a sibilant intake of breath – Page 845 – 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

Exercising democratic choices

I received my absentee ballot this morning, while I was on my way to give Kelly and one of her sisters a quick peek into the Codrington Library. The electoral calculation for me is ridiculously simple. Only two parties have the slightest chance of winning in North Vancouver: the Liberals, with former mayor Don Bell as their candidate, and the Conservatives, with Cindy Silver as their candidate. Between the two parties, I have a strong preference to the Liberals, based heavily on their social policies. While a degree of corruption and the complacency of a long period in power are bad things, they are not the worst of things.

Since the ballot must be received by 6:00pm Ottawa time on election day, I dropped it into the postbox on my way to the Social Sciences Library to study for the statistics test. For any other Canadians in Oxford, or elsewhere abroad, planning to vote (and you really should, democratic participation is important): time is extremely short for requesting and returning a ballot. If you haven’t already done so, fax off your ballot request right now.

Incidentally, every time I have voted in a federal election, it has been from outside Canada. I last voted for Don Bell from the Vatican. I had more faith in timely delivery by their postal system than the Italian one.

Thinking about procrastination

Today has been a decidedly downpourish day in Oxford, trickling with rain when it wasn’t dumping it in vast quantities. Aside from a brief period spent in a cafe with a couple of friends, it was a pretty resolutely work focused period, with progress made on the neorealism and statistics fronts. I also finished a preliminary read of the first issue of The Economist for 2006. More members of Library Court are back (including Nora, who has returned from visiting Bilyana’s family), so the overall impression of marching towards term time is well established. For a while, I really was labouring under the illusion that school would never resume.

I think the reason why I spend so much time at Starbucks here (reading, not buying their mediocre Christmas Blend) is because it’s the best kitchen substitute I have. Reading in libraries is difficult because of just how acute the desire not to be there becomes. Likewise, reading in my room is difficult due to the presence of ample material for the most entertaining use of time than course related reading. As such, a hybrid of the two is quite helpful. In North Vancouver, that was the dining room table, either in the afternoon or late at night. As long as I had my iPod playing, people could use the living room and kitchen without bothering me at all. The other, oft-mentioned, example is the Fairview kitchens where I recall reading quite happily in the presence of Meghan, Tristan, and Christina at various times. Since the Library Court kitchen is just a kitchen, with no tables at which to sit, there is no such intermediate space in college. The Middle Common Room (MCR) really doesn’t fit the bill for me. The closest approximation, then, is the Cornmarket Street Starbucks: my kitchen by proxy.

As a graduate student, I don’t feel that any kind of reading is entirely irrelevant, especially when in a field as diverse as international relations. Everything from non-fiction books in other fields to contemporary novels has some applicability. Also, I am much more likely to remember and be affected by your average really good novel than I am by this or that piece of historical or theoretical reading in my subject area. Non-course readings therefore falls into a category of quasi-procrastinatory activities, like blogging. It serves a non-trivial purpose, but should not be allocated large amounts of time when there are important, urgent things to be done. That said, it’s better than wasting away hours on things with no redeeming academic, social, or financial value.

When it rains here, it doesn’t seem to become all that much warmer as a result, unlike most of my experience in Vancouver. As such, it was through a miserable combination of cold and wet that I trudged to and from G & D’s, where I spent a productive few hours reading with Margaret. I hope her pair of papers with deadlines looming and upcoming exam all go well. Sheltering in Wadham, I feel sincerest pity for anyone who has to spend a long time out and about tonight.

It should be noted that while the Very Short Introduction to Cryptography was tolerable but fairly basic, the one on David Hume is incredibly boring, and the one on Emotion incredibly speculative, frustrating, and poorly written. I am now firmly resolved to buy no more of them, despite the appeal of the concept.
Many thanks to Alex Stummvoll for the postcard from New Zealand. I hope he had a wonderful time there.
My veteran Columbia shoes have begun to literally fall apart: ripping along seams and falling apart around the sole. As I recall, I bought these shoes with my father more than a year and a half ago. They have served well over that time, and I do not relish the idea of buying shoes here. Shoe shopping is an activity I dread quite enough in Canada, where a pair of solid shoes can cost as little as twenty Pounds, and fear that I will despise on this side of the Atlantic. In the end, I think it’s the little things like that that force most people to return home.
The more miscellaneous living stuff I acquire, the more obvious it becomes that moving to London for a summer job would be a very difficult matter indeed. It would take many expensive, time consuming train or bus journeys. While I might be able to find some kind of storage in Oxford, it would certainly be a pain. Living here would be better for thesis research, anyhow. Hopefully some scholarship will come through and take a bit of the heat off.
This week’s Economist features both a link to a gang-run website (including photos taken in Canada) and a reference to the Dan Savage definition of Santorum, which they cite as being “something indescribable in a family newspaper.”

