a sibilant intake of breath – Page 844 – climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction

On the road to a Harper government?

What seemed inconceivable a few weeks ago is becoming the stuff of the most cautious news coverage: Canada’s 39th government might be led by the Conservative Party under Stephen Harper. Having just read an endorsement of them in The Globe and Mail, the traditionally Liberal supporting Canadian newspaper, I can see the legitimacy of many of the Globe’s concerns with today’s Liberals. Too much time in government has had a negative effect on the Liberals. Paul Martin has proved, at best, a lacklustre leader who did not bring the kind of political energy or policy changes many of us hoped for in the post Chretien era. What I dispute much more is their conclusion that the Conservatives can be trusted as an alternative.

How then should we look at the question of the Tories in power? The first issue to come up for me is the one of values. While Stephen Harper has tried hard to reinvent himself and bring his party to the centre, it’s reasonable to ask whether they will be able to endure there. A policy platform including things like minimum sentences – as classically counterproductive conservative policy – makes me wonder about this. So too, the possibility of government by a party with its political centre of mass in Alberta.

Ultimately, one cannot wish, as I have often done, that there was an alternative party of government in Canada and then automatically reject one that emerges, looking as though it could fill that role. While I don’t like a lot of what is in the Tory platform, I can respect any party that is able to earn the support of a large number of Canadians and I think Canadian democracy is the stronger for the inclusion of such parties in the process. The presence of real debate and the possibility of losing power are essential in a system of parliamentary democracy.

Perhaps the best that can be hoped for is a relatively short period with the Liberals out of power. Hopefully, during that time, the bulk of the social progress Canada has recently made, on issues like gay rights, will not be reversed. Perhaps a Harper government would also be able to do something to rebuild Canada’s international position: as I dearly hoped Paul Martin would do. In the process of cutting the deficit, Canada has slashed foreign aid and our international diplomatic presence. If Canada is going to maintain its role as a helpful fixer and leader in peacekeeping (a mantle that has already badly slipped), we need to commit to the armed forces at a level that reflects the operational tempo of a Canadian military increasingly committed to a large number of complex places and projects around the world. The danger, or at least a danger, is that the Tories will focus instead on hopelessly misguided policies like militarizing the Arctic: an action that would serve virtually no Canadian interest.

A spell out of government may even allow the Liberals to rebuild themselves: shedding some of the excess that has arisen from a long stretch in government and hopefully reforming its leadership. Obviously, if Martin loses, his position as party leader will become untenable. Given the many successes of these twelve years of Liberal government, and given the relatively painless nature of the transition of power from Chretien to Martin, the latter man would have nobody to blame but himself.

The Animal Lab Protest

When I walked across central Oxford to return The Life Aquatic, I found the city suffused with a very heavy police presence, on account of the protest that was held today against the Oxford animal lab. Presumably, that was also the reason for the 10m tall, metal-covered and razorwire-topped fence around the lab construction site itself that I saw yesterday. While it’s always a bit unsettling to see hundreds of police officers, this group was much less intimidating than most I have seen. Firstly, they were all in reflective yellow. While I am sure there were other officers dressed in civilian clothes, it is still much more reassuring to see patrols of twenty yellow-jacketed officers with faces uncovered than the black riot gear clad police forces that I’ve seen in Seattle, Washington D.C., Prague, and elsewhere. Secondly, while in North America they would have been bristling with automatic weapons, here they were visibly armed with nothing more than pepper spray and low-profile batons.

With regards to the cause of the protest itself, I’ve said before that I think it’s a misguided campaign: and not only because of some of the objectionable tactics that have been employed by protesters.

While animals do have some level of moral considerability, that does not automatically preclude the moral legitimacy of animal testing for medical purposes. Obviously, it’s not a thing that should be done lightly or capriciously and efforts should be made to minimize both how much such testing takes place and the level of suffering inflicted in the course of it. For the foreseable future, however, animal testing will be a necessary part of medical research and development. There is a balance that must be struck between the development of things like new medicines and surgical techniques, their thorough testing, and the decent treatment of animals. Already, Britain has in place rigorous protection for laboratory animals. British animal labs are inspected more than ten times a year, usually at unannounced times: much more often than in most countries. 85% of medical experimentation in Britain is conducted on rats and only 2% of all procedures cause “severe pain or distress.”

