But this is the point. There have been a thousand eighteenth birthdays like mine, there have surely been equally as many who will have realised this and thought themselves to be philosophically superior. As Charlie says in my favourite passage of The Perks of Being a Wallflower, his friends sitting in a cafe arguing over some issue are merely replaying a conversation had a thousand times before by similar groups. There is precious little originality, and there is precious little variety left in our lives. We laugh at the same jokes and we slot ourselves into the moulds available in society: our education systems turn out doctors and lawyers and managers who then pick from a similar choice of family circumstances. And then we lose our fervour, and become dull and routine, never changing as we plod away at the lives we have chosen. It is oft said that the young are idealistic and unsettled, and that we have ridiculous, ignorant ideas of how we want to shape the world. But this is something we must keep. If everyone just does something that’s gone before and occasionally something new is thought up, why bother? If we settle for what is practical and easy and we don’t instead try our hardest to bring variety and difference and change then you might as well collapse all generations into one and stamp a historical label upon them all as a era of repitition.

The above is probably full of fallacies and I’m sure I’m a hypocrite in so many ways here. If what we have right now isn’t good enough, and never will be according to this model, what is it that we are trying to reach? Why have variety if actually it doesn’t turn out to be very much different for individuals? Maybe by sticking with a routine and what one has one has merely reached the ideal situation. And maybe it is all irrelevent anyway as we all die, and it all ends. Maybe instead of worrying about trying to strike out we should try to achieve that fabled balance between the extremes of progress and conservation, and be satisfied in the knowledge that we’re never likely to divine some sort of eternal meaning, but trying makes us understand things better.

The above is what goes round and round in my head on a day to day basis. When I see a tired looking worker on the bus or a bored school pupil, when I see a stereotypical student or teenager or toddler just going through their lives, I consider these issues. I’m not going to try to pick a side here on the question of what the answer is here. All I would like to hope and set as a goal is that I keep thinking. If we ever put aside questions as unanswerable, there isn’t much point in having the questions at all. And in this again I’m just another would-be philosopher who likes to play around with questions, just someone else who secretly thinks themselves better for doing so, but knows they’re really not. So I’ll keep trying to be original and new, and I know I’ll never likely be happy with how that comes out, and I’ll never be satisfied with the quest. But a life with no certainty and permenance and purpose is infinitely better than one of false surety and contentment. There has to be something more than mere happiness. I suspect I’ll always hold that belief.

I won’t be any different tomorrow morning, but this was worth saying, even if it was a bit garbled and unclear - but that’s sort of the point. Good night.

Our world isn’t in fantastic shape at the moment. As in the fifties when the Cold War was at its nuclear peak, we feel afraid of external threats, but from within we also face massive problems. Warzones only get worse across the world: the Congo has recently erupted into full-scale battle; the Middle East is as violent as usual and no-one seems to have any solutions. Nuclear weapons and other such terrors remain stockpiled, and the West hypocritically demands that smaller states cease their quest for them, raising backs more than anything else. In so-called civilised nations, utilitarianism returns to make torture and abuse of human rights morally acceptable as a salve for the fear that grips the countries, once bastions of human rights and civil liberties, that have now sunk into depravity in the name of a little temporary security. And from within consumerism and rampart capitalism maintains the expectancy of the impossibility that is infinite growth, of always getting more for less. Community collapses, education becomes entirely based around capital in one’s later life, and people lose sight of the greatness that humanity can achieve through thought, consideration and generosity to others, rather than a selfish desire to smother pains with ignorance and material goods. And then, on top of all of this, the human race faces extinction from climate change, or from wars against each other over dwindling natural resources. With our free market situation it seems to me that it’ll only become economical to do something about this threat when it’s already too late - at least for some, if not all, of us.