Heavily school-focused post

Happy Birthday Meghan Mathieson

I went to the country library today with Louise and finished a good chunk of Waltz before signing up for a card and renting a copy of The Life Aquatic. (The local public library here charges you about $7 Canadian to rent a DVD.) My suspicion that Louise would enjoy the film was well founded. Spending time with her today was most enjoyable: how sad that she will be leaving on Friday, the same day as my apprehension-inducing quantitative methods exam will be taking place.

While there is some temptation to express bitterness about how the most interesting thing to happen in Oxford since Michaelmas ended is getting crammed into the last week of break, amidst some frantic studying and preparation, I am resolved to be more grateful than that. Indeed, any opportunity you get to meet someone whom you feel really comfortable, and with with whom you enjoy conversing a great deal, is quite a precious thing. We have resolved to mark her departure with delicious vegetarian Indian food.

I am starting to get nervous about how much is to be done before next term. There is the possibility of being called on to present during the first core seminar, and the attendant necessity to do a good job of the readings and prepare speaking notes. There is the need to do the general and first week reading for the qualitative methods course, which is incidentally being coordinated by my supervisor: Dr. Andrew Hurrell. Finally, there is the need to do a great many small tasks that I put off last term for completion during the break – back when it looked like an incredible luxurious and empty six week span.

Information on the quantitative methods test

At the time when Claire showed it to me, it seemed like a clever idea to photograph the information page on the stats exam. Apparently, it was distributed during the last lab, though I never saw it. While it’s an awkward medium to transcribe from, hopefully doing so will make it stick in my mind. I present it here, somewhat truncated, for anyone in the program who hasn’t seen it. The test is two hours long and has two sections. It will be happening in the St. Cross Building next Friday at 2:30pm. The pass mark is 60%.

The multiple choice and short answer section is based on the following concepts:

1) Descriptive statistics: Types of variables (interval, ordinal, cardinal); Centres of Distributions (mean, median, mode); Spread of Distributions (variance and standard deviation).

2) Sampling and probability: Types of sampling (random sampling, cluster and stratified random sampling, sampling error and non-sampling biases); Probability and probability distributions (models, continuous distributions, the noral distribution).

3) Hypothesis testing and the accuracy of estimates: Accuracy of estimates (calculating and interpreting standard errors, confidence intervals for means and proportions); Hypothesis testing (null and alternative hypotheses, p-values, type I and II errors).

4) Linear regression: Depending and independent variables; Ordinary Least Squares (least squares criterion and error term); Regression model and assumptions; Multiple regression (controlling for other variables, causality, categorical variables as dummies; interaction effects; model building); Regression diagnostics (non-linear relationships, heteroskadisticity, outliers, multicollinearity).

5) Contingency tables and odds rations: Chi-squared test; Contingency tables and expected frequencies; Differences of proportions, calculating and interpreting odds ratios.

6) Logistic regression: Reasoning behind the use of logistic regression for binary variables; Odds ratios and logistic regression; Predicted probabilities for logistic regression.

The second part is based around analysis of the use of statistics in a segment of an IR journal article we will be presented with, something like the last assignment. I can email people the actual jpeg images, upon request.

Overall, it doesn’t look so bad. Most of the above concepts were at least introduced in the Tilley lectures. Reading the relevant chapters from a textbook should fill in the gaps. Moreover, I get the sense that the course directors really don’t consider this a central part of the M.Phil. Otherwise, they would have put in the time and energy to make sure it got decent treatment.

In closing, I can’t resist putting one more link to my statistics play in one act. Despite the mixed reviews, I find it acceptably entertaining.

I was pleased to learn yesterday that more than 1000 people have downloaded the NASCA report from the IRSA webpage since it went online in October.
I’d write something cleverer, but I really should get back to my Earl Gray tea and reading.
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One week of break remains

Anyone who has ever been amused to see the photo of a terrified looking Prince Charles pouring a pint, found in the King’s Arms Pub within Wadham College, might be disappointed to learn that they have the same exact print over at the Angel and Greyhound. I don’t know if either pub was actually the place where the photo was taken, but it certainly diminishes how amusing it is to see it in a second place. It’s like when you’re in Venice and you realize that all the cheap table glass in Murano is identical in each shop and comes from China.

