Yesterday I went to listen to Sir Nicholas Stern at the Examination Schools. Of the many topics he could have been asked to discuss, climate change was the one he finally settled on. He made a very succinct presentation of his findings in the Report, and with the benefit of four months outside scrutiny, also made a considered defence against the criticisms he has faced since last November. (Herein we get all technical) He talked about the probability distributions the team used is assessing how certain levels of carbon in the atmosphere translate to temperature changes.

At 450 ppm CO2e, just above te current level, there is a 50% chance of temperatures increasing by more than 1.5°C, while at 550 ppm CO2e, there is a 50% chance of temperatures increasing by more than 3°C. Both predictions had a 95% confidence band of about 5°C. The distributions they used are by no means the most conservative, but are similarly not the most outlandish. Also, his assumptions close, and possibly slightly more conservative than the most recent IPCC report predictions. (That wasn't too bad, was it?)

Basically, I was impressed and left feeling the doubters are the ones that need to prove themselves now.

Plus, he discussed the reasons people may not want to act: 1. don't believe the science; 2. believe we will be able to adapt when it happens; 3. don't care about the future. These, he said, were 1. absurd 2. reckless and 3. unethical. Plus, he did manage to get one little dig in: he said there are many top scientists who aren't convinced climate change is a man-made phenomena. Nigel Lawson, for example.

Watched a Chris Rock DVD today (Bigger and Blacker). I really love Chris Rock shows. For a start the audiences he has (predominantly black) make each show seem like an event: jumping up and shouting approval and applauding and literally rolling in the aisles. Its more like a healing than a standup gig. Add to that the fact that Chris Rock is a very talented comedian, and one of the best social critics that isn't dead. He courts controversy (almost daring the audience to disagree with him), but not in the way that's only purpose is to see how far you can go. He, moreso than any other "Blacks guys are like this, but white guys are doing this" comics of the 1990s, is the heir to Richard Pryor. There's a point of view and an honesty and an inelligence that stands out a lot more than the actual material and style.

I still need to track down Bring the Pain. "Black people and niggas" is still one of my top five standup routines. Check it.

Went to see some modern art at a suitably titled gallery last Friday. The main exhibit is by a abstract artist called Callum Innes. I liked looking at his paintings, which he achieves by repeated painting and paint removal. The Exposed series especially are very striking when together, as one kind of evoles into the next.

I'd probably go and have another wander around in the next week or so, and then the artist himself is coming to discuss his work on March 8th. I'd like to know more about his paintings than just what they look like, but without reading some critic who uses the phrases like "representing isolation of the self".

Amongst the many things I like to do during my day, trawling through the BBC News page for something to be annoyed at ranks pretty high. I especially like the Have Your Say page as a good starting point for any prospective bout of humanity-doubt.

"I'm not a racist/homophobe/cello player but its about time the silent majority stood up to these brown folk/perverts/bassoon players and said enough is enough and it's time that we returned to the good old fashioned values of segregation/public floggings/string quartets." And why is it the "silent majority" are always about so quiet as to resemble, in fact, a regular-volumed minority? How do they manage that? Do they have to meet up to practice it?

Sometimes, however, you manage to find so many reasons to want a species-change within the main pages. I am aware the Stern report is in all likelihood the very worst case scenario. I sleep easier at night someone is making the worse case scenario public knowledge. That way, we can decide whether the very worst thing possible is something we all want to risk.

That said, how is it possible that anyone can still express doubts about who it was what did all that planet burnin'? And how is the argument that the costs right now may be too high to pay a good one? Are we to expect a discount later on, maybe when we've found an a second planet in the country that needs a bit of work? That would be like a Chancellor who just threw money to people in the streets because the costs of cutting back now outweight the three year recession that will follow? Oh wait, he did that too.

My favourite part of all of this is the reminder to the world that Tories are no longer relevant. The only way to make yourself a relevant conservative is to be a Conservative For Change. It's over. It's time to go home.

I heartily recommend graduate study. This term has been great - hardly any lectures, plenty of free time to research and read and write my thesis. I can hop between seminars that up to three minutes before I had no interest in and five minutes after I stop thinking about, just for the sheer economics of it.

