Daily updates – Page 174 – a sibilant intake of breath

First trip to London

Happy Birthday Matthew Tindall

Tonight’s event, in the residence of Canada’s second most important ambassador, comprised about 300 Canadian graduate students. The residence was quite lavish: richly endowed with artwork and the various trappings of high class hosting facilities. The project of meeting and mingling with dozens of Canadians from Oxford, Cambridge, the LSE, and elsewhere was a daunting one for me, but one which I think I rose to dealing with fairly well. I met a few interesting people from the Environmental Change Centre at Oxford. In particular, Andrew Robinson from Trinity College, who worked for the UNEP and is working on a master’s here now. Hopefully, I shall see them again.

On the bus ride out, I sat beside a Canadian woman who studied French previously and who is now studying law, with an aim to practicing in the area of shipping. In a few days, she is heading to her flat in the south of France, where she will be spending Christmas with her boyfriend. Despite her assurances that it will be extremely cold, I think there are a great many people languishing back in Oxford who will envy her the journey. Hearing her plans made me doubly glad about being invited to London for Christmas with Sarah and her mother. I enjoyed speaking with my co-national about points of law, language, and education – while heading southeast to London.

We disembarked at Marble Arch and soon found the High Commissioner’s residence. As I said, the inside was quite opulent. I suppose that is unsurprising given the importance of Anglo-Canadian relations over the short but broad sweep of Canadian diplomatic history. I spoke with the Commissioner himself for a while, as well as with several members of the Canadian diplomatic service. Chris Yung was there, as were Emily and a number of the Rhodes Scholars who I met at the outset of the year.

After a few hours of mingling, the staff stopped serving drinks: a message for postgraduate students to leave as unambiguous as firing tear gas. Despite a brief attempt to relocate to a nearby pub, I soon ended up shivering at Marble Arch, waiting with Sheena and Emily for buses back to Oxford. They were picked up fairly quickly by an Oxford Tube, but I huddled a while yet while waiting for the X90. I would have liked to do more in London, but there is little that a person can do to access a city when it is rainy, strange, and dark. As I observed on the homeward bus ride:

How hostile, how alien a dark strange city in the rain. The solidity of buildings and the alienation from our huddled fellows all remind us how we are to be jolted and feared, rather than embraced.The collective of experience of life now is such as to conjure intense questioning. Education is not just that investment of time and money that yields more money in the future. It is a wrestling with history, with isolation, and with our own limitations.

Self doubt is the main concern now. It’s a thing that you can seek to defeat – building walls of false confidence around yourself. Alternatively, you can plunge right into it and pray that you will emerge wiser on the other side. That process can only be attempted along with the realization that we can falter and drown.

A bit grim, I know, but it was a chilly and unpleasant night in the period after which it became a solitary one. I was hoping to derive some motive energy from the great metropolis of London, rather than scamper back, spurned, to the small town of Oxford. That said, it was worthwhile and enjoyable to see what an extensive mass of grad students Canada has dispatched to England. While it does have the unhappy impact of reminding you how unexceptional you may well be, you still cannot quite help being impressed by it. (I really do hope that I manage to find some way in which I am properly exceptional, after all, before I leave here.)

One piece of unambiguously happy news, in closing. Tomorrow morning, at 11:00am, is the final STATA lab. I hope that I shall never launch that most reviled of programs again.

Reminiscing about pixels and hit points

Playing the Java port of Quake II for a while today, I was reminded of the days when computer gaming was a frequent use of my time. It began with Nintendo, as it must have for so many in my generation. We bought one at a junk swap at my old elementary school: the seller giving my mother his personal guarantee that it worked. We had Duck Hunt (which I always cheated at, using the gun mere inches from the screen) and Super Mario. Eventually, we traded that console for a Super Nintento, which I maintain is one of the best platforms ever developed. Between Mario World and Mario All Stars, we were well equipped. Add Zelda: A Link to the Past and Super Metroid and you have an awesome system. Add Chrono Trigger, the Final Fantasy games, and the rest of the RPG group and you have the real contender, along with the Playstation, for best platform ever.

