Yes, there is a problem with the pictures on this blog

I need to move them to a different host site. Hopefully I shall have time to do this in the next few days.

I didn’t go to evil medical school for seven years to be called Mr Evil!

My countryman Patrick Porter over at Oxblog takes slight issue with co-blogger David Adesnik referring to him as "Dr", because although he has done everything he has to do to get his Ph.D. (or actually as this is the other place, I suppose it would be a D.Phil), because he has been informed by his university that he cannot use the title "Dr" until he has been granted "permission to supplicate". I have not heard that phrase before, because although Oxford and Cambridge are very similar instituions, one way in which they are distinguished is by having different weird archaic language for weird, archaic customs that are in fact exactly the same. (I was once told that I could not use the title myself until "I had had the degree conferred upon me by a congregation of the Regent House").

However, it is a truth universally acknowledged by doctoral students (and doctoral graduates) everywhere that one may use the title the moment one has been informed that one has passed, whether or not this information is conveyed officially or unofficially. Another equally well understood convention is that if one has passed, examiners will inform you of this immediately upon completion of the oral exam, whether or not they are supposed to or indeed allowed to. (This leads to a certain amount of euphemism. My oral exam concluded with one of my examiners raising his eybrows at the other, the other examiner nodding, and then the first examiner informing me that "The Board of Graduate Studies forbids me from telling you the result of this examination now. However, you have nothing to worry about". In truth, although I had been nervous at the start of the examination, I wasn't terribly worried by this point, as I was aware that I was handling the questions I was being asked petfectly fine).

So typically, therefore, people start using the "Dr" title, when they have been informed that they may not use the title, and indeed when they have been informed that they may not be informed whether they will be allowed to use the title in future. But they do anyway.

In my case, although I could have had the degree conferred in absentia, I put off having it conferred for a further three years, as it took this long for me to arrange a time when both I and my family could come to England again to attend a graduation ceremony. (Sorry, I mean a Congregation of the Regent House). Although I was technically not supposed to use the title "Dr" for those three years, I did. And nobody cared. I had gone through what Patrick described as the King Hell Road Trip that is a Ph.D. and I had earned it, damn it. (However, the bureaucratic exercise to get from this point to the degree can still take a while, and people know this and therefore ignore it. Don't get me started on how the Board of Graduate studies lost my dissertation). A few months after my exam I received a letter from the university informing me that the degree had been approved (and reiterating that I was still not supposed to call myself Dr), and if anyone (an employer or a professional registration board, generally) wanted proof that I had the degree, this letter was perfectly adequate for them.

So congratulations Dr Porter. Enjoy the blogging.

Of course, it is also generally considered okay to be pompous about the "Dr" for six months or so after starting to use it. After that, we generally only use it professionally, when writing particularly rude letters to organisations that have given us particularly bad customer service, when filling out credit card applications, or when talking to Germans. (And then there is the question of whether one should put "Dr" before one's name or "Ph.D." after when using it professionally). Any use of it in excess of this is considered a bit of a wank. As indeed may be this post.

Update: Actually, thinking about it some more, there is one time when "Dr." is frequently used, and that is when greeting a colleague who you know from your Ph.D. program, particularly when you haven't seen them for a while. ("Dr Jones. Good to see you.". "Dr Jennings. How are you? I am absolutely splendid."). I suspect military types who went through boot camp together have similar rituals.

That Palace of Culture does get around

More from last weekend



The Saxon Market in Warsaw is build around a disused football stadium. The market isn't exactly inside the stadium, but it is built on the rim at the top of the stadium, the various stairs and slopes on the outer sides of the stadium, and the ground around the stadium. When I was there last weekend, the inside of the stadium was covered with snow. It is really a remarkable place.

I think it may actually be more a matter of "Polish parents want their kids to love English, actually.



That said, to fully function in the modern globalised world, I think you do need English, so you might as well start early.

I've been lazy about my redirections, but here is a roundup.

I have just posted a piece on Samizdata about the classic geek movie Tron, and why it didn't win an academy award for Best Visual Effects.

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece about searching for Danish cheese in a Carrefour in Warsaw.

The day before that, I posted a piece on Stalinist-Gothic-Vampire architecture in Warsaw.

I have a couple of other posts that I put up in the last couple of months for which I cannot presently find beacuse Samizdata's archives are screwed. I will post even more belated redirections when I do find them.

