, or any, crash/recession/depression/[whatever state of badness it is now] to avert all possible future crises. I guess the moral of the story is not to believe everything you read. Or perhaps simply to read less into what you read. Or perhaps simply to read less!

Brent Roos: A Short but Amusing Story

I suppose when you create a blog you’re signing up to being exposed to the blogosphere in all its glory, including the bloggers who really don’t deserve to be heard. Unfortunately there are some of us, me included, who find some of the stuff people say irresistibly funny; I hope you share my sense of humour :).

Brent's Avatar

Many of you reading this may be acquainted, at least in passing and/or by word of mouth, with the story of a certain extreme nationalist American blogger by the name of Brent Roos who has recently attempted to lay comment-waste to this blog. So I reckon he deserves a post of his own for his efforts. His online presence took the form of a curious persona who seems extremely religious (Christian), extremely right-wing (neither of the US candidates were good enough for him. Neither was my – apparently insufficient – distaste of Communism in China, for that matter) and notoriously rude. As it turns out, it all made for quite a good laugh. Perhaps I should start from the beginning…

Some time ago I wrote a blog post on global warming. I thought it would end up passing by the blogosphere with little comment. My expectations were, I thought, confirmed until fairly recently when I was in China and had just blogged about the whole experience. The first thing I noticed when I next logged on was that this apparently crazy person had written a few quite aggressive comments.

Brent on Shanghai:

So, how’s the communism there? Funny how you mention magnificent things that put you in awe, but seem to forget to ever mention the horrific human atrocities by the communists there who have killed tens of millions of people — whose only crimes were wishing freedom.
Personally, I would never step foot in China. But then again, I loathe the communist.

Brent on global warming:

Blah, blah, blah…. 2008 is the coldest year in a decade. This is nothing more than alarmism and fear-mongering. 30 years ago it was global cooling.
As far as oil is concerned, if not for the fearmongering, we would be drilling for much more oil here in the states. We are the only country on the planet which has restricted itself from it’s own natural resources to the extent that we have.
What is taking place here is not unlike many of the other institutions that the government has seized over the last several months and years. They have seized the media, the banking/mortgage industry, now the auto industry, etc. The energy industry is more global so they cannot just simply seize that. So instead, they reinvent it, claiming that the current system IS GOING TO KILL US ALL!!!!! In other words, this is a takeover…wake up! We are becoming a socialist country right before our eyes. Granted, there are many who want this, because it is far easier to let the government take responsibility for your life, than to do it yourself. If you do it yourself, the only one you can blame when you fail is yourself, however, without failure, there comes no success.
All of the fancy words are crap when you finally get to the point. Global warming/cooling/climate change/enter fearmongering buzzword here/ is total crapola. Don’t believe the hype sheeple…

I attempted to be civilised while smiling to myself:

Brent,
I, and pretty much all scientists, still think the evidence points towards a long-term upwards trend in temperatures. The point I’m trying to press though is that the solution should no longer lie in this religious instinct of humans to make themselves suffer through deprivation and force others to do likewise. As Steven E Landsberg quite aptly put in his book The Armchair Economist, eco warriors are nothing more than irrational idiots who will do all sorts of unspeakable things just to get a few energy-saving bulbs into a house while completely ignoring the fact that the production of the wretched things is (supposedly, according to their own models of carbon dioxide and warming) far more detrimental than the gases emitted in the production of the electricity required to run the average 150W bulb. Children are growing up feeding on this propaganda, learning that electricity = oil = global warming = bad. Eco warriors are literally putting words in children’s mouths from birth, preventing them from making their own informed decisions on such hugely important matters. Fundamentally, I disagree with the eco-warrior doctrine: ‘with great power comes great responsibility’. I disagree with them. But what I disagree with even more (believe it or not) is outright cynicism. I like to think of myself as a sceptic, someone who follows the doctrine that through doubt the truth may be obtained. I don’t think much truth may be obtained from simply assuming everything the media says must be false (although I would probably be surprised if I actually tested that).
Is it a safe bet that you supported McCain? I think in that case that you and I will just have to agree to disagree on a load of things. Drill baby drill is not going to cut it. However irrelevant the oil situation is to the environment, I still believe abusing it remains a bad idea (for reasons outlined in the post).

