Author: Milan

In the spring of 2005, I graduated from the University of British Columbia with a degree in International Relations and a general focus in the area of environmental politics. In the fall of 2005, I began reading for an M.Phil in IR at Wadham College, Oxford. Outside school, I am very interested in photography, writing, and the outdoors. I am writing this blog to keep in touch with friends and family around the world, provide a more personal view of graduate student life in Oxford, and pass on some lessons I've learned here.

The Economist on climate change

Catching up on the reading that accumulated in my absence, I have just gone through the Survey on Climate Change in the September 9-15 issue of The Economist. Their basic argument is that the possibility of catastrophic harm is sufficient to justify the costs of stabilizing the level of carbon in the atmosphere around 550 parts per million, compared with 280 ppm before the industrial revolution, 380 ppm now, and an estimated 800 ppm by 2100 is current policy goes unchanged. The most plausible dangers identified are disastrous shifts in ocean currents, dramatically cooling Europe, and the prospect of rising sea levels. Even modest amounts of the second could do enormous harm both in the coastal cities of the developed world and the lowlands of places like Bangladesh. Other problems include the possibility of an increase in the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, and large scale species migration or extinction.

Canada is singled out several times as unlikely to meet its Kyoto targets. We are committed to reduce emissions to 6% below 1990 levels by 2012, but seem likely to be 23% above. The survey quotes Environment Minister Rona Ambrose as saying: “it is impossible, impossible for Canada to reach its Kyoto targets.” The Economist had not previously been a supporter of Kyoto, though they surely support countries living up to commitments they have made. With this survey, the magazine seems to have changed tack from general opposition to the Kyoto Protocol to recognition that it may be a valid stepping stone towards a better organized and more all-encompassing climate change policy.

At the very least, the editorial change of heart signals strongly that climate change is no longer an issue whose reality is disputed, not suited to serious consideration by scientists, policy-makers, and the media. With my thesis in mind, it is largely the first group that I paid most attention to while reading this. At several points, the article asserts that it is at the 550ppm level that scientists in aggregate start to become seriously concerned about adverse and irreversible problems associated with climate change. That said, the survey also highlights a number of scientific disagreements and failed predictions. The interplay between science and politics is basically portrayed as a simple relationship between two internally complex dialogs. That is a model I certainly mean to unpack further in my thesis work.

As I didn’t actually manage to go see An Inconvenient Truth at the Phoenix yesterday, I am making another foray tonight for the 7:00pm show.

Republican torture ‘compromise’

Despite the thin rhetoric to the contrary, it is clear that the current American administration tolerates and abets torture, indefinite detention without charge, and other basic violations of human rights. This is an astonishing error on their part. It contradicts international law, including laws that have helped to protect Americans captured by foreign regimes. It significantly diminishes whatever claim to moral superiority the United States can use to help guide regimes entirely dismissive of human rights on to a more acceptable path. Finally, it neglects the very ideals about the respect for the human person that form the basis for the American constitution and the general American consensus on the nature of political ethics.

We can only hope that a saner administration will follow in the wake of this myopic crew.

The mainstream media is reporting on this here, here, here, here, here, and in many other places.

First impressions of Tiger

Installation, performance, and headline features

Installing Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) was a breeze – certainly the only time I have been surprised by the ease of installing a major OS upgrade on top of an existing installation. Because of the simultaneity of my RAM upgrade and the installation of Tiger, I can’t discuss the performance effect of the new OS. In aggregate, the iBook runs like a whole new machine. While it used to creak and complain when running just Fetch and iPhoto, it now runs Firefox, iTunes, iPhoto, Photoshop, TextEdit, and Fetch without any trouble. Indeed, 321 megs of RAM are still inactive with that collection, as a Dashboard widget informs me (along with weather forecasts for Oxford, and the all-important Canada-England exchange rate).

