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.

Oxford summer theatrics

Amidst the drilling and pounding in Wadham today, I realized that Oxford University during the summer is much like a theatre between shows. The set undergoes modification and repair; the wiring and lighting gets tweaked and redone; and nearly everyone present is out of character. As such, it is unusually interesting for the kind of person who likes to learn how magic tricks are done, and unusually challenging for those who would rather not know.

Luckily, I fall within the first grouping. I suppose it is somewhat ironic that the great flood of tourists see the colleges while they are being sandblasted and re-paved, the quads while their grass is dying from the ban on lawn watering, and the gardens while they are kitted out as theatres for summer productions of Shakespeare and Wilde.

Something New Under the Sun

Happy Birthday Zandara Kennedy

Extensively footnoted and balanced in its claims, John McNeill’s Something New Under the Sun is an engaging and worthwhile study of the environmental history of the twentieth century. It covers atmospheric, hydrospheric, and biospheric concerns – focusing on those human actions and technologies that have had the greatest impact on the world, particularly in terms of those parts of the world human beings rely upon. People concerned with the dynamic that exists between human beings and the natural world would do well to read this volume. As McNeill demonstrates with ample figures and examples, that impact has been dramatic, though not confined to the twentieth century. What has changed most is the rate of change, in almost all environmentally relevant areas.

The drama of some documented changes is incredible. McNeill describes the accidental near-elimination of the American chestnut, the phenomenal global success of rabbits, and the intentional elimination of 99.8% of the world’s blue whales in clear and well-attributed sections. From global atmospheric lead concentrations to the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer, he also covers a number of huge changes that are not directly biological. I found his discussion of the human modification of the planet’s hydrological systems to be the most interesting, quite probably because it was the least familiar thing he discussed.

Also interesting to note is that, published in 2000, this book utterly dismisses nuclear power as a failed technology. In less than three pages it is cast aside as economically non-sensical (forever dependent on subsidies), inherently hazardous, and without compensating merit. Interesting how quickly things can change. The book looks far more to the past than to the future, making fewer bold predictions about the future consequences of human activity than many volumes of this sort do.

Maybe the greatest lesson of this book is that the old dichotomy between the ‘human’ and the ‘natural’ world is increasingly nonsensical. The construction of the Aswan High Dam has fundamentally altered the chemistry of the Mediterranean at the same time as new crops have altered insect population dynamics worldwide and human health initiatives have changed the biological tableau for bacteria and viruses. To see the human world as riding on top of the natural world, and able to extract some set ‘sustainable’ amount from it, may therefore be unjustified. One world, indeed.

Vancouver music in September

One thing I would like to do while in Vancouver is see a concert by one of the city’s more distinctive musical acts: someone like Tegan and Sara, the Vincent Black Shadow, Melissa Ferrick, or Spirit of the West.

Does anybody know of such a concert between September 6th and 23rd, excluding the dates between the 10th and the 12th, when I will probably be taking part in Cabin Fever 2?

Also, would any Vancouver friends be interested in attending such a concert en masse?

Creepy stuff

Who runs http://www.vroomfondel.co.uk? Also, why do they keep scanning through my blog? They do so through this page and seem particularly interested in anything involving NatWest: the bank where I foolishly opened an international student account.

Is anyone else getting several hits a day from these people? I don’t know who they are, but their URL is registered at the following address:

c/o Net Rank
Suite 1c, Western Way,
Exeter,
Devon
EX1 2DE
GB

Suffice it to say, I do not appreciate their attentions, at least so long as I don’t know who they are or what they are doing. If you run your own server, it is easy enough to ban people referred directly from their strange login site. Just add this to your .htaccess file:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} vroomfondel\.co.uk [NC]
RewriteRule .* – [F]

Depending how automated the system is, that might foil it. If it is run by a group of people working through that portal, they will be able to find another way to access your site, regardless of the above addition to your .htaccess file.

Perseid shower peaks tonight

Taken during a walk with Astrid in late April 2005, this photo shows Lost Lagoon in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Nearby, to the southeast, is Vancouver’s central urban district. Equally close, to the north and through the park, is the southern end of the Lions Gate Bridge to North Vancouver.

In an announcement particularly relevant to those who live outside of big cities, the Perseid meteor shower will reach its peak of intensity tonight. Generated from dust and fragments from comet Swift-Turtle, the Perseid shower occurs annually. The comet in question was discovered in 1862 and is notable for being the largest object that regularly approaches the earth.

The best time to see the shower is in the hours immediately before dawn, but there should be more than eighty meteors per hour visible to the naked eye for most of the night, for those in reasonably dark places. Because of the way in which the planet rotates, the rate at which the meteors appear is about twice as high right before dawn as it is shortly after sunset. This is because, at that time, the particular part of the planet’s surface where you are is both hidden from the sun and facing in the direction of its the planet’s around the sun. Because of that combination, the most visible collisions with material from the comet will occur.

The shower is called the Perseids because the meteors appear to be coming from the constellation Perseus. Those who are going out to watch may find it worthwhile to familiarize themselves with how the constellation looks and where in the sky it appears.

If anyone has a particularly dramatic experience, I would be glad to hear about it here. I continue to look up with dismay at the thick rain clouds over Oxford.

[Update: 13 August 2006] On account of the constant presence of rain clouds blocking the sky and reflecting back city light, I saw not a single meteor. I hope others did better.

On pen varieties

For some time, I have been wondering about the difference between ballpoint and rollerball pens. They do, after all, seem quite similar in construction. Each uses a ball bearing (often made of tungsten carbide) as a mechanism to moderate the flow of ink from reservoir to paper.

