The reading continues

Ceiling at Freud's

Last night was excellent, though it involved rather less reading than might have been expected, given the determination I expressed yesterday. All the same, it was a better use of time. There will be plenty of time for reading during the remainder of the break. (Exam in seven days, first presentations in eleven.)

I got a Christmas gift from Tristan today: a copy of Haruki Murakami’s The Wind up Bird Chronicle. I look forward to reading it, and writing about it here. Translated from Japanese, Tristan apparently found his copy in Toronto somewhere and has enjoyed it a great deal.

Taking a break from reading tonight, I played a game of Trivial Pursuit with Claire, Josiah Kaplan, and two more of her friends. I also had the chance to introduce her to The Daily Show: North American political staple that it has become.

Tomorrow, it’s back to reading. Claire lent me Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics, after saying that it’s extremely dull. After the thrill ride of the Keohane book, it might be just the thing to calm me down.

  • Apparently, in England a ‘gyro’ is a welfare payment, not a delicious combination of pita bread, some kind of meat, and vegetables served at take-away Middle Eastern restaurants and 99 cent Vancouver pizza places. This led to a brief but amusing misunderstanding between Louise and I.
  • Sainsbury’s Soup of the Month: Bloody Mary not nearly so good as the Tomato Basil, though it is half the price. Like most tomato soup, it is best scaldingly hot.
  • The “Making Globalization Work for Developing Countries” series continues on January 20th, with a seminar on the politics of the global energy regime. It will take place at 2pm in the Goodhart Seminar Room, University College.
  • As most of you will know, Israeli leader Ariel Sharon is in very serious condition, following a serious stroke and operations. We may never get the chance to find out how genuine his late-found support for a two-state solution in the region was. I hope his death or political loss of power doesn’t introduce further difficulties and violence into this fraught process.
  • Here is a cool list of ten elegant and impressive experiments.

More bad news for world fisheries

Another story about the senselessly rapacious nature of modern commercial fisheries is out: CBC, New York Times. This, at least, is an area where skeptical environmentalists of the Bjorn Lomborg ilk are dead wrong. To quote from the fish paper (PDF):

Unlike agriculture, where investments in technology and capital can increase long-term yields, the process of technological development in fishing can, in the absence of regulation, only lead to a more rapid depletion of the resource. Fishing can only remain renewable when exploitation does not exceed regeneration.That balance must be at the core of any sensible fisheries policy, such as those that are emerging in Iceland and New Zealand. The comparative barrenness of the North Sea and the Grand Bank shows that this balance has not been respected – even when the states in question are the richest, most technologically capable, and most scientifically advanced in the world.

Dr. Daniel Pauly, of the University of British Columbia (UBC) Fisheries Centre, equates this process of fishing outwards to a hole being burned through a piece of paper. At the centre are the now depleted waters of Europe and much of the Atlantic. Two thirds of Europe’s commercial fish stocks are already outside their biological safety limits, according to Clover, while cod stocks have collapsed from Canada to Sweden. The flames have now reached the coasts of Antarctica, Australia and New Zealand, Africa, and elsewhere. They have reached into trenches and onto sea-mounts previously inaccessible to fishermen.

This process is concealed by a system of world trade that keeps kitchens and restaurants throughout the developed world supplied with fish, many of which come from thousands of kilometers away. This both perpetuates the process of fishing outwards and conceals the fact that it is happening. (4)

The specific articles above are about some of the species discussed in Charles Clover’s excellent and informative book: The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat: roundnose grenadier, onion-eye grenadier, blue hake, spiny eel and spinytail skate. All have been driven to a level of critical endangerment in less than 20 years.

It should be obvious that this is not a trivial matter. Fish is a critical source of protein in much of the developing world. Evidence from West Africa, in particular, indicates that as industrial fisheries deplete wild fish stocks, rates of malnourishment, protein starvation, and related ailments all increase in parallel. This is a humanitarian disaster that is being openly and obviously manufactured. Moreover, there is no uncertainty about what is happening. Rigorous scientific assessments, like those of the Sea Around Us Project present an extensive and alarming body of evidence that world fisheries are in trouble and that, at present, nothing effective is being done about it.

I’d like to believe that most of us won’t live to see most of the world’s major fish stocks critically depleted but, if that is to be the case, we need to start doing dramatically better than we are now. As many of these articles suggest, the creation and vigorous enforcement of marine protected areas would be a good start.

PS. The linked version of the fish paper is the one submitted for publication in Marine Policy and ultimately rejected. It’s very general for a journal article, but I meant it to be accessible to almost everyone. I am looking for another journal to which I can submit it, probably after it has been edited again.