Another widget (pearLyrics, suggested by Jessica) is adding lyrics to my iTunes tracks as they are played, though it is oddly myopic when it comes to absurdly popular songs not released in the last ten years (most songs by Pink Floyd and The Beatles seem to stump it). This is a particularly useful function for me, as I am prone to either ignore lyrics entirely, focusing on the tone of a song, or spectacularly misinterpret them. I will leave the specific examples to my friends, for use in mocking me at parties.

Spotlight hasn’t proved terribly useful to me yet, mostly because I already have all my information sorted for easy location. That is not too unusual, however. All advanced search tools – from Google to Oxford’s OLIS – take time to become familiar enough to be really beneficial. Next time I am digging around for a particular file not viewed in months, it may prove its worth.

I have not used Automator yet, but I eventually want to create a workflow that takes an image file from iPhoto, opens it in Photoshop, resizes it to either 1024 pixels across for horizontal shots or 768 from top to bottom for vertical ones, lets me adjust the levels, lets me apply an unsharp mask, then creates a 320 pixel across the long axis thumbnail version, and uploads both versions to my server using Fetch. Ideally, it would then create an appropriate block of code to paste into WordPress, but this is all a project for a less hectic time.

Newly usable software

One of the reasons I decided to upgrade to Tiger was the desire to use the free application WriteRoom. The essence of simplicity, it is just a black screen onto which you type. Unlike almost all Mac applications, it can be made to take up the whole screen. There is no formatting – though there is optional spell-checking – and the simplicity seems to contribute to my ability to concentrate on the topic at hand. At a stroke, it becomes more like writing a letter than writing an email, which is clearly a valuable transition in a world where enough attention is rarely paid to written expression.

As soon as I can get my Airport card to work in passive mode with packet injection capabilities, the new version of KisMAC seems likely to be quite useful. It is already rather better than the standard Mac OS WiFi interface, in terms of detecting networks and revealing their characteristics.

Less obvious improvements

Another unexpectedly good feature of Mac OS 10.4 is the Grapher utility, which does both two and three dimensional graphing in a useful and attractive way. I may not have enormously much cause to use a graphing calculator these days, but it can be good to play around in an attempt to remember some fraction of what once I knew about trigonometric functions and calculus.

A few welcome improvements have also been made to Safari, though I have yet to open iCal (I use Google Calendar, though iCal would be grabbing the data from there and copying it to my iPod, if my iPod wasn’t broken again), Mail (I use Entourage and GMail), or Address Book (same). The improved PDF functions built into every Print dialog definitely look useful for anyone who does any sort of document publishing or collaboration.

PS. Unrelated to Tiger, but Apple-related: If you call Apple about your broken iPod using a scratchy enough Skype connection, they will call you back at their expense. Since spending time on hold at 30p a minute cell phone fees is among the most tooth-grinding of human experiences, this is good to know.

The power of place

Capilano Canyon, near the Cable Pool

The contrast between the two weeks in Vancouver and my two days back here has amply demonstrated the simple fact that, fine a place as it is to take a degree in, I couldn’t actually live happily over an indefinite period in England.

Indeed, I would have a great deal of trouble anywhere that does not approximate the most essential features of Vancouver-ness: natural beauty (ideally, mountains), certain styles of food (ideally including inexpensive sushi), the acceptability of a Gore-Tex shell as a constant item of clothing, multiculturalism, reasonably good prices and customer service, good public transport, and myriad other factors that are less distinctly noticed than felt and appreciated at an intuitive level. In the end, it comes down to feeling properly yourself in a place or not. I have that feeling in Vancouver, I quickly had it in Montreal, parts of Toronto (Kensington Market) can evoke it, and I felt it in much of Dublin.

Being in a place that challenges you is certainly an essential part of education, but when the time comes to choose a place for the long haul (provided you have that luxury), the way to do it must be through proximity to friends, family, and those other things that define a place as one’s own.

All that said, it’s time to get back to cracking rocks for the thesis, and sorting things out for the upcoming optional paper (not a paper at all, but a series of seminars, for my fellow bewildered North Americans).

Minutes of the Senate Special Committee on Tormenting Graduate Students

Speaker: “Moving on. What can we do to this Ill-Nicky kid? Tax people?”

