Questions

Bombshell is a podcast on US defense policy – it’s pretty good. One thing they do is ask all new guests a set of the same questions. There was a first series set of questions, and now they’ve changed them with a second set. They’re interesting, so I thought I’d answer them myself.

Old set:

What was the best meal you’ve had on a road trip?

Back when I worked at the hedge fund, I went to Japan a fair amount with my boss and one time he made me arrange a couple of nights in an old-style Kyoto inn.I think some of his friends had been and told him he had to have the full Ryokan experience. There’s a whole story to it, but in particular the food was absolutely fantastic.

The inn was on the eastern edge of town, near Nanzenji, one of the most beautiful parts of town. Dinner was a multi-course meal of sashimi, tempura, vegetables, fish, soup, and on and on, eaten in a room overlooking the inn’s garden. It was mindblowing. The next day my boss, possibly not such a big fan of Japanese food, suggested we try the French place down the road, instead. :facepalm:. I went back the next time business took me to Kyoto (that time alone), and they fed me dinner in a tea hut in the middle of the stream running through the garden. Then, as a broke grad student, I took the family for a night, too.

What is the book you’ve owned the longest/reread the most?

The Little Sister, Raymond Chandler. I can remember listening to it with my dad as an audiobook first and understanding fairly little; the glory of Chandler’s books (other than Philip Marlowe, the main character) is plots so byzantine that you come to them anew more or less every time. Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea books run a close second.

What is the fan club/community you’ve been a member of the longest

I’ve been a member of a few internet forums/clubs, and a couple that led to genuine freindships and meeting people in real life. The longest lasting were poker and quant finance related, and the relationships have persisted beyond my activity in either field.

What is your Twitter crush?

William Gibson (@thegreatdismal) is one, but over on Instagram there’s an absolutely fantastic community of UK farming related posters who I am totally in awe of.

What’s your favourite museum?

I’m not a huge museum goer – my idea of a great holiday is lounging in a cafe not seeing museums and galleries, but I probably should go to more as I enjoy them when I do. Particularly as I’ve got older, the sheer age of some objects has begun to have a really powerful impact on me. The British Museum – the Mayan stuff in the middle, or the Korean and Japanese stuff up in the back – and the Ashmolean, are probably the ones I know best.

Favourite Geek Field Trip

No single answer, but I am a great fan of the tiny regional museum/library/archives that are dotted round all of Japan – you never know what you’ll find, and the archivists often don’t know what to make of you at first, but I love the excuse to see another part of the country and I think they’re often a really untapped resource.

What is your favourite statistical distribution?

So many options – I love me some markov chains, and Chi-squared is probably the one I’ve used the most in practice, but I think my favourite is probably a poisson.

New Ones:

What’s your entry music?

I went to a couple of poker tournaments in bygone days in which I had to choose and entry tune. The first one was in Berlin so I chose The Scorpions, Wind of Change, but the second one I chose Thriller, and that worked really well. My wife has always said hers would be Simply The Best, by Tina Turner.

What is the book you hate that everyone else loves?

I thought I didn’t have an answer to this, but then I remember @QMULBioethics asked this on Twitter, and my answers were On The Road, Franzen, and The Road.

What is your most quoted movie line?

Over? Did you say over? Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

What’s your favourite bar?

Lots of pubs in Oxford – The Royal Oak, The Lamb and Flag, The Bird and Baby, are in contention, but there was a bar near where I lived as a student in Tokyo, Ovo Lakto, that I spent probably more money in than any other shop/restaurant ever. Japanese bars often have a system where you buy your own bottle of spirits and it’s kept behind the bar waiting for you to return – my drink of choice then was rum on the rocks. I remember one night walking in off the last train, and as I came through the doors the people sitting round the bar all shouted ‘Ian’, and I had a real flashback to Norm walking into Cheers. It was a sort of touching-yet-also-alarming moment. It’s gone now – I think the owner got a lease in a much better part of town.