The first PC game that really hooked me was Myst: back in the days when it was a glorified, colourful Hypercard stack. I remember taking careful notes, and the anger and betrayal I felt when I realized the game was impossible without a sound card: an accessory our NEC 486 (without math coprocessor) lacked. It was on that computer that I got my first glimpse of multiplayer gaming. We played Legend of the Red Dragon – a very primitive massively multiplayer online game – on a half dozen bulletin board services around North Vancouver. This was before anyone had heard of the World Wide Web. My other multiplayer experience was playing Warcraft II over the modem with Jonathan Morissette and Michael Kushnir. I remember how my mother used to become irked, picking up the phone to hear incomprehensible screeching noises. We had to upgrade our 486 to 8 megabytes of RAM in order to run Warcraft II and SimIsle, a game Mica got for Christmas but that we were never keen on. After all, my cousin Jiri had recently given me a pirated copy of Doom.

There was always a bit of an allure associated with Mac gaming. Jonathan’s main home computer was a Mac and we would spend entire nights trading off between our two saved games of Escape Velocity. This terrifically exciting and engaging game called upon you to improve your ship, defeat thousands of opponents, complete a complex story line (one of two options), and conquer the galaxy. It wasn’t until the two games that marked the apogee of my gaming experience that I found something more addictive. I calculated how many days I would need to go without buying cafeteria food, Coca Cola, or candy in order to afford the cheapest Mac that could run it.

For me, the pinnacle of gaming came with the release of Bungie’s Myth. A revolutionary game on many fronts, it combined a truly three dimensional environment with the absolute need to use terrain and tactics to utmost advantage. Unlike Warcraft, where resources could be mined and more men produced, Myth limited you to what you had on the battlefield. Richly immersive, it became ten times more so online. (That said, I have always preferred to achieve perfection in the completion of a single-player game to giving up that possibility for the challenge and immediacy of competing against other humans.) I remember when there weren’t more than 100 devoted players on Bungie.net. When we all lived in awe of the Comet: the highest ranked player in the gaming ecosystem, and when we checked the Total Codex daily for news and humour. I spent most of my time on Bungie.net at the rank of Prince, a good way above the single dagger that each player started out with.

The other game that marked the peak of my commitment to these fantastic realms was the original Half Life. By this point, we had already progressed to a Pentium II computer with a Hercules Thriller 3D video card. I remember my appreciation when Nick and Neal got me the new video card that cleared up the clipping and white spot errors in Descent: Freespace and that allowed me to really enjoy Half Life in a hardware accelerated environment. From the attractive hero to the complexity of the environments, the creativity of the weapons, and the calculation involved in gameplay, Half Life was a winner in every respect. While I enjoyed playing the sequel after Mica bought it for me during my last year at UBC, even the greatly expanded complexity of the engine and plot couldn’t recreate the obsessive energy that the first game conjured.

While getting into the Playstation era is too adventurous for such a short entry, a few critical games should be named. On Christmas Eve, the year of the Playstation launch, I remember finishing about the first half of Mica’s copy of Final Fantasy VII. I went to sleep once the sun was well up, and after I had emerged from Midgar after about fifteen hours of intensive gameplay. The thing that I missed most after we got robbed one year was my Playstation memory card, which included a perfect game of FFVII. I had defeated both of the Weapons – much, much harder opponents than the end boss – and I had a gold chocobo and master materia. Oh, the loss! Aside from the legendary FFVII, the Playstation brought Einhander – that terribly difficult but engaging side-scroller – and the deadly exactitude of Bushido Blade.

Once I moved to UBC in first year, my gaming career entered its final phase. It was defined first by Civilization II, and then by its sequel. I’ve never been able to resist taking advantage of flaws within a game: how a certain boss in Diablo would just stand there while a fire wall roasted him or how marines in Half Life only activated when you got close enough to them, allowing you to dispatch their stationary forms with one well-directed crossbow quarrel. Civilization II abounded with such flaws. You could make impenetrable walls out of bombers, as long as you had one per square per turn. Civilization III – which became an obsession while Sarah Johnston was still in Vancouver – allowed you to sell cities for outrageous fees, even if they were in atrocious locations. The cash could fuel such a level of scientific research that, playing as the Zulus (my race of choice), you could nuke London by 1000A.D., at which time they would still have nothing better than spearmen to protect them.