But despite these problems we still have one resource that is so very important and so very powerful. We have people. People might be selfish and uncaring, but they can also show incredible altruism, respect and thoughtfulness. Humans have already achieved so much more than solving the above list of grievances. We’ve constructed ideas and fields of science and technology from a primitive existence in caves and forests. We have thought our way outside of ourselves and outside the confines of this doubtable empirical world, and we’ve struggled for truth in the battlefield of ideas. If we can vote in Obama, if we can show that we’re more than mere nature and biology would define us as, then we’re making the first step onto a path to better things. Come on America. Let us remember this day in history with pride.

While it’ll take until then for places like Oxford to let me know whether they want me, I’ve actually already had two offers this half term. This is very reassuring as at least I know I am going to university at all - and as a friend points out, going somewhere I chose. York have offered me ABB as the A level grades they want, including an A in maths which I already have and so this is an ideal insurance offer, should my A levels go fantastically, superbly wrong. Nottingham have given me something less useful; AAB including an A in both maths and further maths as while I am likely to meet this offer if I do, I’d rather go to one of my other choices. The difficulty now is picking between these kind of places, and this I suppose comes down to the course content, something I need to look into more. Probably worth visiting them too, but this can wait until the time of picking between offers comes along, which of course could well be just between these two.

Speaking of this half term holiday, it’s not been going quite according to plan so far. I very much intended to get some non-school stuff done, catch up on some awaiting tasks and generally take stock of things after a solid block of weeks into the new year (note the lack of figure as I can’t be bothered to go and work it out). However I was shocked to discover, on Saturday entirely by chance from an Internet friend, that the Oxford entrance exam for maths is the Wednesday after the holiday, i.e. three days into the term, and as far as I was aware at this point school didn’t know about it. Fortunately I was able to get in touch with a maths teacher from school, and I borrowed text books to revise from as the test is on material we did ages ago (to allow non-further maths students to do it), and it seems the school will be automatically sent an exam paper since I have applied. This has meant that this half term has, after homework, consisted of preparing for this test. I did my first past paper this afternoon, and got around 70%. Adding on marks for silly errors I believe I would have fixed due to careful checking over in the actual exam, this gives me about 80%. This mark doesn’t mean anything however, because the Oxford website is not particularly helpful in terms of what it makes available. For the two specimen papers available, answers are provided but only general notes about how marks are applied, rather than them being split up for parts of questions. For the two actual past papers available, one is on a slightly extended syllabus so isn’t as helpful and neither have mark schemes, but instead average marks and average marks of successful applicants are shown - and they differ between the two years a fair bit. So on the specimen papers I can find out what I got right, but I can’t know if my mark is any good, and on the past papers themselves I can’t even start marking anything. Great.

From what I have done, and through a little web forum searching and chatting to people, I’ve come to the conclusion that a mark of around 80% plus a good interview is what I need in order to have a fair shot at a place, and I think this is something that I can achieve. Most of the test is very approachable, with only a few super hard questions that I’m not likely to get, unlike the Cambridge maths admission test where getting half of it right would be a prodigy-like performance. The questions tend to focus on spotting something, a fact or trick or hidden axiom in a question, which then makes the rest of it pretty simple. I know that I’m not going to be able to answer some of the very hard ones in an exam situation, but I can get the more normal ones pretty well. And if I can’t, I’d like to hope that this means I’m not someone who should go to Oxford for any kind of maths course, and that I’d just find it too hard anyway. I’m trying to convince myself to put my faith in the test and interview process as an effective selection filter. Actually succeeding at said convincing is an entirely different matter of course.