At which point Brent became even more manic:

I’m not a Republican if that’s what you have assumed, nor am I a Democrat (Republicrat/Demlican). There were other candiates (good ones who care about America and the Constitution) you know.

It’s hilarious to me that you *think* that there is a shred of difference between Clinton/Bush/McCain/Obama despite the fact that most of their policies are identical on paper and are bought and paid for by many of the same corporate lobbyists. You have been duped!

It’s also hilarious to me that you think that you are so much smarter than I. I’m above your black vs. white mentality. I see everything through a crystal clear lens, while you observe things through the clouds of emotion. I’m really glad you feel good about what you’re doing. Unfortunately, it is a bit sad that you are totally wasting your life on bunk science.

This is a takeover, and you are on board whether you know it or not. By the way, it is completely untrue to say that ALL scientists agree. It is only the ones who like working, as the honest ones are being blacklisted by the rest of the Marxists who intend to carry out the New World Order –Clinton/Bush/McCain/Obama are all involved. Wake up!

Unsure of what to do (whether to laugh out loud or feel vaguely offended) I sent the link to a friend who, rather to my surprise, posted a prompt riposte:

Heh, thats what I love about the internet, the sheer comedy of the right wing nutters who comment on blogs. Ok, lets give this a quick look through:
Blah, blah, blah[his riposte begins to shatter Bryant’s article from the first 3 words, giving an example of the incisive wit]…. 2008 is the coldest year in a decade. [not true, especially in the ice caps] This is nothing more than alarmism and fear-mongering.[what a ridiculous oversimplification, at least respect the majority of the world’s scientists enough to give their theorems serious consideration] 30 years ago it was global cooling. [what’s your point? You give no evidence to discredit cooling, it just shows that the earth’s temperature is very fragile and volatile, and that human’s can effect it]
As far as oil is concerned, if not for the fearmongering [that’s two words], we would be drilling for much more oil here in the states. [try telling that to Alaskan inhabitants who do everything they can to prevent it] We are the only country on the planet which has restricted itself from it’s own natural resources to the extent that we have. [Britain has huge coal and sizable oil reserves, but doesn’t use them because secondary and tertiary industries are more profitable and less destructive, America is well advised to do so also]
What is taking place here is not unlike many of the other institutions that the government has seized over the last several months and years.[is the earth’s climate an institution?] They have seized the media [the same media that is constantly attacking the Bush administration?], the banking/mortgage industry[you mean giving it 700 billion dollars to help it out? Would you rather they let it rot?], now the auto industry, etc. [that is collapsing on its own accord] The energy industry is more global so they cannot just simply seize that. So instead, they [is the US government the only body claiming that global warming is happening? Until recently they were one of the only major powers to deny it!] reinvent it, claiming that the current system IS GOING TO KILL US ALL!!!!! In other words, this is a takeover…wake up! [you are obviously not clouded by emotion…] We are becoming a socialist country right before our eyes. [mm, if everybody would just see sense and spend all their money on fuel until they become impoverished, Capitalism would flourish, right?] Granted, there are many who want this [ooh, nice move, lets blame the communists to deflect the focus on the fault of the average american], because it is far easier to let the government take responsibility for your life, than to do it yourself. [how did we get here from climate change?] If you do it yourself, the only one you can blame when you fail is yourself, [is the Government banning people from polluting? No! Is it trying hard to look at alternate energy sources? Yes, how is this an attack on liberalism?] however, without failure, there comes no success. [that’s nice…]
All of the fancy words [that you don’t understand] are crap when you finally get to the point. Global warming/cooling/climate change/enter fearmongering buzzword here/ is total crapola. [in your learned and well researched opinion that flies in the face of the 95% certainty by the UN’s IPCC that climate change is anthropogenic Where did you get your PhD again?] Don’t believe the hype sheeple[witty play on words mixing sheep with people?]…