I am not sure whether I ever derived anything more than enjoyment out of all these games. I never learned strategy from chess. Actually, I despise chess. It’s terrifically boring, though you feel that, as an educated person, you ought to like it. Chess is what people played when there were no better options. Whether I learned anything from all these games or not, I am proof, at least, that you can end up in a fairly successful position despite devoting a great deal of time to them. It wasn’t until the later years of high school that anything in my education was ever really challenging or compelling. Perhaps, in that sense, these games filled an important gap. Whatever the truth of the matter is, I salute them, as well as those who made them.

PS. I’ve left out SimCity: another obsession and the game I played most in my dreams, but one cannot be thorough in such things.

PPS. This list also excludes the more elite and challenging element of computer ‘gaming.’ By that, I mean the bypassing and overpowering of security systems put in place to guard actual systems and networks. Such things, though long since abandoned as a use of time, can’t really be discussed here.

PPPS. How can I leave out Starcraft? Oh, the dozens of games that I played for hundreds of hours each.

The events of November 29th, backwards

I am going to write this backwards, since memory peels back in layers and I am too tired to straighten it.

Just now, I left the King’s Arms: where I spoke with Claire about the future of humanity, the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, and the brilliance of our fellow M.Phils. Earlier, I was in The Turf, discussing much the same matter. Quite a broad cross-section of those in the program were present, which was an enjoyable surprise. I particularly enjoyed meeting Andy’s roommate, who studied at UBC.

Before heading to The Turf, I was at a production of Hedwig and the Angry Inch, put on at the Old Fire Station, on George Street. As I remarked to the young man taking notes for student radio beside me: it was like the Rocky Horror Picture Show, except ten times as loud. I enjoyed it quite a bit, as my first piece of theatre since arriving in Oxford this September. I also enjoyed the Old Fire Hall as a venue, complete with curious icy lounges for intermission. I am glad Claire encouraged me to attend.

Claire and I wandered to the play from Wadham, where we stopped to drop off my notes and pick up my gloves. Tonight was quite bitterly cold, you see. Before that, we were at the Christmas Party of the Department of Politics and International Relations, where I got potato chips for dinner and free wine. I spoke very briefly with one of our core seminar directors, as well as with many IR M.Phils and those in related disciplines

Before that, I was at the final quantitative methods lecture given by James Tilley: despised in some quarters and embraced in others. During the break between the two hours, I spoke with a young woman from Green College sitting in the row behind me. While I don’t know who she is and will never see her again, I did see her during the small feminist march that Claire and I passed between the DPIR party and the play. That march is pictured above.

Before the statistics lecture, we had our core seminar. Today’s discussion struck me as particularly good, and I felt as though I participated usefully in it. The first three-quarters were about levels of analysis for interpreting the emergence of the cold war. The last bit was about hegemonic stability theory.

First thing in the morning, I went for a walk and a coffee with Bilyana. While I fear that I may have spoken too much about cryptographic and authentication systems, it went well regardless. I hope that I shall see her again soon – before everyone disperses for the break.

Tomorrow morning, many of us are meeting to make an attempt at this week’s STATA assignment: the penultimate assignment of the much and rightly derided quantitative methods course. As such, I should consign myself to sleep. My best wishes to all who read this. Bonsoir.

PS. For £1250 and the advancement of medical science, one member of the M.Phil in IR was intentionally infected with malaria today.

Milan: now 10110, binary-wise

Happy Birthday Vivian Chan

Birthday happenings

Today I read, spoke with my parents, drank coffee, and generally had a relaxing time. Particular since I haven’t spoken with them in a while, speaking with my parents was pleasant. Likewise, to receive a birthday email from my brother Mica. My mother and father spent the past three days in San Diego for some kind of Miller Thomson partners’ conference. I was glad to hear that they enjoyed themselves. It seems that the lot of them are now planning to go to North Carolina to visit my aunt, uncle, grandmother, and cousins there. I wish them the best for their journey.

