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Dénouement

Jun 27th, 2009
by aiusepsi.
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This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

- T.S. Eliot

So here we are at last, the end of another year.

Amongst other things, the ball has been and gone, we celebrated summer Swedish-style, some of my friends have graduated and gotten good results, and now everyone’s packing up to return home.

I honestly can’t believe it’s all gone so fast, it’s really just scary. Although, what’s even scarier is that the next year will no doubt go equally as fast, and then I’ll be all graduated and looking to whatever will come next; I really don’t know what that is yet, and that’s pretty terrifying. Who knows though, maybe I’m worrying about nothing and I’ll be hit by a bus tomorrow. Nothing ever turns out quite like you expect.

Which, I think, informs my view of the future. You need to have one eye on the road ahead, sure, because you need to know where the hell it is you might be going, but you need to have one eye on the here and now too, because the future doesn’t exist yet, and the here and now bloody well does. You can’t live your life on whatifs and maybes.

On a slight tangent, I do for once wish my blog was slightly more anonymous, because it does mean that I have to be careful about what I say about people I know, because even if I use the popular refer-to-people-by-single-letter trick it’s quite likely the person I’m referring to would be identified, which isn’t fair. Annoying, because sometimes you just need the catharsis that only bellowing at the top of your lungs in a public place can achieve. Metaphorically speaking.

I digress. Right now, I know that I need to get on the dog & bone to BT and cancel our phone line – getting charged for the next tennants’ calls sounds distinctly unappealing – and get my stuff all cleaned and packed up ready to move out tomorrow. The future can wait.

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Paradoxical Freedom

Jun 14th, 2009
by aiusepsi.
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The odd thing about suddenly finding oneself a man of leisure is now that the exams are over is that it rather takes the fire out of things.

When you have a day-to-day purpose, it gives a underlying meaning to which you can anchor the structure and events of your life. Remove that purpose, that skeleton, or holding-pin, and everything else is suddenly adrift. It’s pretty unnerving, all in all. Another way of saying the same thing is that procrastination seems a lot more fun when you have something to be procrastinating from.

Sartre had a pretty good grasp of this phenomenon, all in all. His point was that life is always unanchored, but we like to pretend that it isn’t. He called that “mauvais foi”, or “bad faith”. Honestly, I haven’t read any Sartre for ages because my copy of Nausea is… elsewhere, and Being and Nothingness is trapped in book backlog hell. He’s probably still my favourite, though.

Anyways, exams are over, which means suddenly I have to figure out what to do with my time all by myself. So far, that’s mostly meant staying in bed stupidly late, which is frankly just crap.

I have though had plenty of good times with friends, including a barbeque, drinks in Kensington Gardens, a Champagne and Suit/Dress party, and a trip to the Tate Modern (see http://facebook.com/asimpson for pictures). With any luck there will be more such happy occasions soon.

Guess I don’t actually have a lot to say about stuff right now. This is one of the more fundamental issues with Twitter – it acts rather like a release valve, letting go some of the pressure that would otherwise build up into a blog post. Ah well.

Plans:

  • Have more good times.
  • Play videogames.
  • Read books.
  • See bits of London I haven’t seen yet (like Marx’s grave)

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My Fellow People

May 31st, 2009
by aiusepsi.
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In today’s Observer there was a leaflet from Amnesty International which used a knife and two hand grenades to form an image of a rather definitive part of the male anatomy, with the headline “Rape: Weapon of War”

Inside were witness accounts of how systematic rape is used to terrorize civillian communities. It makes for very uncomfortable reading.

The rest of the paper too is filled with generally terrible stories of things that are happening all over the world; child soldiers in Sri Lanka, a 17-year old Afghan girl stamped, suffocated and stabbed to death by her father for being infatuated with a British soldier.

Here in the West it’s easy to live our comfortable lives making mildly sexist “do the washing up”-style jokes and forget that in many parts of the world women are treated as little more than property, with little regard for their essential humanity; that our joking in a way trivializes a serious problem, and that even here women can still face descrimination.

It doesn’t just bother me that terrible things happen in the world, it bothers me that people actively keep the world this way; that ultimately there are people who are responsible for the terrible things they do to other people. Do any of those soldiers feel remorse for the rape? I know that the Afghan father feels no remorse for murdering his daughter; he says any Muslim father who honours his religion should do the same.

It would be easy to criticize Islam or any other of the religions; for instance the crimes of the Catholic Church are particularly terrible. The truth is that it seems to be a awful human tendency to believe that there are things more important than our common humanity, be they things as weighty as religion and nationality, or as trivial as the football team you support.

The Roma “ultras” stab opposing fans in the buttocks, Nigerian Muslims burned Nigerian Christians to death over the Danish cartoons. In the First World War the two sides stood only a few tens of meters of mud apart trying to kill each other for four years, wasting hundreds of thousands of lives.