Tax Rep: “Hmm. We could reject all of his tuition credits from last year as a tax deduction, then surprise him with a bill for unpaid taxes…”

Speaker: “And…”

Tax Rep: “Nine days before we will start charging interest on them…”

Speaker: “And…”

Tax Rep: “Hmm, make sure he gets the letter just after traveling for a whole day, and while jetlagged?”

Speaker: “That will have to do. He should at least be glad he didn’t earn more money in the previous year for us to tax him on. Speaking of which, I see he has some student loan arrangements, what can you people offer me?”

Loan Rep: “We could allocate less than half the funds we did last year, when his educational expenses and personal assets were the same.”

Speaker: “Not bad, anything else?”

Loan Rep: “We could let him know just a week before classes start… just after he has travelled for a whole day and is both jetlagged and infected with illness!”

Speaker: “Not bad at all. I can always count on you guys.”

Speaker: “Now, you fellas at Disasters and Emergency Preparedness really haven’t been pulling your weight at these meetings. I just hope you have something extra special in the works.”

Welcomed back to England by illness

My theory is that for much of my later time at home, I was suppressing the fact that I was actually somewhat ill. It’s like how Jack Bauer can suppress the need to sleep or charge his cellular phone while he is on the job. Either that, or I was induced to become ill by the long journey and jet lag. As such, I have spent most of today in bed trying to catch up on reading. Now, I am being forced out by the complete lack of food in my house.

On the plus side, the internet connection in my flat seems to have grown back. It was probably a case of scheduled maintenance that I never learned about because I am not a St. Antony’s student.

Clever way to protect cameras on planes

Blatantly stolen from Bruce Schneier’s blog (he stole it from Matt Brandon’s blog), this idea seems really clever. If you are travelling in the States with expensive camera gear, put a starter pistol in the locked box in which the camera equipment is to be transported, then register it as a weapon.

The airline safety people will then treat the luggage as though it contains a dangerous weapon, and you can be more certain they will not lose or blatantly mistreat it. A very neat way to make security procedures work for you. Of course, you can be quite sure they will x-ray it, so this doesn’t help with the problem of transporting film on ever-more-jittery airlines.

Blood and Belonging

Sasha Ilnyckyj in Deep Cove

While flying home, I finished Micheal Ignatieff’s Blood and Belonging. The main subject of the book is the examination of a number of contemporary examples of ethnic nationalism, both more and less violent in character. As he intended, it is a fairly chilling depiction of some of the uglier elements of human relations, in the more disputed parts of the world today. His description of the use of chemical weapons against the people of the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq makes his initial support for the American led invasion more comprehensible.

At the same time as this book makes one fearful about the kind of world we will inhabit in twenty years, it also provides some hope. While I have not personally visited Quebec or Northern Ireland, it seems, on the basis of the coverage I have seen, that things are not as bad as they were when this book was written in the early nineties. Economic prosperity and civic forms of nationalism have the capacity, at least in theory, to slowly erode the bases of hatred and violence. Let us hope that this trend can win out in the long run over the one that seeks to define nation by something as arbitrary and damaging as an ethnic notion of identity.

I started reading this book in order to get a better sense of Ignatieff as a thinker and as a prospective leader. While my new sense is not sturdy enough to be definitive, I definitely think more of the man than I did in the period before I had read any of his writing. His understanding of difficult issues seems to have a subtlety and a compassion that is definitely not the mark of your standard politician. I will have to read more of his thinking, however, before I can issue or withhold a final endorsement.

Incommunicado

I have returned home to find my internet connection at home completely disabled, the landline in our flat being strange and particular about who it will call, and my mailbox in Wadham College re-assigned, with my large pile of post dumped in a box with that of all the other people who have suffered the same undignified treatment. Wadham College has even disabled my access to the network in our Middle Common Room. I feel rather like Bilbo Baggins returning home from a long voyage to find his relatives auctioning off his possessions.

With luck, I should be back up and running by tomorrow. I certainly have a great deal to do.