An annoyance and a new statement of policy

A friend kindly brought to my attention that someone syndicated my blog as a LiveJournal account. This means that all posts appear there as well as here and that people can leave comments in both places. I ask you all not to do so. I do not consider this to be acceptable conduct. I am already giving this away for free (without even text-based ads): I just want to be able to decide the terms on which that happens.

By all means, use the Atom feed or a Bloglines account. You can even read it, along with the others I read, from my Bloglines account. Just do not re-post what is on this site wholesale somewhere else on the internet. I reserve the right to change what is written here when necessary and do not want large amounts of content on other servers. Likewise, it really diminishes the value of the time I put into building the site in this way to have it regurgitated in full elsewhere.

The choice of LiveJournal is particularly jarring, as I’ve long considered it an unhealthy component of the blogosphere. The ‘friends list’ system encourages a high school spirit of petty jealousies while the commenting system seems designed to spread malicious gossip. The only worse blogging services that I can think of are Xanga, which seems to focus on really ugly templates, and MSN spaces.

In short, do not syndicate this blog. I appreciate your cooperation.

Working, once again, to increase the number of facts known per cubic centimetre of brain

Upper Camera

Today was based around several rotations of the great term-time wheel of reading positions that I have established. Cornmarket Street Starbucks to Nuffield Library, to High Street Starbucks, to Upper Camera, to Codrington, to Wadham Library, to Wadham JCR (when quiet), to Wadham MCR (when quiet), to Blackwell’s on Broad Street and around and around again: reading a chapter or two in each position. The strategy keeps my brain from just skipping over long sections of text, while also helping me resist the desire to do something more complex than reading.

I was assisted today by the subject matter. I finished the second half of Richard Overy’s excellent Why the Allies Won: possibly the most engaging book I’ve read since arriving in the U.K. It is well written, convincing, and authoritative. Even though it covers the very familiar terrain of the second world war, it still conveys a great deal of new information and a deepened sense of understanding. Recommended to anyone with an interest in military history.

Dramatically less engaging was my continued slog through Keohane’s Neorealism and its Critics. While it has demonstrated that my conception of neorealism is, in some ways, a bit of a parody, it still isn’t the kind of book you wake up early or stay up late for the enjoyment of reading. Tomorrow morning, I will try to do one of my circuits with it as the sole book in my possession. Despite my best efforts to train myself otherwise, I will almost always read books in order from most to least interesting. This means that I neglect books that are important but very boring, but it does maximize the overall amount of reading I do. Related personal tendencies: eating food I buy in order from least to most preparation time, until I only have food that requires extensive preparation, and wearing clothes in order from most to least comfortable, until I have no clean ones left.

Tomorrow afternoon, good things are planned. For now, I am going to bo back to at least another four hours’ reading, even though most of the nodes on my circuit have already closed.

  • I was pleased to receive a barrage of comments from Meghan today. A surprising number of people seem to find it difficult to post comments. For their benefit, here are some brief instructions.Instructions for commenting:
    First, you need to get to the page specific to the post you want to comment about, rather than one of the archive pages that lists a whole month worth. To do that, just go to the bottom of any post and click on either the blue underlined time at which is was posted, or on the blue underlined bit where it lists the number of comments. For instance: “9 comment(s).”

    Once you are on a single post page, like this one you will be able to see existing comments. Click the “Post a Comment” link to leave one. Clicking the “Home” link will take you back to the front page of the blog.

    Once you have clicked “Post Comment” a new page will open. Then, in the page that comes up, just type your comment. You can enter Blogger login information, if you have it. If you do, it will put your default picture beside your comment, as well as allowing you to delete it later. You can also use ‘Other’ to leave a comment under your own name or alias or ‘Anonymous’ to leave a comment marked as such. Such comments, only I can remove. You will need to copy the squiggly letters that appear below the comment box into the text box below them. This is to keep spam robots from leaving hundreds of comments about their various sordid wares.

    Clicking the blue underlined “Milan” at the bottom of every post opens a window for sending a message to me, if you have configured your email client to do so. Using the “Contact Me” link in the sidebar does the same thing. Finally, the little white envelope lets you email a post to someone else. Please don’t send them to me, I already have them.

  • At some point, I will produce an FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions list) for the blog, but I have resolved to do no more structural modification until I’ve dealt with the stats exam and next term’s pre-reading.
  • On a related note, please stop going to the old address (sindark.blogspot.com). The continued existence of that page is causing problems for search engines. The new address, sindark.com, is what everyone should use.
  • The iBook is increasingly grinding and heaving its way through collections of tasks it formerly had no trouble with. I’ve taken to using my iPod to listen to music while on it, just to free up some RAM and CPU time from iTunes. Given my extremely hesitant attitude towards installing new software or keeping programs I do not use, I don’t know what’s going wrong.
  • The comment about a relative dearth of environmental politics related stuff here is spot on. It’s partly a question of what the course and life in general brings to my doorstep. That said, I will make more of an effort to read and talk about my alleged intended speciality.
  • This is my 1050th post made through Blogger. That obviously doesn’t include the hundreds of OpenDiary posts in the pre-Blogger era.

