Thursday, October 28

 I woke up around 9:15am.

10-11:30am Middle East lecture. WW2 and after. It was quite packed:

• Soviets and the British invade Iran in 1941, kicked out Reza Shah. The reasons: it was a strategic passage between the allies and Soviets. Also, the oil.
• After the war the Soviets stay in Iran for 9 more months: they support Azerbaijan insurrection, create a puppet Kurdish republic called Mahabad Republic that existed for less than a year; meanwhile searching oil in the north of Iran. Iran quickly realizes that Soviets act just the same as the British did. This alienates Iran; eventually the Soviets withdraw under pressure. 
• In the 1920-1940 the Soviets and Iran had had good relationship: unlike the British, the Soviets treated Iran on equal terms. This changes after WW2. Stalin suddenly starts dictating the terms, behaves very aggressively. At the same time, Soviets start pressuring Turkey.
• The Soviets and Turkey establish a joint control of the Turkish Straits (Bosphorus and Dardanelles)
• Stalin alienates both Turkey and Iran. Prof says: "there is a lot of American bias in interpretation of the Cold War, but it’s hard to interpret these events anyhow else. It is really Stalin’s provocative and aggressive behavior that pushes Turkey and Iran Westward". It is not clear why Stalin behaved the way he did. Many archives are still unpublished. In the 1990s, the Professor says he worked with Primakov, Russian Foreign minister at that time, to publish and translate the archives, but the project was barred by President Yeltsin's administration. 
• In the West, the understanding of Cold War develops. "An iron curtain has descended across the Continent"—Churchill gives his iron curtain speech in March 1946. "Churchill speech is an interesting artifact – a man can express himself beautifully”. Churchill had lost election by the time, a man with no power, gives the speech to an American audience, Truman sitting next to him. American media pickup the speech – it goes everywhere, all newspapers, radios, etc. 
• Americans and the British are trying to stitch together chains of alliances across the Middle East (Middle East Defense Org - MEDO; Middle East Command 1951; Baghdad Pact CENTO), but this fails miserably. It is done without considerations of local politics. E.g. in Egypt by the time all, all the entire political spectrum wants is to get the British out; any deals with the British are very unpopular. 

Then working on Topology homework. That was easier than usual. Is this space compact? Is it complete? And why. And a few proofs. Maybe the Prof wanted to give us an easier time during the midterms. That's appreciated. 

1-2pm Office hours with Prof Kh. We talked about some useful theorems for completing a space, then got into more philosophy and whatnot. Humans are functions that take 4 dimensional space and map it to one dimensional text, and reverse. The professor has impressive shelves of English and Russian books in his office all about either math, or physics, or complexity theory and the like. I wonder what my shelves would look like if I had physical copies. Most of my books are in iPad now. 

Quick lunch: broccoli cream soup.

2:40-4pm Topology. Starting Algebraic topology. Defined homotopy equivalence classes, containing functions that can be continuously deformed into one another; confirmed the axioms. It is not a group yet, but that's where we are heading, it looks like. 

4-6pm finishing topology homework, then submitted. Feeling quite exhausted. How do people even work 5 days a week?

Took a break in the evening. I watched some news, played Humankind, sent messages, looked in Google Maps terrain mode, stayed away from the books. 

Bed by 2am.