After a torrent of e-hostility from Brent and the substantial mirth that brought me and my friends, a couple of us decided to actually visit his site and discovered he really was as crackpot as we thought. He supported Israel’s invasion of Palestine on the grounds of, of all things, religion. He classified Linux-users as Communists. He decided the world isn’t overpopulated and that anyone who thinks it is ought to be banished to Siberia (well, something to that effect). Anthony began posting sarcastic comments on his site under the alias “Bryant Dory”, to which Brent replied seemingly incognisant that they really were meant to be sarcastic:

It’s almost as if your comment is satirical … [insert accusation of being communist]

Unfortunately I can’t remember any of these comments and they are unavailable to me to [Ctrl+C] [Ctrl+V] as, seemingly after he realised how stupid he’s been, Brent finally locked down his site with a password.

I think his online existence was met with some hostility, as a Google search for his name yielded these two results on the first page of results:
# Who in the hell is Brent Roos
# Brent Roos Barked at Me and I Barked Back
Someone even called him an ‘arsehat’…

So in conclusion, seriously, if you’re reading this, thank you Brent for supplying us with such entertainment. It’s been a great laugh and I hope you regain enough courage to the internet at some point in the future. xx

Brent's locked down site

Shanghai: First Impressions

I’ve only been in Shanghai for a bit and have just about got over jet lag. I ended up doing an all-nighter last night, taking some night shots of the cityscape from my (highly elevated) bedroom window and watching the smoggy sunrise in awe, just to get my sleep-cycle right and ended up snoring through a Chinese music concert in the evening – oops… So, first impressions.

Immediately after touchdown, the first thing to greet my sleep-deprived eyes was a colourful and gleeful rendering of the cheerful glory of an olympic host, painted onto the side of a member of the China Airlines fleet. Up till now, that remains the only apparent relic I’ve seen of last Summer’s excitement.

Beijing 2008 Advert

As I expected, apart from the airport which was magnificent and unbelievably (to a Londoner) efficient (somewhat different from dear old Heathrow), there are aspects of this place which are somewhat … different. The most striking part is probably the population density. Officially Shanghai has a population of about 20 million, although I suspect that figure is a gross underestimate owing to the number of homeless and unregistered civilians living in this district. With such a population squashed into only 6500 square Km, the city has over 3000 people per square kilometre. Not bad one might think, but the crowds are multitudinous and dense. It is a result of this crowd culture that Chinese people get their (deserved) loud reputation. Even in the most serene places, people will communicate at top volume, choosing to shout rather than to talk normally so as to be heard. Walking around just about anywhere constitutes shoving your way through a throng of people – which itself wouldn’t be so bad if they were normal people. The sad fact is that every person here, without exception, appears to be dying of some disease or other and every line of sight seems to end in someone spluttering, coughing and/or blowing his nose into the air. Hygiene awareness when coughing and sneezing (often while cooking) is approximately zero – bodily fluids/gases exit bodily orifices liberally into the open air without thought or care for anyone unfortunate enough to be nearby. Combined with such a high person to square kilometre ratio and you end up with a fantastic disease spread rate. The smoking situation is also quite chronic. The taxi from the airport reeked blatantly of cigarette smoke. Crowds emit smoke puffs as you push your way through and buildings stink of nicotine. Oh, did I mention the pollution? Don’t get me started on the smog.

typical crowded street

my photo of the iconic view of Shangai showing smog

me cynically photographing more smog

Meanwhile, the traffic is absolutely manic. Shanghai is very much a biking city (electric scooters and bicycles are much cheaper than cars), and such vehicles, when combined with a cavalier disregard for pedestrians, traffic lights and other road users, make for quite deadly weapons. Crossing the road is like waging a war. Seas of pedestrians from both sides of the road meet in the middle in a cacophony of shouting, bustling, coughing and spitting while being constantly punched through by honking road bikes and the occasional impatient taxi. Sometimes there’s a policeman in the middle of it all pretending to direct traffic (both pedestrian and vehicular). There are effectively no real rules for the road. Cars cut lanes and cross junctions at full speed without warning or looking around, and diesel motorbikes frequently mount pavements, pushing aside pedestrians. My dad while he was here personally bore witness to an accident in which an infelicitous pedestrian was hit by a car whose driver just drove off, without care for whatever mess he had left behind. You’d think people would at least take out some sort of physical insurance against such a dangerous road situation, but it seems that taxis deliberately disable seatbelts (the ones I’ve been in have had them ripped out and covered over with cloth).

