On Saturday 23 June 2018 some Trinity in Japan members met at the historic Takachiho Fluorescent Light Bulb Plant in the center of Tokyo.
The Revd Dr Michael Banner will join us on Friday 28 September 2018 for a special event.
The fee including drinks reception, kaiseki dinner and unlimited drinks will be YEN 12,000, nijikai drinks etc are separate.
All Fellows or members of Trinity College (Cambridge University) living in or visiting Tokyo are very welcome.
Registration and prepayment until Friday 21 September 2018. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
Usually we go for nijikai nearby.
Dean of Chapel and Fellow,
Director of Studies in Theology,
Chair of Alumni Relations and Development, Trinity College
Michael Banner’s Bampton Lecture in the University of Oxford, 2013, was published as The Ethics of Everyday Life: Moral Theology, Social Anthropology and the Imagination of the Human (OUP, 2014). The Bampton lectures were held since 1780, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bampton_Lectures
Michael Banner – Birth and Human Flourishing
Michael Banner – Ethics for Lunch: Biotechnology and Respect for Nature: Jonas’s Dilemma
Publications:
Stanley Hauerwas wrote in his review of “Christian Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems”
‘Michael Banner is an event waiting to happen. He is clearly one of the brightest and most interesting young people doing ethics on the scene today. He is a first-rate theologian who promises to be a new and long-standing voice not only in England but in America. This is a good book and one that I believe will be widely read.’ Stanley Hauerwas, Duke University
If you are Trinity College Cambridge member living in or visiting Japan and like to join our meetings, or to contact us:
Copyright (c) 2018 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby.
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 24 August 2018. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
If you are Trinity College Cambridge member living in or visiting Japan and like to register:
Copyright (c) 2018 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby.
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 13 July 2018. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
If you are Trinity College Cambridge member living in or visiting Japan and like to register:
Copyright (c) 2018 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby.
With kind support from the College, we may be able to offer a subsidized rate for students, interns or comparable, please let me know when you register in case you like to be considered.
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 15 June 2018. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
If you are Trinity College Cambridge member living in or visiting Japan and like to register:
Copyright (c) 2018 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby.
With kind support from the College, we may be able to offer a subsidized rate for students, interns or comparable, please let me know when you register in case you like to be considered.
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 18 May 2018. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
Copyright (c) 2018 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
Trinity in Japan member John Williams introduces his film “The Trial” at a preview on 26 April 2018.
“The Trial” moves Franz Kafka’s novel to today’s Japan.
Copyright (c) 2018 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
Professor Frank Stajano, Trinity Fellow, Head of the Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research at Cambridge University, and Gerhard Fasol met at the Cyber Security Conference in Tokyo on 28 March 2018.
Trinity College Fellow Sachiko Kusukawa and Gerhard Fasol held a meeting on matters of Trinity in Japan in Tokyo on 27 March 2018.
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby.
With kind support from the College, we may be able to offer a subsidized rate for students, interns or comparable, please let me know when you register in case you like to be considered.
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 13 April 2018. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
Senior Research Fellow at Trinity, Professor Faculty of History
Professor Dominic Lieven’s most recent book Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia was selected as FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015, and was awarded the Pushkin House Prize – watch interviews with Professor Dominic Lieven here.
Professor Lieven’s recent book “Russia against Napoleon. The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814“, won the Wolfson History Prize and the Annual Prize of the Fondation Napoléon for the best foreign work on the Napoleonic era.
CIRSD Conference on WWI: Panel “What Kind of Failure?” – Prof. Dominic Lieven
Dominic Lieven: Dismantling Anglophone Hegemony Is a Costly Enterprise:
BOOKS:
Copyright (c) 2018 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
Gawain Barnard, Trinity alumni from Hong Kong, and Gerhard Fasol met on 8 March 2018 in Tokyo.
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby. (with kind support from the College, we may be able to offer a subsidized rate for students, interns or comparable, please let me know when you register in case you like to be considered).
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 2 February 2018. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
Copyright (c) 2017 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
Trinity Senior Research Fellow Dominic Lieven is planning to join our bonenkai dinner!