The Oxford animal lab is also a particularly poor target for public anger, given that it is meant to consolidate existing Oxford labs rather than provide new capacity for animal experimentation. Partly, the move to consolidate has been motivated by the property destruction that has become an unwelcome feature of the protest campaign.

Indeed, that protection extends far, far beyond that extended to the millions of food animals that are slaughtered here annually, as well as elsewhere in the world, to provide for the tables of British consumers. Like other developed countries, Britain has an industrial meat industry that I am certain would shock and appall most consumers if they had a good sense of how it operates. The fact that 75% of American poultry inspectors refuse to eat chicken should be indicative of something. Those concerned with animal welfare should pay greater attention to what they buy and eat, before moving to condemn practices that are necessary for the advancement of important humanitarian goals.

As Spencer pointed out on his blog, The Globe and Mail – bastion newspaper of the centre-left in Canada – has given its endorsement to the Tories. It is looking more and more like we’re headed for a Harper government. This is a prospect I find very worrisome.
Lots of IR people are apparently going to the James Bond bop at St. Antony’s tonight. (Roham is on the poster.) For my part, I feel more like reading, especially after the enormous eight egg veggie omelet I cooked and ate with Nora.
Neal is leaving China tomorrow. I wish him a safe journey back to Vancouver.
Going to http://photo.sindark.com/ automatically forwards you to my Photo.net page: where I post my more successful attempts at photography.
This FAQ for Canon EOS cameras has some really good information in it, presented in an accessible manner.

Hilary term (unofficially) begins

Today was a microcosm of the whole Oxford experience. I saw Louise off in the morning, then spent a few hours preparing for a statistics exam that was much harder than I anticipated. It included a lot of the kind of math that would be fine with a few practice homework assignments but is daunting to see for the first time during an examination. Likewise, the analysis portion expected an awful lot: given that the marks balance indicates you should spend 45 minutes on it. That said, it’s behind me now and I am reasonably sure I got the 53.8% that I need to pass the course.

Afterwards, a whole swarm of IR M.Phil students descended on The Turf. Spending an hour or so with them reminded me about all the best thing Oxford offers: namely the company of excellent peers. I know I’ve praised the cooperative spirit of this group before, but it’s a make-or-break issue for me. Along with my name on some distant piece of paper, I am working for the respect of these people, and partly because I feel like I am engaged in a cooperative enterprise with them. I am honoured to be part of such a group.

In my pigeon hole today were letters to Mr. Ilaycky (from the Wadham Hall Manager) and Mr. Iinyckyi (from the Graduate Studies Office).¹ The first was about my ongoing attempt to opt out of all college meals. The second was my first term official evaluation from Dr. Hurrell. In the spirit of transparency, I reproduce it below:

Milan appears to be settling in very well both to Oxford and to the course. We have had four substantive meetings this term and he has written papers on US foreign policy, WWI, the Middle East, and China. The papers have been very well prepared and based on a good range of reading. We have discussed some of the ways in which he might revise his essay-writing. But, overall, he is a very strong student and this has been an excellent start to the M.Phil.

Nothing too colourful, but it’s good to know that I am working at approximately the right level. The real test comes once I need to start producing original research. Claire, Alex, and I discussed thesis titles while at The Turf tonight. My idea: “Overspecialize and you Breed in Weakness: Fostering Communication Between Epistemic Communities Related to World Fisheries.” It’s a work in progress.

While it feels more than a bit audacious, perhaps I should record my impressions of Dr. Hurrell, just to balance out the record. My conversations with him have been engaging – so much so that I frequently walk out of them feeling really energized and convinced that important and original things can be done here. I appreciate the way our dialogue seems to allow each to feed off the other: a process of conceptual exploration that uses the essay I wrote as a starting point, rather than the singular focus of discussion. Again, the real test will come with the more personal work next year.

