I was once asked “how is it that a 21-year-old kid in Norway can work for six months a year, then travel the other six months, when people here (we were in Mexico) have to work their asses off just to survive?”. This is the a good question, as it puts into stark contrast the income inequality between countries in a very concrete way.

The Norwegian in question was working in airport security as the guy who runs the mini metal detector over you if you walk through the big metal detector and it goes “beep”. This is not a very highly-skilled line of work, nor was the pay very high, at least not by Norwegian standards. Anyone who has ever been to Norway will know that the Norwegians enjoy a very high standard of living. Everything is very expensive, but so long as you work in Norway, then your pay is correspondingly high. This guy’s pay may not have been high compared with other Norwegians, but it was high enough to sustain half-year-long trips through Latin America.

Explanation 1 – It’s in the system

So when you cross a border, you can unexpectedly become a little richer or poorer without doing anything. In general when you pass from a more developed country to a less developed one, your money will suddenly be worth more. Why does this happen?

If we step back in time a little to a point in civilization not long after the advent of agriculture, we have small settlements of people who each grow their own food, and make their own clothes and tools. Eventually, they figure out that if they specialize – one group concentrates entirely on farming, another concentrates on making tools, and so on, that they will be more productive and end up with a little surplus with which to exchange with each other, and other settlements. The system slowly grows more and more complex, bringing greater and greater degrees of specialization, and therefore higher productivity.

So one of the reasons is simply because there is more value in another country’s economy. The high degree of specialization also means that it can sustain a population of very specialized (generally, highly-skilled) workers who are in high demand. This surplus and specialization also means higher education, which churns out more productive people. Even though university students spend a lot of their time playing angry birds and don’t seem very productive, because of the principles of comparative advantage, and supply and demand (low supply, high demand), the work that they do “counts” for more.

Explanation 2 – It’s under the ground

But say you take two advanced economies, like Britain and Norway. Things are still much more expensive in Norway than Britain, and Norwegians still seem to make a lot more money.

First of all, when adjusted for “purchasing power parity”, the difference isn’t so great. Purchasing power parity is simply a fancy way of measuring how far your money goes. If the average salary in a country is a million dollars, but the average price of a hamburger is ten thousand, then those people aren’t really better off than if they lived in a country where the average salary was only a thousand dollars, but burgers only cost fifty cents. Something else is making Norwegian Krones go a little further than British Pounds – Oil.

Oil is the world’s most valuable commodity, and rightly so – it is our main source of cheap, portable energy. It is also finite, so its increasing scarcity drives up its value. Norway has a lot of oil. It also has an oil fund that takes the profits from this oil and invests it back into its people, an investment that increases in value with time.

If natural resources make a country wealthier, then why are so many people from countries rich in natural resources so poor? Well… so far, we’ve only been looking at averages, which can be deceptive. The average guy coming out of Norway is quite wealthy, and our experience with people coming out of Norway corroborates that. However, the average Saudi Arabian citizen who we might bump into in Saudi Arabia is not so wealthy, even though the average wealth is quite high. This is due to massive income inequality.

Natural resources can be a blessing or a curse. A blessing because, for almost no effort, you can add value to your economy, a curse because the initial extraction centralizes and concentrates power to an extent that can reinforce dictatorships. Unfortunately, cases where natural resources have been used to the benefit of many rather than a select few have been the exception rather than the rule. Nevertheless, resources do add value to an economy.

Explanation 3 – It’s in the soil

So it’s all very well to compare wealthy countries with poor countries, or wealthy countries with each other, but what about between poor countries? In the postwar period, most of the world except for North America, Europe, and Japan lived in extreme poverty. Now, many Asian countries, while still very poor, are showing steady growth and development. However, many countries in Africa continue to struggle with extreme poverty, and some have even gotten poorer in real-world terms.

Take Indonesia, a former Dutch colony and compare it to say Mozambique, a former Portuguese colony. After the various adjustments mentioned above, Indonesians are, on average, over four times more wealthy than the average Mozambican. Mozambique, although achieving independence much later than Indonesia, and suffering a brutal civil war, has enjoyed a relatively stable democracy for some time, while Indonesia has struggled through dictatorship and regional and sectarian conflict.

Here I believe the main difference is that agriculture is far more productive in Indonesia than it is in Mozambique. In Mozambique, about 80% of the workforce is employed in agriculture but most of it is of the subsistence variety, Indonesia’s economy is much more developed with agriculture accounting for only 44% of the workforce (to feed a population almost 10 times Mozambique’s), and it being a major export. When you can use far less of your workforce to produce more food than you need, then you have much more headroom to grow a diverse and productive economy than if 80% of your workforce is struggling to feed everyone.

Indonesia has been exporting food for centuries because its soil is very fertile. It is volcanic and contains lots of nutrients and, as a result, some of the islands support some of the highest population densities in the world. Agriculture generally isn’t the driving force behind very wealthy countries, but poor agricultural output can be a severe limiting factor to economic development (starving people aren’t very productive).

Global population density. Notice the high densities of Indonesia and Japan, where the soil is volcanic

The climate also has a large role to play in this, as frequent and predictable rainfall allows farmers to plan and therefore be more productive. Infrequent and unpredictable rainfall leads to hunger and famine, which are well-known catalysts for social upheaval, which generally puts large dents in economic development. You can harp on about stability under authoritarian governments all you like, and all the corruption in African governments, but the fact of the matter is that very corrupt governments are endured everywhere, and real stability comes from food stability which in turn comes from climate stability combined with good soil. So while climate change is simply a minor inconvenience to most of the world’s developed countries, who live in stable temperate climate zones, it will wreak havoc on the unstable climates in the world’s most impoverished places.

Explanation 4 – all together now

Of course, no single one of those reasons accounts for all of the economic disparity in the world today. But the answer to the original question is that our Norwegian airport security guy was just lucky enough to be born in a country with a highly-advanced economy, stable climate, good soil, and an abundance of a valuable natural resource. Of course all of these factors multiply each other, and do so over time. Although Norway wasn’t exactly a huge colonial power, it benefited from the added wealth that other European powers gained from their colonies. The same rule that applies to generations of people through time also applies to countries through time – the largest single predictor of future wealth, is current wealth.

Just because someone happens to be born in Mexico, Indonesia, or Mozambique doesn’t mean that it is impossible for them to pull themselves out of poverty by their bootstraps, but it does make the task a lot more difficult. If you grow up surrounded by people who never went to school, you are a lot less likely to finish university than if you grew up in a country like Norway where something like 40% of people finish some kind of tertiary education.

Can we solve this disparity? Obviously, in principle, you can always solve any given wealth disparity by redistributing all the wealth, however that may not be such a good idea in practice. The current per capita world GDP adjusted for purchasing power parity is something like 10,000 USD, which seems like a pretty decent amount of money. Of course, this amount has nearly quadrupled since 1980 and we can probably expect similar growth in the future. While we can expect levels of technology and education to converge as time goes on, the world’s natural resources remain unevenly distributed throughout the world, and the world’s rainfall patterns follow a similarly nonuniform distribution. So while mobile phones and the internet are definitely making the world flatter, for an hour of work in Norway to be paid similarly to an hour of identical work in Mexico a huge amount of wealth redistribution will have to be seen, and sadly this I can’t see happening in my lifetime.

World GDP per capita, adjusted for purchasing power parity. source: World Bank

Art at the UN Headquarters in New York

Guns will always be a controversial subject. For the record, I think guns are really cool. I’ve never owned a gun, and before living briefly in the US have never lived in a culture where gun ownership or use was widespread. In Hong Kong, I used to be something of a BB-Gun enthusiast (air-powered guns that shoot 6mm plastic pellets), and in Australia, while part of a cadet corp, I experienced firing a rifle on several occasions, and even got a marksmanship award on one. For a while I even wanted to be an army sniper, as the challenge of the job and the skill set required seemed a match for the mischievous and sneaky brat that I was, except that since I couldn’t stomach the idea of actually killing someone, even if I could convince myself that they deserved it, I came to the conclusion that that particular career-path was not for me.

Something that strikes me as strange, as I’m sure it strikes many people, is the culture surrounding guns in the US. Following the recent shooting of a congresswoman in Tuscon Arizona which resulted in the death of six people, including a nine-year-old and a judge, there was a gun show in nearby Pima county (where the shooter, Jared Lee Loughner attended community college before dropping out). Those who remember the Michael Moore film Bowling for Columbine, will recall that, following a similar massacre at Columbine High School, the NRA held a rally in nearby Littleton. The gun lobby in the US is very politically powerful and, unlike many other lobbying groups, actually has quite a wide base of support from the general population.

For those who haven’t figured it out yet, I’m a numbers man. That doesn’t mean that I’m the guy you should ask to split the bill, or do your taxes. In fact, I’m probably the last person you should ask to do either of those things, as I am quite useless with everyday arithmetic. Thing about being a numbers man though, is that I’m not half-bad at interpreting data, and I have a peculiar talent in being able to spot when data is being misrepresented (happens a lot). In addition to having a slight acquaintance with numbers, I also majored in philosophy at university which means I can talk your ear off for hours without actually making any sense. It also means that I have a lot of practice in breaking arguments down to their essence, and sifting out all the flowery emotional appeals that inevitably cloud these sorts of issues.

So in the blue corner, you have so-called gun control advocates. What they usually ask for is a tightening of gun controls – that is making it more difficult for a person to obtain a gun. In the red corner (I say “red” because these people are also three to four times more likely to vote Republican, and not because they are communists, they are often quite the opposite) we have people who oppose such measures. On one side, there are screams of lives lost needlessly and gun control being the panacea for all of society’s violent crime ills, while on the other they scream the second amendment and cite constitutional rights, individual responsibility, and rights to protection, liberty and other such things.

At the very base level, one side wants to save more lives, and the other is just afraid of a bit of added inconvenience. Nobody (in the US at least) is seriously pursuing a ban on guns. It would be unconstitutional, and would also not get popular support. However, even a small degree of tighter control would be seen as impinging on one’s “freedoms” which is kind of a big thing in America. In truth, both sides are acting out of paranoia with one side being afraid of being shot to death, while on the other side the fear is that every inch they give is a step down the slippery slope of subjugation by a big scary government.

I’ve become involved in the debate on various internet fora, and I must say that most people who engage in the debate haven’t spent much time thinking about either side or their arguments (should I really have expected more from the internet?). As one of my favourite pastimes is “debating” climate change with borderline-insane people on the internet, I’ve become quite used to the kind of idiocy that dominates these discussions. Why do I do it? Because every now and then, something unexpected happens – someone makes a good point. As a result, I’ve been scouring the internet for reliable data and statistics, preferably from independent peer-reviewed sources (I don’t care what your academic qualifications are, if you’re the president of a shooter’s advocacy group, I’m not going to trust your conclusions).

Thankfully, there is a lot of good data out there. A lot of different websites with different political leanings have cherry-picked that data to suit their aims, but data is still data. Numbers don’t lie. I am, however, trusting that the data was recorded accurately, and that no doctoring has occurred. Perhaps years down the line, wikileaks will leak a document making all the gun data I’ve looked at worthless, but until then, I present the main arguments of both sides as well as whether or not the numbers really back those arguments up.

