Daily updates – Page 166 – a sibilant intake of breath

Electronic botherations

I obviously haven’t been making frequent enough offerings to whichever god watches over electronic devices. First, my digital camera got some kind of dust or mold permanently inside. Since it’s not a camera with lenses that can be switched, there is really no way to open it up to clean the senror. The dust is sitting directly on the sensor and the dark blotches it produces need to be manually removed from every photo that I want to look presentable, especially those with large areas of a single colour. That camera was itself a replacement for the first one I got, which had a defective flash that always fired at full power.

Today, my iPod simply stopped playing any sound in one ear. The iPod is also a replacement for the one I originally got, which would pause randomly and for no reason if it was not kept perfectly still. Hopefully, cleaning the jack for the headphones will fix this newer problem, because my experience of sending the first iPod back to Apple was hellish and the one they sent back (more than a month later) had a click wheel that was off kilter.

I wonder whether I have particularly bad luck with electronics or whether I am just pickier about them working properly and more willing to go through the hassle of getting them fixed. Both my Sony and Panasonic portable CD players got sent back to the manufacturer for defects. My GPS receiver is actually the replacement for a replacement. It’s grandfather had abysmal reception, even compared to other identical models, and its father died for no apparent reason during the second Bowron Lakes trip.

I should not, in any case, let these things distract me from the task of finishing my core seminar paper for tomorrow. It’s on whether order and justice are compatible in international relations. Obviously, it’s the kind of topic that anyone with normative concerns will feel fairly strongly about after five years of studying IR at the university level. That makes it both easier and harder to write upon. In the interests of not being up all night, I shall get back to it.

PS. This week’s readings on normative theory have been the first time I read a lot of Dr. Andrew Hurrell’s work. It has been really interesting, well written, and suited to my research interests. I think I will probably take normative theory as one of my two optional subjects next year. Overall, I think it meshes well with a research project focused on environmental politics.

PPS. It seems like it might actually be my headphones which are defunct. While they seemed to work in my iBook before, they do so now only when you hold them in a certain way. I will need to try out the iPod with another pair.

PPPS. Upon further experimentation, the problem lies with the headphones, not the jack on my iPod. While they work if you twist them in a certain way in the iBook socket, they don’t work at all in one ear with the iPod. I will need to buy new ones. In some sense, this is worse. At least the iPod is under warrenty, and all electronics are absurdly expensive here. I honestly can’t understand why people tolerate it. England desperately needs Walmart.

Ascensions in Bath

To the east and west of the centre of Bath are hills about 200m high. Both on the coach ridges there and back and while in the town itself, it was largely this topography that struck me. Oxford, you see, is a cracker. Only from south of the Magdalen Bridge can you find any kind of hill, and even those are laughable. Bath, by contrast, is almost perfectly composed to be looked over from above.

Upon arriving with the coach load of Sarah Lawrence students, the first place half of us went was the former Roman baths themselves. There, we atomized, and I didn’t see anyone again until we met for the coach ride home at five. Now built somewhat awkwardly into a museum – encased in black painted walls that look like the backstage area of a theatre – you can see the remains of former saunas and the realities of a collection of still-existent pools. The over-dramatic audio guide will tell you in almost comically reverent tones about the goddess to whom the former temple is dedicated.

The town of Bath reminds me a lot of Victoria, British Columbia. It has a similar pedestrian focus and the same sense of being designed for tourists. Even the residential areas that surround it, such as the one that runs to the top of the first hill I climbed, have a similar look. It’s a much larger place than Oxford and considerably more open. It may have been the brilliant weather, but people also seemed to smile more. The second hill I climbed – the westerly one – is capped by a fairly large park that, by walking around the circumference, offers views of all the surrounding hills and countryside.

Unsurprisingly, between ruins, town, and hills I took quite a number of photos. Rather than post them all at once – which would require editing the dust/mold specks out of the whole collection tonight – I think I will post them one by one until I run out of good ones. It may not represent the place where I am from day to day, but it should be more interesting than perpetuating the parade of Oxford shots.