My obsession for getting into Oxford is still a serious issue, especially considering the fact that it’s probably quite likely (assigning probabilities is pretty futile here) I won’t get in, and also that I may well not get into my second choice either. I’ve asked Oxford to consider me for maths should they not want me for maths and philosophy (they give this choice to all applicants) and if I were to get in for this, though unlikely since the philosophy is my stronger side, I don’t know what I’d do: give up my favourite subject or give up Oxford? it seems I’d give up the former at present. I seem to have this idea at the moment that if I don’t, I’ll be missing a mark of self-worth, and that if I do get in, I’ll never again have to worry about my own standards. This is silly. My abilities and more importantly who I am are not going to change because of this application, if I do get in I’ll be very far from the top in terms of ability, and plenty of bright people go to other places. It also doesn’t help how I cannot help but measure myself based on my academic success or failure. I would never, ever claim that ability is something to judge people on and I stick to the idea that choices and intent are what make someone who they are. But I don’t follow this in my own thoughts, that maelstrom of convoluted contradictions.

So with regard to university I shall see how things pan out. With regard to the non-school stuff that I was planning to do over half term, I’m starting to despair at my own lack of ability to actually do the less interesting aspects of my work for projects that I am so passionate and enthused about. It seems that my grandfather’s life-long comment that I’m inherently lazy is coming more and more true. But I think I’m finally accepting that I’m not going to override this natural tendency any time soon. Sure, I could force myself to do things as well as school work and have no leisure time at all, but I’d hardly be doing much of quality. I can’t go forever as some people I know can. So on the advice of a long-time colleague on the web, I’m trying to delegate more, and section myself down to things that I can manage and do and fit around everything else. I’m restricting my Wikimedia work down to jobs I know that I can do well and I’m going to stop taking on other things that I end up leaving hanging for ages because of school and the like, only coming back to them later. I’m going to keep at my role as user support on freenode when I can, working away at something I know I do reasonably well where I can properly and consistently put something towards a project that I care about.

This blog post is feeling more and more detached as I go through all these topics, a common symptom of not having updated properly in a while, and the quality of my writing is somewhat slipping. The other thing coming up pretty soon is my eighteenth birthday, and at the moment I have three parties planned for different groups of people. Party is a word I am loathe to use because of the connotations of such events for my age group. I am not going to be drinking alcohol or going clubbing or having hundreds of people round to trash my house as seems to be the traditional image. Instead, I am taking full advantage of having an inset day on my birthday, which is a Monday, and also one on the Friday before the weekend, giving me a four day weekend. On the Friday I am having a LAN party with Teh Geek Warriors, the usual group of geeks from school, and we intend to get some serious gaming done. The Saturday will just be filled up with leisurely pursuits, since I have asked for the time off work. The Sunday sees a fancy lunch for the family, something that is far more for them than me, since it’ll involve my mother’s boyfriend’s children, who I’m not exactly keen on, and my cousins dog, which I hate. And then on the evening of my birthday itself my friends of my own age (geeks are all younger) will be round for some form of meal my mother is cooking. I am at this point incredibly grateful to her for doing all of this, and will endeavour to do as much as I can to help throughout. I am looking forward to my long birthday weekend. I shall try to update this blog more often, and certainly will do so for those four days. Here’s hoping they are memorable enough that I won’t need to re-read the post to recall.

This conception of things getting easier as I advance through stages of education is of course a very common one. A friend of my father rung me up the other day to ask after his website which I am supposed to manage (another thing which I have fallen behind on) and hit the nail on the head when he pointed out that this is simply never the case. Education always works by insisting that the current stage is vastly more important than the last. GCSEs mean nothing once you start A-levels. Presumably A-levels will be entirely insignificant once you start university. And once you’ve done a degree you’ll probably be told that everyone has one, and you should try and get a masters. And then a PhD… and it just goes on. Currently I have an idea that once I get to university things will be better because I won’t have to worry constantly about passing exams and I will be able to just enjoy my subject and let it flow in naturally but of course this won’t happen; they’ll just be more exams. This silly idea I have that once I get into university everything will be marvelous and I will be able to breathe a sigh of relief is just as unreasonable as a belief that GCSEs are the be all and end all of education.