“Guns don’t kill people, people kill people”. There are t-shirts with this printed on them. The implication here is obviously that the gun is irrelevant to any given homicide and that the sole blame for the death should be placed on the person. This is actually a pretty decent argument. A gun isn’t going to kill anybody by itself, it needs someone to pick it up, point it, and pull the trigger. A similar argument I often read is that, when someone decides to kill someone else, there’s not much you can do about it so why punish legitimate gun owners because of a small percentage of the population who will just find another way to kill if they can’t get a gun.

My counterargument to this is quite simple, and rests on the peculiarities of a gun’s operational properties. Every other murder weapon I can think of requires some degree of effort, skill or combination of the two in order to carry out a successful murder. A knife, a sword, a car, or a bomb all require skill to use. A bladed weapon requires that the murderer get quite close to his victim, exposing him to some degree of personal risk. A car requires skill to operate, and is quite expensive. I can’t think of too many ways to kill someone with a car without causing significant damage to the car as well as risking injury to the driver. Even bombs need skill to construct, the sourcing of material, placement of the bomb itself – all require time and effort to be effective at killing. A gun, on the other hand requires an extremely low degree of skill and an arguably lower amount of effort to be effective as a murder weapon.

So how is this relevant to the argument? It basically means that if someone has decided to kill someone else, they have to put more time and effort into doing it if they don’t have access to a gun. It also means that there is a lower probability of success. Other weapons are simply not as severe, and one the whole, not as leathal. To take the example of the Arizona shooter, he unloaded a 33-round clip into a crowd and managed to kill six people. If he had a knife, he might have killed one person before being stopped. So the point here is – we might not be able to prevent deaths from murders, but we can lower the body count.

Is this really a relevant thing to say though? It relies on the assumption that stricter gun legislation will necessarily be effective at making it more difficult for murderers to obtain firearms. Another argument I often hear is that most guns used in crimes are of the unregistered, unlicensed, or outright illegal variety. Therefore stricter gun legislation would serve to make it more difficult for law-abiding citizenry to get their guns while “the bad guys” would find a way to get their paws on guns no matter what.

The effectiveness of gun legislation has a lot to do with how it is implemented. During the Clinton administration, legislation was passed to limit the number of bullets in a magazine to 10, presumably in line with the earlier argument about lowering the body count. However, there was as loophole which allowed anyone who already had a clip to keep it. There are various reports that this law actually increased the gun-owning-community’s awareness of high-capacity clips and made them more popular. On the flip side, in Australia when very tough gun legislation was introduced in the wake of the Port Arthur massacre, the government implemented a buy-back scheme whereby people who had guns but didn’t want to go through all the red tape now required to keep them could turn their guns in and be compensated.

This resulted in a very large amount of unregistered weapons to surface because those who were owning them illegally decided that the risk of owning them, and the low utility stemming from infrequent and nonessential use was far outweighed by the financial incentive to just turn the guns in. In the end, upwards of 300 million dollars was payed out by the government. Of course, for taxpayer dollars to be spent in this way would require very broad public support, and the government definitely had it at the time. It seems unlikely that something like that would ever happen in America.

It is however generally true that reducing the number of guns in the “legitimate” system makes it more difficult to obtain a gun illegitimately. The example of Australia’s tightening of gun laws included having to provide secure storage for your guns because of the obvious concern that someone might steal your gun and use it to do bad stuff. Statistically, the incidence of gun theft in Australia is negligibly low, and those guns that are stolen generally never surface (not even in gun crimes). However, at this point, Australia becomes a bad example because the numbers are so low that there is little statistical significance to them.

In examining the Australian statistics (the Australian Bureau of Statistics has a good website) I noticed an interesting thing that seems to be missed by a lot of this debate – suicides. Following the tightening of restrictions in Australia, an oft-quoted statistic is that gun-related deaths fell by 47%. This is technically true, but most of those “lives saved” are actually suicides. If you take out the suicides, there is a slight drop, but it is so slight as to be almost statistically insignificant (perhaps someone with a more statistics-bent and less of a topology one could look at the numbers more carefully). Further to this, the suicide rate in Australia only dropped slightly in the same time period meaning that even though gun suicides fell sharply, people were still finding ways to effectively kill themselves (but slightly less effectively than when they had guns).

In the U.S. about 30,000 people a year die from guns. About 1000 of those are accidental, so you would probably see a very slight drop in that if you say, legally mandated secure storage. Usually about half of those gun deaths are suicides. Obviously in the case of a suicide, the gun probably is a little bit irrelevant, but I’d personally like to make it more difficult for people to commit suicide to make absolutely sure that they’ve really thought it through.

All this talk of suicide made me realize that most of the gun debate was revolving around a discussion of gun-related crimes. In reality, gun-crimes account for less than half of all the deaths inflicted by guns every year. All the talk about protecting property, and criminals gunfighting, and people getting massacred actually refers to a set of relatively rare low-probability events. The question then really boils down to – “are we willing to subject a large number of people to the inconvenience of tighter gun control for the questionable prevention or reduction in a number of very rare events?”.

In my view, the answer is still a resounding yes. Going on the numbers alone, I have concluded that tighter gun controls will do a few things: drastically reduce the number of gun-suicides, slightly reduce the number of deaths by accident, slightly-to-moderately reduce the number of gun-homicides (the rate of violent crime won’t shift, but the number of deaths will drop, and the point about criminals’ possession of illegal guns is valid), and it will almost completely eliminate the number of high-profile gun massacres. When weighed against the inconvenience of tighter gun restrictions, I would say that it is worth it.

The numbers show that there is very little correlation between rates of gun ownership and rates of gun deaths (Switzerland, for example, has guns in most households, but a much lower rate of gun deaths than the U.S. (and they’re mostly suicides)). What they do show is that tighter gun controls lower the rate of gun deaths. The exact mechanism by which this works is poorly understood, but a combination of making access more difficult, as well as sending a message “guns are a big deal, just look at all this paperwork I have to fill out to get one” probably has something to do with it.

I suppose that there will always be those who will argue that it is their cultural right to have easy access to guns, and I suppose there is no good counterargument to that. But perhaps a culture which says that it is OK for a significant number of people to die violently and unecessarily should consider the costs and consider modifying their values. After all, culture isn’t fixed, it evolves and changes and is shaped as much by its members as those members are shaped by it. In the end, a violent culture benefits nobody.

Christmas is a funny time of the year.¹ First I am struck by the prevalence of some rather silly political correctness that I encounter in all sorts of funny places. I welcome any arguments to the contrary, but I see no problem in calling the holiday “Christmas”. This is another example of how political correctness, a principle I generally agree with, has forgotten its own point. That point, I believe, is to minimize social and  institutional offence. In doing so, the “truth” if you can call it that, is somehow diluted, which I find even more offensive. Ironically, the same thing seems to have happened to Christmas, which often loses its meaning in amongst the noise of reckless consumerism and gratuitous consumption that always seems to accompany this time of year.

The perceived offence of course has to do with the seeming preference given to christianity and to the christian tradition in the western world. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m one of the first guys to raise an objection to anyone who feels the need to preference the Christian tradition at the expense of any other, or to knock down anyone who believes it to be in any way superior. I do however believe that calling this particular festival and the holiday that surrounds it “Christmas” does none of these things.

I believe that the word “holiday” is some kind of evolved contraction of the words “holy” and “day”

Perhaps it is urban legend, or perhaps this is a case of one of those things that is so obvious that it isn’t actually true, but I believe that the word “holiday” is some kind of evolved contraction of the words “holy” and “day”. Many of the festivals and observances we practice were originally holy days, and in many countries they still retain their original meaning. Halloween for example, or All Hallows Eve, or the “eve of the spirits”, or… the eve of All Saints Day is still observed under those names in many countries, while in others it has turned into an excuse for young girls to dress up as prostitutes on their way to a theme party, and for it to be socially acceptable. (not that I’m complaining, it’s just an observation)

Of course many holidays are not, and never were, based on any kind of religiously significant day. What they are though is “sacred”. National days of independence, birthdays of significant historical figures, or of current monarchs are some of the most common modern “holy days” because in our secular society, those are the things we now consider sacred. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I believe it is a healthy sign of the times when the set of things we consider sacred moves from a bunch of holy relics and religious occurrences with dubious historical backing to days that commemorate historic events of real significance like when a fleet lands in a newly-discovered country, or a country’s declaration of independence (or when Australia wins the America’s Cup).

So we come back to Christmas. Ostensibly the celebration of the birth of Jesus Christ, who according to christians is the son of God. First of all, just to put some historical perspective to all of this, it is entirely unlikely that Jesus (which was a common name back then, btw) was born on the 25th of December. The reason Christ-mass occurs on the 25th is because in Roman times, in the early days of Christianity (when rich, old, white men arbitrarily decided most of the rules, as well as the content of the bible) they sought to replace a pagan festival which itself was a slightly belated celebration of the winter solstice.²

So if this Christ fellow hadn’t come along, we would probably still be celebrating at this time of year. Just as an example, in China we actually do celebrate a winter solstice festival on the 22nd of December where the custom is to gather with family members and eat a lot of food. I think the trouble is that people look for these cultural “fixed points” to base their whole cosmology around (be it secular or otherwise) because it’s a lot easier to do something because that’s how it’s always been done than to actually think about it. Of course, history isn’t like that. Societies evolve, change, and adapt, and school history textbooks seem to miss this point often. Christmas celebration practices, even in conservative rural Eastern Europe have changed significantly even in the last 100 years.

Christmas by any other name would probably have to endure similar debates about its name for as long as we celebrate it.

So what’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and a Christmas by any other name would probably have to endure similar debates about its name for as long as we celebrate it. My hope is that we’ll continue calling it Christmas, and that many years in the future, we have funny little conversations at trivia nights about how the holiday used to be about some significant guy of some major world religion and that’s where the name comes from (rather like how I talked about halloween before). The name is important, because it preserves some historical context and also gives us something to call the holiday that isn’t ambiguous or confusing.³

The question of course, about connecting a major world holiday with a festival which has its origins in a major religion is a good one though. I don’t really mind relgion per se, but some (like Richard Dawkins, for example) do. I refer back to my previous point about the importance of understanding historical context, and also (curiously enough) to the point about the meaning of the “sacred” in an increasingly secular world.

We live in an increasingly secular world, and I would consider myself a secular person. We are learning (some more quickly than others) that you don’t have to be spiritual to be moral, and the two aren’t even necessarily positively correlated. In my secular world, things that are sacred to me are things like the structure of mathematics, and the scientific method (and cricket). I don’t believe that religion is entirely unimportant. It may have been an essential, biologically evolutionarily hard-wired behaviour to get us through the early stages of the development of our civilization. It gives a large group of people, who are mostly strangers to each other, a common point of reference and this helps complex societies to function. Religious behaviour encourages us to see patterns in things (even when the patterns aren’t there) and this would have been essential in the early stages of a society’s development.⁴

What science sometimes doesn’t admit, is that there is an awful lot that it doesn’t know.

