Daily updates – Page 143 – a sibilant intake of breath

Midterms and the importance of the Senate

Talking with friends about the upcoming American midterm elections, there seems to be some confusion about the relative impacts of different outcomes. While I am not an expert on American politics, by any means, the following seems to be the gist:

1. Losing the Senate would be a really big deal. The United States Senate is probably the most powerful legislative body in the world. While the power of the President has increased enormously in the 20th century, the Senate still retains critical powers. Article One of the US Constitution requires Senatorial advice and consent before the United States can enter into foreign treaties, and before the President can make important appointments. A President with a hostile Senate has a seriously constrained field of action.

2. As I understand it, the House of Representatives is much less important, when it comes to the overall ability of the executive branch to govern.

3. The Democrats face an uphill battle to gain control of the Senate. Rick Santorum seems likely to lose his seat in Pennsylvania (as Savage Love readers will no doubt cheer). One seat each in Montana and Ohio are leaning towards Democratic challengers. One each in Missouri, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Virginia could possibly change hands. Finally, the Democrats are defending a vulnerable seat in New Jersey. In order to gain a 50% +1 majority, the Democrats need to swing six seats.

4. Basically, whichever party has the majority in the Senate gets to chair all the committees. This lets them pass along legislation they favour, while forever entrapping legislation they oppose. Many argue that the American Congress (both the House and the Senate) is meant to operate on the basis of consensus. If so, that noble ideal is long lost in contemporary American politics. Controlling committee chairmanships is thus really important.

Those who know more than I do are strongly encouraged to comment. I would love to understand it better myself. With the elections just over two weeks away, and with the composition of the American government rather important for the immediate future of the world, it would be good to have increased understanding.

I lost my laundry card, I lost my mind

Does it not seem amazing that an envelope containing my Codrington reader card, my St. Antony’s laundry card, and all my other Oxford-specific cards (except my Bodleian card) could remain unfound, despite four intensive searches of my entire room, since my return from Vancouver? I’ve gone through every drawer and pocket and folder and box. I’ve flipped through binders and looked through stacks of books. I have dug around under and behind furniture. All told, I have spent at least six hours searching.

All this in a room no more than four paces by six paces. The part likely to make me bitter is the reasoning behind putting them in an envelope in the first place: I didn’t want to lose them while I was in Vancouver.

The time has come, I think, to abandon the search, acknowledge that the cards are permanently vanished or destroyed, and replace those that are worth replacing. How much fun it will be to finally locate them, when I am in the process of moving out next June.

More of you should get Skype

I got lots of thesis reading done today, as well as spending a good couple of hours conversing with friends and family members back home. More friends around the world should install Skype. Since arriving in Oxford, I have spent hundreds of hours exchanging text messages with 126 different people. That said, while an hour or two spent exchanging MSN messages can certainly keep you abreast of what another person is up to, the psychological significance of even a twenty minute phone call seems much greater.

For a conversation between two computers running Skype, there are no fees at all. All you need, in order to use Skype, is a Mac or PC with a high speed internet connection (pretty much any university network is more than fast enough), headphones, and a microphone. There are even Skype compatible phones. The headphones aren’t really required, but if you don’t use them you can get odd echo effects from the 80ms delay that tends to exist for messages between Oxford and the west coast of North America.

While I can use Skype to call normal phones (Canada to the UK costs €0.017 a minute), it always seems like something of an imposition on my part – especially since most of my friends can only really be reached on cell phones. Seeing that someone is online and interested in talking is a useful affirmation of the wisdom of giving them a ring. I haven’t personally been in the habit of leaving Skype running, even when I am at home, primarily because so few of my friends use it. That said, I will make a point of remaining online more often, so as to reward those who take the advice above.

PS. On account of today’s atrocious weather, I was unable to produce a photo worth putting online. Next time I get a good batch, I will backdate one to this entry.

PPS. This ongoing discussion of the moral importance of inequality is highly interesting.

Another pang of thesis doubt

Speaking with Tom Rafferty after the film tonight, I had a bit of a realization. Previously, all my enthusiasm about the thesis project has been tied to the real conviction that these questions are fascinating and important. The problem, of course, is that there are no prizes for picking out interesting questions – especially the obvious ones that everyone sees as interesting. You need to say something new, and I don’t see how I am going to do that.

PS. This has happened enough times now for me to know that Lee will leave a terrifying comment^*, and I will start mentally enumerating ‘places other than academia’ where one can spend one’s life.

* This is not to imply that the comments are not helpful and appreciated; indeed, a bit of raw terror is just the thing to motivate thesis progress.

The History Boys

North Americans trying to understand Oxford, as a British cultural and social institution, should go see The History Boys, while it is still playing at the Phoenix. If that sounds like an assignment, take heart: it is really very funny, even if you cannot appreciate all the regional humour. It will certainly leave you looking at your own position a bit differently, though I can see at least three general kinds of lessons you might take from it. I am not going to list them.

Comparisons I have heard made to Dead Poets Society are both apt and entirely wrong. That film is a reflection of two cultures: American east coast boarding schools and Hollywood filmmaking. Substitute both English elite schools and British comedy, and you might be talking about similar vehicles for the delivery of very different references.

