Four years ago I posted a picture of a door, repeating what my supervisor told me: “when you go out this door, you’ll have your PhD.” Here is is again…

… four years later, here’s me going through it…

DONE! — here is it.

It has been a bumpy ride, and I can’t say it was all enjoyable or “fun”. It was intellectually and mentally challenging, and required a lot of patience and self-driven determination. In the process I learned a lot, and I’d like to think that I also made a contribution. Someone described it also as a humbling experience, and I tend to agree. It has been quite an experience, and one that not many have — I have no regrets, though I sometimes play with the thought of whether it was worth it.

I’d like to thank my family, Caroline, and the friends who supported and encouraged me along the way; it meant more to me than they perhaps realize. I’m also grateful to Xilinx for funding my research and for being supportive technically. Please read page 4 of my dissertation for a more detailed acknowledgment.

Some obligatory pictures…

With graduation garbs (red hood means PhD with the last academic degree not being from Cambridge):

Mom, dad, and brother at the Senate House lawn:

With Markus, diploma in hand:

It’s the time of the PhD when people ask me what I plan to do next (as if the PhD is in the bag, which it isn’t). I say that I don’t know. This is the truth, not an attempt to weasel out of a lengthy discussion. The world is in the gutter, and who knows what will it look like in six months. Regarding my own short term future, I suppose that the best answer I can give is that I’ll go where the best opportunity is. (OK, I am weaseling here, because I’m not defining what kind of opportunity I’m after… I’ll leave it for some other time, though those who know me can probably guess ;)

As per tradition, I provide you with a picture of myself to cheer everyone up. This time I’m squinting and smirking at the Tatra mountains in Zakopane, Poland.

All the best to us all.

I went and got my own bottle of wine, and then at the till the oddest thing happened. I got carded.

Till (old) man: Can’t let you buy the wine without ID*.
Me: Wow. I’m 33.
Lady (packing) in front of me: You should take it as a compliment.
Me (to till man): Thanks. But I don’t carry ID**. I’m 33, really.
Till man: OK, you’ve got white hair, so I’ll let you have it <wink>.
Me (to myself): Now you’ve ruined it.

* Legal drinking/purchase of alcohol in the UK is 18!

** This will change soon. As a foreigner in this country I’m being used as a test subject for their new and pointless ID card effort. That’s another story, though, so I’ll leave it for now.

The first ten flashes — each multiplied by plenty of mirrors it seemed — were tolerable. I was paying attention though, all ten were repeats because the picture just did not come out perfect enough. They were over doing it with the next ten I thought. So I asked one of the guys if they could stop it with the flashes… “b-b-but we’re having a party”… and I said “but you also need to be considerate to other people”.

Obviously, I wasn’t popular with that crowd but I don’t care… people who do not respect other people’s space should be told to tone it down when they overdo it.

In Recife there is a very long beach stretch along a neighborhood called Boa Viagem. It is a popular destination, but used to be more so until in the early 1990s when ecosystem disruption due to development has driven sharks to Boa Viagem beaches. Shark attacks on humans have then become much more frequent. I found this sign interesting as one rarely sees this kind of language on signs, and it was unexpected there in Brazil’s Northeast. Note that the Portuguese portion doesn’t evoke statistics and simply says “Danger: area susceptible to shark attacks.” (Presumably because it is common knowledge over there and the risks are well known).

Today, if we were caught, in addition to being arrested we would surely be additionally tased for bad measure. The near-daily news of people being tased for no good reason reminded me of my story above. Some taser cases and videos can be found on top hits from reddit on the topic; Andrew Meyer coined the “don’t tase me, bro” catch phrase while being tased after making a bit of a fuss asking John Kerry some questions; here’s the comic. Some people die after being tased, though the marketing says that the tool is supposed to be non-lethal. But when you give people a “non-lethal” alternative to verbally or physically dealing with other people, it is a natural outcome that it turns from an alternative to a norm. This is the situation today, with cops tasing without much thought and it seems as though the chances of being tased is largely random, mostly depending on how the cop feels at the moment. With the general sense of paranoia and justification that anything is permissible in the name of security and anti-terrorism, all you have to do is act out of the ordinary, like being slow to hand a cop your proof of insurance; Schneier calls this “The War on the Unexpected“.

