In Bath 2006

July 2006

We are now settled into Bath, in an apartment on one of the busiest streets in the town, but urprisingly quiet once the front windowsare shut.  As you probably already know, Bath was a Roman city and its name derives from the old pre-Roman baths here.  The Romans,with their acumen for governing conquered lands with minimal effort, merged their Minerva with the Celtic goddess Sulis of these baths. BTW, Minerva is Athena in the Greek pantheon -- these guys were not too fussy about whose gods and goddesses they adopted, a very sensible practice I think.  The town (ok, ok, the locals call it a city, but it really ain't!) is rigorously heritage preserved, verypretty, with a magnificent cath edral in the center near the baths.If one is into history, one could really go ga-ga here Now for the let-down.  The University of Bath (I am physically ine CS Dept right now) is on top of a hill, but its architecture sucks.  Many of its buildings are in the cheap bare concrete mode that was in vogue in the late 50's and for much of the 60's.  They call this style "brutalism".

Yokelin has not come to campus with me yet, but when she does she'll be at home -- the Univ of Malaya that was her alma mater is very similar in its tastelessness.  What a missed opportunity to emulate the superb ethos of the ancient town below!  I had no idea of the topography of the terrain when I arrived; the map innocently showed that it was a mere 5km from my apartment, so I figured I'd walk. Bugger me, after the first flat 1/2 km the road began to climb, andit just got steeper and steeper after that!  I made it to the CSD in an hour, sweating (I do not perspire! only women do that!) and looking bemused.  When the office staff discovered I had walked here I became a minor hero -- well, at least they made it appear so, but maybe later they laughed among themselves about this Jakun from the antipodes, so bloody polite these Brits.  Same day one of Marina's colleagues hands me a fresh-off-the-press Springer volume edited by him of an AAMAS w/s on social norms and agents for me toread.  That's what I am doing in the evenings.

Private matters now, so stop reading if you do not know the dramatis personae.  Our elder son Kerwyn and his spouse Amanda come up from London late Friday night to spend Saturday with us.  Amanda's maternal family has ancient roots in Somerset, the county in which Bath is situated, and would you believe in conjunctions! her momand dad were also visiting relatives here.   So on Saturday we all drove around the countryside snooping in villages of those relatives.  Good lord, there was a lot of inbreeding those bygone days as people were not mobile!  I'll attach a pic of yours truly in one of the villages; look at real Tudor cottage in the background.

Bath Again

Our settling in period is finally complete with the purchase of household items that we took for granted at home, e.g., clothesdrying rack -- no Hills hoist in our garden-less flat! and moreover
we want to avoid using the dryer in the nearby laundromat as much as possible.  So last weekend we walked around the city looking atsights for the first time.  I will soon give an illustrated accountof the things we saw, and will see; but for the moment I want toeport two interesting ideas being floated in the UK, an admissionby the Tories of a dreadful mistake, and an observation about honors degrees.

There is a serious proposal to introduce a "carbon expenditure"card that one has to present to buy airline tickets, petrol, etc.-- anything that will contribute to CO2 emissions which cause global
warming.  One your annual allocation is exceeded, you have to buy carbon credits from someone who still has a positive balance.  This is a great idea.  Another proposal is off-shore wind farms.  It has
been calculated that wind energy could provide 20% of needs in thefuture.  There is also anincreasing realization that fruit flown from remote countries (e.g., South Africa, New Zealand), so that people here can eat them out-of-season, comes at a carbon cost. Yours truly feels guilty enough to reduce such consumption, makingan exception for bananas which will never be in season in the UK.

The Tories have now admitted that their privatization of the railways (more than a decade ago under Thatcher) was a huge mistake.  The system is now more expensively run and less safe, customers are being badly served, insufficient investment is being made for infrastructure improvement, etc.  This outcome would have beenobvious to anyone who understands the economic peculiarity of
"natural monopolies" -- really Econ 101 stuff -- that you do NOT privatise them but instead you regulate them.  However, when ideology gets in the way, well ....  Technology sometimes vitiates natural monopolies, e.g., in telecommunications the advent of optic fibres, frequency division multiplex on copper, etc. made it possible for different services to be provided by different companies on the same "wire" to your house.  So Telstra stopped being a natural monopoly, and nowhere is this clearer than in mobile telephony where the copper to your house is irrelevant.  But NOBODY will build a rail track parallel to the existing one just so another company can use it.  Likewise, NOBODY has yet invented a way to separate the water molecules from Sydney Water and an alternative (say) Macquarie Water.  Hence, it would be an irrational act of ideology to privatise Cityrail or Sydney Water.  But don't bet they won't do it -- they are ideologues.

At afternoon tea Prof John Fitch of the CSD here told me that itis now the case that nationally the average proportion of Hons Class I and Hons Class II/I among all graduates (including Pass)  is over
50%. I wonder what the figure is in Australia?