Another productive day

Ceiling in the Bodleian Library

This was an exceptionally productive morning, both before and after meeting Claire for coffee. Into the post, the scholarship application has gone. Likewise, my absentee ballot request: out into the ether of the international telephone system. As always, Joanna Coryndon in the Tutorial Office was very helpful with all the bureaucratic hassles of university life. I was disappointed to learn that she didn’t win the college staff member of the year designation. As I’ve said before, the human face she contributed to the admissions process did much to skew my thinking towards Oxford.

During the afternoon, I finished the Atwood book, reviewed briefly below, and made decent progress on the Hume and Keohane books. By the end of the inter-term break, I will have finished the reading assigned by Dr. Hurell and hopefully made a more general start on the material for next term. I may well need to present for fifteen minutes in the first seminar with Jennifer Welsh and David Williams, after all. All of this reading was done in the Upper Radcliffe Camera, which also reminded me of the increasingly pressing need to find a summer job. The two seem unrelated, but places that are fairly rarely visited have a way of making your mind jump back to what was being thought about when last there.

Thanks to Claire, I even got a copy of the information sheet on the upcoming statistics exam. Part A is a multiple choice and short answer component, centred around general principles in statistics, as elaborated in Dr. Tilley’s lectures. For that, I will definitely want to read the relevant chapters from a good statistics textbook. Part B is interpretation of statistical tables, such as are output by STATA and found in many American international relations journal articles. Having looked over the description, I am not terribly worried. Still, it’s something I will need to devote a couple of days to, at least, during the next ten days or so.

Ever More Banking Frustrations

After months of trying, I finally got access to NatWest Online Banking. As I have come to expect, it includes a powerfully counterproductive security feature. Instead of entering a PIN or password, it forces you to put, say, the 3rd, 5th, and 12th characters of the password into little boxes. This basically means that you need to write your password down, number off the letters, enter the numbers they want, and destroy it. It is completely contrary to convenience and introduces a whole new security failure of visible passwords all over the place or the need to securely destroy them. As punishment for such idiocy, I shall simply not use their credit card unless absolutely necessary. Based on what I’ve seen, I can’t begin to comprehend why Britain is a financial services hub. Banking here is a tragicomic business.

  • First Oxford exam in ten days…
  • photo.sindark.com now automatically links to my Photo.net page.
  • More family members that I thought are apparently reading the blog. My greetings to you all. I shall have to be on my best behaviour, henceforth.
  • Arthur: “What happens if I push this red button?”
    [noise]
    Ford: “What happened?”
    Arthur: “A light came on and said ‘Please do not push this button again.'”
    Related concept: the self-referential warning sign
  • As far as Google is concerned, the blog is still a real mess. The old URL still has hundreds of links to it, now all broken. Hopefully, a few crawls over the next few months will fix things. Until then, I will try to stop moving things around.

Review: The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood

A clever take on an old tale, namely Homer’s Odyssey, Atwood’s short book manages to be critical without being abrasive. It definitely makes for an interesting complement to a text that has become central to so many literary and narrative traditions. In addition, there are a great many clever little nods to Greek myth and subsequent literature. I especially appreciated the sometimes-overt, sometimes-sly references to Tennyson.

The best thing about the book is certainly the character of Penelope as the narrator: speaking from Hades and interrupted on occassion by contributions from a chorus consisting of her murdered maids, around whom the story also revolves. The anachronism is handled skillfully, as aspects of modern and classical fiction sit side by side in the same way as Penelope’s observations about the ancient and modern world. This is the work of a confident author.

The book is concise to the point that there isn’t an enormous amount that can be said about it save that it’s clever and well worth the time it takes to read.

Abbreviated day

Turtle

I completed a lengthy scholarship application today, as well as my absentee voter registration. I think I can feel justly proud about both, even though past form indicates that only one of the two will bring back a positive response. I also read a good chunk of the Atwood book and the introduction to Hume. Significant progress so far, reading about neorealism: virtually none. Likewise for statistics.

Of course, after printing and signing all the forms, I learned that today was a bank holiday and I could not send them. One more task for tomorrow, I suppose. Given that I am meant to meet Claire at ten in the morning, I should have ample time for it.