Touring Oxford

This afternoon, I met Spencer and his partner for the World Debating Championships and gave them a walking tour of Oxford. Before carrying on, I should note that Michael Kotrly and his partner won the tournament, a very impressive feat. I know Michael through UBC debate, where I believe I was treasurer during his presidency. My congratulations go out to him for an extremely impressive performance.

The walk, which I recommend to anyone inclined to play tour guide in Oxford, began at Cornmarket and High Street, from which we walked up St. Aldate’s towards the Folly Bridge. Glancing into the Christ Church main quad, we passed The Head of the River and walked along the Isis until the paths diverge northward again along the eastern canal. We followed that up past Magdalen, where I would recommend having a look at the gardens and greenhouses, before turning left and heading back up the high street towards Carfax.

We ducked into University College, through Logic Lane, and passed through two of their quads to see the Shelley Memorial. We then passed St. Mary’s Church and briefly entered the Codrington Library from Radcliffe Square. Leaving the square from the north, we went down Hollywell Street to New College, where I showed them the plague mound and the cloisters (as featured, somewhat incongruously as far as architecture goes, in the most recent Harry Potter film). Leaving New, we walked back up Hollywell Street, had a look through Wadham, the gardens, and library court, before going up Parks Road to Rhodes House and the Natural History Museum.

After looking at the displays there and in the Pitt Rivers museum, we doubled back. One thing I had never noticed before: the Natural History Museum has a stuffed kakapo, of all animals. Those who don’t know what I am talking about are strongly encouraged to read Douglas Adams’ excellent book Last Chance to See.

The last stop of the four-hour tour was The Turf, where we had a pint before the debaters caught their train back to London. It was good to see Spencer. He doesn’t seem to have been too badly grizzled by the extreme responsibilities of his post as President of the UBC Alma Mater Society.

What made today particularly special was seeing a trio of people I have missed a lot over the break. Bilyana is back from her winter break trip home, as are Margaret and Roham. I ran into Bilyana outside Rhodes House while giving the tour and Roham outside the Natural History Museum. We simply must organize a study group for the statistics exam next Friday. Margaret I met after I noticed her light on while walking back from the train station. Though she is mired in work, she still brings a friendly feeling back into the city, as seeing all three friends did. I now believe that term is starting again in a practical, rather than a theoretical, way. It scarcely seemed possible during the days when I wandered an abandoned Oxford from and abandoned Wadham with only excellent conversations with Louise to break the solitude.

Evening in Oxford with Wadham graduates

As part of a general effort to get to know people in my college better, I followed Kelly and her sister Bonnie to the King’s Arms tonight to meet a whole crew of Wadham graduates tonight. Shifting between there and The Mitre, people had a few drinks and conversed. I owe David Patrikarakos for the pint of Guinness he kindly bought me.

Among the graduates who I did not know previously, I was particularly glad to meet a particle physicist working on dark matter and a fellow Vancouverite. In the latter case, the similarities are legion. We both lived near Trout Lake, we both have some connection to North Vancouver high schools (Handsworth and Carson Graham, respectively), and we both did judo with Hiroshi Nishi as an instructor. We both went to UBC and took courses with Dennis Danielson. Given that he did an honours English degree, I am sure we know a lot of the same people.

Incidentally, and before I go on too long about this, there have been a lot of headaches with regards to Wadham people and getting mentioned on the blog. There are those who tremble at the prospect and, when I know who they are, I generally avoid mentioning them at all and certainly avoid saying anything personal. Then there are those who are neutral, those I simply don’t know the position of, and those who are positively irked not to be mentioned. It’s a lot to remember, so my apologies if I slip up from time to time. A few ugly experiences are teaching me to err on the side of caution. If I don’t mention you by name, it’s probably because I barely know you and met you in a context that someone could possibly, maybe find objectionable (like… a pub… gasp!).

Anyhow, the number of Wadham graduate students who I had rarely if ever seen before demonstrates the extent to which a bit more concentration on the social side of college may be warranted. I shouldn’t let my general aversion to loud music and strong aversion to cigarette smoke be too much of a restricting factor. Thankfully, The Mitre is significantly less smoky than the King’s Arms, which is becoming infamous in my mind for an exceptionally high carcinogen count.