Tonight, there is an MCR welcome back party in Wadham. I’ve also been invited to meet up with a group of the M.Phil people. It’s an invitation I feel inclined to accept. Ultimately, the people are a lot more important than having finished an extra couple of hours of reading. Indeed, it is largely my relationships with people in the program that constitute the motivation to do as well as I can.

No end of post errata tonight.

[1] It’s spelled Ilnyckyj. Nobody would ever try to spell it from memory, so all my problems arise from people who try to correct the spelling because it looks overly insane to them. Fair enough, but that’s how it’s spelled.Oh, one thing: walking to the exam today, I saw that a really serious, almost Israeli-security-barrier class wall has been erected around the construction site for the animal lab. While I won’t get into the ethics and politics of animal testing right now, I think the protesters are really missing the point.

I never quite got the hang of Thursdays

With the first inter-term break nearly complete, I have finished one sixth of my total academic time in Oxford. I think this is now the longest I have ever spent without being in Vancouver. While I am still profoundly uncertain about what I will do this summer, it is still comforting to have the overall shape of the next two years laid out before me. I think I’ve done fairly well this term, on a number of fronts, though it will be nice to get my official assessment from Dr. Hurrell, just to see what he thinks in formal terms.

This afternoon, I successfully reprovisioned myself with peppers, free range eggs, lots of kidney beans, cheese, etc. It seemed a good thing to do before the term started, though carrying home £25 worth of groceries (much of it canned) is an activity even less pleasant than revising for tomorrow’s statistics exam.

This weekend, I need to complete the first week’s reading for the core seminar, as well as get a good start on the first week’s reading for the qualitative methods course that is happening this term. Happily, some of the books for the core seminar are also reading my supervisor assigned to me for the break. Due to the mass of reading that remains to be done once the stats exam is dispatched, I should have the most profound hesitance about going to the MCR welcome back party tomorrow night.

I never did get my hands on one of the statistics textbooks, though I suppose there is an outside shot of having the chance to peruse one tomorrow morning, before the exam but after I see Louise off on her return to Lancaster. I am very thankful overall for the statistics courses I took at UBC: especially the statistics for pharmacy students course I took with Alan Donald. Like Farshid Safi (with whom I did differential calculus at UBC), he is a very funny guy and a professor who I highly recommend on the basis of helpfulness, competence, and personality.

I am not entirely certain whether this is a formal Oxford exam, in the sense that I need to wear the whole silly robe and bow tie combination. It’s not happening in the Examination Schools, but it still seems safest to wear the whole ensemble, just in case. I borrowed a graduate robe from the lodge, for this purpose.

Another Mac OS X tip: spend $20 and get yourself an Optical Wheelmouse or the Logitech equivalent. It is infinitely more pleasant to use for long periods than a trackpad or single button Apple mouse. I recommend setting it up so that pressing the third mouse button (the wheel) has the same effect as pressing F9 in the normal setup of Entourage: showing all windows simultaneously. I wish I had a fourth button to map to the F11 equivalent.
Guinness contains 260 calories a pint.
If anyone I know in Oxford wants to borrow The Life Aquatic, they are welcome to do so. A quirky and extremely funny film, I recommend it to people who enjoy slightly absurd comedy. It needs to be returned to the County Library by Saturday, however.
Is anyone else disappointed about EU standardized passport stamps? My child’s passport from when I first went to Europe was much more interesting looking than my monotonously stamped current one.
Just to remind people, the deadline for ORS scholarship applications is January 20th, and you cannot apply for any other university or departmental scholarships unless you apply for this one as well.
On heavily caffeinated days, like the last two, I find myself enormously more likely to be startled by unexpected events: such as suddenly seeing someone enter the room, or turning the corner in a hallway to see someone close to me. The fact that I had something of a reputation for shocked responses to such stimuli when I was at UBC is not unrelated to my $250 a year Starbucks budget. Having hardly consumed any caffeine over the break (barring the occasional cup of tea or coffee with a friend), it’s surprising to see such skittishness return.

Things to do in Vancouver

I’ve been asked to provide a list of things to do in Vancouver, for the benefit of people visiting. For the critical reason that it is not statistics, I am going to do so now.