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby. (with kind support from the College, we may be able to offer a subsidized rate for students, interns or comparable, please let me know when you register in case you like to be considered).
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 8 December 2017. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
Senior Research Fellow at Trinity, Professor Faculty of History
Professor Dominic Lieven’s most recent book Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia was selected as FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015, and was awarded the Pushkin House Prize – watch interviews with Professor Dominic Lieven here.
Professor Lieven’s recent book “Russia against Napoleon. The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814“, won the Wolfson History Prize and the Annual Prize of the Fondation Napoléon for the best foreign work on the Napoleonic era.
CIRSD Conference on WWI: Panel “What Kind of Failure?” – Prof. Dominic Lieven
Dominic Lieven: Dismantling Anglophone Hegemony Is a Costly Enterprise:
BOOKS:
Copyright (c) 2017 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby. (with kind support from the College, we may be able to offer a subsidized rate for students, interns or comparable, please let me know when you register in case you like to be considered).
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 13 October 2017. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
Copyright (c) 2017 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
Lord Martin Rees, Master of Trinity College 2004-2012, gave a public lecture at the Japan Academy in Tokyo on the topic “The world in 2050 – and beyond” on Wednesday 4 October 2017 at 14:30.
Details here:
http://www.japan-acad.go.jp/japanese/news/2017/082901.html
location:
http://www.japan-acad.go.jp/japanese/about/access.html
notes written by Gerhard Fasol, based on Lord Martin Rees’ lecture notes and Gerhard Fasol’s notes taken during the lecture
Earth existed for 45 million centuries, humans a few thousand centuries. This century is special: we are in a new epoch, the Anthropocene, its the first century where the future of earth depends on humans.
Humans could degrade the biosphere, or cause misdirected technology to destroy or diminish civilisation.
Martin Rees has written a book on these issues, the same book is entitled “Our final century” in the UK, and “Our final hour” in the USA, reflecting the contrast of British understatement and American emphasis on urgency.
Martin Rees did not think that humanity would extinguish itself, but feared that humans would be lucky to avoid serious setbacks, and nuclear armageddon was closely avoided during the cold war.
Nuclear weapons are based on 20th century science, in the 21th century we have created new existential risks based on bio, cyber and AI.
World population was about 3 billion in 1960, now exceeds 7 billion, and is forecast to reach 9 billion by 2050.
Urbanization continues, predictions are that 70% of people will live in cities by 2050, requiring excellence of governance.
Discussing population growth has become taboo, as predictions in the 1970s by the Club of Rome and others have proven wrong. Food shortages were predicted, improvements in food production technology prevented disasters.
Can 9 billion people be fed? Yes they can, using improved and sustainable agriculture.
Famines do occur, but they are the result of wars and political causes, there is no overall food shortage on earth.
Projections of population growth out to the year 2100 vary between 6 billion and 16 billion depending on model assumptions, see Jeff Tollefson : “Seven billion and counting” Nature 478 300 (19 October 2011) doi:10.1038/478300a
Conserving our variety of species is not only about conserving food production and agriculture, there is also an ethical aspect. E O Wilson said: “mass extinction is the sin that future generations will least forgive us for”.
E.O. Wilson Biodiversity Foundation: https://eowilsonfoundation.org/
Johan Rockström argues that humanity must stay within “planetary boundaries” to avoid catastrophic environmental damage: Nature special on planetary boundaries (23 September 2009)
Charles David Keeling measured atmospheric CO2 concentrations at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory starting in 1958 and showed that atmospheric CO2 at the Mauna Loa Observatory rose from around 320 ppm in 1960 to around 400 ppm around 2015, with oscillations due to plant growth cycles around the year.
For an overview discussion see: American Chemical Society ACS “The Keeling Curve: Carbon Dioxide Measurements at Mauna Loa”.
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/education/whatischemistry/landmarks/keeling-curve.html
There are some uncertainties in our knowledge of global warming, eg our uncertainty about future fossile fuel usage, or the impact of water vapor and clouds (see: the fifth Assessment Report AR5 by the Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC).
