Rain and upcoming exams

Claire Leigh with umbrella

Another day of cold and constant rain is proving a demonstration of how volatile Oxford weather has been in recent weeks. Some mornings start out utterly grim and transition into warm and stunning evenings. Others persist stubbornly in keeping people in the libraries and out of the parks and gardens. Weather forecasts for the coming week suggest that it will be better suited to those determined to study than to those keen on giving punting or croquet a try. My hopes that the Lake District trip would be less rainy than Scotland or Snowdonia may prove unfounded.

With exams only 15 days away, they should probably be dominating my thoughts. It is a bit odd how the qualifying test last year, which involves only half the material of these exams, seemed to have much more presence in the minds of those in the program. This may be the product of the declining momentum that accompanies being at the end. It may also reflect how – barring those going on to the D.Phil – there are not many members of the program for whom it is hugely better to get a distinction than it is to simply pass.

Energy trends

This year’s International Energy Outlook has been released by the American Energy Information Administration. Among the key things noted:

  • The total demand for energy worldwide will increase by 57% between 2004 and 2030.
  • If oil prices remain comparable to their present levels, coal will be the dominant fuel for new power plants.
  • Annual growth in installed generating capacity in the OECD will be about 0.9%, compared with 3.7% in China and 3.4% in Brazil.
  • As of 2004, total greenhouse gas emissions from the developing world have exceeded those of the developed world.

Naturally, all of this underscores how difficult it will be to address the problem of climate change, even if the relatively low costs cited by Nicholas Stern and Cameron Hepburn are accurate.

For more on energy sources and climate change, see: Coal and climate change, Solar power and climate change, and Climate change and nuclear power.

Christie precedent overturned

Vault and Gardens, Oxford

The Canadian Supreme Court seems to have overturned Christie v. AG of B.C. et al. This 2005 decision held that the poor could not be charged the 7% tax on legal services that existed in British Columbia at the time. In the Reasons for Judgment, the B.C. Supreme Court stated:

[The Act] constitutes indirect taxation and is a tax on justice contrary to the Magna Carta and the Rule of Law…

I am prepared to grant the following declarations: A declaration that the Act is ultra vires in the Province of British Columbia to the extent that it applies to legal services provided for low income persons.

The court held that those earning under $29,000 should no longer need to pay the tax. It also reimbursed, with interest, the $6,200 that had been seized from Christie for non-payment of the sales tax on behalf of poor clients.

Dugald Christie, the man behind the 2005 BC case, was a Vancouver lawyer who had dedicated himself to helping the poor get representation within the legal system. He died about ten months ago while bicycling across Canada to raise money for that cause. Prior to his death, Christie lives in a small room at the Salvation Army’s Dunsmuir House, where he apparently worked twelve hours a day encouraging lawyers to do more pro bono work. He founded the Western Canada Society to Access Justice, which consists of sixty legal clinics across British Columbia, and has since expanded into Saskatchewan and Alberta.

The Supreme Court has now held that:

“a review of the constitutional text, the jurisprudence and the history of the concept does not support the respondent’s contention that there is a broad general right to legal counsel as an aspect of, or precondition to, the rule of law.”

I was surprised to see that a right to council isn’t actually included in section 11 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The idea that a normal person can have a fair trial without legal council doesn’t seem a very plausible one.

Three follow-ups

Nothing happened here

1) Remember how our flat got deprived of refrigeration? One week on, we are still subsisting off of bread and cheese we keep cold in the metal cages outside our windows. We call them the ‘alternative fridges.’

2) Remember how I lost the ballot for the Lake District trip with the Walking Club? Well, somebody dropped out. Because I expressed so much interest in it, they offered the spot to me. As such, I will be climbing mountains again from June 1st to 3rd. The only thing that would make it better would be having more than 16 days left before exams.

3) Remember ‘Studio Photography on the (very) cheap?’ Well, I have figured out how to build a large and effective diffuser for under $3. That was the purpose behind this query. Two sheets of A1 tracing paper turn out to perfectly cover the lower section of the window.

Note how English tea stains glassware. The picture would be a lot more attractive if I propped the glass objects up on something, cleaned them before taking the photo, and photoshopped away the tape holding the paper to the window and the place where the two sheets overlap. This was meant to illustrate the assembly, not be artistic of itself.

Bikes for sale

For too long, the Wadham College bike shed has been seriously cluttered with seemingly abandoned bikes. Now, bikeless residents of Oxford have an opportunity to benefit. I got this message from the college a few hours ago:

We’ve arranged with College to have a mass cull of the old bikes littering the bike shed, hopefully with a huge auction of old bikes in the back quad on Saturday 7th Week / Sunday 8th Week. Quality bikes that just need a little love and repair will be sold from as little as £1 each, so tell all your friends!