The first area to address is the ‘classic touristy stuff’ category. Included within it are both things worth seeing and things better avoided. I would definitely suggest going up Grouse Mountain but, if at all possible, I highly recommend doing so by climbing either the Grouse Grind or the Baden Powell Trail. Both would provide a much more authentic Western Canadian experience. Both are fairly energy intensive trails, but nothing that a young and fit person wouldn’t be able to deal with. A less strenuous option in the same area is to walk up or down Capilano Canyon, either from or to Cleveland Dam.

Also in North Vancouver is the Capilano Suspension Bridge. My advice: skip it. It’s one of those ‘drive a whole tour bus full of (probably German or Japanese) tourists with digital cameras and expose them to actors in period clothing’ kind of places. If you want to see a suspension bridge, I recommend the one in Lynn Canyon. It’s free and there are a number of nice hikes there. You can walk around Rice Lake (very easy), up to Lynn Headwaters (still easy, but longer), up to Norvan Falls (more of a challenge), or all the way up Hanes Valley, up Crown Pass, and then down Grouse Mountain (a serious day-long trek, with an interesting but difficult to navigate boulder field segment).

Among more urban attractions I would recommend: Granville Island, a kind of cultural conglomeration under the Granville Street Bridge, built on former industrial land. It features a number of good theatres, such as the Arts Club. Check what’s playing. Also located there: a number of good markets and restaurants. A good place for souvenir shopping.

Downtown is worth a bit of a wander, but I would avoid Granville Street. Instead, walk westward along Robson Street towards English Bay. That route passes some of my favourite restaurants in the city. Tropika, not far past the provincial courthouse, is an excellent Thai/Malaysian restaurant which is ideal for going to with a group. Farther along, Hapa Izakaya is one of Vancouver’s funkiest contemporary places, serving modern Japanese food in a unique atmosphere. Farther still, where Robson meets Denman, you will find Kintaro – an authentic Asian noodle house popular with the business crowd, Wild Garlic, a fun little bistro with good drink specials, and Tapas Tree, a safe option for non-adventurous diners that still offers some interesting menu items.

Once you get to Denman, walk southwards along it, possibly stopping for gelato at one of many places nearby or for a coffee at the Delany’s there. Alternatively, ask someone to direct you to the nearby liquor store and watch the sun set while sitting against a log in English bay with a bottle of two of the excellent local Granville Island Breweries beers. I recommend their amber ale and the winter ale, if it’s in season.

North and east of the central area of downtown, you find Gastown, which is probably worth a bit of a look as well. It’s right beside some of the dodgiest areas not only in Vancouver, but in any city I’ve visited, so watch out. The waterfront between the Pan-Pacific Hotel and Coal Harbour (next to Stanley Park) is also a nice walk. For something longer, you can extend it all the way around the sea wall, under the Lions Gate Bridge, and then back around into English Bay. A bit less ambitiously, you can cross the causeway leading to the bridge, walk around one side of Lost Lagoon, and reach English Bay along one of a number of nice paths.

Personally, I would recommend visiting the campus of the University of British Columbia. If you do, don’t miss the fantastic view from the escarpment near Place Vanier (ask some students how to get there). Consider walking down the wooden steps to Wreck Beach: Vancouver’s nude beach and an attractive place to visit any time of year. If you carry on northwards, along the beach, you will pass two spotlight towers installed during the second world war in case of Japanese invasion. Farther still are Jericho and Spanish Banks: really nice beaches to visit in the summer to swim, windsurf, or have a bonfire.

Another nice expedition is to catch the Seabus from its downtown terminal at the base of Seymour Street across Burrard Inlet to North Vancouver. It only costs $2 or so and it gives you a nice view of the harbour. The other terminus is at Lonsdale Quay: worth a bit of a look for its own sake. A few blocks up Lonsdale Avenue, you will find Honjin: one of many cheap and excellent sushi restaurants in Vancouver.

If you want to eat on the cheap, the 99 cent pizza downtown can’t be beaten. Avoid Love at First Bite on Granville. Instead, go to either AM or FM classic (on Smithe and Seymour, respectively) or to my favourite, which is located across Seymour Street from A&B sound, near the 7-11.