Applying to university is a process I’m currently involved in, as noted. These days it’s been privatised to within an inch of its life and is done entirely over the web, and is known as UCAS, or the University and Colleges Admissions System. Applying involves filling in lots of information - qualifications, employment, contact details and the like - but also in writing a personal statement, or set of reasons why you want to do the courses (up to five at five institutions). This is by far the hardest bit. We’re told to mix academic achievements and enthusiasm with hobbies and interests, but linking all of this together is very difficult. The other problem is that I could fiddle with my statement for ever, messing around with wording and clarifying and the like, and I’d end up never submitting it, so it’s just a case of getting it written and as good as possible and then just hoping for the best and hitting send. Conflicting comments don’t help either. While my form tutor says the statement is ‘perfect’ and that she would eat her hat if I didn’t get in to either Oxford or Durham (my top two choices), my family are more criticial of my wording. What’s also difficult is selecting my other three choices of where to apply. Open days and prospecti generally provide little more than advertising material and while I’ve obviously looked into and visited my top two choices there doesn’t seem much to gain from the others. Yet the chance of not getting into my top two is high and so I need to pick places I will eventually be happy with; I don’t trust my form tutor’s hat-eating at all. So I think I’m going to put Birmingham, York and Nottingham down, all for Maths and Philosophy, and we shall see what happens.

Sorry for a very all over the place post. I’ve just got so much to do and think about at the moment.

Despite the hardened geeks of freenode staff heckling me as an Apple fanboy who was buying a locked down device for a ridiculous amount of money, my experience so far has been extremely positive. The iPhone may be missing a lot of features (its camera is of low quality compared to other phones and has no flash, it can’t forward text messages, it can’t send multimedia messages, it can’t bluetooth files around etc.) but what it does do it does so very well, and software features can be added later. In hardware terms it’s fantastic: a below-par camera doesn’t bother me as if I want to take photos properly I would use, er, an actual camera. So while there are things that I would change, things that can be changed in software updates I do hope Apple will roll out (which is likely given that now Google’s Android platform has arrived there is finally some smartphone competition to force Apple into improvements), I have in my pocket a fantastic little device. It is my web browser, SMSer, e-mail reader, music player, direction finder, IRC and SSH client, emergency torch (we had a power cut tonight so this was handy), Twitter client, notepad (although I still like having my trusty ‘collected notes’ commenplace book), clock/alarm/stopwatch/countdown, ping/whois utility, light distraction (simple games), eBook reader (not yet, I intend to look into this), RSS reader (this is one of the main reasons I got it, to try and keep up with blogs and things, and of course once you have the web a world of opportunity is opened. Having all this with me all the time is great.

I could blah for ages about all of the things I’ve just listed but I’ll try and keep to the more notable pros and cons. Firstly, what stands out? The touch-screen interface is very effective. Only very occasionally do I find the phone not doing what I want it to do and this is usually because I have my other hand touching the phone and pressing buttons without me realising. Everything flows together nicely and I am getting pretty fast with the on-screen keyboard. Even if it takes up half the screen during use, and is very easy to hit the wrong keys on, the auto-correct means I don’t go wrong very often, and it is learning things that I type frequently already, such as ‘fn’ for freenode which it would probably thechange to an actual two letter word for any other users. The IRC client that I have been using turns off auto-correct and the amount I rely on it very quickly becomes apparent: my messages to the SilentFlame channel last night were often extremely garbled. The lack of copy-and-paste abikity is a pain but software problems can be fixed, and with the ability to e-mail URLs and the like it’s not that bad. As shown in the picture attached to this paragraph, texting is done very well. Messages are sorted into a conversation view with whomever you have messaged. For me this is fantastic. Not only does it mean I no longer fail to understand replies to my messages sent after I have forgotten entirely what I wrote, but as a user of Gmail since 2004 I am obsessed with keeping archives of all messages so this makes me happy.