People looking for a decent hybrid at a good price should also consider buying mine. It won’t be going for £1, but it will probably sell for substantially less than I have spent on buying and improving it.

Dinner in Green

Green College flatware

Many thanks to Jenn for inviting me to the formal dinner at Green College tonight. You know the primarily focus of a college is medical college when you see the staff of Aesclipius on the dishes. Located on the second floor of their observatory tower, the Green dining hall is unusually interesting. The head of the high table was also especially gracious in his after dinner comments. It was an excellent way of celebrating how everything but my four exams is now complete, as far as my academic program goes.

I have been lucky enough to dine in Wadham (including 23 high table dinners, so far), in Lady Margaret Hall (thanks to Richard Albert), at St. Antony’s College (thanks to Alex Stummvoll), at St. Hugh’s and St. Cross (thanks to Claire), and at New College as a consequence of my involvement with the Strategic Studies Group.

PS. Michael Ignatieff’s talk was reasonably interesting, but not to the extent that I feel it would be overly valuable to put the notes on the wiki. If someone specifically wants them, leave a comment and I will type them out. This was my first real chance to explore Wolfson, though I did arrive their by accident at the end of a long walk during our snow day. The fusion of recent architecture with the Oxford style of quads is interesting, though not entirely successful.

Non-metaphorical icebreaking

A couple of interesting random facts that I came across today, about the ferries that operate in the Baltic, including between Tallinn and Helsinki:

  1. Many of these ships have an ice class of 1A Super, which means they can travel through sea lanes where the ice is one metre thick, provided they have an icebreaker out front to break it up a bit.
  2. At least some of these ships (belonging to the Finnish shipping company Eckerö Line) were specifically made NATO-compatible, so that they could be rapidly converted into troop carriers in the result of the Cold War becoming hot.

The details of icebreaker design are quite interesting, though I suspect that building them will not be a growth business in the decades to come. Of course, if the northern polar region melted enough for icebreaking routes to be profitable forms of shipping, that might prove to be untrue for a certain period of time.

A show of force in the Gulf

No matter how much one tries to focus on the non-security bits of international relations, anyone who reads the news and is concerned about the world will get exposed to it pretty regularly. Yesterday, for instance, nine American warships carrying 17,000 military personnel were sent into the Persian Gulf. Some speculate that this was intended as a corollary to an announcement from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) about Iran’s ongoing nuclear program. The strike group included two Nimitz carrier battle groups and 2,100 marines in landing ships. The ongoing war games will apparently “culminate in an amphibious landing exercise in Kuwait, just a few miles from Iran.”

According to the IAEA, Iran has about 1,300 centrifuges online at Natanz, with another 600 likely to become available over the summer. Having 3,000 operational centrifuges would produce enough weapons-grade uranium for one bomb per year.

The question of how to deal with challenges to the existing non-proliferation regime is an acute one. More and more states will gain the technical capacity to make bombs in the next few decades. Many will be in dangerous parts of the world, with hostile neighbours who can be plausibly expected to be building bombs of their own. Furthermore, the inability of the current regime to prevent the North Korean test raises the question of how much influence the international community really has, especially when some states are willing to become pariahs.

Twenty months in Oxford

Antonia Mansel-Long in the Wadham Gardens

With a few weeks left before exams and about a month left before leaving Oxford, I find myself thinking backward and forward more than in the present. As such, even though I have every reason to be quite busy, I am feeling somewhat in the lurch. Those bits of life that feel most immediate don’t have anything to do with the M.Phil program. Actually, now that seminars have ended, I rarely see any members of the group aside from the ones I live with and a couple of others who are neighbours. I am looking forward to our post-exam barbecue on the 14th as the last instance in which I am likely to see more than a dozen of the program’s twenty-eight members in one location together.

Thinking back to the first few months in Oxford is unusual. They seem much more alien to me than the last year, as well as any of my time at UBC. To begin with, I was living in Library Court. I was eating bagels and cheese, more than anything else. I was spending quite a bit of time in pubs, as that seemed to be the major venue for social interactions. Largely on the basis of where I am living now, life has a much more normal and natural feeling. As revision has been showing, even the material that I was working through back then has become rather unfamiliar in the interim. It would be hard to say with certainty whether a paper I wrote in October 2005 was actually written by me, or by someone with the same reading list and a similar style of writing and analysis.

In any case, I am looking forward enormously to knocking off the last few academic items that need to be completed in Oxford. I am hoping that I will then have the chance to focus on what has been best over the last two years. I certainly hope that I will get to try punting at least once before departing, as well as see some of the friends who have been fixtures of life at various times, but who I now hardly ever see.