As always, the letter writing has been taking place on Friday lunch breaks in the Camden Room, with people turning up both to write letters, and to attack the week's cause - there are regulars in both groups. Friendly and caring as all Westminsters are, they appear to need their precious Friday lunch breaks, and although the letters continue to be written, they do not appear in such volume as the Committee might like. The causes vary from Human Rights' abuses in Colombia to arms sales to Indonesia and all manage to provoke some criticism, but few seem to invite the compassion of potential correspondents, and many are shunned by them as far away and irrelevant. It would be a welcome change to write to someone whose name does mean something, but this does not necessarily mean that the other causes are meaningless and unworthy.
Perhaps a change in the format of Amnesty might be welcome, and new ideas would be appreciated (and indeed a link up with the Abbey's Amnesty Society is a possibility currently being investigated), but it is a worthy cause and should continue to function as a charitable society organised by the pupils for the pupils.
Alex de Jonquieres (Rigaud's)
Articles this year came from all parts of the School and covered a diverse range of subjects extending from a simple (?) explanation of quantum mechanics (Richard Lim and Murray Rogers) to bread making (Gilly French) and from addiction (by Henry Newman - not about rowing) to Henry Tizard (Zeno Houston). Bevman and Robbo were skilfully avoided, but the Borg did make an appearance and Issue 12 had an excellent picture quiz supplied by Alvin Chuang. More seriously, Hooke reported the very impressive achievements of Westminster scientists and mathematicians in the various Olympiads; surely no other school can match these. It also reviewed books, the Tizard lecture, the CERN trip and the engineering course, not to mention scientific society lectures.
Actually, I am supposed to mention Scientific Society lectures. This year was rather different from previous years in that we took greater advantage of external lectures and arranged fewer events here. In retrospect this was a mistake. Whilst lectures at the Institute of Physics or Royal Institution are usually good fun and well presented, it meant we never really developed the feeling of belonging to a group who meet together regularly - I particularly missed the arguments and discussions with visiting lecturers over supper in the Hastings Room. Next year Scientific Society will be firmly based in school (but not to the exclusion of all external lectures). The other problem this year was the imbalance of subjects having a strong physics bias (sorry!): we celebrated the centenary of the electron at a lecture given by Professor Sir Brian Pippard, learnt about the physics of skiing with Guy Bagnall (well-known to finalists in the Physics Olympiad), enjoyed an excellent lecture by Chris Buckley on medical imaging, an afternooon of particle physics at the Royal Institution (with Professors Kalmus and Close and Dr Wyatt) and further lectures on the nucleus (Dr Al Khalili) and superconductors (Dr Islam). Dr Michele Dougherty, a mathematician engaged in planetary research gave an illustrated lecture at Westminster on the Cassini-Huygens mission to Saturn (read about it in Hooke 12). In addition to these activities several sixth formers attended a Particle Physics Master Class at Imperial and another group are preparing to travel to CERN to visit the LEP accelerator near Geneva. Meanwhile the Biology Department has been invited to provide final training for the British Biology Olympiad team in school during the summer holiday, and we are beginning to plan for a sixth form conference at Westminster in conjunction with the Scientific and Medical network entitled Beyond the Brain (Play Term 1998). Watch this space....
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Steve Adams