Another area worth visiting is Commercial Drive. Either catch the 99 bus down Broadway or one of several buses or the Skytrain from downtown. This street features a number of art galleries, fun cafes, and a nice bohemian atmosphere. It is to Vancouver what SoHo is to New York or what Kensington Market is to Toronto.

There are lots of good theatres in Vancouver: the Orpheum downtown, the Stanley out near Broadway, the Firehall theatre near gastown, and the Chan Centre and Freddy Wood theatres on campus at UBC. Grab a copy of The Georgia Strait to see what is happening, in terms of music and live theatre. It’s free and includes the excellent column “Savage Love.” Look for it in boxes around the downtown area.

Dance clubs really don’t interest me, but the ones people seem to go to are mostly on the northern bit of Granville Street, before you reach the bridge. I would recommend The Cellar (the jazz club on Broadway, not the sleazy dance club on Granville) for some live music and a nice atmosphere.

This is nowhere near a comprehensive list, but it should be enough to get started. Vancouver is a really wonderful city: beautiful, easy to get around in by public transit, and large enough to have a good level of culture. While it can definitely get extremely rainy at times, if you find yourself with some nice weather, I strongly recommend one of the walks or hikes I mentioned above, or something else of your own devising outside.

Good day or weekend trips from Vancouver include Whistler, for skiing or snowboarding as well as general mountain exposure, or Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands.

Stats meeting and Indian food

Compared with the past few days, today was warm, luminous, and bright. Walking to the Manor Road building, Oxford looked like an entirely different place from the cold and drizzly expanse it has been for the better part of the last week. It’s the kind of day that in the midst of which you can’t help feeling more optimistic.

The stats meeting today went fairly well. It was too well attended to work as a cohesive whole and dividing it into smaller groups would have required more centralization than was likely to emerge from such an ad hoc assembly. Regardless, in an informal kind of way we managed to address a few of the issues that had been making me anxious. Hopefully, I will somehow be able to get hold of one of the textbooks before the exam takes place: the libraries I’ve found have all been stripped of their copies. The only thing I am really shaky about is the math behind logit regressions, though I am fairly sure we’re essentially meant to treat it as a black box operation.

Tomorrow, I am determined to rise early, infuse myself with coffee acquired with difficulty from a recalcitrant Starbucks staff this afternoon, and delve into all the inter-term break work I so admirably pledged to complete weeks ago.

Dinner with Louise this evening went well. I maintain that the vegetable Vindaloo at Kashmir on Cowley Road is one of the best examples of the variety I’ve encountered, though my deprivation from tasty ethnic food here makes me more likely to see any example in a good light. Hopefully, I will have the chance to see Louise again before her departure. Oxford shall be a poorer place for her absence, as of Friday.

I got my Hilary Term battels pidged to me today: £964.08, even after all my refunded meals.
The bulletin board on the wall behind my desk is now completely covered with photos, postcards, and miscellaneous reminders. It makes the room feel much richer.
Does human cognition employ Bayesian reasoning? This article makes an interesting case for why it may.
“Westfall” by Okkervil River is quite a good song. My thanks to Tristan for giving it to me initially.
Oh, and Apple, I can’t believe you would be so stupid as to add a spyware-like feature to the newest version of iTunes. How stupid and disrespectful, and just when you are trying to get good press for new products. It’s fairly benign, so I am not really angry, but you really can’t claim to be a superior breed of company if you’re using the same kind of technology for which that lots of other companies are rightly in the doghouse. Turn it off.

Typical exam time conduct

Cleaning and organizing

I did a lot of general housekeeping tonight. I made a full backup of my hard drive, reconciled my school files between the iBook and the terminal server, and copied current and critical files to the USB key. I did all my laundry, cleaned my room, sorted correspondence that has been sitting about, organized books (both those read and those in progress), returned finished Wadham Library books, and cleaned and sorted my dishes, pots, and cutlery. I updated and debugged the whole collection of automatic scripts that deal with some elements of the blog’s operation, as well as email and calendar management. I caught up with all my email correspondence, though I still have a great many letters to write. I even sorted my huge collections of used envelopes, plastic shopping bags, and cardboard boxes. While I do find uses for them, I continuously find myself gaining more at a rate that exceeds the one at which I use them.