My camera can only do max 4 second exposure. This is the result

no seatbelt

When most people think of the police, the first two words that jump to mind tend to be ‘law’ and ‘bastards’, often in reverse order. In China, things are very different. During my very first trip to the market I saw a policeman grab an item from a shop and stroll away calmly with the ill-fated shopkeeper running after him, tugging his arm. They are far from law, but they sure are bastards. There are no rules, no morals, and few properly enforced civil rights laws (thoughtcrime law on the other hand…) – the police are just bullies with sticks and uniforms (and guns).

As far as first impressions go, the internet actually isn’t bad. I’m using the [still censored] connection in my dad’s apartment (he works in Shanghai) and the upload speed is faster than what Virgin Media give me back home in good old London. The download speed, about 1Mbps, is still one tenth what I get in London, which is still perfectly ample for surfing. Remote desktop on the other hand is torturous. I’m still worried about thoughtcrime and censorship, and since my blog is on the blocklist (well, all wordpress blogs are, I think) I’m typing this up on Notepad and subsequently posting it through remote desktop.

There are though good things about Shanghai. I’m overdramatising the bads a bit as, well, that’s what I do as a cynic. But the prices are undeniably good and conversion is convenient (10Y = £1 almost exactly). Stuffed bao (sort of buns) go for 10p in the supermarket, and clothes prices beat Primark hands down. The underground actually works (unlike London), and there are some great photos to be taken, particularly night shots while I’m recovering from my jet lag.

my attempt at night photography without a tripod

So, that’s what I think of Shanghai after about 3 days. Brilliant place, though a little crazy. If you want me to test some websites to see if they’re blocked, do comment / contact!

Surviving China

Communist China

I’m leaving for the Lake District on Thursday on the school Winter Walking trip, after which I’ll be travelling to China with my family. Being the cynic that I am, I suspect China will be more Ray Mears-esque in terms of tough survival than the potentially freezing/hail-ey/flooded conditions of the Lake District in Winter, and being the masochist that I am, I’ll love both trips. Being the pragmatist that I’d like to think I am, I’ve already started thinking about how to survive the desperately corrupt, totalitarian and uncompromising system of law, justice, police and politics.

Internet: Tor

The ‘Probrem’
Accessing the internet is crucial to me, even at home. My main form of communication with the outside world when I’m not out is through the internet. I rarely make phone calls when email and IM suffice and writing letters is almost out of the question. In China, it will be my only point of communication with the outside world, since I’ll be separated from everyone I know by thousands of miles. Unfortunately China’s internet is segregated from the outside world by the Great Firewall of China which means any data obtained from the censored network of ‘information’ available from inside China is very probably erroneous, especially if it has anything vaguely to do with politics. Most blogs (wordpress for example) are also banned.

TOR: The Onion Router

The Solution
TOR (The Onion Router) is basically an open source software which links thousands of computers around the world in a huge relay network for the purpose of providing what is essentially a very secure proxy. This means anonymity for anyone who uses it, as well as a method for getting round internet censorship in certain authoritarian schools and institutions and, more importantly, China. I shall be bringing with me a portable version to grant me the ability to keep track of and avoid the growing list of poisonous Chinese foodstuffs.

I’d also encourage anyone who reads this to consider running a Tor router and generally helping the cause. There’s a Facebook page and group and a volunteer section in the site. You’ll probably route some of my traffic if you set it up quickly enough!

Internet: Remote Desktop

The ‘Probrem’
There is still a problem. Although I’ll be able now to surf without hindrance (albeit slowly – Tor is rather slow), I might need to access some files on my home computer which are stored on encrypted hard drives. I’d be worried about taking a HDD on a plane trip which, after being bombarded with X-rays then being shaken about a bit, might be rather shaken up. I obviously can’t just use remote desktop normally – China will get the password to my home computer and will probably keylog everything that goes through which would grant Hu Jintao the key to all my data: precisely the opposite of what I want. Remote desktop through Tor is also painfully slow.