Tonight was really very interesting, but I’m not particularly in the mood to talk about it. As such, I shall have to leave you all in suspense. Life’s cruel, isn’t it?

People should understand that this is a good sign, insofar as my well being goes. The more interesting things I have to do, the less I blog.

The year ahead

Garden door

On the first day of the year, it seems wise to look ahead. There are two terms left during this year at Oxford: Hilary Term, which begins on January 15th and ends on March 11th, and Trinity Term, which begins on April 23rd and ends on June 17th. There will also be exams: one on statistics on the 13th of this month and then three more in April, before Trinity Term begins. Passing the qualifying exams is necessary for passing the M.Phil.

From June 17th until early October, I will have a summer break. While I am fairly certain it has to involve a good amount of work on my thesis, it will probably be necessary for me to work for money as well. One ideal job would be a research position in Oxford. I could live here, use the libraries, and hopefully get a good amount of research done for my thesis as well. Another appealing option is to work at something fairly remunerative in London. That would help me reduce student debt, as well as giving me the chance to live in a fascinating and dynamic city. All this is just fantasy at the moment, however, since I have no real leads on summer jobs. Yet another thing that needs to be done in the near future.

With the first inter-term break coming to a close, I note with dismay that I haven’t done much of what I hoped to. I did do some cooking and improve my diet a lot. I also read a few books and travelled. I got no exercise to speak of and took no photos on film (though I took many digital ones). I also got a whole slew of things related to the blog done. It should be able to happily maintain its present state for some time.

Now seems a good time to buckle down and complete some more items from that list, carry out some long-delayed paper correspondence, and generally get on top of things before Hilary Term begins.

Having just finished another issue of The Economist (I have read hundreds and will read hundreds more), I note with dismay that my vision seems to be worsening. While I can do well enough with books, magazines, and computer screens, signs across the road require squinting and, sometimes, greater proximity in order to parse. Better to be increasingly nearsighted than farsighted, I suppose, for someone for whom life is likely to involve a really massive amount of reading. All the same, it’s with some regret that I consider bringing the glasses which I first acquired before my first batch of university exams due to these kinds of difficulties back into the regular rotation.

  • I need to dispatch the last documents for the Chevening application, immediately.
  • The same goes for my absentee ballot request.
  • Does anyone from the IR M.Phil program have the sheet that was apparently distributed about the contents of the quantitative methods exam? If so, I would very much appreciate if I could borrow it in order to make a copy.
  • Talking with Neal, Drew, and Astrid over MSN this morning was very enjoyable. I am grateful again and again for the extent to which modern communication technology lets me keep in touch with friends across the world.
  • Trying to update my personal financial projections for the new year, I saw the more difficult side of all of that. Six accounts in two currencies at three different banks and linked to two credit cards from differnt banks in different currencies do not make for easy bookkeeping.

First post of ’06

First photo from Claire's partyWell, what a party. Cricket, port, and Moroccan food. My thanks to Claire for bringing it all together. More comprehensive reporting later.

I was under-dressed for the occasion, taking ‘black tie’ to mean ‘the most formal clothes that you own.’ I hope I wasn’t judged too harshly for showing up in a business suit. The atmosphere seemed fairly laid-back, despite the constant pitter-patter of flash capacitors. Quite possibly, the now-ubiquitous digital camera is the attainment of Bentham’s concept of the panopticon.

This party was definitely smaller than the first party I attended amidst the university offices. There was a lot of good conversation, particularly about strategic studies stuff with a young man who I hope I will meet again. He looks particularly quizzical in this photo.

In any case, I hope everyone enjoyed themselves as much as I did. It was amusing to arrive back at Wadham, three hours into the first day of the new year, and chat with the night porter for a few minutes. My best wishes to all those in Wadham, to my family, and to friends around the world. May this next orbit be a better one than the one which preceded it.

Nightpiece, by James Joyce

Gaunt in gloom,
The pale stars their torches,
Enshrouded, wave.
Ghostfires from heaven’s far verges faint illume,
Arches on soaring arches,
Night’s sindark nave.

Seraphim,
The lost hosts awaken
To service till
In moonless gloom each lapses muted, dim,
Raised when she has and shaken
Her thurible.

And long and loud,
To night’s nave upsoaring,
A starknell tolls
As the bleak incense surges, cloud on cloud,
Voidward from the adoring
Waste of souls.

The poem above, from which the name of my old blog was taken, was first given to me by Sarah Johnson (now Webster) when she was visiting the University of British Columbia in 2001.

I have always appreciated it more for the sound than for the meaning; a trend that is shared between the music and the poetry I enjoy. I almost never engage with trying to find a meaning. I prefer to just let them suggest themselves to me, though the sound and structure of their language.