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.

Newly impermeable

The weather in Vancouver is stunning. So much so, and for so long, that there is a kind of thin haze obscuring the view of the mountains. Thankfully, there can be little doubt that the city will get a blast or two of cleansing rain before I depart.

Considerable progress is being made on the tasks that I resolved to complete while in Vancouver. A trip to Mountain Equipment Co-Op (MEC) with my mother, this afternoon, yielded a replacement to my venerable but now far-from-waterproof Gore-Tex coat. The successor is a really superb three-ply Gore-tex shell, which should be suitable both for general Oxford wintertime wandering and for more daring activities in the outdoors. The bright red colour should make me easier to spot. In addition, I got a few other things: a fleece vest, some shirts, and another pair of liner socks for hiking. I am now hoping for a proper Vancouver downpour: that will let me see the city in its natural state, test out my new jacket, and clear the haze that is obscuring the view of the Coast Mountains to the north.

This afternoon also involved pizza, coffee, and the taking in of ambience on Commercial Drive: a famously bohemian part of the city. It is a place to which I have to return, ideally with Sarah Pemberton or Sasha Wiley.

With my UBC accounts now expired, I have no effective means of accessing the internet for free in downtown Vancouver – which is annoying. There are a good twenty wireless networks operating around this little park beside Robson Court, but they all require WEP keys or some other form of authentication. Also irksome is the fact that the Lens and Shutter location in Pacific Centre is closed. Perhaps I will be able to make a stop at the Park Royal location later tonight, amidst the assembling of food and gear for Cabin Fever.

Having just realized how prudent it would be to bring bathing trunks to an event where water skiing is probable, I have another item to track down.

Up for two days, on the ground running

Soft water! Phone numbers with the right number of digits! Friends and family members long unseen. The visit has been going very well so far. I spent a few hours with Nick, Jonathan, Topher, and Emerson – engaging in our endless habitual pursuits of conversation and the consumption of food and drink around his most welcoming house. I have also begun ticking my way down the list of essential tasks that I set out before leaving.

I expect that blogging while here will largely consist of short posts accompanied by an unusually large number of photos including people.

PS. Forgive me, but my keeping track of other people’s blogs will be somewhat lax during the time of my stay in Vancouver. I am sure people will understand. 236 posts have come online among the various blogs I read, just since I left Oxford.

PPS. I was quite astonished by how nice the international arrivals area of the Vancouver International Airport is. After leaving Gatwick, it is like stepping into another world. As such, it is a really excellent introduction to our city, for those arriving the first time.

Back in view of the Coast Mountains

After a long but favourable trip, I am back in North Vancouver. Returning to Vancouver after a year feels like putting on a properly tailored coat that you haven’t worn for a while: it makes sense immediately, and there is considerable pleasure to be derived from that fact.

I am off to explore the neighbourhood. Vancouverite friends, please call me. Temporary cell phone information pending.

Homeward bound

Thinking back over this year spent in Oxford, the most valuable aspect of it has definitely been those who I met. That is a definite continuity with Vancouver, as it is the people there who are the reason this return trip is so exciting and desirable. Having the opportunity to spend two weeks with Vancouver family and friends, followed hard upon by a return to Oxford at the same time as so many people will be returning for the resumption of classes, is an appealing social cascade.

While it may exaggerate my studiousness of late just a bit, it still seems apt to think about this trip as the temporary abandonment of the Tree of Knowledge in favour of the Tree of Life. Barring any serious delays, I will be in Vancouver by about 9:00am Pacific Standard Time.

People in Vancouver who want to get in touch with me should email me or call my parents’ house. I will try and sort out a cell phone for while I am there, but the feasibility of that plan will be determined by how well the cost matches the benefit over my relatively brief time in the city.

Baseless rivalries

Michael Ignatieff uses the phrase “the narcissism of minor difference” during his discussion of the violent collapse of post-Tito Yugoslavia. Whereas once Bosnians, Serbs, and Croats were able to identify themselves on the basis of all sorts of characteristics, beliefs and affiliations, Ignatieff argues that the deteriorating security system effectively stripped people down to a base identity established in race, thereby splitting communities, undermining trust, and pushing things farther along the road to violent upheaval.

The intentional amplification of trivial differences seems to be a particular human talent – like seeing faces in random patterns. Among the most absurd examples of this intentional polarization and flimsily-grounded vitriol is the Oxford-Cambridge rivalry. It boggles my mind that people could feel hostile towards the other school, or people from there, simply on the basis of the minor differences that exist. In organization, in history, in societal role – Oxford and Cambridge are essentially the same.

There are some who argue that such rivalries are a form of healthy competition and that they somehow drive people to excel. This is the school of thinking that led to the brutish conditions in so many boarding schools where children are encouraged to fend for themselves and, like the participants in the Stanford prison experiment, rapidly begin to brutalize one another. While rivalries of this kind do create competition, it is not a competition that fosters or encourages healthy outcomes.

And yet there are intelligent, normally right-thinking people who describe their fellows at the other institution in derogatory terms. I suspect that it is precisely that similarity that generates the impulse to defend one’s choice through an assertion of superiority. The criticism is always semi-joking, but that hardly exonerates tho who carry it out in my eyes. Saying in jest that you despise someone for an utterly insignificant reason is no credit to you as either a comic or a human being.

Thou shalt make backups: frequent and comprehensive

After considerable expenditure of energy, I now have a full duplicate backup of user data from the hard drive of my iBook. I also have no less than eight backups of everything really essential.

I am now… ready to upgrade to Tiger, the latest available version of Mac OS. I am also adding a 1GB stick of RAM to replace the 256 meg extra stick that Apple charged me so much for when I first paid for this computer. I need the extra memory for Photoshop and iPhoto.