Since I’ve had the phone for over a week I have certainly experienced some less pleasant aspects, but as noted above these are mainly software related. The phone has crashed several times: hard reboots don’t always get all the downloaded applications working again, although they often do. Updating a particular app often fixes all the rest. In general the phone can be quite temperamental and slows down a lot at times for no visible reason. There are no background processes, meaning that I can’t stay connected to, say, Google Talk, and go and do something else as nothing can run unless it is actually on the screen. The built in e-mail client is rubbish (thankfully Google’s iPhone-adapted Gmail web-based app is brilliant (as shown next to this paragraph) so I can use that, but that is of course slower than a local program) as it doesn’t support threading at all so is utterly unusable for me as I have mailing lists clogging up my inbox (which is out of control right now, so sorry if an e-mail of yours still hasn’t been answered). Many people have complained about the e-mail client and it could definitely do with improving. The battery life of the phone is appalling when the web is used over WiFi or 3G as these both drain battery, but this is because battery technology just hasn’t caught up with transmission yet. In terms of off-phone issues, 3G coverage really isn’t fantastic so I am often reduced to dial-up Internet speeds. This is fine in my view for reading e-mail and RSS feeds, but it is a shame O2 don’t have better coverage. Being as the iPhone is Apple, I am forced into using iTunes to both activate, upgrade and backup the phone, and to download music onto it. iTunes is in my view a terrible piece of software that I personally find very hard to use, so I’m annoyed I have to use it, but I know a lot of people love it.

While the iPhone may be a great device, I’m obviously not keen at all on the locked down nature of it. As soon as people heard I was getting it, most of the school seemed to commence shouting me down as a consumerist and a capitalist, with my feeble defence of wanting it for a very specific purpose of web browsing not bearing much weight. Philosophically it is very unsound. It’s using a corporate operating system with Apple vetting all applications that can be installed on it. But while I would never choose this over a free alternative, these is not in this case an alternative. I run my computer on Ubuntu because it’s great both functionally and philosophically, but I have Windows installed because I have to in order to play games. I have the iPhone as it is the best choice if I want a phone that does all of the above. So I think I’m in a reasonable position, given the world I’m in.

Overall then, I think my £350 has been spent wisely as I have a great device that does what I expected and does it well, giving me something very useful to have around. Given that I spend my money on little else, I decided to go for it, and am pleased I did. I heartily recommend this to people who would make use of the web to the extent I do. If not, it’s not worth it, as it’s then just a fancy phone with a nice MP3 player.

World-weary sophisticates of 14 or so are quite capable of coming over all soppy at the sound of the Old Bear signature tune. ~ Daily Mail, August 1995

I just found this and have been listening over and over again, which is generally what I do with music. I’m a bit rubbish: I get obsessed with certain pieces and play them continuously and then get bored of them and hence don’t seem as good, so really what I should do is not play the same thing so much. Still, this theme tune is particularly good. It brings back many memories of enjoying the Old Bear TV show and the books, with their characters and tales. It gives me a feeling of goodness and contentment, as though little else matters beyond Old Bear’s stories. That happy little world in which they lived was so simple and fulfilled, and I lived in it too.

In this country, raised by ‘good’ parents who are able to provide, most people have very fond childhood memories such as those evoked by this theme tune. And yet very few would choose to go back to those days if they could, to live a life entirely constituted of them. Why is this? Is it because we accept that we grow towards extremes of both responsibility and fulfilment as we grow up - by this I mean we gain new and exciting things to do that surpass the likes of Old Bear but we also gain responsibilities for things we would rather not do and didn’t have to do as a young child.

A more philosophical look at this might be to argue that no stage of life is ideal and they all have different things to learn from them. But then we die and it all comes to so very little. For now then I’ll just enjoy this theme tune.

So I was arguing for a society where people were individually better off even if they didn’t deserve it in the standards of many other members of said society. Why? Because they would be happier, and because I don’t see the rest of that society as having any right to take such basic rights of a decent standard of living away, because we’ve had too much poverty and suffering in the human race already. But this is effectively utilitarianism: I’m arguing that the duty of contributing to one’s society is less important than the outcome of happiness for all. However, I believe I can reconcile this apparent hole. The reason I want to allow everyone to have basic rights at all costs is one of liberty: people must be in a position where they can be individuals if we are to be in a position where society is exposed to as many possible variations of humanity as possible, because this is the only way we can hope to achieve a better society on whatever scale of betterment you choose to use. Many would use happiness, I’m not sure yet.