But mainly, I had this dream last night. In my dream, I believed I was in a recurring, well, not exactly dream because I didn't acknowledge that I was asleep, but a recurring story, I suppose. As a result, I knew it was going to veer into nightmare territory, and I knew what the nightmarish incident was going to be - I was going to go from looking at someone to taking a third person look at myself, at which point, I was going to be a hideous green troll/goblin creature-thing. I'm pretty sure the person mentioned above were real - I reckon one of them was Bradley Whitford (West Wing) and Charlie (Imps), though I can't remember which of the two the person was at the time of the troll/goblin. The whole thing panned out exactly like a knew it would (I think there was even a part of it when I was asked by another person if I knew what happened next).

So you can imagine my surprise when I awoke from a nightmare that, quite frankly, I gave myself advance notice of, feeling like I had awoken from a nightmare.

[In this section I talk about how long it has been since I last posted a blog entry.]

Wow, hasn't it been a long time since I last posted a blog entry. I have been existing more or less constantly in this time, but it has gone undocumented. To recap: summer, caravaning, Rome, left home, new flat.

[In this section, I discuss what I'm up to right now.]

I'm co-running the Ministry of Mirth this term. There are shows 22 October, 5 November, 12 November and 26 November, so come down to the Wheatsheaf on those Sundays at 8pm. Tickets are £3, unless you want to buy a block and sell them on, in which case you can buy 10 for £15, which are valid for any of the shows.

This Sunday at 4pm, I am on the first broadcast of OXIDE's new panel game, The Sunday Sideshow. It's a regular panel show, with current affairs rounds, improv games and some very well scripted in-jokes. Please listen. If anyone knows how to rip directly from a stream, I would love it if you did this for me: you can listen here.

And there is still the Imps. In my spare time, I like to write a thesis.

[In this section I wax lyrical about my two current favourite albums]

I recently bought two albums that while in sound are completely different, have many similarities, mainly in the region of being excellent. The first is Cult of Luna's "Somewhere Along The Highway". CoL probably closest resemble a doom band, with the slow, chugging melodies and riffs. Doom, for me, is heavy music. I never think fast is heavy. Slow is heavy. Black Sabbath sound heavier to me than Dismember. And quiet moments can be heaviest of all, like the calm before a storm. The album is completely about creating an atmosphere in which the rest of the music can exist. It comes across much more like a single piece than a 10 track album, and that this quite an achievement.

The other album is Agrophobic Nosebleed's "Altered States of America". Clocking in at under 22 minutes long, this one hundred track alnum (that is 100 track) pushes right at the frontier of grindcore and extreme music. Most tracks last under 10 seconds, there's a 1000bpm drum machine thumping out blast beats behind the insane guitar shredding. The entire thing leaves you stunned - there is no respite from the dense wall of noise and chaos that begins and ends over and over within a single breath. I figure most people would say this wasn't music - I'd probably agree. It really is something else.

[In this section is stop writing]

For all those out there who would like to see more mothers of victims getting to shape our laws, this will put you at ease. You see, the man who killed her daughter wasn't just a murderer. No, it's much worse. The Internet did it as well.

People who know me know where I stand on censorship. I think it should be banned. But seriously, folks, if you all just go ahead and assume the I'd make the usual points about "what is and isn't an actual crime", and about "personal choice and whether looking at something actually causes harm (or whether the harm may come from offences that already exist, such as, you know, murder and forced prostitution)", here's what's really dumb about the whole thing. How do we get from something that is violent to something that is violent and pornographic? Because if it's just coupling sexual gratification and violence, then my copy of American Psycho is about to get me into a fair amount of trouble. Similarly, at what point on the S&M scale does fetish material become "violent"? You can't say at the point where some serious harm will be done, because that's surely related to the duration. I mean, you could strangle someone for ten seconds at a time, and allow breathers, and then there would be no long term damage. Would that be OK? I'm guessing no. You will also kill someone if you hit them with a cane for, oh, I don't know, a week? But I don't this this law will really be targetting flagellation websites.