This is me trying to be too arty

I love the modern globalised world

I am sitting in my flat in London, eating some delicious kabanosy Polish sausage, that I bought a few hours ago in Poland. I think this is cool.

The English language could use this word



The sign just points to one of those little shops that selll computer components and accessories, and where the owner builds made to order computers for customers and does laptop repairs, often on a "no fix no fee" basis. (These shops often have one or two pay for use internet computers in the corner, too, so they can be useful if you can't find a more conventional internet cafe).

I am in Warsaw

I had a very trying trip here this morning, which involved (amongst other things) having my credit card eaten by a ticket machine at King's Cross Thameslink railway station, and sitting in an aeroplane on the ground at Luton airport for more than two hours before we were able to get underway. But I had a pleasant afternoon just the same. I was last here in 1992: at that point the city was a huge expanse of grey concrete blocks going in all directions to the horizon, surrounding a small but very beautiful centre that was rebuilt post war and one of the most ludicrous Stalinist buildings ever created. The ludicrous Stalinist building is still there, but it is now surrounded by a variety of other stuff. And the rest of the city has much more colour, and there are newer buildings. I am going to try to explore some of the outskirts of the city tomorrow. I suspect that some of the more interesting new developments have occurred there. (As always, that would be easier with a car, but I am doing this trip without one).

Obviously

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and donâ??t enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 94% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 94% Moya (Farscape) 88% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 81% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 69% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 56% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% SG-1 (Stargate) 44% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 31% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 31% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 6% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

Redirection

I have a sort of tangentially on the winter Olympics but mainly on the Australian Institute of Sport piece over at Samizdata.

What am I?

Yesterday, I went into a travel agent to enquire about fares to Australia at Christmas. The rather bubbly and helpful girl behind the counter gave me some information and then asked me "Have you been to Australia before?"

Saturday evening song lyics

Sit, good dog, stay, bad dog, down, roll over
Well here's a good man and a pretty young girl
Trying to play together somehow,
I'm wasting my life, you're changing the world,
I get drunk and watch your head grow

It's the good times that we share
and the bad times that we'll have
It's the good times
and the bad times that we had

Well it's been a long slow collision,
I'm a pitbull, you're a dog,
Baby you're foul in clear conditions
But you're handsome in the fog

So I need some fine wine, and you, you need to be nicer
For the good times and the bad times
That we'll have

Sometimes we talk over dinner like old friends
Till I go and kill the bottle,
I go off over any old thing,
Break your heart
and raise a glass or ten

To the good times that we shared and the bad times that we'll have
To the good times
and the bad time that we've had

Well it's been a long slow collision,
I'm a pitbull, you're a dog,
Baby you're foul in clear conditions
But you're handsome in the fog

So I need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer
For the good times
and the bad times we know will come
Yeah
I need some fine wine
and you, you need to be nicer
you need to be nicer
you need

For the good times
and the bad time that we had
Sit

Good times, bad times
Sweet wine, bad wine
Good cop, bad cop,
Lapdog, bad dog
Sit.

I need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer, by the Cardigans, from the Album Super Extra Gravity

(More regular blogging is likely to resume here soon).

Back in London

Must sleep now.

I am in Valencia in Spain

However, I have found some WiFi pretty much in the last moment before I have to go home, so right now I need to get off the internet and head for the airport. More when I am back in London.

Yay

This morning I received a package from the Home Office, which included a letter telling me that my application for permanent residency status in the United Kingdom had been granted, and which also contained my passport. This is good news all round. One good thing is that I am no longer grounded in this country. I have been unable to travel for the last several months, and this has been getting me down. I was tempted to go to Paris for lunch tomorrow, but decided that this would be a little too expensive. (A return train ticket with this little notice would be about £100). However, I might go to Spain next weekend.

Happy New Year, Everybody

It is new year's eve, and time for my annual recap post. For people who have not been here in previous years, I am very deliberately going to answer the same questions I answered a last year, a two years ago, and a three years ago, even though some of them are perhaps not quite the same questions I would ask of myself now, and some are questions to which I don't really have answers. New questions will be added answered wherever they feel appropriate. I have had a year of ups and downs, I think I have to confess.