Most agree on two messages:
Some economists apply quasi-commercial discounting of the future, and essentially write off anything beyond 2050, see Bjørn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus:
Economists Stern and Weizman argue that it is worth paying an insurance premium to protect future generations against worst-case scenarios, see the Stern Review.
Note that there are psychological factors: people generally don’t accept discounting the future where radioactivity is concerned: radioactive waste disposal is required to prevent leakage for 10,000 years.
The ethical question is: should we discriminate based on the date of birth?
CO2 levels will continue to rise, despite the Paris agreement. Pressure for panic measures might rise.
Geo-engineering measures (injecting aerosols into the stratosphere to cool the climate, carbon capture etc) are discussed, but are likely to lead to political nightmares: e.g. some cold areas in the world might actually want the climate to be warmer in their areas.
Two mitigation measures are politically realistic:
“Gain of function”: in 2012 groups in Wisconsin and in Holland showed that it was relatively easy to make the influenza virus more virulent and more contagious, in 2014 the US Government decided to stop funding such “gain of function” experiments.
“Bio-hacking” is hard to control globally. Freeman Dyson asked, when children will be able to create new organisms and “play God on the kitchen table”.
20 years ago IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov, programmed by the world’s best chess players.
Last year Deep Mind (acquired by Google) beat the world champion of Go, however programed by machine learning.
Will robots and AI create more new employment than they eliminate – the old question of industrial revolutions, or a new paradigm?
Robots and AI machines could act orthogonal to the interests of human.
Are we responsible for the well being of intelligent robots?
Ray Kurzweil: The singularity is near – when humans transcend biology
Ray Kurzweil thinks that humans could transcend our biological limitations by fusing with machines. Humans could merge with computers.
For worry that this “singularity” transition might not come during his lifetime, Ray Kurzweil wants his body to be frozen to await the singularity to arrive, frozen by the “Society for the abolition of involuntary death”.
Lord Martin Rees prefers to end his days in an English churchyard rather than a Californian refrigerator, and has therefore been labeled an old fashioned “deathist”.
Lord Rees was amused to find out that at least three British academics are subscribing such a body freezing program, although one of these seems to have opted for the discount economy class option, where only the brain, not the whole body, is frozen…
Flotillas of miniaturized probes will explore the solar system eroding the case for human space flight.
Human space flight will be for adventurers, but there is no escape from earth. Space is too hostile for humans.
There is no advanced life anywhere in our solar system. There might be freeze-dried bacteria on Mars, there might be creatures swimming under the ice on Saturn’s moon Enceladus.
Most stars in the sky are orbited by planets, like our Sun. Could there be “twins” with similar conditions as our planet earth? Some have been found, and there could be millions in our Milky Way.
Could there be life?
We don’t even know how life started on our planet earth, and we don’t know if there are other forms of life beyond our life based on DNA/RNA chemistry.
Searching for signals from life on far away planets is worthwhile. If we can actually identify such signals this would prove that mathematics, logic and physics can be done by others outside our human sculls and brains.
Lord Martin Rees is chairing an intensive search for radio and optical signals from extraterrestrial life funded by Yuri Milner:
Yuri Milner to Fund $100 Million Search for Intelligent Alien Life (Wall Street Journal, 20 July 2015)
Astronomers have one big difference to most people – they care for the “far future”.
Our Sun was formed 4.5 billion years ago, and has about 6 billion more years to go before the fuel runs out. And the universe will continue to expand.
As Woody Allen says (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Talk:Woody_Allen): eternity is very long, especially towards the end.
We may not even be at the half-way stage of evolution.
Our wet organic brains may have reached close to their limits in evolution, but machines and robots are just at the beginning. Non-biological “brains” may develop beyond any expectation.
The most important challenges are global: global warming, energy, food, population.
Scientists can act globally, and can influence politics- if they do it right.
We need to change priorities and perspectives: we need to prioritize clean energy, sustainable agriculture, and need to manage the risks of new technologies.