Watching this film here was much like watching The Rocky Horror Picture Show in full costume, singing along and throwing rice. The film may not reflect reality directly, but it throws a kind of fun slant on it that allows you to position yourself within the public statements being made. The very last scene is also quite clever.

One quick comment, in closing: in North America, you would never see a film with a good six or seven minutes of all-French dialogue. And if you did, the proportion of the audience laughing at the jokes would probably drop off sharply. While my French has never been rustier (a long decline, dating back to elementary school with an upward blip during my time in Quebec), I could grasp more than enough to be laughing along.

Mica in two new Google Idol contests

My brother Mica has two new entries in the Google Idol video competitions. Partly thanks to strong support from readers of this blog, his video for “Walk Idiot Walk” won a previous competition. This is also documented on Wikipedia.

His two videos that will be in the running are:

“The Jock Rock” in the semi-final of the Pop competition
“I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor” seemingly yet to be listed

I will post updates as the status of the videos change. See also Mica’s website.

New voting process

The voting works quite differently from last time. Instead of allowing one vote per IP address per day, it allows one vote per user account per round. They are tracking IP addresses used for account creation, so trying to set up fifty accounts from the same computer will land you in trouble. (Of course, if you set up fifty and used them to vote for the video that you want to lose the round, it might be a highly effective strategy.)

One word of concern: it doesn’t say anywhere on the site that they will not be selling the email addresses used in the signup to every spammer from Nigeria to Philadelphia. As such, I recommend using your most spam-ridden and least important email account to sign up. Last time, they could at least count on people seeing the banner ads each day as they came back to vote. In order to replace that income stream, you have to at least suspect that they are harvesting emails for profit. You cannot just give a fake email address, like when leaving comments on this site, because they will send you an activation code that you need in order to vote.

Everyone’s least favourite piece of mail

After having an enjoyable dinner in hall last night, I found the statement of account for my battels waiting in my shared pigeon hole. £10,360 in university fees (up 4% from last year) and £1,847 in college fees (up 2.5%). Taken together, that is 74.5% of Canada’s GDP per capita, or 266% of Estonia’s.

The university fees are certainly more defensible. They cover my supervisions, the Social Sciences Library, and myriad other things closely related to education. Given that the Wadham library is of little or no use to me, I do not live in college, and I would not be eating there if it wasn’t part of a scholarship, it is a bit hard to see how a year as a member of the college is worth as much as two MacBooks (or a MacBook and a nice dSLR). The college fees don’t even include printing.

Adieu to Oxford PhotoSoc

Today, we had to choose whether to join the Photo Society and pay the money or stop attending the classes. I have decided to do the latter. With about forty people present, they are too big to get through any decent sample of the work in just an hour. Also, while some of the things being discussed are at a level that would be useful for me, a lot of really basic stuff gets talked about as well. I don’t need to spend an hour and pay £3 to learn something about Photoshop that Neal taught me in two minutes. If I was going to use the dark rooms, the £30 a year fee would be very reasonable, but the last thing I need is some other pursuit to draw me farther away from thesis and seminar reading. Indeed, I have a date with the latter for the rest of tonight that I expect to take a good chunk of it.

After my final PhotoSoc session, I had dinner at Lady Margaret Hall tonight with Richard Albert: a Canadian, formerly at Yale, doing the Bachelor of Civil Laws degree. Confusingly, it is a master’s level program, and it is entirely about common law. In any case, conversing with him was most interesting – an experience that will hopefully be repeated before our respective tenures in Oxford come to an end. Talking about Canadian constitutional law definitely tested my memory of classes with Gateman and Tennant. It is the sort of thing entirely too interesting to be devoted as little attention as can be spared for it.

No more attention can be spared for anything, at this moment, When your seminar is the next day, and the possibility of having to present fills you with dread, you know you are in for a long night of reading.

[Update: 1:00am] I think the page on the wiki for the Developing World option is starting to shape up nicely. It should be a good reference, in the end, for paper writing and exam preparation. Fellow members of the program, feel free to use it. Even better, sign up and add something to it.

[Update: 2:00am] Yes, I do realize that today’s photo is a perfect demonstration of why, instead of using the B&W mode built into my digicam, I should shoot in colour and then render into B&W using Photoshop’s channel mixer. I wish there was a mechanism by which I could compose with the LCD of my Canon A510 in B&W mode, but have it retain colour information for such purposes.

Lecture-heavy day

As is the norm on my lecture-packed Tuesdays, some really interesting ideas have come up today: on everything from international law to the Israeli security barrier and the mathematical models that dictate funding structures within the World Bank. Of course, this contributes to my terror about both having to be a generalist and being expected to know a very great deal about particular areas. This is an anxiety I will bury for the moment.

One note to myself, in future: when you are practically seething with disputational energy during a presentation, as during a debate round where you can see a good half-dozen critical factual and logical flaws, remember the following:

Let someone else ask the first question. They will get things started and help set a congenial tone.
Decide exactly what to say in advance.
Deliver it deadpan, with no concealment of how logically lacking you found the argument, but with no vitriol either.

Setting out these personal suggestions isn’t evidence of some kind of egregious personal lapse, but rather a general observation based on one of today’s question and answer sessions. Kudos to a friend of mine, for showing me how it’s done.

If I have the time and energy, I will write about some mathematical observations relating to today’s presentation on the World Bank at a later time.

Concise

At Oxford, you get to spend time with some awfully interesting people.