Stern stuff

I've always liked spring evenings. Of course technically it isn't quite spring yet, not until the 21st. But it's a light early evening as I walk across the fields to the University, and it's about 6 degrees warmer than it has been. That is, it is about 6 degrees, and everything's no longer frozen. Birds are singing. Trees and grass smell of, well, trees and grass.

It was actually a bit of a gamble. I only heard about this evening's event yesterday, and hadn't realised until today that I'd be able to make it. Free tickets were available by phone or email. I emailed, and got no reply. Towards the end of the working day (4:30) I phoned too, but everybody in the Economics Department must have finished work early.

And can you blame them? Lord Stern (of Stern Review fame) had been invited to give a talk on his experiences at the infamous COP15 (that's Copenhagen climate talks to you and me). The fact that Lunchista had no ticket (free or otherwise) made me the official gatecrashing delegation, but I don't take up much room and I usually behave myself. In fact no-one was checking for tickets, and a handful of us late arrivals were quietly ushered in just as the Vice-Chancellor was finishing his introductory speech. Perfect.

The lighting (this "dramatic lighting from above" lark seems to be becoming fashionable) made Lord Stern's features look slightly Indian. I found myself wondering whether he, like Lunchista, had a slim Indian strand in his family tree, possibly dating back to some aristocratic liaison in those enlightened times before the Victorians started frowning on that sort of thing.

He lovingly described the characters, atmosphere, mistakes and successes of the Copenhagen talks, in particular how, because every decision had to be made unanimously, it reminded him of Student politics. Thinking back to when I was a student, many of our campus wannabe politicians were students of Economics, so that must have resonnated for practically everybody in the room. Somehow campus politics just didn't appeal as much to us Physicists, which perhaps explains a lot.

One of Copenhagen's successes, which I must admit had passed me by at the time, was the REDD anti-deforestation programme, by which countries with more trees than money can be bribed to keep their trees. The biggest failure, on the other hand, appeared to have been the idea of writing a "provisional" agreement in advance (with a view to saving time) which, naturally, offended every representative who wasn't directly involved in it. Oh well, you live and learn.

There followed lots of talk about future growth while reducing Carbon emissions. I wondered whether he'd ever had a chat with Prof Tim Jackson. There was even time for questions at the end: I would dearly have loved to ask about this but I felt I'd already pushed my luck a bit!

Worth the candle

It's getting towards the shortest day, that time of year when in this part of the world there exists such a thing as "Four o'clock in the evening". There have been some pretty long days, though, for the heads at the COP (where COP apparently doesn't stand for COP-enhagen, or even a football stand in Liverpool (recent viewer poll question: "Marmite or Custard?"), but is actually short for "Conference of the Parties". Earlier on in the week, candle-lit vigils had been organised around the world, to give all the heads there a bit of a boost.

Because Lunchista has it on good authority that all the poor guys want is to be confident in the knowledge that, if they come up with some drastic agreement which means we no longer have the right to get up before dawn and drive 90 minutes to a pointless and overheated (or over-air-conned, or both) job each day, we're not going to vote them out of office. Or burn them out, depending on your country's constitution. And so Lunchista grabbed some of our emergency supply of candles, and a pretty painted jar to put them in, and headed off to take part.

That jar has a bit of a story.

Way back in 2003 Lunchista, along with rather a lot of other people, just couldn't see any point in going to war in Iraq. Better government? Not usually to be found while you're being bombed. Terrorism? All the terrorists were elsewhere at the time. Oil? Already got ours, under the North Sea. Jobs? The forces already have a useful line in peacekeeping and disaster relief. And that's before you start on the "moral" thing. Even Colin Powell, a military man from the crew-cut to the boots, didn't rate the idea, on the grounds that there wasn't an "exit strategy". Sensible chap.

So as part of an international wave of protests one Sunday, I organised our own small effort under a tree at a nearby roundabout. We put out only a hundred or so flyers, made a banner (the sheet and gaffer-tape method), stood at the spot and waited...and were joined by dozens of people! Not to mention a phone-call from the local press, who gave us a couple of column-inches. And a Sunday evening, when most people below retirement age are heading from where they like to be, back to where their work makes them live, isn't exactly quiet on the roads: lots of people saw our message.