That kind of behaviour also has its setbacks. It gives us a lot of false positives, and has this tendency to encourage large groups of people to live in fear. A primitive society which constantly has to fear attacks from other tribes (or bears, some of whom can climb faster than they can run) benefits from having this constant state of mortal fear (because they are often in mortal danger), but in our modern society these behaviours can be very inconvenient. There is also an emphasis on arbitrary authority that just rubs me the wrong way. That’s why we’ve slowly been replacing the way we carry out our lives with things determined by the scientific method. What science sometimes doesn’t admit, is that there is an awful lot that it doesn’t know, but that doesn’t mean we should leave dogma and superstition to make us doubt the very little that we do know.

Anyway, I’m getting off the point… which is that denying facts goes against principles that I hold sacred in my secular world view. The fact is that Christmas is a festival whose dominant customs originated with the Christian tradition and as such it shouldn’t lose the name, lest we lose important information by denying its origins and divorcing it from its historical context. Christmas is only an important holiday because the powerful countries in the Western World were quite Christian at a time when they were at their most powerful. Already though, since these powerful countries have become increasingly secular (and supposedly live by the principle of separation of church and state) the festival has also become increasingly secular. In Hong Kong for example, it has simply become a festival of gift-giving, big parties, nice meals, and lots of lights (so not very different from normal everyday life really). Maybe in the future, it will become a minor holiday, buried in amongst holidays with more historical significance to whichever society ends up being the next world cultural superpower.

Does religion still have a place in society though? For now, I think so. Again, we should learn from history (seriously, kids don’t learn enough history these days, or aren’t taught it properly). While it is true that the major world religions are responsible for some of the worst bloodshed and atrocities that civilization has ever witnessed, as well as some of the worst abuses of power, and the punishment of countless innocent victims, it is also responsible for a great deal of good. A huge portion of humanitarian projects are organised and funded by religiously-based organisations. Throughout history (until the very recent advent of state public education systems) in all faiths, organised religion has been responsible for setting up schools and educating people. The world’s first universities were based around monasteries, and indeed this is why academic robes are the way they are.

For a long time, the church/temple/mosque/synagogue/shrine was also the primary gathering place for local communities. It is hard to imagine now, in our interconnected world, but not so long ago the “local community” was the only community anyone was really exposed to on a regular basis. Perhaps the superstition is now absent from the festivals, but we should not forget them for what they really are, and that is a chance for people to come together and connect with each other.

we should not forget them [festivals] for what they really are, and that is a chance for people to come together and connect with each other.

Perhaps something to think about this Christmas, while you’re munching on your roast turkey in a snowy village in somewhere Denmark, or gnawing away on some barbequed shrimps down under – think about what’s really important. Is it whether we call it “Christmas” or “X-mas” or “the holiday season”, or is it about what it has come to represent – companionship, family, and community. Is it about decorations, lights, and who got the most expensive gift, or is it about reconnecting with people you may only see once a year despite how easy it is to travel and communicate in this modern age? Maybe you’ll even think about all the frantic shopping, flying to and fro, and all the work behind the scenes that makes it possible for all this to take place, and contrast it with the world of the impoverished, living on a dollar a day (if that), who probably don’t even know it’s christmas because they can’t afford any food, let alone a radio to connect them to a world whose easy connections we take for granted.

The world is what we make of it, and the meaning of Christmas is not fixed by the particular sequence of letters of the alphabet it happens to have in its name. It should be a time to come together, not just as a family, but as a community, and not just as a community of your local neighbourhood, profession, or clique, but as a world community – a community where we take responsibility for our actions and the impacts they may have on others, and a community where we are kinder, more generous, and more forgiving of each other. Because that’s not how it’s always been done, but it’s about time we started, because for goodness sake, it’s Christmas. Now go and be merry!

Footnotes

Upside-down world map. Notice how the projection still makes countries like Greenland, Russia and Canada much bigger than they really are (Africa is in fact many times larger than Greenland). Cartographers for Social Equality wouldn't be happy about this.

I’m not happy with the world. I should be more specific – the world is great, but I’m not happy about the way humans conduct themselves while they are on it. It’s no secret that I have a strong belief that if we carry on doing what we do, and treating the world the way we have, then we’re not going to be around for too much longer. Our existence simply isn’t sustainable. Moreover, it is unsustainable on many different levels. One of the biggest problems I have with conservatives, and I may write more about this in a later article, is that if you had to boil conservatism down to its most fundamental principle, a principle that spans as broad a base of conservatism as you can hope to encompass, then it is this – trust in the old ways, for they served us in the past and will continue to do so in the future. The hidden implication here is that new ways should be viewed very cautiously and resisted on principle. Of course, to continue on the line of hidden implications, it also implies that the past is always a good blueprint for dealing with the future, and also that “keeping things the way they are” is necessarily a desirable thing. Both are questionable. In this post however, I do not wish to talk about politics.

To begin, a (criminally) brief overview of the whole-earth equation. We grow food, we eat it. Eating gives us energy so we can grow more food. If we have extra energy or food, we can do something with it. So basically anything we do that isn’t linked to either the growing of food, or the generation of energy must be “paid for” by the surplus of our production. Energy complicates things slightly because solar, geothermal, and gravity (the moon’s – tidal) are the only sources of energy that really exist. Things like coal and oil are merely “batteries” that have been charged over millions of years and happen to be very dense energy-wise which makes them useful. This is why electricity is so useful – it allows us to easily convert energy from one form to another with minimal waste. Throwing more energy at a problem is usually a pretty good way to solve it, which is how we manage to feed the population of the world on the amount of land that we have – through the use of chemical fertilizers and industrialized farming methods, we basically pump more and more energy into the ground, and in return, it gives us more food.

In fact, the energy contained in food these days is often exceeded by the energy that is required to manufacture it. How is this possible? It is because we are quickly depleting the fossil fuel “batteries” that I was talking about earlier. The obvious conclusion from this is that we’re going to run out of batteries and be forced back to an energy budget that is dictated by how efficiently we can harness the renewable energy sources available to us. At the moment, my feeling (and I’m sure there have been studies done on this) is that we wouldn’t be able to cope. Firstly, too many everyday things still require fossil fuels and are not able to substitute anything else (most cars, ships, and all airplanes). Secondly, even if we were to forget about that and assume that everything can be recharged at a power point, I’d bet a lot of money that we still consume far more energy than we can currently extract from renewable sources.

Obviously, the smart thing to do would be to dedicate as many resources as possible towards increasing the efficiency of renewables to meet our growing energy demands  as well as coming up with solutions for all those situations for which fossil fuels have no easy substitute. Small inroads have been made in the form of electric cars and more energy-efficient appliances, but I’m almost sure that the rate at which our renewable energy capacity is increasing is being outstripped by the rate at which our energy consumption is growing.

As if that alone doesn’t present an almost insurmountable challenge to the current generation, we have the additional problem of climate change. It turns out, that in burning these wonderfully convenient fossil fuels, we release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which in turn disrupts the greenhouse effect and makes the planet hotter overall. Of course, carbon dioxide only makes up 385 parts per million of the atmosphere, but the unprecedented growth of the human footprint on this planet in not only burning fossil fuels, but also deforestation (forests are a significant carbon sink) has meant that that number has increased by over 20% since the industrial revolution began. The reasons why this is bad are covered in detail in The Earth Debate series elsewhere on this website, but suffice to say that the future isn’t looking very bright at the moment.

So with this in mind, I have compiled a short list of a few small things that I would like to fix which I believe will make a significant impact on ensuring that future generations can enjoy this wonderful planet that I grew up on.

Photographs changed the public opinion on the Vietnam War

War

The observant among you will have noticed that the title of this website is “Daniel Yeow and the Quest for World Peace”. I believe that this is still a worthy and significant goal. Perhaps surprising in my analysis of the current state of the planet is that I believe strongly that this is achievable in our lifetimes. Mankind has been at war with itself for as long as people have been capable of killing each other. Strangely enough, one of the periods of time during which we were most optimistic about achieving a lasting world peace was just prior to the first world war, when it was believed that the extent of international trade and globalization meant that warfare no longer made any sense because all parties had so much to lose due to their interconnectedness.

Of course, we all know what happened next. After World War I, the alliance was so vengeful that they subjected Germany to reparations so burdensome that the treaty sealing the end of the first world war effectively guaranteed the second. Out of the second world war emerged the United Nations along with the Bretton Woods institutions. However, since the end of WWII, the number of armed conflicts both between as well as within states has decreased dramatically. There are certainly still areas of tension – North and South Korea, Russia and Georgia, Israel and Palestine to name a few.

So what makes me think that war is on the way out? Photographs. Think about the two world wars for a while, pay special attention to the images that come into your head. Just about every image from those wars that was contemporary with the time period wasn’t seen by anyone until quite long after the still or motion picture was published. Moreover, in a technical sense, it was so difficult to get those images and publish them that it was relatively easy for states to control the flow of information. In the Vietnam war this changed significantly, and images from the conflict, despite the government’s best efforts, turned the tide of public opinion against the war.

Journalistic standards are pretty bad these days, but Keith Rupert Murdoch is 79 years old and even he cannot live forever. The progress of film making technology is such that making documentaries has become easier and cheaper than ever before thereby leveling the playing field, previously dominated only by those who had the backing of the state, or large corporations. One only needs to look at the world of climate change documentaries to sense this leveling effect. Two significant climate change denial documentaries have been made – The Great Global Warming Swindle, and Not Evil Just Wrong. Both were backed by money from conservative, libertarian think tanks or big oil, and despite claims to the contrary, are blatant mouthpieces for those special interest groups. Despite these, and the many baseless attacks made, An Inconvenient Truth still stands above those, as do documentaries made on much lower budgets like The Age of Stupid, and less-directly-aimed documentaries like those produced by the Yes Men.

As information flows more freely and easily (think about Wikileaks) more and more of the general population will be exposed to what war is really like. They will not be insulated from it any more, and this will make it more and more difficult for elected officials to get away with waging war. Many people claim to support the war, while others still confuse supporting the troops with supporting the war, but a fundamental fact remains, and that is that people generally don’t like killing each other. The video “Collateral Murder” released by Wikileaks earlier this year caused such a furore because it showed something that nobody wanted to see – innocent people being killed. It happens in a war, and most people can accept that, but they don’t like it.

As an aside, more of the world’s GDP (GWP?) is spent fighting wars than on anything else. If we could finally end this childish and brutal practice, then we would finally be able to divert a very significant amount of our productivity to solving these pressing problems of preserving our civilization.

Kevin Carter's famous Pulitzer-winning photograph. Carter committed suicide not long after this was taken due to depression.

Poverty

I became concerned with poverty after reading Jeffrey Sachs’ book “The End of Poverty”. So concerned that I ended up at Columbia University sleeping 4-5 hours a night completing a masters degree in the hope that I would learn one or two things which would help me achieve this goal. The reason this problem shot right up my priority list was because I realized that if we were to solve this problem, it would go a very long way to solving a lot of the other problems of the world. Starting at the top of the list, ending poverty would go further towards achieving world peace than ending the small arms trade would.