You will never see my room so spotless, well-organized, and dust free as in the period leading up to exams. Partly, that’s because stress makes me far more obsessive.

Resurgent interest in hobbies

I cleaned the lenses on both my A510 and Elan 7N (not that the poor girl has seen any action since we got here) carefully and thoroughly. As I’ve said before, I really miss the experience of using an SLR. It’s a superior tool for the capture of images in almost every way. The only disadvantages (which are major) are the cost of film, awkwardness of carrying such a large device, and tendency of people to get scared or at least very unnatural in the presence of large, black, professional-looking cameras. Those caveats aside, I can’t overstate the value of an accurate, high quality viewfinder with heads-up exposure information; a good flash with real flash metering; a high quality overall metering system; good, changeable lenses with USM drives and fast focus, even in low light; seperated focus system and shutter controls; and the existence and intelligent location of intuitive controls that let you do immediately what you would need fiddly menus to do on the A510. All that said, I am unlikely to go back to film in the near future, despite all her charms.

Magnified culinary inclinations

See previous post.

Enough of this nonsense; I should do another 40 minutes of statistics, then go to sleep.

One tip to OS X users making backups: to backup something like your iTunes folder, use the command prompt rather than the GUI. Just open a terminal and type “cp -r -v ” then drag the original version of the folder into the window, followed by the location to which you want it copied. This is faster than using the graphical user interface and one error doesn’t cause the whole operation to stop. Also, it seems to allow much smoother simultaneous use of other applications.

More revision and “How to Eat like a Grad Student”

Today was spent chewing over material from the quantitative methods lectures, looking up key terms online, reading about neorealism, and taking breaks to read The Economist. Such is the natural conduct of an international relations graduate student. Since I proposed the joint study session for the stats exam tomorrow afternoon, I feel I should be well prepared for it.

Looking through the Cabin Fever photos this afternoon, during a study break, I was reminded of how much I miss the people who were there: Tristan, Alison, Jonathan, Nick. Neal, and Meaghan especially. I hope I get the chance to see all of you somewhere, before I leave Oxford in summer of 2007. This is one reason I am glad to have digitized more than 5000 photos before leaving Vancouver.

Motivated largely by the desire to avoid stats, I made an unusually complex dinner tonight. I don’t even know how to categorize it, but I will explain for the benefit of people in similar living arrangements:

How to Eat like a Grad Student
An occassional new feature of a sibilant intake of breath

Preparation time: 20 minutes (if you stagger everything correctly)

Vegetarian (vegans could replace the butter with olive oil and cheese with vegan cheese-like stuff)

Nutrients: calories (potatoes), protein (cheese, beans, tofu), hot sauce

Requires minimal kitchen equipment

Costs less than 5 Pounds

His Dark Materials

Large bowl or plate (courtesy of Margaret)

Sharp knife (in my case, my Swisstool multitool)

Frying pan (courtesy of Sarah)

Microwave oven

Stove (apparently called a ‘cooker’ over here)

Optional: goggles (if your eyes object as much to the sulpher dioxide released by chopped and cooking onions as mine do)

Potatoes (3 medium)

Onions (red, 3 medium)

Kidney beans (1 can, in chili sauce)

Hot sauce of your choice

Tofu (about 100 cubic centimetres)

Sharp Cheddar cheese (about 30 ccs)

Butter (about 10 ccs)

Preparation:

Wash potatoes, cut about halfway through lengthwise to release steam, microwave until cooked.

Heat frying pan to maximum temperature, add butter.

Peel and chop onions into small pieces.

Fry onion pieces in butter until browning.

Add hot sauce.

Chop tofu into 1cc pieces, chop or crumble cheese.

Add can of kidney beans to cooked onions.

Add cheese and tofu.

Add more hot sauce, cook until uniformly warm.

Cut cooked potatoes into pieces or slices

Put onion/bean complex on top of potatoes.