Fewer but better

After 168 consecutive daily posts, I am suspending the practice of daily updates. A number of factors inform this decision, but it’s mostly because I don’t have time at the moment to produce one post every 24 hours that is terribly interesting. Certainly, I don’t have time to produce such a post that also includes an original and aesthetically pleasing photo. Rather than subjecting you to content of declining quality as overly many of my thoughts are directed towards other things, I shall be more discerning in terms of when and what I post.

As always, comments are appreciated.

We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave

With only twelve days left in the term, things are getting fevered. In addition to housing, scholarship, and job search stuff, it is now reasonably likely that I might be called upon to present in core seminar. As such, I need to explicitly prepare presentations, as well as doing the readings. While that will be good when the time comes to revise for our qualifying exam, it’s not the most welcome extra project at the moment.

I finished one scholarship application today. Now, I just need to finish a paper on the question of “How convincing is the argument that ‘anarchy is what states make of it?'” by Friday, and another on the question of “Is justice compatible with international order?” by Tuesday. I have a supervision tomorrow and another scholarship application to finish in the next two days.

Spending a few hours talking with Emily in her new room tonight was very welcome. While much of the conversation related to school, it felt seperated from all matters academic to a sufficient degree to be genuinely relaxing. I should make a point of spending more social time with her and other friends and members of the program – even at the busiest and most stressful period of the term. That time is definitely now, when we’ve been going for six weeks already but there is still enough term left for deadlines to build on each other like ripples growing into a crashing wave. It was really nice to surf that wave with Emily for a while.

The Scanner Darkly trailer looks awesome, mostly because of the unique style of animation. (Quicktime link) This may become the first film I see in a theatre in the UK, though I didn’t think overly much of the book.
The talk on “The impact and role of major international scientific assessments on global governance” that I announced here and hoped to attend tomorrow has been cancelled due to “family bereavement.”

Short post, much news

In one hour this afternoon, it went from being so brilliantly sunny that my eyes hurt as I walked from my seminar to Sainsbury’s to completely gray, hailing, and cold enough to make me wear my scarf for the first time in weeks. I appreciate such drama.

There have already been two inquiries about my room in Wadham, which is certainly promising. My battels for Michaelmas term – including the cost of five non-vegetarian dinners a week – were £927.88. That includes linen and other miscellaneous fees. I presume an equivalent amount would cover the Trinity period: April 23rd to June 17th. According to Susan Sharp, the Accomodations Manager, the room would have to go to a Wadham student, as it is located on the main college site at Broad Street and Parks Road, right beside the King’s Arms and the Bodleian. People interested in having a look should email me.

Congratulations to the other victors in the OUSSG election. Also, my thanks to those who turned up for the bloggers’ gathering. It was interesting to meet some new people, and to see oft-corresponded-with people in person again.

This Saturday, I am going to bath with some of the Sarah Lawrence exchange students in Wadham. It’s about 80km away and I’ve heard from a number of people that is very nice. At a minimum, it will let me take some non-Oxford photos.
Discussing with Christina the merits of getting a bread knife, I stated that buying such a thing “clashes with my nomad lifestyle.” It’s not that it wouldn’t be justified over the course of a year and a half, but that it doesn’t work with student residential minimalism: increasingly highly (and expensively) educated nomads that we are.

Days spent reading yield boring photos

There is a strong negative correlation between the number of people in the Cornmarket Starbucks and the number in the Codrington Library. Having spent much of the day reading in each, I can provide evidence that is this statement is true both for different times within a specific day and between days. Unfortunately, when the Codrington closed at 6:30pm, I was left with fewer choices. In the absence of an effective reading partner – who girds you to the task through social pressure – the location of an appropriate study space is crucial. Both together can lead to awesome bouts of productivity of the sort that make it just barely plausible that I got in here by a means other than computer or administrative error. The general absence of such explosions, this term at least, sometimes leads to my questioning the wisdom of that selection.