The “poverty line” in many countries is arbitrarily determined by a number. Even the UN has figures on poverty defined by the number of people who live on less than $1 a day, or $2 a day. Thinking about that for a second, that really isn’t enough to live. True enough, millions of people die in the world every year simply because they are too poor to stay alive. That’s a pretty sobering thought – to imagine that there are people in the world who die because they can’t afford to stay alive, when we hear about people complaining because they can’t afford a new car/iphone/jacket. The implications for that kind of poverty are pretty obvious – if you are given the choice between dying because you’re too poor to stay alive, or killing someone else for the chance to live a little longer, then it might not surprise you that that is exactly what a lot of people do.

It doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to extend this concept to large, organized groups doing it. A lot of idiots from all colours of the political spectrum like to lay the blame on Islamic fundamentalists. While it is certainly true that religious extremists are often the ones who perpetrate crimes of terror, I strongly feel that the reason that the extremists become so extreme has more to do with poverty than with religion. It is a fun hobby of people like Geert Wilders to quote verses from the Koran and label them as inherently violent. Of course, even a cursory glance through world history will show that all religions have experience periods of extremism and committed atrocities in the name of whatever deity they happen to follow. Indeed, one of the most peaceful religions in the world today – Buddhism, is widely believed to be responsible for the invention of martial arts because soldiers would often plunder temples when regional warlords exchanged pleasantries, and the monks got sick of being defenceless and invented self-defence.

What I’m basically trying to say is that if you’ve got a roof over your head, and enough food to eat, you’re very unlikely to want to go out and kill someone. Everyone’s after the same contract – work hard, and be given the means to provide for oneself and one’s family. If that contract cannot be provided, or is broken, then people will feel their lives threatened, and will likely take the matter into their own hands.

The other advantages of ending poverty are numerous. Food security for a family results in less children because the probability of a child surviving into adulthood is greater. The further out of poverty a people can be, the more likely they are to invest in themselves, in the form of infrastructure, and education, which further improves their quality of life and productivity, which in turn increases their ability to dig themselves out of poverty… and so the spiral continues.

The book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” by Jared Diamond, (which is essential reading for anyone who wants to save the world btw) gives some good answers to the question of why some people in some parts of the world became wealthy while other parts of the world have remained in poverty. Simply put, the land that you happen to grow up on has a certain carrying capacity which depends on many factors such as rainfall, soil quality, accessibility of clean water, to name a few. The higher this number, the more likely and the more complex a civilization is likely to develop.

In truth, the development of complex societies around the world was varied and sporadic until quite recently, and reason for this is that the world has become more interconnected. This connectivity has allowed us to spread the inherent risks of depending on a small plot of land for all your food. This way, if a large area were to suddenly have a few years of drought, the society there doesn’t die off completely, but instead is supported by an ally with the understanding that when the situation is switched, they would do the same.

It’s about time we extended this protection to the poorest parts of the world. With the coming unpredictability of climate change, it is not outside the realm of possibility that someday the most impoverished countries in Africa might become the world’s breadbaskets. Equipping them with the infrastructure and knowledge to help themselves benefits both them and us. In truth though, we shouldn’t do this simply because it makes us a little bit better off in the economic equation, or that it increases the overall utility in some whole-earth equation. We should do this because it is the right thing to do.

Although he met an untimely end, his nonviolent "fight" against injustice inspires us to this day

Injustice

Dr Martin Luther King Jr once said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere”. Justice is a funny concept, and one that deserves a lot of thought. Far more thought than this article can realistically contain without going too far off-topic. A common thread in all historically successful civilizations is a strong sense of the rule of law. Hammurabi’s code of laws, one of the earliest examples of codified legal and economic systems has such laws as “If a man strikes a pregnant woman, thereby causing her to miscarry and die, the assailant’s daughter shall be put to death.” Most of Hammurabi’s laws end with the accused being put to death, and one would hope that we have developed a more humane way of dealing with injustice in this day and age.

Most, but certainly not all countries have laws which work fairly well. The major advantage of having laws, even if some of them are silly or make no sense, is that it makes things more predictable, and when things are more predictable, then things are easier to plan, and when things are easier to plan, then more can get done. A mature justice system, in particular if it is enforced well, is a pretty sure-fire way to prevent civil conflict.

I find that in general, codes of laws and the legal systems of individual countries are far more well-developed and “just” than the loose sense of international law that exists between countries which still resembles playground politics than anything else. For example, in the middle east (and I’m sure I’m going to cop some criticism for this) you could write entire libraries on why there is always conflict in the area, but what it boils down to is “your brother killed my father, but he’s dead now, so I’m going to kill you”.

Many argue that we should not interfere with the affairs of others, but I think this is a hopelessly naive way of looking at the world. It implies that the actions of people in one country have no effect on those in another, which is demonstratably untrue. As our footprint on the world grows ever larger, we need more than ever to learn how to live together and get along. One of the greatest challenges of international justice is that it is trying to exist in a system of anarchic states with no higher authority to appeal to. It is then left to us to be good neighbours to each other and we’re doing a pretty poor job. As W.H. Auden once said in the concluding lines of a poem on the eve of World War II, “we must love one another, or die”.

So there you go, three little problems that I would like to solve. I’m not too sure how I’m going to go about doing any of these things, but getting a job at a bank isn’t really on the cards (sorry dad). In solving these three, hopefully we’ll be some of the way towards ensuring that a somewhat habitable world will be available to future generations, and the same opportunities that have been available to me in my sheltered, privileged life will be available to everyone. Yeah, I’m a dreamer, but I reckon if everyone in the world dreamed as I did, then it wouldn’t be a dream. I dare you all to imagine a better world.

One of many signs dotted all over Cuba proclaiming the "A Better World is Possible"

“We could learn a lot from crayons; some are sharp, some are pretty, some are dull, while others bright, some have weird names, but they all have learned to live together in the same box” ~ Robert Fulghum

There's more to it than just putting some skates on and going fast

In catching up with old friends in Melbourne, I have noticed a curious trend. Ordinarily, when one catches up with old friends after being overseas for an extended period, one is asked mostly about where one has been, what one did while there, and was it was like. While I was, expectedly, bombarded with those questions, I was struck by something else that I was asked for a lot – advice on physical training.

Unbeknownst to me, it seems that being a full-time athlete makes me an ideal candidate for being asked about all things relating to physical training, the assumption here being that I am somehow very knowledgeable about it. While I am fairly knowledgeable when it comes to matters of training, that should not be an obvious thing. Not all (in fact, very few) athletes know much about the science behind their training schedules. I suppose my friends also assumed that, being the sort of person who I am, I would have taken the time to learn about the science behind the training. While this happens to be true, the information in my head is not as useful as a lot of people seem to think.

Let me begin by saying that I’m not a naturally sporty person. That might sound absurd, given that I have been involved in a great many sports, some at a fairly competitive level. A phrase I have recently used a lot is that I have been the fortunate winner of some kind of “genetic lottery”. It is well-known among my friends that I eat ridiculous amounts of food and never seem to put on any weight. What is less well-known is that this isn’t because I lead an active lifestyle. While I lived in New York doing my masters degree, I did almost no exercise. I always took the subway from my apartment on 86th St to uni, on 116th, which is about 20-30 minutes worth of walking. I still ate copious amounts of food, yet I neither gained weight, nor did I have the appearance of gaining weight. I did the occasional push up and sit-up for merely cosmetic purposes, in preparation for the unlikely scenario that a girl should find herself in my apartment requesting an inspection of the muscles in question.

It was only after I finished the actual degree and I found myself with a lot of free time, did the thought of exercise even cross my mind. I would then run a lap of central park just for fun, or play some indoor soccer or table tennis. An unusual thing that I noticed was that, despite not having done any training for almost a year, I was still a great deal fitter and stronger than most of the people who also participated in these activities. Moreover, most of these people were regular and long-term participants in those activities. Genetics – mere luck – determine a great deal about one’s sporting prowess, and this is especially apparent at the elite level. It is also apparent, if one knows what one is looking for, at the lower levels of sport. This is something to keep in mind, when considering any advice I give relating to sport.

Often I am asked to give advice on what training needs to be done for “general fitness”. This question baffles me. For me, sport is a tool; a means to an end. Most of the time for me, that end is just to have fun and be social. Recently, I had a go at making the Olympic games that end, but it didn’t quite work out. The notion that there are people out there who, by themselves, for no other reason than “general fitness” go out for runs and to the gym confuses me slightly. I often ask “what’s your goal?” to which I am usually met with the reply “just to get fit” at which point my head explodes in confusion.

But this is silly. It seems ridiculous that someone who has spent as much time in as many different sports as I have, and as much time training at a high level as I have can offer no help to the hapless seeker of information on how to be “generally fit”. Without clear goals (and by “clear goals” what I really mean is, “which olympic event are you trying to win?”) it is difficult for me to dispense responsible advice. However, in my meandering experience and observation, I have witnessed a great many people in their quest for “general fitness” doing things wrong. Is this a bad thing? My previous argument included matters such as risk of injury, however I have since realized that since they are not full time athletes, doing things badly just occasionally doesn’t do them enough harm to properly inconvenience them, and by “properly inconvenience”, I mean “injure themselves in a way that they would notice, and would impair their ability to train further”.

Nevertheless, I will now attempt to give advice (hence the title of this post) on how one might go about achieving their goal of “general fitness” without attracting the ire of people such as myself.

Firstly a word about technique. It is the first and last thing you should be thinking about whenever you do sport. There is hardly space in this article to go into any real detail about biomechanics so I won’t. Instead, my advice is to observe people who are at the top of whatever sport you happen to be doing and do what they do. Proper technique is the key to realizing your full potential in any given sport. Even if you do not have Olympic aspirations, proper technique is also a good way to avoid injury. In everything you do, there exists such a thing as “proper technique”. Some people have an ability to watch people and then copy their technique well, while others can “feel” their way towards good technique (talented swimmers do this). Get a coach, get a mirror, get a stopwatch… do whatever it takes, but make absolutely sure that you are ALWAYS thinking about doing things with proper technique.

Have fun – many people forget this. Many people also forget that fun can take many different forms. Playing a team sport like hockey for example can be fun for the social aspect, sports like orienteering can be fun for the exposure to beautiful scenery and nature (and bears). For those who just go to the gym, perhaps it is a good time to catch up on all the latest lectures from iTunes U, or to take a survey on the correlation between female buttock diameter and bench press ability. It can even be as inane as wanting to socialize with hot female curlers after a curling match. Whatever you can do to make it fun, do it because if you’re not enjoying yourself, then you’re not going to be motivated, and being motivated is important for all those instances when you don’t really want to wake up to go training because it’s too cold, wet, or early in the afternoon.

