Rubbish photographs

I've been taking rather a lot of photos over the past couple of days. The one above is of the cooked breakfast I went and had on an impulse in the Brunch Bowl after my 9 o'clock lecture- normally cooked breakfasts aren't really my thing so I'm not quite sure why the craving, but anyway. The other photos however have been for The Beaver. I don't suppose they'll get published, but it's still fun. Some have been for the next issue, following the brief of 'anything environmental'. Others are for a calendar The Beaver's apparently going to be doing, for which the theme is simply LSE life. Some I've got a bit confused about which they're for halfway through- for example aerial photos of Houghton St showing the Environment Week banner and a lot of LSE life going on in front of it.

I'm not quite sure whether 'anything environmental' meant 'anything happening as part of Environment Week', or whether it really meant anything at all that could be labelled as in some way environmental. I probably could have got some photos of the events- I went to all but three of them, and I'm kicking myself for not having my camera at the film on Wednesday so as to capture a picture of the huge audience looking raptly at the screen (though it could have been a bit problematic fighting my way from my spot on the floor to a good viewpoint and back again)- but in actual fact I didn't. So, as well as pictures of the banner and of the Environment Week goody bags being handed out, I've taken quite a lot of broader environment concept pictures. This largely involved stopping every five seconds as I walked from LSE to Oxford St today on my way to do some shopping to take pictures of rubbish bags and loose litter, the idea being to make a picture from nine or sixteen shots of rubbish arranged in a rectangle, which would portray how much we throw away or how wastefull our society is and thus be Environmental. I'm sure I must have got some very odd looks, only I was concentrating on the photos too much to notice.


Besides the photos, what have I been doing? I went to the NFT yesterday with Ginger to see Belle de Jour, which was certainly good but very bizarre and quite hard to understand (in terms of what was actually supposed to have happened and what was all in her mind). I've been going to Environment Week events- the one today was pretty good, all about practical things that are being done to prevent climate change or try to mitigate its effects for local communities. And I've been doing some work, of course. Not much- there doesn't seem to be as much this term. I do have one project, or presentation rather, which involves critiquing a journal article. Who got what particular article was sorted out before we broke up for Christmas, but I have to say I haven't even read mine yet. Well, I did have that Computational Statistics project to do. I should probably already have got cracking earlier this week after I'd handed that one in, but anyway, I've printed it out now and intend to read it over the weekend, along with the two articles that people are doing presentations on this week (we have to read other people's as well so as to be able to talk about them intelligently afterwards). Anyway, my presentation isn't till week 9, so though I should probably get a move on, I'm not in dire straits yet. Besides that, I've been catching up on what I missed by oversleeping on Tuesday- I borrowed LJ's notes and copied them (though there wasn't much as you can print the lecture notes out from the Public Folders- what I was copying was anything extra the lecturer said that she'd thought worth putting down, plus the commands he used in a demonstration of the computer package), photocopied the computer class worksheet, and tried to do the excercises from it. Once I'd accepted that I wasn't going to find the data set that the lecturer had used in his demonstration, and so I wouldn't be able to type in all the commands from that and see what they did, it actually wasn't too hard- I used commands from the demonstration that looked likely, changing the variable names to the appropriate ones for the data set I was using and the question I was trying to answer, and though there were one or two bits of trial and error, mostly the first thing I typed in did what I was hoping. So it seems like STATA isn't going to be too hard to use.

Then I've also been to a few meetings. Today there was one for the programme representatives that was pretty interesting- it was held by the Education and Welfare Officer rather than staff from the School, and we probably spent more time talking than she (and the General Secretary who was also there) did- they were keen to hear our views on everything and we were really listened to. And yesterday was People and Planet- we started planning the Global Dinner for Global week. The basic principle is that everyone who comes gets allocated to be either rich or poor for the evening, with most people being poor- the rich people get a three course meal with alcohol while the poor people just get a simple meal, the idea being to highlight global inequality. We had some really good ideas for entertainment and the food itself, and I'm looking forward to helping organise it.

Oh, and of course there was the UGM yesterday. At the UGM that I missed at the end of last term they appointed a Keeper of the UGM to try to combat paper throwing, who certainly adds a decorative presence to the stage (he's been wearing white trousers, a vaguely military looking long navy coat with silver buttons and a hat somewhere between a top hat and a bowler, as well as being quite attractive, or at any rate charismatic, in himself), but seems to lack teeth as far as the paper throwing goes- there has been less, I think, but I find it hard to attribute it to him as all he does is point a finger at the culprit, and doesn't even give them a verbal warning or call out their name. Still, we got a lot done compared to last week- several motions passed, including quite a few where I really wasn't sure which way I felt, which made things more interesting, though it came to an end ten or fifteen minutes before time with many more motions still on the agenda as about half those present suddenly rushed out when someone said there was a fight going on outside the lecture theatre (apparently it was between some pro-Israel and some pro-Palestine girls- the first motion was to twin with a Palestinian university, and the proposed amendments, which didn't pass, were to twin with an Israeli one as well among other things). I was in the half that followed more slowly once the Chair person had reacted to the sudden exodus by ending the meeting, and I didn't see anything. I hung around a bit in case the meeting was re-opened, as people were going back into the Old Theatre, but that appeared to be it.