I’m still not sure how I feel about the whole constructivist argument. While much of it strikes me as likely to have more explanatory power than realism, theory in the abstract is an intractable thing. I think this is slightly akin to how tactics exist both as conceptual possibilities and actual things employed in battle. By the time they are used in the second way, they’ve lost a lot of the rigidity and theoretical elegance of their former role. They get muddy and smashed up. One sort might help you win the day and the other sort might not, but it’s only when they’ve been applied in such ruthless circumstances that you will ever know. Hopefully, we will eventually get to something like that point with these theoretical discussions. More likely, we will just keep sparring like armchair generals over the relative importance of infantry flanking operations and effective artillery placement.

For good or ill, my assessment of theorists frequently comes down to their basic ability to get an idea across. I remember explaining to Tristan my theory of what it takes to become a famous theorist: you need to have a concept that is novel and that can be explained by someone reasonably knowledgeable about it to someone intelligent but entirely ignorant of it. Moreover, this needs to be able to take place at a party of the kind I attend: ie, those quiet enough to allow a conversation to occur. This is a standard that really famous theorists will meet many times. There are a large number of ideas from Plato, or Hobbes, or Rousseau, or Marx, or Adam Smith, that can be explained under these circumstances.

The extension of this is that, in order to be a theorist whose ideas I am likely to seriously contemplate, you need to be able to lay them out cogently in a piece of writing that I am not overwhelmingly tempted to skim through at the end, or clean my room instead of reading. By such measures, Alexander Wendt succeeds. “Anarchy is What States Make of it” has a strong, comprehensible, and interesting argument. This is especially welcome given how incomprehensible the terminology of sociology can become. The fact that I only needed to teach my spell checker four or five words while taking notes on it is a point in favour of Wendt’s piece. Another good sign is that Wendt is generally better to quote directly than to paraphrase: something that is rarely true of academic writing, and certainly not true of Waltz – that great pillar around which the whole of IR theory seems to revolve, whether deservedly or not.

Wendt’s discussion of how a circumstance can be socially constructed but also not subject to change is very interesting. Perhaps that’s because it saves the appearances of the world as viewed by realists without being based on their ontological assumptions – always a neat trick. It’s also an effective response to the lingering doubt I feel about the explanatory power of such sociological viewpoints. If it’s all a muddy, mutually constitutive haze out there, how can we hope to understand it or do anything? If mutual constitution can produce circumstances that are strictly delineated and self-reinforcing, it seems that it is capable of conforming more closely to the often unbending character of world politics.

Housing trouble

A serious snag has arisen in the housing situation. Wadham College won’t let me give up my contract to live in Library Court until the 17th of June, unless I can find another Wadham student who wants the room. Finding someone who wants to live here for just one term seems as though it would be difficult to arrange, though it remains a possibility.

Another possibility is to find someone who wants to live in the new flat between April and June. I could then move in for the following year once my time in Wadham ends. This seems like it might be less difficult than the first option, since somebody from any college could take one of the rooms in the Church Walk flat.

Still further possibilities include having the other two intended residents simply find a different third roommate. It may be easier to do so for the year-and-a-bit period than for just a couple of months. Meanwhile, I would sort out some alternative accommodation. The final possibility would be for all three of us to search out a different place. This seems the least sensible alternative (provided nothing else comes up regarding the Church Walk flat), especially since all three of us would like to move there in April, if it was possible.

Perhaps I can convince Wadham to relent. Alternatively, perhaps I can find someone who wants to take over tenancy of 11 Library Court for a few months. The location is certainly excellent. Indeed, if anyone reading this is interested or knows someone who might be, please pass me the message.