This morning, I also opened an elegant card from Sarah Johnston, as well as some gift certificates for Blackwell’s. I used them towards my excellent map, which is still inspiring fantasies of all manner of exotic journeys.

Over the course of the day, I finished some more of An Instance of the Fingerpost and should note that it is an extremely grim book. I’ve always had a particular anxiousness about all things medical – those ominous reminders of the ephemeral quality of life. It is therefore particularly troubling for me to read of hangings and dreadfully ineffective medical practices. I used to have anxiety attacks just walking into hospitals, so visceral the reminder of mortality could be. It reminds me of one of the most haunting passages from one of my favourite plays:

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. It must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. What does one make of that? We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the words for it, out we come with the knowledge that for all the compasses in the world, there’s only one direction, and time its only measure.

Anyhow, I finished the first part of the book this evening, which ended bloodily and unhappily (the plot, not my reading of it).

Margaret stopped by this afternoon and very kindly gave me two bowls, a plate, spoons, and a mug. I am now enormously better equipped to eat off dishes not temporarily borrowed from the MCR. She also gave me an artful and odd looking book: Taschen’s 1000 Extra/Ordinary Objects. The collection was even in a box wrapped in pages from The Economist. Many thanks.

In the evening, I went for a walk with a very ebullient Emily. We had hot chocolate, which was nice, and it snowed for a while, which was very welcome. If we are to be subjected to cold, it’s nice to be given the beauty and novelty of a bit of snow as well. This is only the second time ever when I have seen it snow on my birthday. Emily’s enthusiasm is always appreciated and contrasts with the grizzled, embittered image of graduate students I have developed as a kind of semi-believed caricature.

Canadian electoral politics:

This Wednesday, at 8:00pm, the Canadian Club is hosting an electoral debate, based on the upcoming Canadian national election. It is taking place in the Margaret Thatcher Centre of Sumerville College. I recommend following it up with drinks in the Ho Chi Minh Quad at Wadham, if only for the sake of balance. With a Canadian confidence vote, which the government will likely fail, looking imminent, it looks like we have an election ahead of us. It will lead to me lamenting the fact that there isn’t a credible opposition in Canada. Can anyone really imagine the Tories or the NDP forming a government? I think the defection of someone like Ujjal Dosanjh from the provincial NDP to the federal Liberals says a lot about which parties have the people and organization it takes to govern.

Initially, I had hoped that the Martin minority government with the NDP would be one that advanced progressive policies. As it happens, it seems to have been mired in this corruption scandal, coupled with weak leadership and a lack of vision. The revitalization of Canada’s role in the world that we were hoping for from Martin really doesn’t seem to have happened. That said, I will almost certainly vote for the Liberal candidate in North Vancouver Capilano, since the possibility that the Tories will retake the seat is not outlandish.

For that retro charm, Bytonic Software has released a version of Quake II, ported into Java. It works fine in OS X. And here I thought Java was buggy and slow; the photo upload applet on Facebook certainly is.
Apparently, the statistics instructors are trying to foist an additional assignment upon us, in contravention of the notes of guidance. Seeing as to how they haven’t made any substantial changes on the basis of our criticisms, despite their early apparent willingness to do so, I think we should hold them to the letter of the original notes: “Five/six short assignments done throughout Michaelmas Term, to be assessed during the term.” (Emphasis in the original.) Given that they are making us write the test, despite how shoddy the teaching has been, I don’t think we should put up with them further expanding the course work: none of which really increases our ability to use quantitative methods in international relations, due to the failings described at length here previously. Other, competing programs at different schools should be making hay from how lacking the quantitative portion of the Oxford M.Phil is.
Another BBC article on human rights in the age of the ‘war on terror.’ Specifically, on CIA secret prisons.
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Room better decorated: festooned with possibilities

After the undergraduate IR lecture this morning, I took the plunge and used most of the book credits that Alex and Sarah gave me to buy an enormous map of the world. You can’t really tell from the photo, but it’s a very fine laminated map, with metal strips along the top and bottom to keep it in shape. While the college will fine you one pound for each piece of blu-tac you use to affix something to a precious wall, they will happily provide you with a hammer and nails with which to do so. For an international relations student, it seems an entirely advisable thing to have done.