Martin Rees has written
see also the series of articles by Martin Rees in the Huffington Post
Three Fellows, Professors Mikael Adolphson, Sachiko Kusukawa and Dominic Lieven and eleven Trinity in Japan members attended the special Trinity in Japan event on Friday 8 September 2017 in Tokyo, organized by Gerhard Fasol, Trinity in Japan Chair, and Past Fellow of Trinity.
Discussions reflected the very wide spectrum of curiosity, energy and achievements of Trinity members.
Bringing religious studies to Japan’s venture start-ups, finding and understanding the oldest rock of Japan, leading the United Nations and foreign Press in Japan, finance at Japan’s largest automobile maker, working on overseas mergers and acquisitions with Japan’s trading companies, and in the other direction, working with foreign companies on acquisitions in Japan, teaching English as a preparation for future action in Japan, writing Novels, taking care of Japan’s Government finance, bringing Cambridge venture companies to Japan, European Revolutions, royalty and leadership for Japan’s Ministries, and many other topics were discussed this evening.
We started with a drinks party.
Professor Sachiko Kusukawa brought us best wishes from Trinity, and words of greeting from Professor Michael Banner, Dean of Chapel and Fellow for Development of Trinity. Michael Banner reminded us of Trinity’s 700 years of history, celebrating the Septcentenary of the Establishment of the King’s Scholars in the University of Cambridge, the Foundation of King Edward the Second, The Founding of the King’s Hall on 7 July 1317. Sachiko Kusukawa brought each of us a copy of the speech given by the Master, Sir Gregory Winter, to celebrate the Septcentenary.
About 2/3 of members moved to a restaurant nearby for nijikai, and three of us continued discussions at a sanjikai into the early hours…
Fellow and AMES Director of Studies at Trinity, Keidanren Professor of Japanese Studies
Books:
Dean of Trinity College and Fellow in History and the Philosophy of Science, Professor of History
Books:
Senior Research Fellow at Trinity, Professor Faculty of History
Professor Dominic Lieven’s most recent book Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia was selected as FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015, and was awarded the Pushkin House Prize – watch interviews with Professor Dominic Lieven here.
Professor Lieven’s recent book “Russia against Napoleon. The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814“, won the Wolfson History Prize and the Annual Prize of the Fondation Napoléon for the best foreign work on the Napoleonic era.
CIRSD Conference on WWI: Panel “What Kind of Failure?” – Prof. Dominic Lieven
Dominic Lieven: Dismantling Anglophone Hegemony Is a Costly Enterprise:
BOOKS:
Gerhard Fasol Trinity 1978, Past Fellow
Copyright (c) 2017 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
Meeting for lunch on Tuesday 29 August 2017, discussions about ventures, health, IoT, entrepreneurs, trends, brain.
Copyright (c) 2017 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
Yasuhei Fukumoto, Director of the Mathematics for Industry Institute of the University of Kyushu (past Visiting Fellow Commoner at Trinity) met with Gerhard Fasol on 10 July 2017.
Copyright (c) 2017 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
The fee is again YEN 10,000 including a kaiseki menu and unlimited drinks for about 2 hours, please prepay the fee as always. Usually we go for nijikai nearby.
Registration and prepayment deadline is Friday 30 June 2017. I will send location details and account details for prepayment to those who register.
Senior Research Fellow at Trinity, Professor Faculty of History
Professor Dominic Lieven’s most recent book Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia was selected as FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2015, and was awarded the Pushkin House Prize – watch interviews with Professor Dominic Lieven here.
Professor Lieven’s recent book “Russia against Napoleon. The Battle for Europe, 1807 to 1814“, won the Wolfson History Prize and the Annual Prize of the Fondation Napoléon for the best foreign work on the Napoleonic era.
CIRSD Conference on WWI: Panel “What Kind of Failure?” – Prof. Dominic Lieven
Dominic Lieven: Dismantling Anglophone Hegemony Is a Costly Enterprise:
BOOKS:
Copyright (c) 2017 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
Professor Mikael Adolphson is
You can find further information on Professor Mikael Adolphson’s work here
If you are Trinity College Cambridge member in Japan or visiting and like to register:
Copyright (c) 2017 Trinity in Japan Society All Rights Reserved