I should start developing a short and intensely focused wish list of things for my mother to bring from Vancouver. Obvious choices include MEC clothing: especially button up shirts of a solid colour with breast pockets, olive or khaki pants, and shoes to replace my one increasingly dilapidated pair. One critical item: twelve of so of the kind of four-coloured pens I take all my notes with.
I realized this evening that you can search for degree and decimal minute coordinates in Google Earth. For instance, searching for: “49 20.018 -122 56.200” will shift the view to rocks overlooking Deep Cove. I’ve been adding markers for my favourite hikes, cities I’ve visited, etc. It’s actually slightly thrilling to throw in the coords for a friend’s apartment in Helsinki (recorded to help find your way back there a few months ago) and then see the exact building come up.
Also interesting, with the default disk cache of 400MB, Google Earth seems to be capable of showing every place I’ve looked at during the last few days at the highest level of detail at which it was previously viewed. It also seems to retain all the major roads in North America and the UK, even when not connected to the internet.

Un jour lent

Leaving the St. Cross bop relatively early last night was probably a good idea. I actually managed to get a respectable amount of work done today. I’d say that’s because of the combination of the dreary weather outside and the feeling of deadlines actually creeping up on me: weapons at the ready. While I’m not sure if this little pause was terribly well spent, it’s clear that it is coming to an end. Over the course of the day, I read Reus-Smit, Checkel, and lots of Wendt. If this week’s seminar doesn’t degenerate into another theoretical shouting match, I should be able to participate in the discussion.

General school stuff

Portions of two scholarship applications got finished this morning. So far, such efforts have not yielded the cost of postage expended so far in applying, but I am hopeful this tide can be turned. I also read up on British tenancy law, which seems to be reasonably straightforward, though somewhat different from its Canadian equivalent. We will need to pay attention to getting a good tenancy agreement for the flat we will hopefully be renting for the summer and next year.

I should probably volunteer to write a paper for Dr. Hurrell next week. I can write it on the constructivism question, on the basis of the readings and the core seminar discussion. That way, I won’t have two papers due in seventh week, when the second core seminar paper for this term is due. I can write that on the topic for the seventh week discussion.

Upcoming talk

There is a talk this coming Thursday that I will be attending and encourage anyone who is interested to attend as well:

“The impact and role of major international scientific assessments on global environmental governance”
Dr Robert Watson, Chief Scientist, The World Bank
Thursday 23rd Feb, 5.15pm
Martin Wood Lecture Theatre: adjacent to the Clarendon Laboratory on Parks Road at the corner with Keble Road.

Given that is is very closely related to my intended thesis topic, I will certainly be attending.

New Oxford Craigslist

Andy Kim, a member of my program, has apparantly brought about the creation of a Craigslist for Oxford. According to him, it is “for housing, selling things, and all sorts of other weird things that generally happen on craigslist. It has its pluses and minuses, but I think it generally makes for a better connected community. ” Oxfordians should consider having a look. There isn’t much there yet, but I am sure that will change with time.

It’s not a service I’ve used myself, but I remember that Zandara found her really cool flat in Vancouver through it, so it must have its uses.

I am sure everyone remembers about the bloggers’ gathering on Tuesday, but I thought I should plug it again anyhow. If I am going to miss the Strategic Studies Group meeting for it, there had better be at least a few people there.
Ainsley Harriott flavoured cous cous makes a really good snack, especially if you add some olive oil. You can get four or five bowls of the stuff for the price of a Sainsbury’s sandwich. The “Spice Sensation” flavour is especially good, and reminds me of Indian food.
Google Earth is out for Mac. I spent at least an hour this evening checking out places I know well. Hornby Island is not at all where I thought it was, though my experience of getting there never actually involved navigating. I’ve also been adding markers for friends around the world. I’ve added everyone who has sent me a letter. Once you have entered the data point, you can set the program to fly between them in sequence. I may never do reading again.
What are you meant to do when you read something really unsettling on another person’s blog? It’s exceptionally hard to identify a person’s tone over this kind of medium, especially when you don’t really know them any other way. The choices seem to be to leave a comment that might miss the mark entirely or just ignore their post. Are painfully generic words used in attempted condolence better than nothing?