The map now hangs on my wall as a reminder of all the places where I need to travel. Sipping coffee from Sulawesi and looking it over, I have been imagining all manner of possible future expeditions. During the next month, I will see Tallinn and Helsinki. Next year, I would dearly like to arrange my thesis so it requires a trip to Brazil. Given that it’s a particular area of interest for Dr. Hurrell, a developing country, and subject to a great many environmental considerations, that may well be possible. The plan for after the M.Phil is to climb Mount Kilimanjaro with friends. After that, Australia, New Zealand, all of Asia, and most of Africa will remain. Then, there are the really exotic possibilities: lemurs in Madagascar, the more remote islands of Indonesia, the far north – complete with the Aurora, and Tierra del Fuego: practically touching Antarctica. I am glad that I’m only 22.

Another excellent thing about the map is that it gives me a better sense of where my increasingly far-flung friends are now located: Astrid in Ecuador, Neal and Marc in Beijing, Adam and Nick in India, Gabe in Finland, Tristan and Viktoria P in Toronto, Sarah in London (just down the road), Kate in Victoria, and everyone back in Vancouver. I miss you all and I hope our paths will cross soon, whether in Oxford or elsewhere.

Twenty-two orbits completed as of midnight, what now?

Do you know the feeling when a day just feels out of step? It’s a general sensation of hunger, tiredness, or illness that never becomes acute enough to justify a direct response, but which just makes for a graying of your overall experience. Part of it can definitely be chalked up to my strange inability to sleep last night. Spending nights alternating between tossing in the dark and trying to read something soporific is reminiscent of years ago. It shows, I suppose, that we can regress as well as progress.

I spent the morning and the afternoon trying to move forward on some of the hegemonic stability theory reading for the core seminar. I spent a few hours doing the ‘read and wander,’ where you shift venues every chapter or so. Later, I spent about an hour talking with Bilyana. It was both pleasant and a reminder of a number of things that I am doing wrong here. My overall strategy of maintaining distance between myself and college life – which I often find threatening – is a rather crude one. It could benefit from some fine tuning. As for the hegemonic stability stuff, I will entomb myself in the SSL tomorrow to work on it, except when I take a stab at the STATA assignment with Claire.

Later this evening, I spent a few hours reading An Instance of the Fingerpost. The language, setting, and protagonist all remind me of the work of Oscar Wilde, such as I was reading in Vancouver earlier in the year. I remember sitting in the Delaney’s in English Bay, reading The Canterville Ghost and waiting for Meghan. Perhaps it is the descriptions of scientific experimentation that most evoke the parallel between the two. I remember walking with her afterwards, and then looking out across an unusually wavy False Creek at Vanier Park and the Maritime Museum. Anyhow, along with speaking with Bilyana, reading Pears’ book did much to lift the last part of today from the doldrums it was languishing in earlier.

One piece of good news from Africa came in today. In proper Kerrie style, she has exploded back onto the internet, posting a whole collection of entries written in Ghana. As my closest rival last year for most compulsive blogger, I am happy to have a new infusion of information from her.

On Thursday, it seems that I will be meeting a group of Canadians to take the bus to London for the reception for graduate students at the Canadian High Commission. If I remember correctly, Emily will be coming as well. It will be wonderful to get beyond the boundaries of Oxford, even if only for an evening. This week, I must also remember to get my booster immunization for mumps.

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A good day, and a really excellent evening

This morning, I was delighted to receive two envelopes that, while lacking a return address, bore the familiar handwriting of Sarah Johnston. As each is marked ‘for your birthday,’ I’ve placed them carefully aside until Monday. Many thanks to her for remembering. Indeed, these last few days have been a wonderful reminder that there are people out there who care about me; I appreciate it a great deal.