Countries I visited in 2005
United Kingdom, France (three times), Hong Kong, China, Australia, Germany, United States of America (twice), Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg. (* Methodological note on this question at the end)

Countries I visited in 2005 that I had not visited before
Luxembourg

Greatest product I discovered while travelling to one of these countries
What is there to discover in Luxembourg? Banking? Pretty scenery? Portuguese beer for twice what I paid for it in Portugal the weekend before? I did buy a nice bottle of Alsatian Pinot Noir in Luxembourg, and I do rather like the light Pinots for that region, but the occasion when I discovered this was in Alsace earlier in the year.

Greatest product I discovered in a country I had visited before
The obvious answer is Alsatian Pinot Noir, I guess. I could also mention my weird propensity for coming back from European destinations with large pieces of cheese in my luggage here, too. And I bought what was apparently an interesting bottle of muscet in the Douro port country, but I didn't get to taste it as the bottle broke in the boot of the car as I was driving much too fast to Porto airport in order to make my flight back to London.

Total number of countries visisted in my life
36 (Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, USA, Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Kenya, Tanzania, Portugal, Spain, Monaco, Italy, Japan, Ireland, Thailand, Nepal, Macau, Finland, Estonia, South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Belgium, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark, Luxembourg).

Number of these countries that no longer exist
3 (Czechoslovakia, Macau and Hong Kong, although you can argue both that Hong Kong and Macau are still countries or that they never were).

Best theatrical production I saw this year
The only play I saw this year was a production of The Tempest at the Globe, which turned out to be a mess. I did have a meal in a restaurant immediately after it, however.

Movies I most enjoyed in 2005
Pride and Prejudive. (In my mind easily the best adaptation made of the book). Serenity.

Most over the top (and very Japanese) movie I saw this year
I can't really think of a Japanese movie that I saw this year which qualified as "over the top", which is a shame given how over the top Japanese movies often are.

Japanese animated film that I am most glad that I finally caught on DVD
Laputa: Castle in the Sky . Also, I saw Howl's Moving Castle in the cinema, but it was unfortunately a dubbed print. I bought region 3 DVDs of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds, My Neighbour Totoro and Grave of the Firefies very cheaply in a Chinese DVD/VCD shop just off Canal Street in New York City, and I really must get around to watching them.

Books that I most enjoyed reading in 2005
I didn't read very many books this year, unforunately. I bought a few, but largely didn't get around to reading them. Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau was good in the sense that he interviewed all the right people, and was I think a sign that the presence of the singularity just down the road is something that is becoming clear to the mainstream, but it didn't contain much that people who have been watching this kind of thing were not aware of already. It wasn't as good as his Edge City which really was an exceptionally inciteful look into how the world is today (and which has influenced my thinking as much as any book I have ever read).

Musical acts that I would have liked to have seen, and that I could have seen in London in 2005 if I had bought tickets in time, but didn't
Sigur Ros (again). Imogen Heap. (She is playing London again in the New Year, however, and this time I have booked a ticket).

Favourite television programs of 2005
I have pretty much stopped watching television on television. I now get full season box sets of programs on DVD, or I use the wonders of Bit Torrent to watch shows that our friends in the TV networks will not provide in Britain until next year. As for as the DVDs are concerned, I finally watched Firefly, and it was almost too wonderful for words. There were clearly teasers and references to the next five seasons in the 14 episodes of season 1, and it makes me incredibly sad that I am not going to see those five seasons. I also watched Wonderfalls on DVD, which was great too. The one season we got of that seemed more complete though. Although I would have liked more of that too, I did not feel the loss as desperately as I did the loss of Firefly. (Still, there is obviously a connection between these two series. Tim Minear was one of the main figures in thr production of both. Minear is amazing: of all the fine writers of the team that Joss Whedon put together for Buffy and Angel, he is the one who is as good as Joss. I hope that one of his series gets picked up for more than one season before long. As for other TV I watched, I am still watching 24 which is fun if slight (and repetitive, to tell the truth). And I watched 24 which is good fun but complete tosh. Of the school of writers that started producing their own programs about a decade ago, JJ Abrams is the most successful. He is nowhere near as good as Joss (although he is perhaps a more visual director) but he is the one who has produced mainstream hits. Lost is fun for now, but at some point some of the mysteries as to what is going on on the island are going to have to be explained, but the explanations are going to be lame and everything is going to collapse.

Live sporting events I saw in 2005
England v Australia, first test, day five. Lord's. I managed to see just about the only day of the entire Ashes series that was not exciting. And at the end of it I was certain that Australia was going to win the Ashes. So was everybody else.