Numbly reading

Most of last night was a unpleasant mix of short nightmares and insomnia. Around 7:00am, I decided to give up on trying to sleep and just read The Economist. As a consequence, I felt exceptionally numb today: dulled in all senses and incapable of feeling anything completely. It’s odd to be able to pinch yourself and barely feel it, chew food and barely taste it. And this after a day when I consumed nothing caffeinated aside from a single cup of Earl Grey tea.

I spent much of today at the Oxford Country Library. It’s a place with much to recommend it. It’s close to Wadham, fairly large, and mundane in architecture. It’s the kind of place that exists at approximately the right level of distraction for reading to take place effectively. The Country Library also has dramatically better cell phone coverage than anywhere in Wadham.

Concentrating on readings that take the form of PDF files is especially difficult for me. Things on screen just don’t have the same impact or apparent importance as things on paper. That’s why I print off critical emails and occasionally especially poignant blog posts. Another factor is undoubtedly that PDF files must be read on a computer. Even if the computer in question lacks the infinite distraction of an internet connection, it will always have at least a text editor to draw one’s attention from the matter at hand.

As I am liable to do when feeling less than well, I bought a raft of healthy food today: fruit, three kinds of cous cous, nice olive oil, organic tofu, orange juice, whole wheat bread, and hot sauce. While the ginseng experiment seems to have had a negligible effect or none, the availability of quick to prepare healthy but tasty foods definitely increases both my productivity and happiness.

Musical recommendation

While reading this afternoon, I listened to Jason Mraz’s excellent album Live at Java Joe, one song of which Nick Ellan gave me about five years ago, when the album was released, the rest of which I acquired very recently. It’s both comic and melodic, extremely informal, and with a very authentic live feeling. “Zero Percent” and “Dream Life of Rand McNally” are especially good songs.

I wonder when I will hear back from the Chevening Scholarship people. Is is my hope, this time, that I will at least make it to the interview stage. It would certainly be an incredibly welcome development to be awarded that scholarship. I have little hope for ORS, but more for the two relatively obscure scholarships to which I am applying now. Ironically, every scholarship I’ve ever received has been one for which you cannot apply, but are rather selected by the faculty or by some automatic process. Hopefully, that trend will be broken in the next few months.

Random vignettes

UK Pub Smoking Ban

The major reason for which I dislike spending time in most British pubs is apparently soon to be eliminated; I mean, of course, the carcinogenic clouds that seem to be a feature therein. It’s amazing, actually, that people persist in an activity that kills about half a million Americans every year, according to the Centres for Disease Control and World Health Organization. People should consider a pass-time that kills only a tiny fraction of that number: like serving in Iraq. Whatever enjoyment people derive from it, it clearly doesn’t make sense in cost-benefit terms. It demonstrates the extent to which the rational actor model fails in the face of various biochemical and sociological factors.

While my inclinations generally run in a libertarian direction, smoking is largely exempted from the categories of things legitimately subject only to personal choice. Especially in the case of commercial venues, smoking involves exposing other people – including employees who are there night by night – to the myriad dangers involved in the practice. From a personal perspective, it will make it more enjoyable to go to pubs – which is an activity with almost monolithic power, when it comes to the ways in which students relate socially in groups here.

In two words: I approve.

Olympic commentary

Mica informs me that Canada now has eleven Olympic medals. Well done, I say. That said, the only really intense Olympic experience I ever had was during my second year in Totem Park, where the whole undergraduate resident student body became caught up in Canada’s successful race for the men’s and women’s gold medals in hockey. I even watched the game between Belarus and unknown country X (where unknown country X is the one everyone expected to win) where the puck bounced off the goalie’s mask and into the net. Almost all of the time, sports are really boring. Sports and nationalism together: occasionally interesting.

In two words: why not?