I had quite an excellent time this evening and tonight. Emily, Claire, Nora, Alex, and Margaret all came for dinner at the Moonlight Tandoori Restaurant. Unfortunately, something went wrong with the reservation and they could not give us a table. Luckily, the Kasmir Halal restaurant next door proved available and quite good. I haven’t eaten so much since I arrived in Oxford. I had a tasty bowl of Dall Soup – to combat the cold – followed by papadums, vegetable vindaloo, and garlic naan. The vegetable vindaloo was the hottest curry I have ever been served without specifically requesting that the curry be made hotter. It was wonderful. Also good was the chance to introduce Nora to the delights of Indian food: of which she had not previously partaken.

Along with dinner, we shared two bottles of wine that Margaret kindly picked up at Tesco’s. Perhaps the best thing about the night was conversing with friends from disparate parts of Oxford, and appreciating the fact that they enjoy conversing with one another. One of the things I always enjoyed most about throwing the occasional big party with lots of food and friends from all over was giving them the chance to meet one another. When living in a strange place, it is incredibly empowering to feel like part of a community; tonight, I definitely did.

After dinner, Emily and Alex had to scamper off to do work. Shortly after, Margaret left with a similar determination. Claire, Nora, and I, however, discovered a Jamaican bar on the west side of Cowley Road, no more than a block or two north of the restaurant. Before that, we tried going to the Wychwood Brewery, but it was unpleasantly loud and there was nowhere to sit. By contrast, the Jamaican bar offered plenty of places to sit, nice bass-heavy reggae music, and an enjoyable ambiance. We were also introduced to an excellent cocktail. Called a ‘dark and stormy,’ it consists of Appleton Special Jamaican Rum (dark) and Old Jamaican Ginger Beer. Served in a half pint glass, with ice, it tastes like a more interesting, more Caribbean gin and tonic. It met with universal approval.

Very kindly, Nora furnished me with a travel guide book on Tallinn: A Hedonist’s Guide to Tallinn and the Iain Pears novel An Instance of the Fingerpost as birthday gifts. I look forward very much to reading both during the next while, and making use of the first, during the break. Very generously, Nora, Claire, and Margaret also paid for my excellent birthday dinner. Alex gave me a very kind card, and voucher for the purchase of additional reading material. Emily also gave me a card, but I am fairly certain she means for me to open it on my birthday proper. My profound appreciation goes out to everyone who showed up. You really didn’t need to get me anything, but I am exceedingly pleased that you did. One day, I shall mix up a pitcher of dark and stormy and share it with you all – especially those who didn’t get the chance to try it tonight.

One thing I discovered today: there are more than fifteen geocaches within a kilometre of library court. Perhaps over the break, I shall do a bit of searching.

Another supervision: I may be able to handle this grad student stuff

Leaving my supervision with Dr. Hurrell today, I felt quite happy with how it went. He had good things to say about the paper and we had a good conversation about several aspects of it, as well as how it relates to contemporary China. We also worked out what I should do over the inter-term break: namely, edit the fish paper for resubmission to a different journal, as well as some background reading for the theory course. I was pleasantly surprised that he didn’t assign me a paper to write, but that may well change before the term actually ends.

I am quite pleased with how working with Dr. Hurrell is going; all this, however, is just a prelude to what will happen once the original research portion of the program begins. I was wrong earlier when I assumed that the two ‘optional papers’ are actually research papers. Here, ‘papers’ just means courses, and these are more or less along the lines of our core seminar this year. As described in the Notes of Guidance, there are quite a number of possibilities. The ones that seem most interesting to me, in decreasing order, are:

The Function of Law in the International Community
International Normative Theory
The International Relations of the Developing World
Strategic Studies

That said, I will need to see the syllabus for each, and get a sense of who is teaching it, before I decide. The courses won’t take place until next year, anyhow. It makes sense to choose topics that will ultimately contribute to my thesis: another thing I should have decided on the overall structure of and question for by the end of this academic year. Comments about what I’ve written so far about it would be very welcome.

Later tonight, I am meant to meet Margaret to watch Spirited Away, but I’ve not spoken with her since I saw her in Manor Road by chance about six hours ago.

PS. Wychwood Hobgoblin is a very fine ale indeed. My thanks to Tony for introducing us.