This arbitrary taser treatment given by trigger happy cops is scary, and certainly does not contribute to a general feeling of security it was meant to promote. The long term effect is the continuous erosion of trust in police and the “system” — not that it is in any good shape currently — which will be difficult to recover from even if tighter controls are placed on taser use. When this happens the unintended consequence would be that police lost the “touch” of actually dealing with people, and even worse, they would use their lethal weapons (guns) more casually than before. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear in the near future of a case where a cop claims that he/she reached for the taser, but instead shot the poor speeder in the chest with a lethal bullet.

You’ll need the suitcase’s wheels to be robust, so I would expect that this only work with quality brands; I went quite fast with mine without a problem. Another issue to be aware of is that the cords should be a bit loose in order for the rigid handle poles not to break; this also helps while turning.

I have just returned from a 10 day trip to Boston, where I attended a conference and presented a paper (which won “Best Student Paper“!) One of the items on my shopping list was a new pair of jeans, as my previous ones are torn, patterned, washed from real-life events. I wasn’t prepared to how difficult this would be.

Essentially, most jeans today come “pre-cooled”, which means that they have patterns on them that emulate heavy use and have torn bits which are “pre-patched”. When I confront “sale associates” with this issue they are a bit dazzled but soon realize that indeed, I am in a bit of a “situation” as non of the jeans they have on offer answer to my unique requirements: jeans that look new! (Some “associates” said that that is the first time they ever thought of this.)

I finally found a pair at Macy’s; it was not exactly the figure I was looking for, but I figured that if I want new jeans that looked new, my options are incredibly limited.

Bad news: I’m balding.

I was just reading F.A. Hayek’s speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1974 and he mentioned a book called Limits to Growth as a current (to 1974) mistake in the application of seemingly scientific method to complex economic phenomena. It led me to read about this book on Wikipedia and then, via Google, to a paper by Matthew R. Simmons called Club of Rome Revisited in which he attempts to rehabilitate the Club of Rome (widely panned in the years since) by showing how misguided its critics were and how correct its predictions were. I started to be more interested when I then browsed to Matthew Simmons’ site and found that he is a big proponent of Peak Oil. In fact he wrote a book I had heard plenty of but whose author’s name never stuck: Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. It is referenced a lot by a certain type of paranoiac on the market bear boards I frequent (don’t ask what that says about me).
It was crazy to read an intelligent man, Matthew Simmons, summarizing the gloom and doom predictions for the future and saying “jeez! they were right! look how good their math was!” When in fact, whether or not their predictions were right, what Hayek so eloquently debunked was their math. It was a bullet-proof debunking. They tried to apply simple math to complex social phenomena to get any sort of prediction. Can’t be done. Wait, I am wrong. It can and is done all the time. It can’t be done accurately or with any hope of scientific validity. Read Hayek’s paper if you want an eloquent explanation of why. What amazes me is that this man, Simmons, is not ignorant of Malthus. In the intro to his paper he strenuously distanced himself from the blindspots and errors of Malthus. He then did his best to channel Malthus. I’d say if his Peak Oil scam doesn’t work out he should set up a scam as a medium because I’d have been willing to believe he was communicating directly with the long-dead British doomsayer.
I suppose it is mean to call it a scam since he is a victim of the scam before he is a perpetrator. Malthus is already serving an eternal sentence in the Halls of Shame for popularizing it. But just because the Club of Rome used an early supercomputer to distance themselves from the bad math doesn’t make their results any less shamefully unscientific and inaccurate. And just because Simmons noted that their predictions of the world population in 2000 were pretty accurate doesn’t get him off the hook for failing to note that everything else they predicted was way off. But more importantly, the accuracy of their predictions does not in anyway validate the methods used to generate them! If an accurate prediction is based on flawed analysis is the prediction still correct? Only in the most useless sense or to your balance with your bookie. The limit of what is knowable regarding the state of mind of the (accurately predicted) billions of individual actors in the world prevent math from being a tool to accurately predict the future of the world. As a phenomenon of organized complexity (see complex systems in Wikipedia) it is immune to this treatment. The complexity of human genius has allowed us to make a mockery of Malthus’ predictions of doom and exhaustion (though not his population numbers) and further to laugh at the well-intentioned but blinded-by-misapplied-science Club of Rome and now I suspect that Peak Oil is the third act in Malthus’ original play “Oh My God We’re DOOMED! or How I Misapplied Science to Scare the Children.” It continues to embarass the Keynesian central banks of the world and force senseless double speak from politicians and economists as they explain why their policies fail, their predictions are useless, and the unintended consequences of their actions dominate the intended ones. It just isn’t that kind of science. In closing, I hate you John Maynard Keynes =) =p