What I’m going to focus on takes its cues sports-science-wise from the early part of a training program. This is the part where an athlete has just come back from a long break and is simply preparing the body for “proper” training. At this point, a lot of people are thinking “why don’t we just get straight into proper training”. The simple answer to that is that it might kill you, and it would certainly injure you in a way akin to taking one step forward and about ten steps back (starting from zero, mind you). If you eventually want to get into “proper” training, then it’s up to you but I would generally advise against it unless you really want to go to the Olympics. Past a certain volume of training, there are rapidly decreasing returns, and past a *slightly* further point, it will do more harm than good. One of the challenges of a high performance coach, is to find that maximum amount of training that a body can take and do the most with it. Athletes chosen for this kind of thing are often considered for their ability to withstand and recover from high volumes and intensities of training.

A quick word on eating – eat well. Drink LOTS, in fact, carry a water bottle around with you wherever you go and sip from it regularly. Don’t go crazy trying to avoid every little thing that has fat in it. Do NOT go out and buy all the low-fat and sugar-free food in the supermarket. Avoid processed foods as much as possible. Think of it this way – if it has been processed, then your body has to un-process it to get to it. While your body is busy doing that, it also has to clean out all the stuff that isn’t “food”, like preservatives, colouring, etc. That’s all effort that is being wasted, and effort that your body was never designed to go through. You should try very hard to eat something within 20 minutes of finishing a workout because your body absorbs things faster while it is in that heightened state. If you can stomach it, nibbling during a workout is also recommended (as a practical note, I’ve only been able to make that work on long bike rides).

Your cardiovascular system is important for obvious reasons. In sport, even in sports which emphasize sprinting over endurance (shot put, to take an extreme example) a well trained CV system is important because it helps you recover from training. My general feeling about this, is to do something that is as low-impact as possible. Cycling and swimming are options that come to mind, and which of these you choose depends largely on which is closer to the sport you are training for. For a sport like speed skating, cycling is perfect because not only is it low impact, but it also works very similar muscle groups to those used in skating. Swimming is a better all-round workout and doesn’t usually require as much space. (you could always put your bike on a wind-trainer, or use a stationary bike I suppose). If your chosen sport is an endurance-heavy sport, like cross country running, then running is another option. Running however, is quite high-impact and requires more recovery time, and this should be kept in mind when designing your own program.

Specifically, every workout you do will train your CV system to some extent. It is helpful though, to have at least one session a week which targets it specifically. When I trained, it was a 3-hour bike ride every Sunday afternoon in a large pack. Of course, this is in the context of a training week where we would often do an easy hour on the bike in the late afternoon of every day for “recovery”. If you’re on a bike, you’ll need more time than if you’re swimming, and if you’re running, try not to go for more than 45 minutes otherwise you’ll food-flat.

Work on your flexibility. You don’t have to be able to do the splits to be good at speed skating (although, if you’re a figure skater, it really helps) but having a good range of motion is very important not only for injury prevention, but for your own awareness of where bits of your own body are. Stretching for flexibility involves lengthening the muscle to its limit for about 20-30 seconds and repeating the process 2-3 times. Do NOT stretch immediately before or after a workout – it weakens the muscle. I suppose if you’re not training very often, or very intensely, it won’t matter much, but it will prevent you from getting the most out of your training. Flexibility workouts should be treated as separate workouts, but you can be flexible with them (har har) and do them anywhere – in front of the TV while your favourite weekly show is on for example. If flexibility is central to your sport, then you want to do this twice a week at least, otherwise once is fine.

Work on your core. When I say this, people think of abs, and six-packs. That is not quite what I mean. I’m really talking about obliques, and pelvic floor muscles. They are very underworked and underused muscles, yet are some of the most important when it comes to… well… moving. It’s hard to really understand this unless you’ve have a bad back injury. I had a prolapsed disc once, and it really sucked. It also made me realize how much you use your back in everything that you do, from tying your shoelaces, to opening doors. Small wonder then, that when you get to the elite level everyone tells you to work on your core. Of course, EVERYONE should work on their core because everyone moves. Just doing lots of sit ups though, isn’t going to help you very much.

working on our cores on the grass outside

You’re aiming to develop the muscles that stabilize you. This is all about having a strong platform from which to jump, throw, run, whatever. A nice one to start with is the “prone hold”, sometimes called the plank, or ab brace. It’s simple – you hold yourself off the ground using your elbows and toes. The key is to keep your back straight and to draw your belly button towards your spine (sucking your tummy in). Start with two or three sets of thirty seconds each. It might take a while, but you should eventually aim to progress to at least two sets of two minutes. I used to be able to do two sets of five minutes every day without much trouble. Another good exercise to add to that, is what I call the “wood chop”. This is where you sit on a medium-sized inflatable fit ball, and perform a twisting action with your arms outstretched drawing a weighted-cable across the front of your body (rather like chopping at a tree with an axe). These exercises won’t necessarily make you look hot in the mirror (with a shirt off), but they will make you biomechanically much more efficient at moving your own body.

Intensity is important. I actually have the opposite problem when I work out, I have a tendency to go out too hard and toast myself (which is fine for certain workouts, but not all). This depends very largely on what sport you pick, but it is a good idea to vary the intensity of your workouts. Training too intensely too often will burn you out and injure you. Doing the opposite will make you surprisingly useless at your chosen sport. Take this anecdote – I had a friend, Juan Carlos Valencia, stay with me for a number of months and he would run at least 10k every day. He challenged me to a race once – 800m, and I feel sure that he felt sure that he would win. He spent more time than I did training, and he certainly ran a far greater distance on a regular basis. However, when the day of the race came, I ran on his shoulder for 500m at a pace that I would describe as “uncomfortably fast”, but at 300m to go, I took off and covered the final 300m in the time it took him to cover 200m. I was exhausted, and he was not… but I had won the race by a considerable margin. I was training 5 days a week at the time (I was training for the 400m at university games), and my workouts weren’t long, but they involved a lot more speed work and were done at a much higher intensity (I call it “vomit intensity”).

Now just some quick notes on weight training to finish off.

Weight training in indispensable if you’re serious about getting anywhere in sport. Even if you aren’t, it’s much more time efficient than simply doing a lot of the sport. Always do a full warm up consisting of at least 5 minutes on a stationary bike or equivalently low-impact apparatus. Start with legs, then chest, shoulders, arms, and finish with your core workout. Even though you don’t specifically target your core until the end, you should always be thinking about what your core is doing when you do all the exercises. Always warm down afterwards, and don’t feel silly if you’re spending more time warming up and warming down than you actually spend working out.

Specificity is key. For weight training to really benefit you in the sport that you are doing, you need to be doing exercises which are reasonably specific to the actions that you perform in that sport. In speed skating, that is relatively easy – lots of squats, dead lifts, lunges and other similar exercises. Even then, we were instructed to time our muscle contractions to closely mimic what they would do in skating. For example, we did one-legged squats with a small amount of weight and we would count to three on the way down, but come up using only one count. Does it make a difference? Yes, a very very small one… but when fractions of a second matter so much, these things all add up. I suppose if you’re getting to the stage where you’re designing very specific weight exercises to assist with your sport, then you would (or should) have a coach to assist you.

Don’t get obsessed with lifting heavy weights. That’s a high speed train ticket to the land of injury. I suppose the exception to the rule “don’t get obsessed with lifting heavy weights” would be if your chosen sport is weightlifting, in which case, that is your imperative. Otherwise, realize that lighter weights, combined with proper technique and specificity will actually be much more effective in achieving your goals (nebulous as they may be). If you just want big muscles, then the feeling that you are going for is the “burn”. 2-3 sets of 10-15 reps, where the last 2-3 reps are giving you the “burn” is the general formula for muscle hypertrophy. Do these reps slowly on the way down as well as on the way up and you will be more effective. Eat lots of protein immediately after your workout to maximize your recovery.

Muscles are a funny thing. They are essential to performance in sport, but many people are surprised at just how much range you have when it comes to training muscles. If your aim is not to simply have big muscles, don’t get obsessed with having big muscles. Bodybuilders are actually very weak. For the amount of muscle they have, they really can’t do much other than look (questionably) good with their shirts off. As far as strength to weigh ratio goes, gymnasts and ballet dancers are the winners, and it won’t surprise you that being from either of those sets of people is a great starting point to get into other sports. But, in sports like shot put, your strength-to-weight ratio doesn’t get you anywhere, only your strengths does, and in speed skating, there is some middle ground. What I’m trying to say is “don’t put on more muscle than you need”. Muscle is “expensive”, you need to feed it, you need to maintain it. When you’re running hard you will hit your lactic threshold sooner if you have more muscle. I guess the point I’m trying to make is that you must always keep in mind what your muscles are there to do.

I don’t know if any of this information is useful to anybody, but there it is. Below is a typical week of training program for “general fitness” aimed at a versatile, well-rounded athlete such as a middle distance runner, skater, or curler. I am NOT currently doing any of this, nor do I intend to. If any readers decide to give this a try, I would be very interested in any feedback. The 1000m bike intervals and the 300m runs are the two high intensity workouts, you should ease into them and resist the temptation to go too hard. Delayed-onset muscle soreness is not a myth.

Monday

AM: Weights

PM: 1hr recovery ride if time permits(a normal conversation should be able to be maintained)

Tuesday

Running, 8x100m, 3min recovery (consistent high intensity, times should only drop off slightly in the 7th and 8th set)

Wednesday

AM: Interval ride, 6x1000m, at least 6 min recovery (These are from a standing start. Try to stay consistent. There is a tendency for these to make you feel ill towards the end. If you have trouble finding a bike and 1000m of clear road, do it on a stationary bike at a reasonably high resistance for 90 seconds. You should feel toasted at the end of every one.)

PM: Stretch

Thursday

AM: Weights

PM: recovery swim (not laps, think: water aerobics)

Friday

technique drills, in the mirror if possible, perhaps some small amount of core work

Saturday

Interval run, 8x300m, 90 second recovery, then 15min off, then 400m 100% (For the 8x300m, try to be completely consistent. The first few sets should feel too easy, and last few sets should feel very difficult, but all should be completed in the same amount of time. You should feel ill, like vomiting, after the 400m. Walk a lap, then jog a lap gently to recover. If you’re up to it, have an ice bath and then a warm shower afterwards.) p.s. Skip the 400m run for the first few weeks.

Sunday

Rest, or long slow recovery bike ride (2hrs+, take food)

(p.s. on monday and thursday nights, the recovery session can be replaced by an hour of deep tissue massage (the kind that hurts) once a week)

Dutch election results by municipality

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t like to be nasty to people. While it is certainly true that I have a pugnacious side to my nature, I am a generally peaceful and conflict-averse individual. The day that I departed the Netherlands also happened to be election day (I somehow timed my departure from my brief trip to the UK to coincide with their election as well). In this election, Geert Wilders’ party, the Party for Freedom (Dutch pronounciation – partee for de fry-hide) won 24 seats, up from 9 in the previous election, making him non-trivially powerful in a parliament where government is formed by coalitions of many small parties. Geert is a particularly interesting figure because he is regarded as controversial owing to his strong anti-Muslim stance. Recently discussions I’ve had with friends who live in the Netherlands has revealed that part of his popularity stems from his perceived straight-talking nature, and because he says things that “everyone is thinking, but is too afraid to say”. Of course, most of these things turn my stomach, so I’m going to take this opportunity to read between the lines for all of those out there who have either been too lazy or too stupid to do so yet.