A day of intellectual engagement

Happy Birthday Nick Sayeg

The most surprising thing about my three pound Tesco brand radio alarm clock is that came set to use one of the BBC talk channels as the wake-up noise. I’ve never changed it, and it has been influencing those precious dreams you get in snippets, punctuated by the smashing of the ‘snooze’ button. It is an odd thing indeed to be cajoled out of bed by the sounds of men with British accents discussing recent novels, developments in physics, or U.K. politics. I’ve never been someone who listens to the radio, except as a means of being jolted out of repose. It is too random, too filled with commercials, and too attention intensive in the wrong ways. It’s not something I can ever really enjoy, though it frequently annoys me.

Today’s ‘Advanced Study of IR’ lecture was delivered by Gavin Williams about the politics of development or, as he called it, the politics of most of the world. I particularly appreciated some of the methodological questions that were raised and then discussed among those present. Regrettably, only four of the twenty-eight members of the IR M.Phil were in attendance. After the lecture, I spoke with Dr. Williams for about forty minutes. We talked about British and Canadian politics, the tendency of sub-state political regions with newly-discovered oil reserves to contemplate succession, and the reasons for which institutions persist in making and perpetuating bad policies.

Aside: Thesis considerations

This evening was also the first chance in quite a while when I got to talk about my intended thesis topic . Dr. Williams’ enthusiasm has reaffirmed my hope that it will be a useful project, though I need to decide upon a way to pare it down to an M.Phil thesis sized question. The general project is to examine institutional and legal mechanisms for dealing with the advancement of environmental science. Environmental science involves quite a bit of uncertainly. By definition, complex dynamic systems (like ecosystems and the climatic system) are hard to understand. What we need are policies that are based on the best knowledge we have, aware of the extent to which those conclusions might be incorrect, and able to respond to new developments. Basically, the people doing the science and the people making the policy need to talk to one another, understand what is being said, and care about it.

The basic point is that there are separate intellectual communities: scientists, lawyers, policy makers, etc, who don’t manage to communicate effectively about environmental issues in many cases. That, or they fail to produce outcomes that make long-term environmental sense. Members of all these groups can also be co-opted by those who profit from the status quo. We need to consider interests and incentives, as well as modes of communicating and types of interpersonal connection. It’s not just who reads what journal, goes to which conference, or understands which piece of jargon; it’s who pays for the research, who pays attention to the policies, and who stands to lose or gain from all of this.

The question has many faces. You can look at the professional discourse of the different groups and try to understand where they understand one another, where they do not, and why. You can concentrate on the incentives presented to each group, particularly in terms to how they relate to one another. Are policy-makers rewarded for basing their strategies on sound science? Are rewards long-term or short-term? Perhaps the best way to tackle many of these issues would be to choose a case study. An obvious choice is climate change, due to the lack of scientific certainty and the level of political involvement, but I shy away from it. It’s too big, too politically charged, and it involves uncertainties that are too great. It’s not that climate change isn’t happening or that people aren’t causing it. What we don’t know is what the consequences of climate change they will be, who will bear the costs, and whether the cost of dealing with climate change exceeds the cost of stopping it. I don’t think we have the science to answer these questions right now, though it would definitely be good to have an effective and relatively de-politicized channel for turning increased certainty into more refined policy once we do.

I called Meghan briefly tonight, to say thank you for the Klein Bottle. Apparently, her graduation was yesterday and she gave the student address. I hope her family and friends were there to see it, and that enjoyment was had all around. My felicitations to Meghan Lynn Mathieson, B.A. Hons. (UBC). Best wishes in future endeavours.

Later, Nora prepared an excellent veggie casserole for Bilyana, Bryn, Kelly and me. It was thoroughly enjoyed by all and, furthermore, it was good to spend some time talking with other Wadham students. I’ve barely seen Bilyana since first week. As a mathematician, she was also particularly qualified to appreciate the Klein Bottle, which I felt near-obligated to show her.

