Projects

Here are some projects which go beyond the scope of individual blog posts:

Popular posts from this blog

What have been the greatest intellectual achievements?

In yesterday's post I briefly mentioned Claude Shannon, founder of information theory. It occurred to me that even most Oxford students wouldn't know who he was, despite his work being crucial for the subsequent development of the "Information Age". How many other intellectual revolutions in obscure fields haven't become common knowledge yet? Perhaps the best way of finding out is just to start listing the greatest and most influential intellectual achievements ever, and seeing if anyone else has more to add - particularly in the humanities and social sciences, where my knowledge is a little shallower. Also, is there anything you expect to deserve a place on this list in the next few years? I'm focusing on achievements which either founded or greatly influenced an entire field (also, although there are many amazing artistic and engineering achievements, to keep things relatively concise I'm not going to include either here). Of course this will be necessa...
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In Search of All Souls

I recently sat the All Souls Fellowship exam, called by some the " world's hardest exam ". It requires you to write twelve essays for four papers over two days; the breadth and novelty of the questions make it a fascinating experience. Two of the papers were "general papers" and two were in a humanities subject of your choice (in my case, philosophy); most papers had around 25 questions. I've summarised my answers below, as well as noting some of the other particularly interesting questions. General paper I: 1. How should you prepare for the end of the world? I started off with a somewhat emotional argument about the badness of death on an individual level. I referred to Epicurus' argument that we have nothing to fear from death because when we are dead, we will not have any preferences about it at all - but argued, in response, that having preferences about future states of the world is a foundation of our lives. In terms of the end of the ...
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Going to the dark side vs seeing the light

Since I've now been lucky enough to attend both Oxford and Cambridge, I thought it'd be interesting to compare and contrast the two. Bear in mind that I only spent one year in Cambridge, and that graduate students' experiences differ significantly from those of undergrads. Also note that there are many aspects of Oxford and Cambridge which are practically indistinguishable, and so I've skipped over most of those similarities. Nevertheless, here are some comparisons which have stuck in my mind - and which might help you decide (in the words of the particularly obnoxious Boat Race slogan) " which blue are you? " Geographic differences Oxford is a bigger city than Cambridge, with its suburbs stretching out much further. In Oxford, students who live outside the city center in places like Cowley or Summertown are surrounded by shops, bars and restaurants; whereas in Cambridge, they'd be surrounded by quiet residential neighbourhoods or paddocks. Since stud...
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