The election

Frustrated by scandal and a general sense of dissatisfaction, Canadians want a political party that they can really believe in, rather than support as the least bad option. As the campaign carries on, it is increasingly clear that the Tories are not that party. From mandatory sentencing to militarizing the Arctic, their policies run the gamut from retrograde to foolish. Much as I would love to have an opposition party with a credible chance at serving as a good government, these are simply not them.

The Liberal party deserves some punishment for sleaze and an uninspired agenda under Paul Martin, but the people who would suffer under a Tory government (poor people, people outside Alberta and Ontario) don’t deserve it.

One last note: people should beware direct interpretation of Canadian electoral polls. As I explained to Margaret, the absolute share of the vote has no direct bearing in a Parliamentary system like Canada’s. Since each riding elects an MP and the party with the most MPs is called upon to form a government, all you need in theory is a single-vote win in a plurality of ridings. While that is very unlikely, the same property means that parties with broad national support have an advantage against those with concentrated support. Every extra Tory vote in a solidly blue (Canadian Tories use blue, Liberals use red) riding in Alberta, beyond the winning vote, is effectively wasted. That said, it’s not encouraging to see support for the Conservatives as high as it is, given how their campaign has been unfolding.

According the the Royal Mail registered mail tracking service, my Chevening Scholarship application “has been passed to the overseas postal service for delivery.” Fingers tightly crossed.
Here’s an entry about electoral security being done right in Wisconsin.
Corporate social responsibility, being done wrong by Microsoft.
It’s amusing to note just how frequently some people seem to be Googling themselves and following the links to my blog. Either people Googling themselves or someone at a particular IP address Googling someone else on a near-daily basis.
Tomorrow morning, I am meeting Louise to do some pre-term reading. I shall be extremely glad for her company.

Population and the environment

One spectre that has long haunted the environmental debate is that of population size. Partly, that controversy seems to derive from some of the extremely dodgy characters who have made it a top concern. Plenty of very ill-informed commentators have based doomsday scenarios around population growth figures. Still, there are reasonable people taking a similar line and it does seem intuitively obvious that fewer human beings would put less strain on limited resources, all else being equal. Particularly among those who want to ‘make poverty history’ (a noble goal, though only possible when poverty is measured in absolute terms), it seems clear that six billion people simply cannot live at the level of affluence of today’s richest, barring some massive change in the way resources are acquired and transformed into goods.

The classic environmental liberal argument says that as people become richer, their family sizes start to fall. This may be because they are better educated and women gain both access to birth control and the knowledge and freedom to use it. It may be because people in relatively undeveloped economies use large families as a strategy to avoid poverty in old age. With the advent of banking, pensions, and the like, the need to do so diminishes. The evidence for slowing population growth is certainly strong, with the UN projecting that the human population will peak sometime around 2050.

For me, the absolute number of people on the planet is obviously far less important than the conditions under which they live. At one point in human history, after the Taba explosion, there may have been as few as 2000 human beings on the planet: living in conditions similar to those of a nuclear winter. Obviously, population size and quality of life are not perfectly correlated. By that metric, population can perhaps best be thought of in terms of the effect it has on people’s lives: especially those of women and the poor. The Rawlsian strategy of focusing on the effect on the least advantaged does have an intuitive moral appeal to it.

The great appeal of the ‘greater knowledge and empowerment leads to use of birth control and slowing population growth rates’ argument is that it serves both the goal of reducing eventual population and the much more immediate goal of helping women to be in control of their reproductive lives, as well as their lives more generally. Given how a hugely disproportionate amount of injustice is directed towards women worldwide, and given the huge inherent dangers in childbirth, even in the rich world, this seems an almost universally appealing kind of development.

One last fallacy should be addressed, in closing, though it’s one well covered enough already that I doubt it will be unfamiliar to anyone. It’s not the countries that have hundreds of millions of poor people that are using the majority of available resources. Patterns of consumption are not only too high, when it comes to limited resources, but dramatically skewed towards the richest consumers. Each year, humanity as a whole uses as much oil as forms naturally in about 400 years. Taking a look at who is benefitting from that, it is unjust as well as unsustainable.

I suppose the safe, but less than entirely satisfying, conclusion is that we can’t take an issue like population and make sweeping generalizations about it, without more cautious consideration of what the important aspects of the situation are and how they relate to moral judgments and non-moral facts. Still, it’s not a thing we should shy away from discussing, just because some of the questions and implications are uncomfortable.

The reading continues

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

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

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.