Home Office Minister Vernon Coaker, "pointed out that the vast majority of people find extreme pornography deeply abhorrent." This is true: the Home Office state that "a petition signed by around 50,000 people objecting to the extreme websites that promote violence against women as sexual gratification, has been presented to Parliament". I don't think it's easy to find these sites. You would have to look. So are all those people going out of their way to be disgusted, just so they can sign a petition, or have they never encountered the material, but just knowing it was out there, somewhere, probably right behind their children, is keeping them awake at night? He also added, "Such material has no place in our society". I would also keep it away from public libraries and billboards. But statements like this always seems, to me, like an argument in favour of allowing this material on the Internet: it keeps it away from society. It also keeps it in a place where it could be monitered, freely and easily, for the actual crimes of sex slavery, child abuse, and violence that occur without being staged and without the consent of the participants.

At the end of the day, I really just figure that the presence of violent pornographic images don't make people murder other people. The fantasy exists before the pictures. If anything, it's an outlet. I say this about violent video games and other "social evils", and I'll continue to say it until I see proof otherwise. There are plenty of things we may find unpleasant, but I don't think censorship is the answer, and that is mainly because I don't really see as there is a question. To steal from an Economist article on prostitution: It's a dirty business, but it isn't any of the government's. Or as I like to say, in the spirit of tolerance, one man's "vile and obscene" is another man's "chick covered in cigarette burns dangling by her nipples from a cross beam fantasy".

I'm not into any of this, before you ask.

Love.

Today was a good day for lovers of freedom.

Firstly, the police are asking the government for special powers to punish troublemakers without needing to go to court. Cool. Can anyone do that? Is there someone I can write to get these powers? And then there will be old argument: "the police have asked for these powers to help them protect our security". Yeah, I like my job to be made easier for me as well. Of course, I'm filling boxes in a warehouse. We want to bypass the courts, we want longer to question suspected terrorists. The job of the police would be dead easy if we were all made to wear shackles every day, but I guess that probably would cause a fuss.

Then, there's the proposal of profiling in airport, which is a lovely euphemistic term for a less media friendly word: discrimination. You know, acting differently to a person based on their physical charachteristics or ethnic background. Terrorists are a subset of all the people, not a subset of a subset of all the people. When they say the measures will be singling out those who statistically pose the greatest risk to the public, I guess that means "Muslims", or possibly more usefully, "the Brown". They could specialise the image more, but that's going to cause problems. No-one suspected the bombers from last July until their heads popped off, so maybe a criteria slightly more advanced than "I've got a funny feeling in my waters" might be necessary. I could be being hysterical of course. They may just mean, "people who have bombs in their pockets", in which case I'm totally on board. I'm a big fan of people with bombs in their pockets being searched more carefully before boarding an aircraft.

Anyone in Oxford on Thursday?

God damn it.

One month before the end of term, I called up JD Sports (where I worked last year) and asked if there was work for the summer. There certainly will be, was the reply. When I get home, they call me asking me when I wanted to start. Today I go in for the first time, only to be told there is no work, because they've had to take on some other people last week, who are going to be around during the Christmas peak season.

I don't object to the reason, because I never expect to come back and find that they were keeping a job open. But I was told there was work. I didn't look for anything else. Finding something else now will be difficult. And if it wasn't for the ESRC, I would be currently working out where I could sleep while I rent out my bedroom. This is an angry morning.

Oxford facebook people need to see this, just so you know:

Hinckley In Pictures

On Monday morning, I read American Psycho for half an hour in bed, then my nephews turned up at Cath's house, and I was asked to read, I think it was called, "George Gets a Letter":

George delivered all the mail to the animals who lived in the outback. He was also a fucking evil psychopath. One morning, George brought two letters to Marty and Barty, the possum brothers. "Do you have any mail for us today?", they asked. "Yes, here's a letter and I'd like to cut out your spines and chew on them and heres a parcel", George said "Thank you, George", the brothers said.

Later on his round, he ran into Mitzi. "Hello George", she said. "Hello Mitzi", said George, "here's a letter for you." "Thank you George." Then she said, "George, do you ever get any letters?"

"No I don't, but then I could never read them because last night I was raping a bitch with a pick axe", George said.

"That's a shame", said Mitzi.

Well, you get what's going on here. I am available for children's parties, by the way.

Slayer. In Flames. Children of Bodom. Lamb Of God. Cardiff Arena October 30 2006. Fuck-me-in-half. Overheats and explodes in a fit of rockilepsy.

