Freesteel Blog » March round Hilbre Island

March round Hilbre Island

Wednesday, March 23rd, 2016 at 11:19 am Written by:

I really have been neglecting to blog. I’m going to bang out a few quick posts on this the day before my holiday.

Saturday 12 March involved a grumpy day paddling around Hilbre Island with a rather fuzzy camera.

This is the stone wall on the northwest corner of the island at high water:

The professor on the water had just gone on a 10 day trip to Japan to use up an academic travel budget, and at the same time busted a chunk out of the dwindling global carbon budget [podcast here]. You don’t want to see what the bailiffs do when they collect on an unpaid carbon debt. They’ll take your food.

I’ve been speculating about a specialization of my Question from Hell proposal where visiting professors who have just flown to give a lecture get routinely asked about their carbon budget (which they could have avoided by teleconferencing) as the first audience question from a young student. It will be rude and ungrateful to ask such questions of a visiting guest, and will embarrass everybody. The excuses are lame.

The top excuse will be: “We don’t have the equipment”.

If that one gets a lot of laughter, the second excuse will be: “Meeting in person makes a big difference”. To which I’d like to respond: “Where’s the research?”

There isn’t any.

I’d love to set up a controlled experiment where the person who doesn’t do the 10 day trip to Japan gets to take a 24 hour bus ride to a hotel opposite a Japanese takeaway in Dundee via Plymouth and is locked-in with the internet where his only communications portal for the next 120 hours is a telepresence robot parked in the corner of the lab in Japan. He is free to rove the corridors if he’s being ignored. Maybe one of the brighter students would take pity on the robot and take it home overnight for late night chat with bottle of sake, or even for a night tour round the city on a motorbike. I hear these VR goggles and hi-def cameras are pretty good these days.

The time duration exposure, the portability, and the lessening of inhibitions could easily mean that human bonds and interaction could be much enhanced compared to proceeding to these places as a meat embodiment that smells and needs to go to the toilet occasionally.

If this Questioning takes off I am expecting that university administrators, who can be blindingly stupid, commit to ban such questions, as you cannot ban something like this without actually telling people what it is you are banning.

PS. Cory Doctorow was burning up the planet ten years ago.

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