The only moment of any of that which gives me hope is the Christmas truce, where both sides got up out of the Trenches, and played football together; a spontaneous outbreak of peace. It only goes to throw the pointlessness of the rest of that war into horribly sharp relief.

I don’t understand. I wish I did. For now, joining Amnesty seems like it might be a start.

Posted in: Thoughts.
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Weariness

May 26th, 2009
by aiusepsi.
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So I’m roughly half-way through the exam season, five down, four to go.

Some of them have gone well, others not so well, others were going well until I found myself running out of time, started panicing and ignored the obvious answer…

Anyways, all in all, it’s been pretty miserable so far, and it really doesn’t do wonders for morale. I really just want this to be over, because this whole experience is just making me feel like crap, and I’m pretty damned sick of it.

Right now, I’m supposed to be revising Plasma Physics, because the exam’s tomorrow and for the life of me I have no idea what he’s doing using the Bennett relation to derive the Pease-Braginskii current, and I really need this exam to go well. For a whole bunch of reasons.

At least there’s only 4 left! Plasma I think is generally going to go well, then on Friday there’s Comprehensive II, the sequel to the exam that made us all want to commit suicide the first time around, Dynamical Systems & Chaos on Tuesday, which could be pretty unpleasant, and then Foundations of Quantum Mechanics on Thursday which I think will be pretty good too, so should form a pleasant wind-down. Hopefully.

I’m really not looking forward to results day.

Anyways, back to the physics of the Z-pinch…

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The Incident

May 14th, 2009
by aiusepsi.
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By way of procrastination (Atomic physics sucks!) I’m gonna talk about the season finale of Lost. If you haven’t seen it yet, stop reading now! For the intrepid few, feel free to carry on

Continue reading →

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The Library Café

Apr 29th, 2009
by aiusepsi.
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Ah, what an establishment. Open late, on campus, easily competitive with anywhere to eat in the near vicinity…

All you need to get coffee (a must for any long-term revision session) and food is a short trip downstairs from the library proper, and all (well, most of) your bodily needs will be satisfied. The food’s also actually not bad – I’m quite impressed with the pepperoni pizza.

It’s also great in non-revision times, ’cause it’s pretty much the only place you’re allowed to eat and drink while sat  at a computer. There are also booths each with a big flatscreen on the wall, which I’m sure will be excellent for working on things like projects next year. Mostly so far I’ve only used one for playing the Wikipedia game; the aim of which is to challenge your opponent to navigate from one Wikipedia page to another e.g. Beef Wellington -> World War I by following links. That one is actually pretty easy. Answers on a postcard.

Anyways, I ought to hit more revision. I still don’t know enough about Nuclear and Particle physics, sadly.

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Dylan

Apr 28th, 2009
by aiusepsi.
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Last Saturday the O2 Arena played host to the latest leg of Dylan’s never-ending tour, and I happened to be there, quite by chance.

Well I say that, it was actually quite difficult to get there, because over the weekend the Jubliee line was undergoing upgrade works; this is quite a problem, as the Tube is pretty much the only practical way to get to the O2, otherwise it has pretty much the worst transport links in the world.

In the end, we had to get a Tube, a train, and a rail replacement bus service, and it took probably the better part of two hours. Getting back was equally as difficult, but there we go.

Once we’d all met up and taken our seats, we waited for the show to begin. Dylan was announced by someone saying that he released some of his greatest works in the 90’s – not an ausipicious start.

He came out and launched into Maggie’s Farm. This is where things started to go rather downhill; there were no video screens, so Dylan was rather an indistinct blob in the distance. Also, at some point in the last few decades he seems to have lost the ability to sing; rather the lyrics were growled out, a short phrase at a time. This lead to a curious effect where there quite a few times where he was actually out of time with the music. The lyrics also suffered from some pretty bad intelligibility problems, so I had a hard time understanding what he was, erm, growling.

Then there was the music itself; often he’d be halfway through the song before I recognised it from the lyrics. What was performed bore no relation to the songs I knew and loved. Also he talked to the crowd exactly once, to reel off the names of the members of his band. Because apparently he doesn’t play the guitar himself any more either.

I can understand that maybe if you’ve been playing and touring as long as he has, you’d get tired and sick of the whole business; I could understand that, but do it on your own time. Sir Paul McCartney is from the same era, and he still manages to put on an incredible show.

Honestly, to play the Devil’s Advocate, I had a lot more fun going to see Coldplay at the O2. They must be sick to their back teeth of playing Yellow, but you bet it comes out at every show, and they make it look they’re actually enjoying themselves. Also, Chris Martin just seems like a nice guy, whereas Dylan just came over as a bit of a twat.

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