Remote Desktop

The Solution
Remote desktop’s security needs to be pimped up. For some, a windows product juxtaposed with the word ‘security’ is almost oxymoronic, but I’m not *that* cynical. Some time ago I found a fantastic guide to Remote Desktop which focuses on security. Here are a few good ideas which I took:

1. Lockout Policy

Run >> secpol.msc
Security Settings\Account Policies\Account Lockout Policy
It’s always a good idea to set this if you’re going to allow remote desktop connections to your machine in case Mr Brute Force comes along.

Security Policy

2. Use SSL

Run >> gpedit.msc
Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\Terminal Services\Encryption
This speaks for itself really – encryption is a necessity if anyone’s going to get round the Great Firewall of China

Group Policy Window

3. Change Port

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Terminal Server\WinStations\RDP-Tcp\PortNumber
If a hacker finds your IP he might immediately try the default Remote Desktop port. Change it to something random like 156 to baffle him. If you’re concerned about choosing a port number, here‘s a list of port numbers. Happy reading :)

Food

The ‘Probrem’
Need I say more?

Everyone knows about China's tainted milk scandal

The Solution
We’re bringing rations from good old Tesco – I can look forward to a holiday of canned food. In addition, there are some food items which are probably not poisonous. Food which has to be imported and can’t be made/grown in China for example. I can’t think of anything immediately… Vegetables should also be fairly safe provided they are properly washed to cleanse them of excessive pesticides and have thick skins. Hopefully they aren’t full of Arsenic like the rice.

Though I hate to say it, China is still fundamentally a third world country, despite her phenomenal economic growth. There are real problems which she faces. I suspect, owing to the way China seems very good at under-stating problems (e.g. SARS some years back) that the economic situation over there is far worse than it seems and I’m genuinely concerned that possible ensuing riots might cause the government to change fairly more violently than I hope. Meanwhile however, I’m really looking forward to being plunged into such exotic territory and actually almost excited about the potential danger – what doesn’t kill me will make me stronger, right?

I hope these ideas help someone – this research should in theory help me. I’m still not sure whether I’m over-preparing and/or being melodramatic about China’s perilous nature. If you think there’s something important I’m forgetting, please point it out to me! I’m making it a new policy to attempt to abide by some of Ben’s rules (an excellent compilation of blogging policy I think), particularly rule three about actively welcoming critical comments. In this case in particular, my holiday (or, if you’re as worried as me, my life) might depend on it, so if you have any advice for me or anyone travelling Communist-Eastwards this Christmas, I’d be very keen to hear from you. TIA

My Stance on Global Warming

I’ve just chanced upon Will’s ‘vlog’ post (it was a video embedded into a blog post – what else am I to call it?). It’s a bit old – I take time to chance upon things. So, the world is coming to an end because we are selfish and excessive in our use of energy. Apparently.

Officially, I like to refer to myself as a sceptic and positivist – I follow the doctrine that speculation on ultimate causes or origins is futile and believe in the system of obtaining knowledge through systematic doubt and continual testing. Thus my stance on global warming is neither that of the maniac eco-warrior nor that of the inexorable cynic. However whatever the case it’s always important to take a multifaceted analysis of any situation and think outside the box (to use the old cliché), instead of dogmatically pursuing a mere single thread which exists as a relatively insignificant decoration on a thick quilt of intrinsically interwoven issues.