This makes more than enough for one hungry person and tastes way better than the same recipe with any of the components removed. If you add enough hot sauce, it makes a good decongestant if you have a bit of a cold.

With a few more potatoes, this could easily serve two people. It’s a scalable recipe. Actually, this one is good enough that I might even try subjecting another person to it. Cooking for more than one would obviously be dramatically more efficient, as the marginal time for preparing a second portion of the above is dramatically less than the marginal time for preparing the first portion.

The most sensible way to deal with reading for the first core seminar is to delay it until after the exam. The exam finishes at 4:30pm on Friday and the seminar isn’t until the following Tuesday. To do the reading now would waste valuable revision time (or, at least, time I can spend thinking and writing about revising).

As I am sure most people could guess, the two for one deal on strange Superdrug brand energy drinks can lead to brief periods of very high productivity, followed by a pronounced dip characterized by hunger and a weird inability to concentrate. (How to shop like a graduate student: yes, I would like to buy these cans of energy drink and four tubes of discounted toothpaste, paying with a foreign credit card.)
I am looking forward to a pre-departure dinner of Indian food with Louise tomorrow. Delicious, delicious vegetarian curry, dahl, etc on Cowley Road.
Looks like you can’t trust writable CDs for long-term backup. Good thing hard drives are getting so cheap.
Seeing all the IR M.Phils returned from miscellaneous places around the world tomorrow is a much anticipated happening. It’s always a lot easier to motivate yourself to work as part of a working group.

Seeking banking advice from Britons

After another afternoon of trying to deal with NatWest, both online and in the branch, I am seriously considering switching to another bank. Every time I say this, people advocate the bank they use as “much better.” I wonder if I was complaining about another bank, people would start vocally endorsing NatWest.

What I care most about:

Easy, low cost international transfers.
Easy transfer of payments to my college, by bank draft or any other means (ideally, an online electronic transfer).
Good online banking.
Decent interest on savings accounts.
Good customer service.

At present, I am doing as much as possible through my Canadian banks, since they just seem to be better at these things.

The major irritant in doing so is the difficulty of paying the college (it charges an extra 2.5% for credit card payments and my Bank of Montreal MasterCard only gives 1% cash back). Also, it’s annoying to have to keep updating financial records for so many institutions and in light of ever-shifting exchange rates.

Therefore, I ask you, kind British readers, which bank do you recommend and why? If I am going to go through all the bother of opening an international account again, there needs to be a marked improvement. I appreciate your advice.

Stats by daylight, wandering by moonlight

Today was excellent. I saw a broad swathe of Oxford that was unknown before, and did so in good company. Prior to that, I actually got a surprisingly large amount of statistics revision done: quite necessary now that I know I am going into the exam with 66.2%. My assignment grades ranged from 55% to 78%, though not in accordance with how much I thought I understood the material. While it’s my lowest mark ever in a university course, it is one of the higher ones among a class that is intelligent and hardworking in every case. The poor overall performance is an indictment of the course: not the students. It takes considerable restraint to keep from constantly spouting off about how disappointing this one course has been: it did much to sour a term that was otherwise excellent. Anyhow, I will try not to think about statistics except insofar as it involves hammering the meaning of a chi-squared test into my head.

The path along Oxford canal is enormously more interesting than is suggested by its starting point at the Hythe Street Bridge. Walking along it, you pass all manner of weirs and cross a number of interesting bridges: all while passing a flotilla of long canal boats. Eventually, you reach an enormous meadow, both larger and flatter than the Christ Church Meadows, where – if you’re as lucky as I am – a whole pack of horses will wander over to you in search of food. As a place for wandering, I recommend it.

Wednesday, at 1:00pm, there will be a group study session for the quantitative methods exam. It’s happening in the room beside the cafeteria in the Manor Road building, where the Christmas party took place. I encourage people to bring notes, textbooks, questions, etc.
I am hoping to locate one of the two stats recommended textbooks tomorrow. As far as I can tell, the Bodeleian has one of each off site somewhere, and the two copies of the Wonnacott text in the SSL are both out until after the exam. Any suggestions?