For about three and a half hours tonight, I awaited essays from next month’s tutorial students in the MCR. Having exhausted what scaps of newspaper were available, I fell back to reading a copy of Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code, abandoned by some departed grad student.
Two hundred and sixty pages in, and unlikely to proceed [...]

One advantage of not having all of your gear with you (particularly large backpacks) is that it forces a certain parsimony in packing. Given that we are only going for four days and that we will be spending a lot time crushed in a minibus, that is probably for the better. As such, I am [...]

Happy Birthday Bilyana
While walking with Kelly this evening, we found an unusually nice bit of Oxfordshire, accessible through a park near their new flat. If you carry on down St. Aldates and across the Folly Bridge, then farther on down Abingdon Road, you will eventually see a park on the right. There is a small [...]

I have discovered why the rear wheel of my bike keeps going out of alignment and rubbing against the frame: the wheel itself is somewhat bent. No matter how I line it up, there is a warp that causes it to rub against the brake pad once or twice per revolution. Over time, I guess [...]

Google Maps predicts that the drive from Oxford to Shiel Bridge, near the Isle of Skye, will take almost thirteen hours. That seems an excessively long time to traverse less than 550 miles, but they may know things about the character of the roads that I do not. We leave at 8:15am on Thursday.
The weather [...]

The best piece of writing I have come across in the last week or so is a chapter from the Bromley and Paavola book on environmental economics that I have been reading. By A. Allan Schmid, it is called “All Environmental Policy Instruments Require a Moral Choice as to Whose Interests Count.” The argument is [...]