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.

Among my peers, the pervading attitude is not even up to the rhetoric coming from our political leaders here in the West. While they may continue to trade with China, sell it arms and at the same time express their ‘deepest concern’ and other such clichés, the majority of those I know in my age group who have an opinion at all focus on the progress China has apparently made and how this outweighs any current suffering. They are blinded by the bright lights of the new skyscrapers and the profits to be hauled in by, or so it is portrayed, all and sundry who make an entrepreneurial attempt at business there. It’s the American Dream all over again. To them, the issues of human rights are entirely secondary to a country that is using its economy to improve the lives of ordinary people there and lift them out of poverty. But this is simply the usual excuses of those who stand to benefit materially from abuses and oppression.

It is a fallacy, I believe, to use progress in this way to justify an unacceptable situation and use this to treat China as if it were a country with a government that should be accepted as a peer on the world stage. It is as if closing half of the Nazi’s death camps means it is to be treated as a liberal democracy when the other half remain open. Sure, China now is better than China twenty years ago. But while the problems remain it is not something any other country should accept. Surely, it could be argued, trading with China encourages it to get even better. But instead this sends a message that things as they are now are okay, are being accepted. And this is not on. Even if China continues to make progress under the current accepting ethos of the West and improves steadily, think of all the abuses that will be inflicted in the meantime. It’s far away and out of mind for the businessmen reaping the rewards of such practices. And as is always the way it is the people of the country that suffer the most. I’m boycotting an olympics that has destroyed, without any sort of compensation, the homes of innocent Chinese people to build the facilities. My issue is with the Chinese government, not its brave people.

What, then, should be done? It would be extremely naive of me to call upon our governments to apply more pressure through the cessation of trade and the expansion of speeches attacking China’s record from those in positions of power. Governments are, it seems, always going to be useless at such things. But popular opinion remains a powerful force in global politics. The BBC and suchlike continue to provide damning evidence (see From Our Own Correspondent this morning for yet another example of police intimidation to foreign journalists followed by worse to their own people). The liberal press and the Internet continue to provide the arguments. We must push these values up people’s list of priorities. I’m not saying that this is achievable or something that all would agree on. I’m merely stating what I believe to be the only moral option.

It’s worth nothing too that I struggle to understand the motivation of China’s leaders. In the aforementioned BBC report this morning, the correspondent ended with similar confusion: what are China trying to hide? If they fear losing their position of power they should not, they control the army and various other appratus of state. Just look at the Tiananmen Square massacre. I can accept that democracy takes time for a country that hasn’t had it for so long, if ever. But why create a culture of fear where people are afraid to talk to foreign correspondents and students, historically the bravest of rebels, will only post their criticism of the government anonymously on their university message boards. The latter was an example given to me by a teacher of how China allows freedom of expression! Ha! Anonymity should never be a requirement, only an option. Otherwise, it indicates a state of fear.

Scanning back through this I sound even more like a railing loony liberal than I normally do, but maybe that’s a good thing; maybe it’s better than the apathy currently pervading those who will, in the future, influence the actions of the West. Or more likely, this little tirade will di sappear into the endless archives of the blogosphere, as insignificant as ever.

Straight As, 4th in year for my hardest subject (History), 100% in my pure maths modules and 100% in my Philosophy set text (Descartes’ Meditations).

But as usual I now really don’t care: results only matter to me when I don’t get what I want. I’ve put in so much effort this year and it’s paid off but I don’t feel like celebrating, I’m just maybe a bit happier than usual. And I’d much rather be like this than some of the alternatives.

However, last night I had a dream about getting my results. I had the envelope, but - presumably because my brain didn’t know what to expect in the envelope and thus was avoiding showing me - I wasn’t opening it. Instead, I was behind the library desk at school and appeared to be organising envelopes for other people. How odd that my subconcious would have me doing this, and in the library of all places. Also, a friend was nearby, and they had just got a B in Philosophy, the subject I am most concerned about, which I presume was a bad omen for me as the friend is of similar ability and did similar amounts of revision to me, and we were all at a disadvantage because of doing the subject in so few hours. I woke up from this in the dark with a sickly, fearful tummy ache feeling rather scared. This isn’t usual Sean-like behaviour surrounding exam results.

The fact is that at present, whatever else I claim, exam results and the accompanying university that I want to go to are very much my ultimate goal in life at the moment, as they are the first hurdle to pass to get there. I’ve been struggling to feel purposeful with anything not related to this over this summer holiday, e.g. Wikipedia activities. This focus is somewhat ridiculous. It is not true that I have failed entirely if I don’t succeed in these areas - but while I like to tell myself that I fail to convince myself of it. I blab on that I am content to search for meaning through thought and debate and writings like this blog but really, if I don’t get what I want tomorrow or I don’t get into the university I want to go to or both (results tomorrow can be made up over the next year if they are not too bad so the two are not totally dependent on each other), I will feel like I’ve completely failed and it was all a waste of time. I won’t be able to convince myself that what I have gained this year in terms of expanding my mind is more important than the grades. I know this because of what it felt like after I got my GCSE results and got an A in History where I wanted an A*. And that’s really sad.

So I’m going to try and stop thinking now (wow) because it’s unlikely to go very far, and I’m going to wish friends good luck for tomorrow and go and watch some TV, and go to bed. We’ll see what happens with that brown envelope tomorrow.

And yet still I’m told that the basic view outlined above is incorrect, even when I try to spell it out as simply as possible as I’ve done here. My parents say that all they want is for me to be happy and that my ‘quest’ described above is somehow going to compromise this. I don’t get this. Whatever I may say about aiming for things other than happiness, how does the above compromise this? It’s supposed to leave more space for it by clearing out silly things like depression. If anyone else understands their perspective and would like to explain it to me, I’d very much appreciate it.