Tomorrow evening, I have supervision with Dr. Hurrell: discussing the paper on the Chinese Civil War. Afterwards, I am supposed to watch Spirited Away with Margaret. For those who haven’t seen it, I thoroughly recommend it. It’s my favourite Studio Ghibli film: notably for creative combination and reinterpretation of elements of several different strains of folklore. Also, the artwork is quite stunning. Studio Ghibli also made Princess Mononoke, My Neighbor Totoro, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Castle in the Sky. The studio is headed by the extremely talented Hayao Miyazaki, and I recommend their work without exception.

Lauren sent me some Nina Simone songs, and I like them a lot. Especially good is the song “Feeling Good.”
Here’s another Oxford blog, with a unique premise.
I now have 24 hour access to the Manor Road Building and the Department of Politics and International Relations. Don’t you envy the fact that I could be in there, drinking in the greenish light and pouring over readings or stats assignments every Saturday night, all night long?
Penn Jillette on athiesm. From Jessica.
The L.A. Times has a distressing article about the treatment of pre-war intelligence. (Via BoingBoing)
I am quite curious about what has happened to Kerrie Thornhill. I knew she was going to Ghana, but not exactly when. Unusually, all five or so of her blogs are silent. If anyone knows what’s up, I’d appreciate being filled in.
Today’s big environmental politics story

Afternoon with itinerant friends

Happy Birthday Darren Thompson, Kristina Meakin, and Spencer Keys

Seeing Nick and Ellen today was good fun. I had my first opportunity to serve as an Oxford tour guide, and I tried to cover some of the lesser known places. We ducked through a half dozen colleges, the Codrington, and very briefly into the natural history museum. We also had dinner at the noodle place on the northwest side of Gloucester Green: my first real dinner out in Oxford. Following with my veggies in black bean sauce, I got a fortune cookie with an inspiring message inside: “You are the guiding star of his existence.” How nice.

Later, having some drinks at the Turf with Nora, Margaret, Nick, and Ellen allowed for some engaging penta-national discussion. We talked about travel, India, the dangers of nitrogen narcosis, and the strange connections that we keep finding with the nationals of other countries. For instance, the Rhodes Scholar friend of Nick’s who we met in Starbucks today – with whom he studied economics in Brisbane – is now in the Economics M.Phil with Margaret, the friend of someone (me) who studied law and economics with Nick in Vancouver. It’s also interesting to think that, among us all, only Ellen comes from a nation never colonized by Britain.

Nick is an Australian lawyer who served as a fellow member of the ‘box seats’ for Robert Gateman’s law and economics class at UBC during my final year there. We ended up arguing on the same side for the moot carried out as part of that class, about the non-therapeutic sterilization of mentally handicapped people, as well as living rather close together in Fairview. In a few days, he is leaving for India, where he will be spending about a month. He bought his anti-malarial medication at the Boots on Cornmarket Street tonight: a kind of final reminder of the imminence of departure, I suppose. I look forward to seeing whatever photos he ends up posting on his blog.

Ellen is Norwegian, and was also studying as an exchange student at UBC. Both she and Nick have spent the past while in Scandinavia, and will be moving to Australia around Christmas time. As part of my ambition to see a good part of a major country on each inhabited continent by 2013 (when I shall be 30), I hope to visit them there soon.

While waiting for Nick and Ellen this afternoon (a bit of a coincidental combination of names, since I have a high school friend named Nick Ellan), I read some of Richard Overy’s Why the Allies Won: the book that I withdrew from the Wadham Library in order to lend to Alex Stummvoll. I quite like the style in which it is written. Despite the fact that next week’s seminar topic is: “Can we explain the post-war economic order by using the theory of hegemonic stability?” I may carry on with reading this book, alongside those more pertinent to the subject under discussion.

PS. Many thanks to Gleider Hernandez, of the MCR executive, for lending me the new Tori Amos CD. I shall document my impressions of it at a later time. It takes me at least a few days to form an opinion about music, and it can take months to develop a stable one.

PPS. This is the 101st post on the new blog.

PPPS. With the start of December comes the start of the next batch of scholarship applications. I need to get on top of that. Last year, I ended up in the top half of the waiting list for the Chevening Scholarship. Now that I am here and they would only need to fund me for one year, I am hoping they will see fit to ease some of my financial worries.