Geert Wilders

First off, this guy’s a fucking idiot. Unfortunately, he’s an idiot in a way that isn’t easy for ordinary people to detect, which makes him that very worst kind of idiot – the type that people take seriously. Sadly, these types are increasingly common in politics. The main thrust of what he says basically revolves around some rabid anti-Muslim sentiment with a bit of racism thrown in. This is really the main sticking point for me – regardless of what he actually says, and how sound his policies may sound, what he’s basically saying is “I am a racist, a xenophobe, and I hate Muslims” (even though he has been known to explicitly state the opposite, I’ll believe him when he gives me good reason to). If you vote for him, you are, by extension, saying the same things. A lot of people, at this point, accuse me of being some kind of liberal, leftie, hippie, apologist, appeasement nutcase who’s too afraid to face up to the horrible truth, or other such nonsense like that. While I would certainly agree that I am fairly left-leaning, I’m certainly no bleeding heart, and I’m not afraid of facing the truth. In this case though, I would say that I have a clearer perception of the truth than most.

What he’s basically saying is “I am a racist, a xenophobe, and I hate Muslims”. If you vote for him, you are by extension, saying the same things.

There is a very real issue here; that of the identity of a nation. These old white guys, who are used to being in charge of everything, feel threatened by all of these very different-looking, and different-behaving people. They don’t like their culture, customs, habits, and especially their religion. They don’t want them coming into their churches, their houses, or (god forbid) marrying their daughters. Obviously, enacting divisive social policies is going to fix all of this. If the concept of the Dutch national identity is based on some kind of ideal of a homogenized society based around a single religion, ethnicity, and culture, then obviously there is a problem. I would go so far as to say that, without realizing it at a conscious level, a large number of Dutch truly do perceive their national identity in those terms. There’s nothing very wrong with that, it just means that society needs to grow up a little bit and realize that things that are ordinarily viewed as traditions, and norms, are not immovable, fixed concepts that have been around for time immemorial (which is what conservatives always seem to imply with their “traditional values” nonsense), but they are dynamic and increasingly-rapidly changing things.

There are also secondary issues. Like the freedom to practice religion in general, and whether or not we can really place value judgements on the validity of religions in the world today. Various friends of mine assert that there is something fundamental about Islam that makes it more dangerous, or in some way inferior to the Judeo-Christian tradition. Without going into too much detail of the arguments for or against religion in general, as opposed to a completely secular society, and having read all of the Bible and most of the Koran, as well as religious texts of various other major world religions, I would say that none are particularly superior to any of the others. Wilders once said that Muslims should tear out half the Koran before coming to the Netherlands, which may be a valid point, but a great deal of the Bible would have to be removed as well if we were to be consistent in our application of religious discrimination.

The real problem is that while most of the very visible Christian extremism in the world today involves crazy people in the US getting their knickers in a knot over gay marriage and trying to repeal Roe vs Wade (and Sarah Palin, did I mention her?), the visible examples of Islamic extremism involve large fiery explosions. There are various reasons that the extremism has taken on the form that it has, and most are related to the fairly random distribution of wealth and, in particular, wealth inequality that exists around the world today. It is my opinion (and you’ll find that I have very strong opinions about this) that religion, at least as far as the belief in God is concerned, has absolutely nothing to do with the reprehensible behaviour of those who supposedly act on their God’s behalf. Religion has always been a convenient tool for wealthy, powerful people to use poor people to kill other poor people for profit; in all religions.

But the dirty world of politics is diluting these important issues. The “debate” isn’t about what’s really going on at all. It’s posturing about terrorism and national security. It is playing to the politics of fear, because using fear is a much easier way to control people than using rationality. Aristotle recommended two parts logos, one part ethos, and one part pathos, but modern politicians seem only to ever use pathos in their rhetoric; it’s cheap. The slightest logical scrutiny of the arguments involved quickly reveals them to be quite nonsensical. But why should that matter to the electorate? They don’t want to hear that there is a very important difference between the statements “all terrorists are Muslims” and “all Muslims are terrorists”; no, they want to believe that their scary brown neighbors who speak a different language are dangerous but it’s ok because the government is going to do something about it, thereby improving national security.

Everyone seems to want an excuse to be nasty to everyone else, so a religion, and now anti-a-religion has become the tool of choice. The power-hungry are simply trying to create an pitched battle where only small misunderstandings exist. Perhaps they truly believe all of what they say, in which case they are simply very stupid, but I don’t buy that; I think they know what they are doing, and that is more morally reprehensible than any of the crimes that they accuse the “other” of committing. But we must not allow ourselves to be sucked into this ridiculous game of political point-scoring based on ill-founded emotional appeals. Very real and complex issues that require considerable thought and introspection are being simplified and externalized and one of the world’s major religions is being used as a scapegoat. We could be level-headed about this, or we could slip into blame-game finger-pointing reminiscent of the world of playground bullying that most of us (but not all politicians) grow out of. People don’t want to think, and they’re giving that responsibility to their “leaders”. The world “leader” seems to imply that some kind of progress is being made, but in the case of Geert Wilders, anyone foolish enough to follow him is only being lead off a very steep cliff.

Wilders calls his party the party for freedom, but I say he is offering the opposite. Aung San Suu Kyi once said, “The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear”. If you really want a free country, the first thing you must do is free your mind from fear, and the first thing that the Dutch should do, is free itself from Geert Wilders.

beyone petroleum... but not bullshit

It’s that time of the year again, and I am once again in a reflective mood about the state of the world in which we live. That state, to put it mildly, is “not good”. We are rapidly headed towards a nasty collision with mother nature and the worst part about it, is that we’re really not doing much to stop ourselves. The problems we face are very large and multi-faceted, and it will take all of our human ingenuity (and then some) to fix these problems, however I foresee disaster not so much because I think we lack the ability to solve these problems (although that is a distinct and rather scary possibility) but because, even before we get to that, we will probably manage to stop ourselves from making a good attempt at it.

Take for example the incident in the Gulf of Mexico involving BP. There are many layers of badness here. First of all, at the most basic level, there is a lot of crude oil spilling into the ocean. More than has ever been spilled before and it will have profound effects on the ecosystems of the gulf. The other, in many ways more disturbing, thing about this incident is that almost every day, it is revealed that there was some kind of systematic cover-up. Sometimes we hear about regulators not being tough on BP, other times we hear about corners being cut by BP, and sometimes we even hear of very unusual things like the chemicals that are being pumped into the stream to “break it up into smaller particles” which serves to do nothing other than mask the true size of the spill. However, one of the worst things that I have heard recently, is when people stick up for the bad guys.

There seems to be an interesting sub-group of the human population who are either deluded from reading too much Ayn Rand and learning all their econ from Mises.org (or worse, Rush Limbaugh) who seem to feel that it is their duty to stand up for the “underdog”. In this case, the underdog is poor BP which is taking a hammering in the media at the moment. I hear cries of “what do you know about drilling for oil”, and “leave them alone, and let them clean it up” etc. One of the most unfortunate side-effects of the morally reprehensible PR campaigns of tobacco companies, who for a long time published fake scientific papers which basically said that smoking isn’t such a bad thing, is that it has become acceptable, even normal, for large corporations (who have the kind of money you need to make talented people lie like that) to stage expensive publicity campaigns to cover up their mistakes. This has a follow-on effect of making people believe the lies, and perpetuate them. The liars are always easy to spot, for the same reason that dumb high-schoolers who cheat on their homework are easy to spot – because they say the same thing, often not even bothering to change the wording. The number of times I’ve had the same fake climate science papers cited by climate change deniers is kind of amazing.

I find it incredible that human civilization, and all it’s wonderful achievements in science, technology, invention and so on can’t seem to get over this hurdle. At school (at least in Australia) we are taught “media analysis”, the object of which is the better equip us to separate the stuff from the fluff. When you watch Fox News for example, it’s mostly fluff and a quick analysis of the language used, without even checking their “facts” (which are mostly made-up), can usually reveal the true nature of the “news” being reported. Unfortunately, I have a suspicion that not everybody who is taught this at school actually learns it, or retains the ability. Even if they did, what match is an increasingly poorly-funded education system against an obscenely well-funded publicity machine with the backing of a large multinational corporation? I’ve thought about the strategy of giving proper scientists PR departments. Of course, that is a battle that nobody can win – an oil company who wants to deny climate change will ALWAYS have more money than the combined R&D spending of the entire planet.

I used to think that the truth would always win out because, well… it was the truth. Now I’m not so sure. In economic terms, it should be much easier to pay someone to publicize the truth than to publicize a lie. How much less expensive should it be? Well, it comes down to how much our society values the truth compared to how much our society values money – and now we start to see some of the problem. In an ideal world, you shouldn’t be able to pay someone to lie… but we all know that everyone has a price. I would like to think that my price would be more than the anyone could pay, and this may be true in monetary terms… but not all payment has to take the form of money. A death threat, for example; not to myself, but to someone very close, would conceivably force me to lie in a meaningful way. Corporations have been known to do this from time to time. Is it legal? It is if you don’t get caught; you would be surprised the number and types of things that can be bought if you have enough money and a bit of imagination.

That is, of course, only half of the problem. People are much more receptive to some things than others. If two people of equal standing were to present you the following conflicting “facts” – on the one hand, you have potentially catastrophic climate change where the solution involves developing whole new industries, and making drastic lifestyle changes, while on the other hand, you’re told that everything is going to be ok… I know what I would *rather* believe. Now add the fact that scientists, for some inexplicable reason, are not held in very high standing in the public eye, at least not next to smooth-talking celebrity talk show hosts. Yes Houston, we have a problem.

For a long time in my life, I only ever considered the problem of world peace on my long-term agenda (you can tell that I’m not a very ambitious person). World peace is one of those problems for which a “technical” solution doesn’t exist. That means, in my mind, that no amount of science or technology is going to achieve world peace, but the solution instead involves, in the immediate sphere, a lot of compromise, negotiation, and tit-for-tat, while in the long term, it will require an evolution of the way that a lot of people think. I have come to the conclusion that climate change is similar.

True, there are technological advances that can potentially solve the problem overnight. But those solutions are a long way into the future, and in many ways that would be “cheating”. Why? Because current technology is able to solve our problem (yes, I’m quite serious here) but it will take a lot of negotiation, and compromise to make that happen. Climate change is not a problem for which no technical solution exists, but the “best” solution is the non-technical one. Though it is likely that this crisis will end, or drastically reduce our large and complex civilization, it also has the potential to make us take the next step in our evolution, and that is to learn how to get along on a global scale. Climate change could be just the kick in the ass that we all need.