Productivity, etc

I finished this week’s Economist today, as well as several of the readings on constructivism for next week’s core seminar. Medium-term projects now include:

Finishing two more scholarship applications
Arranging transport and accommodation for Sarah Johnston’s March 18th wedding in Chichester
Sort out accommodation for next year
Get a wedding gift for Sarah and a birthday gift for my mother

Without a looming essay deadline to motivate, I will need to learn to focus energies on the basis of other kinds of deadlines. While it might require an enormous personal adjustment, it’s just the king of thing that’s necessary in order to exist as a crude proxy of the kind of ‘highly effective people’ whose habits are written about. Thankfully, since my habits are written about almost exclusively by me, nobody need know about the instances where I wander ever so slightly from the path of enlightenment through massive doses of academic prose.

In two words: read more!

Of hair and housing

Another round in an ancient battle played out today. I mean, of course, the battle that has raged over the length of my hair. There is a camp that encourages it to become ever-longer: a camp served by apathy and thrift on my part, but opposed by my will. Short hair is manageable hair, which does not become an embarrassment if briefly slept upon or subjected to a hat. The viability of the hat option makes temperature control more feasible. In short, the advantages of short hair are legion. Of course, the longer-hair crowd always wins out in the short term, as the stuff extends day by day. I always win in the medium term, once I muster the energy to blast it back. The first red line is when it becomes capable of touching my eyes; the second when it begins sticking out over my ears; and the third when it starts behaving unpredictably on the back and sides of my head. By then, it has become a dangerous snarling mass.

When you think about it, winning in the medium term is the best we can ever hope for as human beings. I’m now probably mostly made of Oxford tap water, where once I was made of Vancouver tap water. My ability to continue rebuilding myself out of water and digestive biscuits is ultimately capped by entropy: the central reason for which we are all doomed in the end. As such, it if in the 5 to 50 year time scale that we have the opportunity to snatch what victories we may from the jaws of irrelevance.

Speaking of medium-term victories, Kai and I may have found a suitable flat for next year. It’s located right near St. Antony’s, on Church Walk. It’s farther from Sainsbury’s and the centre of town, but about the same distance from the Department, and closer to Jericho and some nice commercial areas. It’s a basement suite, located underneath some kind of institute. As such, there will be nobody upstairs to bother us or be bothered evenings and weekends. It also includes a sizable back yard: almost as large as all of Library Court. We could definitely hold some nice garden parties there. The three bedrooms all have safety windows looking outside at ground level. (The third bedroom would be occupied by our silent partner.) The kitchen looks good and even the smallest of the bedrooms would more than adequately serve me.

At £85 a week for the two large bedrooms and £75 a week for the small converted living room, it seems quite pricey. That said, my termly battels in Wadham have exceeded £900 for each term and inter-term break period. Having a better kitchen would also encourage me to eat in more often, as well as affording me the chance to actually store prepared food. Those prices include power, water, and broadband internet access (obviously the most vital of the three). In short, the flat itself is very nice with advantages of location and design.

The biggest potential problem has to do with availability. The lease runs from September to September, which is standard, but the three current residents are all moving out in April. They are looking for someone to serve out the rest of their lease, then take one on for next year. My accommodation in Wadham runs until the 17th of July, but I am inquiring as to whether I could move out before the start of Trinity Term instead. Then, I could live in the new flat from the start of April until our exams end in July 2007, at which point we would presumably find people to play the same lease-finishing role as we would be playing from April to September of this year.

This will be the first time I’ve actually lived in accommodation that is private to this extent. I say ‘to this extent’ because the building does belong to St. Antony’s College and it would be through them that we would be letting it. Even so, it is much closer to private accommodation than Library Court, Fairview, or Totem Park have been.

I am excited about the prospect of living there.

PS. The haircut, which I got from the same place on the Cowley Road as the last one, is neither the best nor the worst I’ve received. The best was in Venice and now comprises the picture I show to barbers; the worst was in London, and I am sure it’s now part of my CIA dossier. This one is slightly worse than the last haircut I got in Oxford.