Tuesday, November 1

[soid]

 I woke up around 9am, hardly. Only 5 hours of sleep, again.

10-11:30am the Middle East lecture. Palestine and Israel, part 1. I could sense in the air the topic was contentious. Well, I think most sensitive people avoided taking this class. We started with rejection of nationalism as a description of reality. “Nationalism is an important phenomenon to understand, it is not reality, however”. It is not an age-old conflict. We covered roots of Zionism as interpreted by different historians (goes back to mid-19th century). Then the Prof argues the crucial moment for Zionism was the Balfour Declaration of 1917 by the British, establishing in the Palestine a “national home” for the Jewish people. At the moment 90% of the Palestinian population were Arabs, Jewish population was less than 10%. Arabs are ignored. The movement starts as a colonial project: at the time, colonialism is seen as a good thing (civilized nations help their uncivilized brothers, etc.). Zionist movement first calls themselves “Jewish colonization project”. In many ways, in the beginning, Jewish leadership acts as a colonial power. Why did British do this? It’s debatable, but it appears they tried to find a way to secure Suez Canal, Egypt properties – Jewish people in the Palestine would always be allies of the British in this. I’m a bit lost overall, so I should read the books more. We’ll continue this topic on Thursday.

Doing my budget till 12:30pm outside of lecture hall. First of November.

Then lunch. I saw Ph. walking by, but he didn’t notice me. He looks more like a woman now; he wore a black dress and looked stylish as usual. Does he still go by “he”? Maybe not. I regret not calling him join my table. 

1-2:30pm Then I went to the history of China lecture; Ming period; working on my NLG paper there. Three of the classics of Chinese literature from that period:

• The Journey to the West
• Luo Guanzhong - The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
• The Water Margin - Netflix now making a movie about it
• The Plum in the Golden Vase - 18th century, erotic novel

Another interesting artsy looking book from the Ming period is "Elegant life of the Chinese literati". I'll read it when I retire (I never will). Also, Italian jesuit Matteo Ricci (1552-1610) created the oldest-known map that shows America. It is called Ten Thousand Countries of the World.

2:40-4pm Topology lecture. We defined the fundamental group, then saw some examples of covering spaces. A complex thing becomes just a group of Z. I love to see groups again.

4-7:30pm working in the science library. Writing my NLG paper: creating LaTeX tables, showing off my sucky results, described related work. Then I got bogged down by setting up Google Cloud, hoping that training would be faster there. Oh, well, user interfaces are not Google’s best thing. Very hard to do anything in the interface without finding a proper guide for it and following it carefully step by step. I was often catching a gaze from a girl from another table. Do I know here? I don’t remember. She would look at me, then jump her eyes elsewhere if I looked at her. She looked busy and tired, though. Maybe I'm a good thing to look at while studying? Some people around were taking naps. 

10-12am working on Google Cloud setup. My SSH keys got erased when I just put them on the VM. Turns out I need to setup everything in that sucky user interface. And the like problems. But satisfactory overall: small steps, making progress, getting portions of dopamine from making the thing working. 

12-1am reading Khalidi’s “Sowing Crisis”. I got to Israel/Palestine section, besides others. I read it just like a continuation of the lecture this morning; I imagined the same voice when reading it. I was thinking that he’s laying out a pretty complex argument in this book, but if some casual reader picks up the book, they would be lost in there without much background. He’s throwing so many facts around as if the reader were aware with everything what happened and just looking for another interpretation. A lot of it makes sense for me now, but when it touches something I haven’t heard before, it doesn’t explain it. Lebanon in 2008, for example. Was there a civil war at the time? He's very critical of the Bush administration, of course, but the book is written in 2008, so it was not mainstream view at the time as far as I understand.

Bed by 2am.