It is sometimes said that uniting against a common enemy can bring people closer together. I think that’s a bit childish. What if that common enemy is all of humanity itself? We are our own worst enemy. What would aliens think if they happened on our planet? They probably wouldn’t want anything to do with us, they’d probably leave, thinking “oh well, in a few hundred years they would have wiped themselves out and we can have this planet”. History constantly repeats itself, yet we never seem to learn anything from it. Is it because we’re too lazy to study history? I don’t think so. I think it has a lot more to do with the fact that we’re all fed a lot of bad information, and we have an overinflated sense of self-importance. I’ve been in a slightly cynical and somewhat philosophical move lately and if you were to ask me what my message to the people of the earth would be if I was some kind of all-powerful being who was somehow in a position to deliver a message to the people of earth that they would listen to, it would be “get over yourselves”.

While it is unlikely that people who happen on this website are the despicable types I mention above who whore out their consciences and voices to the highest bidder in defence of the misdeeds of corporations; if you are one of them, and have read this far, I encourage you to post a comment; because you have a lot to answer for. C’mon, bring it… my pugnacious streak is in need of some attention.

And to the rest (because those I mention above are generally beyond help) I leave you with two instructive footnotes. One of my favourite Carl Sagan quotes – pale blue dot, and one of my favourite speeches, JFK’s “peace speech“.

File exchange on a distributed network

Torrents are wonderful things. For those who are unfamiliar (and it is entirely possible to be unfamiliar yet still be a regular user), torrents are a system by which files are shared over a network of computers. If the Internet is the era-defining black swan of our generation, then torrents are the cargo trucks on our superhighway. They are the natural evolution of the solution to the problem of moving files from place to place.

First, a bit of context and technical background. Back in the good old days when the Internet was just starting up and a gigabyte was considered huge for a hard disk, bandwidth was very limited. Most people connected via modems using telephone lines with carrier signals that sounded like faxes. To send large files from computer to computer was difficult, HTTP (or hyper text transfer protocol) was limited in this capacity and FTP (file transfer protocol) was clumsy and often required the swapping of passwords and connections between trusted computers. This basically meant that you had to “know” in some sense, the person with whom you exchanged files, or else download files over slow and unreliable connections.

Then came P2P, or peer-to-peer networks. You’ve probably heard of Napster, which was one of the first widely-used P2P networks. The nature of P2P is exactly what it sounds like. In the case of Napster, the tracking of clients was still centralized, but once a request for a file and a computer with that file had been identified, then these two computers would be able to connect to each other and the file transfer could take place. Although Napster was eventually shut down, it paved the way for other P2P systems such as gnutella, which are decentralized and allow downloading of a single file from multiple hosts who also have that file, further speeding up the spread of data.

Then came bit torrent. In a technical sense, the whole mechanism for how torrents works fascinates me. With something like the gnutella network, you can download a file from as many different computers as have the file, which is great, and can be very fast although… think about what happens when a file first hits the net.

One person has the file, great. Lets say you’ve got a network of 10 computers who all want the file. The other nine start downloading the file from this one dude so the this one guy’s network connection gets maxed out until everyone else has the file. We can make this interesting and say that it takes one hour to transfer this file from one computer to another (to define our bandwidth), and so it will take nine hours (because the first computer’s bandwidth is split into nine) to transfer this file from one computer to the other nine simultaneously. You could be very clever about it, and transfer it to three computers first (taking three hours) then having those four computers with a complete copy of the file transfer it on to the remaining six (taking one and a half hours) for a total of four and a half hours. Actually, given the above constraints, the quickest way of doing it is for the first host to simply download to one other host (one hour) then for those two to download to one each (one more hour) then for those four to download to the remaining six (one and a half hours) for a total of three and a half hours.

As you can see, the main difficulty is that a computer needs a complete copy of the file before it can begin to give it away to another computer. In the case of very large files, this can become problematic, especially if the network has a lot of computers and connections between any two are not always reliable. This is where torrenting comes in. In a torrent, a file is split into many different, very small pieces, and “seeded” to the “swarm”. The real kicker with a torrent is that a computer may begin to upload different pieces of a file to other computers before it has completely downloaded the original file. It seems like a very small adjustment to the original parameters, but the implications are mind-boggling. Reconsider our original situation.

The original file host splits the file into nine pieces and distributes a different piece each to the other nine computers (taking only an hour). Each of the nine computers sends their “ninth” to the eight other computers in the network (taking possibly a little less than an hour) and we’re done. But it gets better – because you don’t have to wait until you have the full copy of a file before you can send bits of it onwards, consider what happens when the pieces are smaller. Say the original host splits the file into thirty six pieces and distributes the first nine to the nine other computers during the first fifteen minutes, in the next fifteen minutes, the next nine pieces are distributed from the original host AND all of the first nine pieces are distributed among the nine. So, fifteen minutes after the first hour (the time it takes for the host to fully upload all the pieces of the original file). It is easy to see that, the smaller the pieces you split the file into, the shorter the amount of time after the initial download it takes before all the computers in the network have their own complete copy of the file. Another beautiful thing about this system is that once a few full downloads have been completed, especially on very large networks, computers can drop out and come back with minimal disruption to the whole deal whereas before, the dropping out of a computer with the complete file would slow things down considerably.

There’s something nice about the way this all works. You could, in theory, have a very large network in which no one computer has the complete file yet still be able to complete the download from the fragments.

Now most bit torrent programs keep a record of your upload/download ratio, and some people won’t let you download from them unless your ratio is above a certain number. I was thinking about this the other day, and came to the conclusion that these demands were, in theory, mathematically unreasonable to ask of anyone. In the above example, the original host would have uploaded one complete file and downloaded none, while the other nine would have downloaded one complete file and uploaded a ninth of one. Of course, they uploaded that ninth eight times giving a total of eight uploads between the nine of them and nine downloads of course. The ratio for the downloaders is and the total “global” (for a very small globe of ten computers) ratio is therefore one-to-one.

This is, of course, an average. As the number of computers (let’s call it n) approaches infinity, the ratio for the downloading computers approaches . But in the real world, these aren’t closed systems, some people stay on the network and continue to seed packets to computers with incomplete files, while others bugger off as soon as their download is complete. If we assume that everyone eventually has complete copies of the files being distributed (which is one of the only reasonable assumptions we can make here) then the global ratio has to be 1:1. If you’re one of the system admins out there who leaves their computers on the network all the time and basically seeds files forever, you’re going to have a huge upload-to-download ratio. If you then insist that anyone who downloads from you has a ratio of at least one-to-one, then you create a small problem – where is everyone else going to get the high ratio from? If the global average is one, then, given that these large superseeders exist, getting a ratio of one would depend on there being many people out there with very low ratios indeed, which is probably not what these sysadmins are trying to promote with these ratio restrictions.

The clever among you may have already spotted a way out – continuous growth. If the network constantly expands, then it is possible for everyone to eventually have access to file hosts who stipulate a ratio greater than or equal to one. At the moment, this seems plausible, but obviously there are eventual limits to the size of the network. Eventually, users will probably be forced to set up “sockpuppets”¹ in order to increase the users’ ratios, which is counter-productive because the whole idea of coming up with the system was to more-efficiently use system resources.

I guess this rant probably wasn’t what you were expecting. I suspect that most were expecting some kind of philosophical rambling about intellectual property and copyright and the evils of the RIAA. Instead, you got a technical description of how torrents work which you may or (more likely) may not be interested in. Oh well. Access to information and the rules regarding intellectual property are thing that I care deeply about, so I’m sure I will eventually go on a very long rant about it… maybe next time.

Eyjafjallajokull - try saying that 10 times in a hurry

It has come to my attention that today is Earth Day… or perhaps it was yesterday, or the day before. In fact, it may have been the case that all three days were “Earth Days” which seems a little silly, or perhaps I got it wrong and it is actually Earth Week. When I first came to the realization that it was Earth Day, I felt a little bit bad for not knowing, and felt that I should have done something specifically on that day to show that I did in fact care for our pale blue dot. Then I had a realization – I already do. My life has more or less been pointed in the direction of saving the world for some time now, and unlike those sportspeople whose sole physical exertion takes place during competition or, at best, during the weeks leading up to it, I am (as my speed skating experience may indicate) putting in the hard yards in in a long-term kind of way.

I am currently in one of my favourite cities in the world – New York. I am told that this is one of the most energy-efficient cities on the planet. This may seem difficult to believe, especially if you’ve ever walked through times square at night and wondered about the kind of obscene energy bill that those few city blocks must incur. However, there is a wonderful side-effect that you get in cities that comes from increasing returns to scale. Because cities are so much more densely populated than rural areas, the ability for members of the population to share resources makes everything just a little more efficient. Actually, I suspect the largest contributor to NYC’s energy efficiency is the decreased transportation costs that come from the increased population density and public transportation system.

I was once told that there was an academic paper that showed that New York’s public transportation system consumed as much energy as the equivalent number of passengers would have expended, had they been in cars. This is almost a ridiculous assertion, and if I ever get a hold of the paper, I’m sure I’d have fun ripping it to shreds if someone hasn’t already done so. The most likely mistake is the common academic one of assuming linearity. Linearity is simple, and our minds are fairly good at dealing with it. Of course, we live in a non-linear world. Per unit increase in input, the outputs don’t necessarily increase in proportion. Traffic in New York is a good example of this. If the number of cars on the road goes from say 0-1000 cars, the increase in energy consumption would increase in proportion. However, as the number increases past a certain point, the energy increases by ever increasing amounts per car because traffic causes trips to take longer. If you were to close the subway, you would have an extra 5 million or so passengers to take care of every day. Sure, many of them wouldn’t take cars, but I fail to see how this could possibly decrease any measure of per-capita energy expenditure.

Being inadequately equipped to deal with non-linearity is one of the great problems we face today. It is not that we haven’t in our possession the necessary mathematical tools to understand and deal with these problems – such tools have existed and been understood for a long time. The real problem is that most people just don’t understand. Take the example of a volcano spewing volcanic ash into the atmosphere. Our inconveniences stemming from such an obviously unlikely and far-fetched scenario do not increase linearly with the increase in ash. They increase in steps, or more likely giant leaps. Between each of these steps, there would exist a small amount of linearity, but not very much. To start with, the nearby glaciers will melt causing local flooding. A relatively small inconvenience involving having to evacuate and relocate people. Increase the ash output a little though, and you can shut off air travel in almost all of Europe for a few days – more than just a minor inconvenience. Keep increasing the output, and you will start to get fluctuations in the climate (and possibly a global shutdown of air travel). At a certain point, the output of volcanic ash can effectively block out the sun for a long enough time to be very inconvenient to the continuation of human civilization.

These non-linearities can be found everywhere. Take for example the giving out of cash handouts by governments when it comes close to election time. Do these handouts make a difference to anybody? Not really. But they can get a government elected, after which it can steal spend vastly higher sums of money on other things. Yet a great deal of time is devoted to educating people about systems with linear returns, or at most slightly decreasing or increasing returns to scale. Once upon a time, this may have made sense, since the world that lay within the sphere of humankind’s influence behaved in a mostly linear way, but now, humanity is able to influence extremely high-impact events (because it has created for itself a huge, interconnected world where small disasters can propagate through the network and become very big disasters very quickly).