As we were packing up after our appointed hour I noticed that someone had left their home-made night-light in the tree. I let it stay there for a few days in case they wanted to return and claim it, but they didn't, so I did.

Back to this weeek, and here we are at 5:30 pm on Saturday in a shop-lined city centre square, lighting our candles. As luck would have it, that time in our city centre was "not optimal" for silent vigils, or indeed silent anything. Someone, in this case the City Council in a filthy great truck, has to clean up after a whole week of the pre-Christmas shopping frenzy. Why they had to do this by reversing around the entire square (as opposed to going forwards and sparing us 20 minutes of safety warnings) is anybody's guess. Perhaps it was a two-fingered gesture to a past government election campaign. I can only hope that our MP, who was good enough to join us and read out the first part of our "Declaration", wasn't offended.

Is it all worth it? Well it might be time to think of Battenburg cake, or even Mr Pareto with his 20% of the effort leading to 80% of the result. The cost to Lunchista of taking part in all this was one candle (you could be more energy-efficient, but who would take a "CFL-lit vigil" seriously? And anyway, I was glad for some of that energy-lost-as-heat on my hands). The odds of success are unknown, but the possible reward is, well, about the size of a small planet.

Busking it

Now Maths A-Level almost certainly isn't your cup of tea, but many moons ago it happened to be mine. However, that is not what today's musings are about.

Young Lunchista was sitting in the classroom one morning, while our teacher was taking us through the finer points of 'partials'. And for once, the said young Lunchista was completely at a loss to understand what on earth our teacher was talking about. Everybody else (six bright lads: we were a fairly small, rural school, where you could look out of the window and see the hills) was listening attentively, as the equations on the board got longer and longer, the assumptions got more and more abstract and Lunchista got more and more lost.

Finally I could stand it no longer, put my hand up and asked for an explanation of how the very first step had been arrived at. So all the algebra was dusted off the board, and the poor chap patiently took it from the top. Our Maths lessons were very civilised affairs: no-one got all sarky if you didn't understand stuff. 'Partials' appeared to be some kind of gradient (which is really just the slope of a line), except that each point could have more than one of them. I was still clueless. How could a point on a graph have more than one slope?

Rinse and repeat.

"I'm sorry sir, I don't get what the things actually are, that we're trying to calculate." Pause. Cue genius.

"Well, imagine you were out on those hills fellwalking. One of those partials is the gradient you would feel if you were walking towards the East, and the other is the gradient if you were going Northwards"

And after a very visible light-bulb moment on my part, the lesson carried on. What still puzzled me as we headed for lunch was that I was usually among the first in our class to get my head round new things in Maths, so why had I been so thick that morning? Unusually, the lads came and sat with me as I ate. "Can you explain what on earth all that was about in Maths? You seemed to understand it..." Cue second light-bulb moment. Jammy gits, they'd just sat there in class letting me ask all the awkward questions! So they all got the full, take-no-prisoners explanation of partials, with mashed spuds and gravy. Because I happen to believe that life is always better if people understand stuff.

That incident, quite apart from revealing the subtleties of partials, and indeed the patience and ingenuity of teachers, first put me on to the idea that people are perfectly capable of sitting there looking as if they know everything while in fact remaining totally clueless. Not only that, but there are times when they actually prefer this option to the alternative of admitting inexperience in order to gain more understanding. Even in a class, where you would think that admitting you haven't got your head round something at first pass wouldn't result in a catastrophic loss of cred.

So as our country, and most of the world with it, lurches into interesting economic times, take a look at our leaders at the G20 summit this week. Are they in fact just a larger version of the lads in Lunchista's maths class all those years ago, sitting hoping for some or other inspiration that will enable them to take the whole matter forward, hopefully to a happy conclusion for all of us? Are they just busking it? Will they, worse still, only bother to gain enough understanding to bail their own selves and their ilk out of the likely ensuing poverty, while not being wise or knowledgeable enough to lift the rest of us out as well?

Funnily enough, the full name for those mathematical descriptions of slope is 'partial derivatives'. The same word, and the same idea, behind the type of trading notorious for its contribution to the instability in the financial system.