I am having other general problems with my arguments for morality. One thing I particularly hold to is the importance of intentions. To me, given that the only thing people have control over is what they aim to do, this is the only thing that can possibly be used to judge them. It’s not reasonable to punish someone for causing great misery when they didn’t intend to because there’s no point: it’ll just make them suffer when they can’t do anything about it. This suggests that now is very important. It’s not what happens in the future, it’s what we do now that defines us, what we choose to do or not do. But we make choices about what to (try and) do now based on what we are aiming for in the future, so I’m not actually making any kind of progress on things. I attack consequentialism for aiming at future ends rather than worrying about the means needed to achieve them for always looking into a future and never ‘landing’ somewhere. But actually, I end up in the same problem myself.

This isn’t flowing properly today so I’ll leave it there.

I’ve also renamed my blog again, back to ‘Intellectual scribblings’ (it was once ‘XyrWeblog | Intellectual scribblings’ - gargh how horrible). This is not an expression of arrogance. It’s just a nice little phrase that I rather like and I think it at least reflects the aim of this blog, even if it doesn’t reflect the reality. This is a lot nicer than simply ‘Sean’s blog’ which doesn’t really hold any meaning at all. There are a few issues with this new theme that are worth pointing out: the artistic scribbled labels aren’t always visible and obvious (try posting a comment and you will see what I mean) and the text is a tad small. But I really like the notebook idea since I have taken to using a notebook regularly of late, and so I think I’ll stick with this for a while. Now let’s try actually writing some decent content - after I’ve fiddled with things like the link list and post categories and the like…

A few thanks are first in order. Thanks Google for running my blog for ages, thanks the WordPress team for the free software, and thanks Evan Eckard for the beautiful theme.

I am really hoping that I will have more time during termtime this year for activities such as Wikimedia, something else which I’ve not exactly been fantastic this summer about actually getting on with. By dropping history I should have a lot more time because that was always my most heavy subject in terms of homework last year. So now I only have maths, physics and philosophy. The former two will get harder in terms of content, but they’re never subjects to be particularly work-heavy once I get the concept at hand. This holiday we were set an essay for physics that I really struggled with because it wasn’t really an essay. There was no argument, no point, simply a regurgitation of a lot of information taken off the contents of my folder and the Internet. Thus I struggled to make it flow and I’m really not happy with the result. Hopefully year thirteen should be better for this kind of thing. Less facts, more arguments. We shall see however, and there is always physics coursework looming in early 2009. And of course exams will be really important this year. However the lack of history is a big bonus and we shall see where it leads. I’d probably be more interested in doing history than physics at this point, but not in the workload and unfortunately my choice has to come down on that here given how much I disliked Y12. Which is a shame, as history is more important to me at the end of the day.

Hopefully there will be some good pen and paper RPG sessions next year as we’re looking to play both DnD 3.25e and Exalted 2e, that is the usual Dungeons & Dragons plus a new group for Exalted, a game which in the view of many of us who played it last week with Kvetch to see what we thought of it is a lot better than DnD. It has social combat, a concept called stunting which gives an actual mechanical benefit to describing the actions of one’s character, and more realistic damage (seven instead of fifty hit points). Power levels in Exalted are very different. All characters are demigods and the backstory of the world can’t be seperated in the way you can have a DnD campaign in any generic fantasy setting. But we’re going to try to get a group going for it and we’ll see what happens. Nevermore is hopefully going to run the game which will be nice as for once I will be able to be a player instead of making up adventures as DM. So that is something to look forward to.

So we shall see how this year goes. Last one at school, in fact.