An aspect of the entire oil and global warming debate which is often overlooked or perhaps deliberately ignored is the economic and political aspect of it. If you think about it, nowadays oil is equivalent to power. This is very much an economic phenomenon projected onto the plane of political power in which Middle-eastern countries and Russia are at liberty to exploit their massive amounts of black gold, an unfortunate precedent which can be and in fact is unashamedly translated into a disproportionate amount of undeserved political influence. I’m sure I’m not alone in my (personal, biased and subjective) dislike of the idea of all this scarcity power being in the hands of the countries which happen to have all this oil and gas; I’d hate to see America and Britain on their knees begging Putin (we all know he’s still wearing the trousers over there) or some militant religious extremist group for a few barrels of oil. In other words this political leverage is all about the scarcity power of oil. This constitutes my primary reason for supporting a long-term move to abandon oil and other fossil fuels as a source of energy: oil is a commodity on which the world is increasingly reliant and whose natural residence is apparently countries which unnervingly frequently end up in political turmoil (I think it’s fair to say) so my personal opinion is that it seems after a little consideration a fairly bad idea to build the world up around it. I’m therefore a great fan of alternative, particularly renewable ways of producing power which don’t involve the use of such a messily obtained substance.

original image

Returning to the argument considered by most eco-warriors, I think Will is in part absolutely right (please ignore my seemingly nonsensical juxtaposition of words) about the warming aspect of, global, err, warming – whether it be us or pixies or cosmological factors who/which are at fault, there exists quite unequivocally a problem and it undeniably requires attention. However, personally undecided about the verity of the claims about the anthropogenity (neologism I believe, but a good one) of global warming, I’d argue an engineering solution rather than a human / social / lifestyle one is needed here – a protective rather than preventative solution. The Earth’s atmosphere is simply so complex that few people can claim to understand its workings in any great detail, let alone work towards an accurate model of cause and effect; by my logic it follows intuitively that any attempt to tackle a perceived cause may well be in vain if not deleterious (for example the questionable proposal of filling the atmosphere with sulphur dioxide) – far more propitious a solution would be simply to be pragmatic and do what we know we can do: consider methods of protection against predicted conditions which can themselves be more reliably extrapolated than an attempt of analysis on dubious and often erroneous data.

In fact, even if it were true that humans were the cause of the earth’s positive temperature gradient (against time), I’d be willing to bet that any attempt to reverse the trend would be futile, be it too little, too late, or both. A single word sums up the impossibility of the task of reducing Carbon emissions: China. As some may know, I blame China for many things, including milk, red tape and Communism; in this case though I feel it would be unjustified to blame her, even if her factories were indeed the cause of such future strife and suffering. Allow me to elucidate my uncharacteristically sympathetic attitude towards the developing world. I’m one of those cynics who believe the world, or at least the majority of it – certainly the influential parts of it – are driven by two main wants: money and power. In addition, everyone knows that just about everything runs off electricty. No business could function without it: transport, computers, buildings and manufacturing all slurp up vast quantities of electricity. So if money is everything and everything is electricity, there’s a lot to be said for electricity in money terms. China was blessed with unfair amounts of coal naturally available to the country, making coal a cheap source of energy. Chinese businesses (probably with the help of the government) merely exploited this by building coal power stations en masse, something the West would undoubtedly have done in the past, and which it would probably still do today. We got damn close with ‘drill baby drill’. China’s population situation is also geared towards high energy consumption: it doesn’t take a great leap of faith to conclude that 1.3 billion people squashed into 9.6 million square kilometres will require more than a few wind farms to power, and at the time China began developing at its unprecedented and scarily rapid rate (around when I was born) nuclear power was still very much an experiment and the world was still reeling from Chernobyl; the only way to supply power affordably to such a large population with so little space was to use cheap and cheerful methods: fossil fuels. So is it fair to blame China for making use of her natural resources partially out of necessity? I certainly don’t think so.

original image

So returning to the problem of global warming, it seems unlikely that China will wilfully do anything about her carbon emissions. Meanwhile, even if both the UK and US manage the 2050 target (I’m sure it used to be 2012…), the effect will be minimal, to say the least, even if it is true that global warming is our fault. My argument about protection rather than prevention seems to make sense.

So why don’t I join environment committee? In fact, there are several reasons, but the main problem for me is that the committee stands for something which I don’t: working off the assumption that global warming is by definition anthropogenic, it seems to work primarily to reduce Carbon emissions, a measure which I consider ineffective at best, and simply wrong at worst, and the fact that some of its aims happen to coincide with my personal ambitions for the world, e.g. renewable power, isn’t enough to convince me to join. Regardless, I still wish them luck in whatever they do; I’m good friends with one of the main figures in the society and am confident that he has good intentions and indirectly or otherwise yearns for a future unreliant on oil, and therefore also on the Middle East.