Another rather large problem the Earth is facing this Earth day is the disconnect between people and the planet. Now, I’m not one of those crazy people who advocates going back to living like the “good ol’ days” because, frankly, the good ol’ days were not a very good time to live – life was short, people were generally hungry and vulnerable to disease, and most of the world’s population, even in supposedly wealthy countries, lived in abject poverty. However, because of technology and urbanization (2008 was the first year in human history where more people lived in cities than in rural areas) our productivity has increased enough to provide a very large proportion of the population with living standards to rival that of a king as recently as 200 years ago. One of the side-effects of this though, is that people have lost their connection with our planet. By “connection” I don’t mean that we don’t hug trees often enough (although I am not opposed to hugging trees per se), I mean it in a more pragmatic sense. In the sense that, most kids leave school not understanding why the seasons are the way they are, and why they are flipped in the southern hemisphere (and some kids don’t even know that they are flipped in the southern hemisphere).

What is needed is better education. People should know where their food comes from, how it is grown, how it comes to be in our supermarkets to be had at such great convenience. Umberto Eco articulated in a great essay from La Repubblica: “Science, Technology, and Magic” about how we treat modern technology like magic in that we don’t really understand what goes on behind it. There have been many brilliant attempts at getting this kind of information out there, such as the story of stuff project, but sadly there are not as widely-known as they ought to be. Some might argue that there is little value in understanding these things, and that all we need to do is accept that they work, and move on. I disagree, in fact, I very strongly believe that one should understand the tools before one is allowed to use them. For example, very few people really understand how utterly dependent on steady, predictable rainfall our complex civilization really is. Recent price fluctuations in oil have started to make some people realize how dependent we are on cheap energy. But most take it for granted.

The real problem with this disconnect is that it leaves us very unprepared for unexpected events. If recent history is any indication, people don’t realize anything until there is a crisis. Moreover, people won’t care unless the crisis has a direct impact on their lives, by which time it is either too late, or too expensive to be able to come up with a good solution, and people get suckered into accepting very bad solutions. In fact, Milton Friedman is largely responsible for advising governments to use crises to pass legislation that would otherwise be too unpopular to be passed under normal circumstances, thus short-circuiting the entire democratic process. Most people would agree that such compromises are a bad thing, but try to get them to agree to a carbon tax, and it’s a different kettle of fish. Even though that money spent now will save a lot more money being spent later.

Investing early to save inefficient emergency spending later does not only apply to money. Being well-educated about how our world really works would save invaluable time and grief later. An investment in good information in a knowledge economy should be a no-brainer. But instead, we leave these things until the last minute, when the only sources of information (and I use the term very loosely here) which can tell you what you think you want to know in a short time are news reports and made-for-TV documentaries which invariably have to filter information, and often with an editorial slant. Indeed it is very sad that this is the means by which most people have learned about such weighty issues as the world economic crisis, and climate change.

“For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.” ~ John F. Kennedy

This Earth day, spare a thought for the Earth, but remember that to truly understand many of the complicated earth systems which affect us takes time and effort (and I should know, I did a whole masters degree in it, and still only scratched the surface). Go out and learn about where your food comes from, how stuff gets made, and what happens to things after we throw them away. While you’re at it, learn about how the Coriolis effect works, and why the seasons are flipped in the southern hemisphere. Maybe teach yourself why the world’s deserts are located where they are, and not over the equator, where you might expect (because that’s where it is hottest). But most importantly, remember that the problems we face can’t be solved in one day, nor can an understanding of them be achieved in one day. Remember that, no matter how selfish you think you might be able to get away with being, we all share the same planet, and with matters relating to it, we must be better than our own selfish instincts. We must think on a planetary scale, and that means long-term, and wider-reaching than “my back yard”. Respect the Earth, it is the only one we’ve got, and if we’re not careful, we might break it in a way that we cannot fix, then we’ll be really be in a fix.

“The only unchangeable certainty is that nothing is unchangeable or certain”, so said John F. Kennedy once. Every now and then, one passes through an anniversary of a significant event and is forced to reflect on life, and its many unusual twists and turns. I haven’t lived in Australia (which I still consider “home”) for just over two years now. Those who know me well, know that I sometimes harp on about living life “on one’s own terms”, but looking back, I can’t help but notice that many of the most significant changes in my life were brought about by chance events, over which I had absolutely no control, most of which I could not have possibly predicted.

Whilst studying at university, I was once asked at a party by a very attractive young lass for course and career advice (can anyone else see the irony here?). As I had consumed a small amount of alcohol, I am a little fuzzy on the precise details of the conversation which followed. I do remember making an effort not to be distracted, and in so doing gave a rather unsatisfactory answer – the truth (and we were both, ultimately, left unsatisfied). The truth, as far as I’m concerned, is that in this day in age, it is almost impossible to really have a “plan for life”. Even planning for the unexpected is futile because the unexpected is, by definition, utterly unpredictable and therefore impossible to plan for. In an unusual flash of insight and honesty, I told her that for at least the last 6 years of my life, there has not been a single year in which my direction and outlook on life had not changed very significantly. My advice was therefore not to worry too much about long term plans, but to follow her heart and passions.¹

It is difficult to trace the origin of my particular meandering brand of life to any single event, but the beginning seems like a good enough place to start. I was born, it is believed, on the 5th of December 1981 somewhere in Taiwan. The reason I say “it is believed” is because I was adopted and I have yet to trace my precise origins. Although I probably wasn’t aware of it, it is easy to see how my life was, from the outset, already steeped in uncertainty. But far from being merely a bridging-paragraph to introduce the reader to the deeper story by way of a cute but somewhat superfluous anecdote, this story has further substance. I was originally meant for adoption by a Canadian couple. Although I am sitting in a motel in Calgary writing this, those who know anything about me know that I am not Canadian, but ended up being adopted by a couple from Hong Kong when the paperwork from the other couple fell through.² (of course, I didn’t know any of this until much later in life, but that is another story entirely).

There’s something almost romantic about arriving in a new place to begin a new life with nothing except your bags. But by the time you are doing it for the third time, it gets old. The first time this happened, my move from Hong Kong to Australia, had been a long time coming. Most of the move was arranged by others as I was young at the time, and I had known that I would move for a long time prior and had plenty of time to become mentally prepared for the move. The other two instances – the move to New York, and the Netherlands, both happened very quickly. For the New York move, I had all of four months to prepare myself while the lead-time for my move to the Netherlands was an even more ridiculous 6-weeks.

What kinds of circumstances can prompt a person to just pack up and move to a completely different place? War, famine, and civil unrest come to mind. Thankfully, I was never forced to move for any of those reasons. Quite the opposite, in fact. To move me to New York, I was offered admission to a masters degree program at Columbia University – not the kind of opportunity that a person of my lowly academic record passes up. An education at an institution like Columbia as well as the chance to live in New York, along with all the career prospects there was just too good. It would take something incredible to tear me away from a place like New York, but as it happens, just such a thing came up. The opportunity for a chance (albeit slight) of speed skating at the 2010 olympic winter games (and having all expenses paid for in the meantime).

But what is change? It is the opportunity to grow as a person, to learn, possibly to reinvent yourself. It is often a hard pill to swallow. The circumstance of my move to Melbourne were met with some resistance because I first moved into boarding school. It is not an experience I would wish on anybody yet I would be the first to acknowledge that I learned a lot from the experience. I did not learn discipline (as was the intention of my parents) but instead learned more useful skills such as how to pick locks, evade security guards, and avoid gangs of racist redneck farm-boys. I also learned a valuable life-lesson to do with reinventing oneself. When you move to a new place, few people know you, and sometimes nobody knows you well. You aren’t weighed down by the burden of your past life or reputation.

So what though? You make little (or big) adjustments to your exterior, but it shouldn’t make a difference to what’s inside. This of course presupposes that what is “inside” is unchangeable and is not affected by what goes on “outside”, which is clearly not the case. This is, in my belief, one of the most valuable things you can get out of a change of place. You have this perfect opportunity to not only realize that you can reinvent your image, but also to realize that the terms by which you define yourself and your whole personality rest on similarly shaky and superficial grounds. So the funny thing is, by simply changing your location, you can realize your potential to change yourself.

That being said though, escaping from oneself is not always so straightforward. When I lived in Australia I was very heavily involved with Amnesty International. During my involvement, I accumulated a bit of a reputation. It wasn’t a bad reputation – quite the opposite, but because it had grown so large (even larger than my ego) it annoyed me. It bothered me how people knew of me before they knew me. I would get special treatment, I would get a lot of attention. People would judge me, and form opinions of me based on what I had done, and not on who I was. When I moved to New York, I decided that I would continue involvement with Amnesty, but since I found my reputation burdensome, I would make an effort not to tell many people about any of the things that I had done.

The plan seemed simple enough, but it did not go as I intended. It seems that, even though limiting the people who saw my CV was easy enough, all the things I had learned could not be unlearned. My extensive experience in many aspects of governance, event planning, campaign planning, and the like all somehow managed to make themselves known to the world. Although I carefully shied away from any important formal positions, I have a suspicion that my standing in the social hierarchy of the group was much higher than I wanted it to be. Certainly much higher than I intended it to be. It seems that it is more difficult to escape oneself than I originally thought. As Popeye so eloquently put it – “I am what I am”.

Where does that leave us? Is it possible for a person to change? Yes. But it takes effort. You are what you are, but what you are is partly defined by what you do, and that is largely in your hands. When you move from place to place a lot, you are often asked where you consider as “home”. To overuse a cliché, home is where the heart is. Where that is will vary for many people. For some, it will be to follow a passion be it fishing, mountaineering, or speed skating. For others, it is with family, or close friends. Sometimes a person’s heart can simply belong to one other person. You don’t really know until you’ve had to go without. If moving from place to place has taught me anything, it has taught me about what is and isn’t truly valuable in life, and to appreciate it.

Finally, as evidence that change on the inside does indeed happen, and on a fundamentally profound level, I present this aerial photograph of the Columbia University campus which I took on my first ever trip to New York in March 2007. This photo is unusual in that it elicits a strong emotional response in me. What’s more, is that that emotional response has varied enormously over time. When it was taken, I had been rejected from a PhD program that I had applied to. During that trip, this was as close as I could bring myself to the campus, and every time I saw this photo, I would whisper to myself “so near, yet so far”. A mere two months later, I was unexpectedly accepted to a masters degree program there and the emotion quickly changed to a combination of disbelief and excitement. When I finally arrived in September, even my lofty expectations were greatly exceeded and the experience really changed my life. The emotional response to this photograph continued to be disbelief, but the giddy excitement and anticipation that had been there before was slowly replaced by a sense of belonging and, dare I say it – achievement. By the time I left New York, the feeling of belonging, possessiveness even, was accompanied by pride, as well as that strange feeling you get when you sense that something great is coming to an end, like the end of a roller coaster ride, and a feeling I had felt previously towards the end of my time at Melbourne University. Now, I look upon this and feel a sense of longing, for I miss the Columbia Community and all that it stands for. I also miss the student life and all the amazing friends I made while I was there.

Change can be jarring, it can be traumatizing. But you can use it to realize a change in yourself (for the better, one would hope), after all, we could all use a little change.