Looking at Strippers: A Game Theoretic Approach

Craig Holmes*

A father, his son, and two men who are boyfriends to two of his daughters go out on a stag night. The best man takes them to a strip club at the end of the evening, and while all would not have chosen such a move themselves, they decide to go along with it. The following morning, the wives or girlfriends ask them how there evening turned out, and what they did.

Hence, this is a four player game. The strategy set is {Tell Partner, Don't Tell Partner}. All players move simultaneously. If one of the men admits to going to a strip club, all the women will know because they talk. If no-one mentions it, they will never find out. The men receive a payoff of +5 for getting to see some dancing half-naked women. They are penalised if they tell their partner (who gives them the Third Degree and a withering stare, in that order) by -1 , but if they do not and someone else does, then the penality is -3. Finally, they received a bonus of +1 for each other player who does not mention it when they do, because they feel virtuous and honest.

Solve for Nash equilibria.

It can be seen that Tell Partner is a dominant strategy. Consider player 1's choice. If everyone else does not mention the strip club, then mentioning the strip club brings payoff of +7. Not mentioning the strib club brings a payoff of +5. Alternatively, if one, two or three of the other players have mentioned the strip club, not mentioning it will bring a payoff of +2, while mentioning it will bring a payoff of +6, +5 or +4. Hence, it is always a dominant strategy to play Tell Partner, regardless of what the other three players choose.

This reasoning applies to all four players, so the unique Nash Equilibrium outcome should be {Tell Partner, Tell Partner, Tell Partner, Tell Partner}, with everyone getting a payoff of +4. Note that this is Pareto inefficient: if they had all said nothing, then they could have got +5 each. But such an outcome can not occur because of the incentives to deviate.

What happens when this game is played in real life? It would appear that most players attempt to achieve the better outcome and choose Don't Tell Partner. This could be due to that fact that the payoffs are not common knowledge. For instance, three of the men may receive an additional payoff from sticking together and lying, believing they have got one over the womenfolk. This is commonly referred to in the literature as the Male Solidarity Principle. They also have a prior belief that the fourth individual has the same payoffs, so expect him also to play Don't Tell Partner. Such a hypothesis is possible, but to test it, a repeat of the experiment would be required. The players would have to update their beliefs over the fourth player's payoffs, and may act differently.

There are other extensions. We could consider a two stage game, where the first stage involves deciding not to invite me, I mean, not to invite the fourth player, who they believe tells his girlfriend everything, but these are left for the reader to analyse.

*University College, University of Oxford. I'd like to thank the participants of the experiment, and a girl called Misty, who provided me with a discussion on the role of prior beliefs in the equilibrium solution, and could get her legs right behind her ears.

So I did the whole stand-up comedy thing after a year of putting it off last night. And it wasn't that bad. The set went over pretty well. What I learned is I get better responses to daft silly one-liners that to anything I may want to say topical or political, which is probably because there are thousands of people who do the latter better. So that's good to know.

There's a video, apparently. I'm interested to watch it. People watching said I didn't look nervous. That was in no way reflective of how I felt. Which is kind of daft because then I'll go, every Monday, and do anything and say anything I fancy, including, but not limited to, imitation of animals, sing, miming a rectal examination, dance, attempt accents, speak in Elizabethan English, and, for that matter, tell jokes, in front of more people and it doesn't bother me a bit. I don't understand.

Craig

Just finished the fifth series of the West Wing. I really don't understand the people who say the show suffered a marked drop-off in quality after Aaron Sorkin left. It's a different show, I'll grant you: often bleaker, less warm, sometimes missing the wit of the first series. But I don't see as that's a problem. The characters are so established by this point that their dialogue probably writes itself. We all know how everyone is going to react to any situation. Also, it's coming toward the end of the term, so the politics is getting serious, while the characters are getting jaded and tired. That makes sense to me from a story-line point of view.

And John Wells throws so much new stuff into the series. The Access episode. The fading in and out before the shutdown. And An Khe, with the shooting down of the aircrafts, which is a brilliant weaving of two stories together as one. The series contains two great liberal triumph episodes ("Shutdown" and "The Supremes"), another minor one in the "Slow News Day" episode, great character development in CJ, plus another gripping season finale (I make that five from five). Also, "We don't like Asians".

My feelings toward the West Wing are always going to be a little biased, but still, why so little love? More love please.