Most stunning place I visited in 2005
Crater Lake, Oregon. My drive up the Douro valley was pretty great, too. As indeed was my drive up the Tarn Gorge.

Place I visited where I felt most like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, he spied the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other, wild with surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien
Actually, I was a bit weak on places of great importance to antiquity this year. These are often near seas and oceans, and most of the places I visited were inland. I went for a drive up the Hudson Valley, and imagined how this was once the greatest highway of the Americas, but I am not sure if this is antique enough.

Great bridges I walked over in 2005
The great bridges I visited this year were not walkable. (Note that I exclude bridges and tunnels I have visited in previous years from bridge and tunnel questions).

Great Bridges I travelled over in vehicles in 2005
The Millau Viaduct. The East Bridge. (If I were to include bridges I had visited before, I could have added a lot of others too. Visiting New York and San Francisco will do that).

Great Bridges I saw, but did not travel over in 2005
None immediately come to mind.

Great tunnels I travelled through in 2005
The Severn rail tunnel is about the best I can do.

Other places I visited in 2005 that are of interest to the hacker tourist
The computer markets of Shenzhen, China, and Chek Lap Kok airport, Hong Kong.

Places that are of interest to Jane Austen fans that I visited in 2005
The Cobb in Lyme Regis, Dorset. (And Louisa Musgrove was insane to jump off those stairs. I am amazed she lived). Jane Austen's grave in Winchester Cathedral.

Most upsetting event of the year.
The July 7 bombing of London. (Everyone was expecting it to happen at some point. It was still terrible.

Rawest emotional reaction of the year
Sadly, that is too personal for me to want to blog about it.

Moments in 2005 that most reminded me how Australian I still am
Wandering round the East End of London (where I now live) looking at little remnants of the East London culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and suddenly being aware where related little bits of Australian culture came from.

Most time consuming but rewarding activity I took up in 2005.
Cooking fancy meals for guests. (Actually this is a rediscovery of an activity from a few years ago in my life, but it is nice to have resurrected it).

Most surreal literary/travel experience in 2005.
I suppose the best I can do hear is "Reading Jane Austen's Persuasion in an Inn in Lyme Regis, while looking at the Cobb out the window and wondering if the Inn I was sitting in was the same as the one the characters were dining in in the novel. (One can seldom tell in Austen. She is non-specific about locations).

Most surreal musical/travel experience in 2005.
Listening to an MP3 of Suzanne Vega singing Tom's Diner in Tom's Diner in New York. (Note: it is very important that it was an MP3 that I was listening to). Listing to Sheila Nicholls "Fallen For You" while wandering around the Guggenheim in New York City.

Most unexpected thing that happened to me in 2005
I allowed myself to get depressed over a member of the fairer sex. I had promised myself that I never would again.

(*Methodological note: To have "visited" a country, I generally consider that I must have physically left the airport or the railway station. Merely changing planes or trains, or flying over a country or catching a train through it does not count. However, to say I "went to Germany" this year is perhaps pushing it, although I did strictly qualify. I flew to Karlsruhe-Baden Baden airport in Germany, but then got a bus directly to Strasbourg in France. (Actually come to think it I earlier in the day walked over a footbridge into Germany, had a beer, and then worked back. Actually I am talking crap. That means I qualify without any trouble.

Also, to count myself visiting a country twice, I require it to be on separate trips. If I cross the border from Spain to Portugal and then come back a couple of days later, I don't count it as two trips to Spain).

Update: When I posted this, I managed to neglect to recollect that I crossed the Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong Kong for the first time. That's a big one to neglect, given that it is the sixth largest bridge in the world. As a slight excuse, I did previously see it in the distance in 1997, and this time I did go over it in a train in foggy weather. (Or was it smoggy weather? The weather in Hong Kong is always smoggy).

Redirection

I have a piece on Time's people of the year and on the difficulties of browsing the web from a PDA over at Samizdata.

Michael Jennings quote of the day (and possibly post of the month).

More than once did Elizabeth in her ramble within the Park, unexpectedly meet Mr. Darcy. -- She felt all the perverseness of the mischance that should bring him where no one else was brought; and to prevent its ever happening again, took care to inform him at first that it was a favourite haunt of hers. -- How it could occur a second time, therefore, was very odd! -- Yet it did, and even a third.

Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. (Volume II, Ch X).