China and Censorship

China’s reputation for oppression and censorship is truly notorious, in both past and present. There’s a reason why traders call the divider between research and the trading floor a ‘Chinese Wall’: it supposedly prevents any information whatsoever from leaking through. China is surrounded by metaphors and connotations linked to walls and censorship; the Great Firewall of China for example prevents law-abiding and innocent Chinese citizens from educating themselves about the world around them: they have no way of learning about China’s history other than to absorb the government propaganda administered on a daily basis; they genuinely believe America consists of nothing but greedy corporations bullying China and taking advantage of Asia; according to their version of Google, baidu.com, nothing ever happened in Tiananmen Square. Killings, what killings? Nothing happened here. Oceania was never at war with Eastasia… For those without access to the real world, what the government tells them is the real world. Those who control the present control the past, and if an entire population is being indoctrinated with clearly false information about historical events, it’s probably safest to hide underground for a while when that population is freed and told otherwise.

China’s methods of protecting her citizens from the ‘scary truth’ are multifarious, immoral and, in my opinion, largely disgusting. Already the immoral nature of the Great Firewall of China, a huge blocking mechanism which denies access to any online information on the tragic parts of China’s history to citizens, is clear and reflects badly on the government responsible, but to make things worse, Google was bribed into censoring search results for terms like ‘Tiananmen Square’ and anything pertaining to the worst parts of China’s history. Even users of Skype, vaunting about end-to-end security and enhanced privacy, were shocked when the creators of the supposedly secure service succumbed to the temptation of China’s monetary offer and surrendered users’ privacy to the Chinese government. And now, as if to confirm suspicions, even internet cafes, used by many for anonymity, are under attack: China has decided to take photographs of all internet cafe customers.

The whole Chinese system of hierarchy is actually rather worrying. In the modern age, certainly in the West, the entire nature of hierarchy has undergone a revolution, most markedly in education. In the past, the teacher-student relationship tended to take the guru-apprentice approach, in which the teacher is infinitely wise and the student never questions and just absorbs. Today, with the explosion of information, the student often knows more than the teacher in specific areas of interest, and the role of the teacher has changed to a guide, someone who teaches the student to teach himself – more a mentor than a guru; indeed, the student is invited and encouraged to challenge established theories with new evidence and question what is often taken to be true. Even the law is often questioned, and the presence of sceptics (in the true sense of the word) in the West has blossomed, and a substantial fraction of a generation has been bred of people who do not just follow rules blindly and instead think intelligently about politics, policy and law before making decisions. China on the other hand has been left behind in both areas, both in terms of information and a culture of questioning. Information on the real world, and on real word politics and history, is simply unavailable to the majority of the population, and the people are forced to obey rules blindly lest they end up imprisoned or, more likely, shot. China has a culture of no questioning, of blind obedience to some higher authority. For the government this is wonderful and it’s a success for internal politics – many Chinese simply believe whatever they are told by their government no matter how blatantly false or one-sided it may be, accept the indoctrination and are blindly patriotic, supportive of a a political structure built on lies, censorship and corruption, and this is actually very dangerous. As China slowly develops into a Capitalist country, and as information becomes increasingly free, the government is going to have to change at some point. Germany was bad enough at the end of the first world war when their citizens believed it was a defensive war, so when – and I think it is a case of when rather than if – China’s government collapses, her citizens will be confused and angry, and 1.3 Bn angry and confused people is really not very funny: political stability will become something of yesterday, the economy may well collapse, and international relations will certainly suffer.

I was actually full of hope that the Olympics would change things. The huge campaign on human rights was given so much exposure that I genuinely believed China would be forced by the rest of the world to accept that it could not continue to oppress information. They even opened access to the BBC website, something I hoped would set a precedent for further steps towards sanity. Sadly China’s human rights and censorship situation, as far as I’m aware, is still very much the same as before.