As it turns out, the difference lies less with the mechanism than with the ink. Anyone who has ever accidentally broken open a Bic ballpoint pen knows that the ink inside is thick and goopy. This partly explains why ballpoint pens can be hesitant to start writing after a long period of non-use. Rollerball pens, by contrast, use a thinner, water-based ink. It is more vulnerable to smudging that ballpoint ink, but less likely to leave a spot where you begin writing. They also feel smoother to use, though not as much so as fountain pens, since you are still exerting the effort to make the ball turn, despite friction.

Generally, I use a four-colour Bic pen to take notes and mark up things that I am reading. I have developed a system over the years that lets me find specific things and kinds of things in books and articles I have read much more quickly than by skimming unmarked versions. The flexibility of the four colours makes up for how the pen is somewhat thick and inelegant in the appearance of the text it produces. For letters, I use a fountain pen, in hope of making them more legible to my much frustrated correspondents (I never really learned how to print, much less handwrite, in a clear manner. It is generally legible enough, but certainly not elegant.) When writing to myself, or trying to make my writing look as good as it can, I generally use my better Cross ballpoint pen, or a rollerball.

What do other people use, and why?

On risk and decision making

In a complex world, understanding risk and responding to it properly is an essential human skill. Every kind of important decision involves it: from making choices about where to get electrical power to deciding whether to walk home through a dark city or let your children use the internet.

The manipulation of risk-related thinking is an increasingly obvious trend, with two major facets. The first is manipulation of the data upon which people base their decisions. The media, for instance, grossly exaggerates many risks. Rare phenomena, by definition, are news. Things that happen all the time (car crashes, domestic abuse) are not. As such, we worry about serial killers and terrorist attacks, when there is a vanishingly small chance either will ever harm us. Even worse, some campaigns actively deceive so as to try and achieve political ends; one particularly harmful example is education systems that misrepresent the effectiveness of contraceptives in hopes of encouraging teenagers to refrain from sex. Such campaigns are both unacceptably patronizing and quite obviously harmful. Another obvious example is the cultivation and exploitation of fear, on the part of governments, as a mechanism for securing increased power and freedom from oversight and criticism.

Such campaigns blend into the second trend: a denial that risk-related decisions must be made at the level of individuals. A natural trend of those in charge is to strip people of their ability to choose, for any of a number of reasons. There are times at which it is reasonable to force people to take certain precautions. Requiring people to have car insurance is a good example. Such cases, however, must be evaluated through public legal and political scrutiny, and justified on the basis of arguments that are critiqued and data that are legitimate and verified.

The intelligent solution is to teach good risk-related thinking. That means learning how to identify the agendas of those providing information. It means having tools to make reasonable assessments of logical arguments, as well as supporting data. That means not keeping people ignorant or keeping essential information secret. And it means teaching a perspective of individual empowerment, where the reality of trade-offs between different risks is acknowledged. Alas, it seems unlikely that such an approach is likely to be widely adopted.

Reading and Sin City

I called the repair centre today and they said that a technician hasn’t even looked at my dust-laden digicam yet. They say they have a backlog of several weeks. As such, we are going to have to see how long I can keep finding suitable photos of the day in my archives. Within the collection that lives on my hard drive, most of the good photos have already been put online somewhere or other. Apologies to those diligent few who may have already tracked these down.

This photo was taken during the summer after my first year at UBC. It was taken in Vanier Park, near the Vancouver Planetarium.

Aside from zipping around on a number of administrative projects, today largely comprised sedate reading. I am two thirds of the way through John MacNeil’s Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century. I picked up a surplus hardback copy from the county library in excellent condition for £1. Mostly, it is familiar reading, though it may be useful to have a source to which so many stories I might tell in the thesis can be attributed.

Later in the evening, I watched Sin City with Kelly. The atmosphere of the film was definitely well-assembled, with good cinematography, costumes, and general verisimilitude. The plot is a triptych of very classic revenge tales: all bound up with underlying assumptions about roles people play and the duties that attach to them. Actually, the extent to which these stories are so automatically comprehensible makes you question the bases according to which you assign social expectations.

The most startling moment was near the end, when I finally realized why one character was so familiar looking; she is the same woman who played Rory in the many episodes of Gilmore Girls that I watched with Nick’s sisters over the years. Not quite the same as seeing the farmer from Babe become the hardbitten chief in L.A. Confidential, but a somewhat similar instance of contrast. To say more risks ruining plot elements. In essence, the film is well worth seeing. Because of the heavy visual focus, it would probably have been especially worthwhile to see in theaters.

More trimethylxanthine considerations

While Foosh Mints maintain my energetic support, I feel rather differently about Boots’ ‘feel the difference’ caffeine strips. Each pack includes 28 strips and each strip contains 8mg of caffeine (8% of one Foosh mint). Despite the much lower caffeine content, they taste rather more bitter and generally nasty. They are also slimy and loaded with artificial sweeteners, gelling agents, bulking agents, and glazing agents. Even at the price at which Boots seems to be trying to get rid of them (£1 for three packs), they are not worth it.

I confess to being intrigued by the prospect of caffeinated hot sauce.

Ka-Boom!

A few minutes ago, something happened above me that was exceptionally loud. I was wearing my Etymotic ER6i headphones with the foam eartips, which boast a 35 decibel reduction in ambient sound. In spite of them, the noise was painfully loud for several seconds.

I assume it was a supersonic patrol of figher aircraft, maintaining some defence of London, nearby, and other potential targets. Definitely unnerving.