Tuesday / Wednesday at LSE

Tuesday November 18th

At the LSE Library earlier than usual this morning and two important finds - Agassi Towards an Historiography of Science from 1963 and Finocchiaro History of Science as Explanation. Both were in the Lakatos collection - the former mis-stacked. Both are essential reads for me at the moment

There is a fire alarm ringing pre-lecture at the New Academic Building. I stood outside chatting to Anne Marie about her dissertation plans. Unfortunately, her presentation is this Friday and I can't really justify going down to London to see it. A shame really as her theme - which seems to be something from the philosophy of mathematics - would have been good to hear about. John Worrall continues his lecturing on Copernicus, but at least it is getting a bit more philosophical.

At our H of S seminar, George wastes ten minutes talking obout the heuristic argument for realism, which had just been covered by JW, which annoys Victor. We then have a paper by Ian on Galileo's telescopic observations and various associated articles by Hanson, Feyerabend and Kitcher on these observations. I have 6-8 points I would have liked to have asked Ian about, but George introduces what he believes is a "logical contradiction" argument by Galileo against Aristotle. His argument is nonsense, but he gets very annoyed as we dispute this. So then he launches into a long 20 mins speech - and I never get to ask my questions to Ian. Not how a seminar should be in my view. Lunch follows with Victor and Leonardo - grumbling about George mostly. Perhaps I should send him an email.

At 2:00pm, it is my next Hedge Fund Society talk - this one being a broad talk on approaches to trading. I llustrated the technical parts via the Yahoo finance website, which I thought was quite effective.

Off then to the hotel. This week I have a back room (which is very quiet) plus a regular bed, rather than the bunk bed I had last week - the best room I have had so far

The P of S lecture is on "Interpretations of Probability". I had a short talk to Caroline before the lecture who seems quite anti-Victor/pro-George, which rather surprises me. She told me that JW was actually really cross with the points Victor had made at the meeting the other week. I also sat next to one of the PhD people - a girl who was at the student-staff forum the other week. I would really like to know how she is getting on - I have recently been having some thoughts on doing a PhD myself.

At the P of S seminar, some of us get essays back - for me this was my Bayesian essay that I did with no advance preparation for. I was fairly pleased with the comments, though the paper wasn't very good. Femke did her essay on the History of Science quote from Lakatos. I had a quick read of it - it was certainly not what I would have expected of a post-grad essay!

Long chat with Vicenzo and Leonardo at Holborn tube station - life, the universe and everything.

Wednesday November 19th

Reading Finocchiaro first thing this morning at the hotel - this could be a very important book for me. I wonder if it is still available to buy anywhere. The book seeks to criticise and develop Agassi's argument from Historiography. Oddly, it doesn't mention Lakatos, though it was published a few years after the relevant Lakatos paper. Wonder why?

Today's dissertation seminar is by Caroline - her thoughts are very loose at this stage. I made some comments, but nothing too serious. This might be the last of these seminar that I attend this year. For what I get out of them compared to what I could do if I stayed home, it is perhaps not worth staying up just for.

A quick getaway at the end of the seminar to meet Emma at Liverpool St. We have some lunch and do a little bit of prep for her Barclays assessment centre this afternoon. This takes place at a hotel in Canary Wharf. My sole aim is to try to keep her as calm as possible before hand. This seems to go ok

From Canary Wharf, I make my way home - reading Goldstein's Incompleteness on the coach.
Then a quiet couple of hours downloading and printing articles off the various journal sites via the LSE library website - this is such a change from when I was a student, and could form the basis for much of the work that I do over the remainder of the course - so much more effective than reading entire books.

Mid-evening, Emma calls to say she has been offered an internship position at Barclays for next summer - another brilliant achievement by young Riley. Given the deteriorating economic situation, I think internships will be at a premium, so she has done really well to get one with her first attempt - and this is actually the one she most wanted to get as well. So a pretty perfect outcome.