Another seminar presentation

The History of Science lecture starts with a brief comment from Professor Worrall noting the issues that have been raised over the last week, but responding by confirming his view that a detailed review of the data is vitally important. So today's lecture follows the previous pattern by largely following Kuhn's treatment. But our complaint to not about the lecture as such, it is about George's abilities in the seminar.

And unfortunately, today show no improvement on last week. The seminar is really terrible. Kyle did a short presentation on the data related to the planets - largely following Kuhn again (he hadn't been at last week's seminar and didn't know the full details of what transpired). I raised one or two questions with the aim of provoking some discussion. But once again, George launched into a couple of long digressions taking up perhap 25 minutes of the remaining time in our seminar. I asked one rather facetious question about why one of Kuhn's disgrams was the wrong way round, but this produced an absurd discussion of how the constellations had looked different to George when he was in southern Greece compared to northern. Total nonsense. So we remain unhappy about this seminar. Several people are pondering on sending further emails to John - myself included.

I had lunch in the Brunch Bowl with Victor. Talked about Kepler related studies, and what he might want to do when he finishes the course. As I rather expected, he is one of the current MSc students who most wants to develop a possible academic career.

Just after lunch I happened to come across the LSE Hedge Fund Society who had their stand up in Houghton Street. I had a long chat with the secretary and we are planning to do a series of talks. The first will be Nov 18th - probably on the impact of events like the credit crunch and Sept 11th on financial markets and hedge funds. Before Christmas I will also do a talk on the ten best hedge fund books. These presentations should be pretty straightforward to do and not take up much time. Might be fun as well. The Hedge Fund Society apparently has 600 members and its events are typically very well attended.

Spent the main part of the afternoon in the library reading some articles from the Journal of the History of Astronomy that I'd brought down with me. The library was very full - is this likely to be the pattern going forward? Later on I spent a hour or so in the MSc students' common room on the 4th floor. It is not practical to stay in the library for the entire gap between H of S and P of S it seems to me.

While there I got chatting to Jacob, who has decided to quit History of Science - mainly due to the experience to date with George. He surprised me by saying that he was involved in the re-launch of the Clare Market Review magazine that is scheduled for late this term and would I be prepared to write a paper on something to do with Nassim Taleb. I certainly would be! We will pass emails about this over the next few days

Tonight's P of S lecture is on Imre Lakatos. It spends the first 30 minutes looking at his life and philosophy of mathematics, even though these are not relevant for the course. However, I did find this bit very interesting. The second half hour presented the MSRP. It is only when you see a lecture on it that you realise just how clunky the approach really is.

Next up the Seminar and much to my surprise, I was not speaking straight away. Instead, Miklos wanted to spend the first half discussing the previous lecture. This inevitably resulted in a lot of people raising points that were directly relevant to my talk (prior to me speaking). I was not altogether happy about this, but there was nothing I could really do about it.

And we didn't really cover too much of what I had planned to say. I was very happy with my decision to largely ignore the paper itself and focus on developing a wider framework for understanding the paper - this seemed to get a good response from the others. But by the time I had finished it was just after 8:30 and few people wanted to ask any more questions or raise any more points. So my portion was only really 40 minutes out of the 100 we were there. Not what I expected at all.

So I have now finished seminar presentations for a while. Now to focus on the Taleb article and the remote plan I have to submit a paper proposal to that conference in the USA on Philosophy and History of Science that Miklos mentioned to me.

Heavy rain and sleet as I waited for the coach at Marble Arch. Turned to snow as we left London. This was quite deeply settled as we passed the Goring Gap. Seems rather early in the year for our first snow - does this imply a bad winter?