Both the Tiger upgrade and the extra RAM will be part of my Vancouver homecoming. It puts my mind at ease to know how many different places academically essential files now reside.

The photographic future

I had an odd philosophical post written, but it was far better to blast it to some obscure part of the RAM of this computer, to be utterly erased when I next reboot it, than to put it online somewhere. Instead, I should write about photography.

On the basis of some books I have read, it seems reasonable to conclude that photography did not emerge too long before the start of the 20th century. To begin with, it was an awkward, delicate sort of thing to do. You needed lots of black velvet cloth, heavy glass plates, finicky chemicals, and expertise. Over the next seventy or eighty years, photography went from something that a British Lord might do as a hobby to something that people all over the world did all the time. Where once the coronation of a Queen might be worth photographing, suddenly the first steps of every child were, if someone had a camera handy. I personally salute Alfred Stieglitz as perhaps the most important single person in the establishment of photography as an art form. Of course, if he hadn’t done so, it would have been someone else. I suspect they would not have done so as elegantly. At least a few of my photos are direct ripoffs of Stieglitz.

With the advent of digital sensors and – perhaps more importantly – the internet, further democratization has taken place. When the cost of photography is reduced to the bother involved in pushing a button or two, transferring a file to a computer, and then moving the same onto someone else’s website there is really very little reason not to do a great deal of it. Very soon, the biggest associated cost becomes time.

I hope I get a digital camera, eventually, which is comparable to my best film camera in terms of versatility, ease of use, and quality of output.

A pocket protector too far

If you have ever felt the urge to take your geek tendencies and just run with them – much like how Macbeth did with his thirst for power – I recommend becoming embroiled in the controversy about the hypothetical atmospheric and biological consequences of a fictional explosion in a film starring Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford, and Carrie Fisher – who I prefer to remember as the bazooka-wielding assasin from The Blues Brothers.

Would the destruction of the second Death Star in The Return of the Jedi have inevitably annihalated the ewok race that aids the rebel commando team? Some people say yes. Others say no.

They all have way, way too much time on their hands. The same is true of these people, but at least they have provided me with considerable amusement over the years. Their reviews (1, 2) of recent Star Wars films definitely lay to rest the idea that they could possible be considered consistent or accurate.

This whole discussion was promted by a post on MetaFilter, which I can thank Nick Ellan for addicting me to years ago.

Dangerous Afghan skies

I was talking with Edwina today about the possibility that the British Hawker-Siddeley Nimrod MR2 reconnaissance aircraft that crashed in Afghanistan recently was shot down by a FIM-92 Stinger missile, as Taliban representatives claimed. Fourteen British airmen were killed in the crash: the largest single day loss of British military personnel since the Falklands War. Given the ongoing presence of the Canadian Forces in Afghanistan and the famous provision of about 500 of these surface-to-air missiles to the Mujaheddin by the CIA during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it is a question with contemporary relevance for Canadians.

Under construction since 1981 by the Raytheon Corporation (which also makes the washers and dryers used in residences at the University of British Columbia), the Stinger missile has a range of about 4800 metres and a maximum altitude of about 3800 – well below the cruising altitude of commercial aircraft. The Stinger seeks targets using an infrared homing system and is propelled using a two-stage chemical rocket. The homing system is thus vulnerable to flares used as decoy heat signatures, as well as to the reduction of an aircraft’s thermal profile through mechanisms like the internally mounted turbofan engines on vehicles like the B-2 Spirit Bomber, not that the Canadian Forces will or should get any of those.

Most of the reporting on the crash says that it was the result of a technical fault. This is the position that has been taken officially by NATO and the RAF, while the Taliban has claimed that it shot the plane down. There were Taliban fighters in the area, as evidenced by the rapidity with which the British Special Air Service (SAS) commandos were dispatched to destroy any secret electronic equipment that survived the malfunction and subsequent crash. Of course, it would be especially embarrassing to have a £100 million plane shot down and fourteen British soldiers killed by a $26,000 missile that was given to your enemies by the country with whom the Blair government is so loyally and controversially allied. As with the earlier discussion on conspiracy theories, we are left with little means for analyzing the official reports aside from our own intuition about which sources are trustworthy and which explanations are credible.

Whether the crash was an accident (as seems most plausible) or the result of enemy action, the dangers of continued military operations in Afghanistan are demonstrated. Even with complete air superiority, powerful allies, and all the other advantages of being in a superpower coalition, Canadian, British, and American soldiers will continue to die in Afghanistan until such a time as we decide to leave that country to the government and warlords who effectively control it today.

Leaving Oxford in 36 hours; reaching Vancouver in 53

My flight to Vancouver leaves Gatwick at 5:55am GMT on Wednesday, which is actually 9:55pm of Tuesday in Vancouver. Assigning three hours to the bus ride and three more to be sure of clearing security on time, I will be leaving Oxford – suitcases in tow – at midnight local time tomorrow. While that is setting up England-Tuesday / Canada-Wednesday to be a kind of uber-day, such is the character of the flight plan. I just hope that my brain is back on its bearings by the time we will be leaving for Tristan’s cabin on Friday morning.

Everything from now until Tuesday night is likely to be about consolidation. Packing, organizing, and otherwise preparing. The prospect of the forthcoming journey is an exciting one, indeed.

[Unrelated, but unfortunate] Steve Irwin, the self-styled ‘Crocodile Hunter,’ was killed by a stingray in Queensland today. He was frequently a model for characters generated by the Handsworth Improv Team, in which both of my brothers performed for years, and generally struck me as a decent sort of fellow. My sympathies to his family, friends, and two young children.